If you haven’t been outside much over the first 4 1/2 months of 2025, it’s totally understandable; some of the best TV shows in years have been released, giving you plenty of reason to stay indoors. With The Studio, Adolescence, and Severance, Apple TV+ and Netflix have produced the year’s most talked-about shows, while series like The Pitt, Paradise, and Dying For Sex have turned medical disasters, governmental coups, and liberating orgasms some of the most compelling TV of the year. To have fully kept up with the best of the best on TV, the outside world would need to be an afterthought. But at least you’d be able to see Wilson Fisk (Vincent D’Onofrio) break a man’s skull with his hands.
With so many great TV shows out in 2025, it can be tough to know where to start. These are the 14 you need to watch now if you haven’t already.
2 / 16
Every year in which there’s a new season of Black Mirror, it’s one of the best seasons of TV that year. This year, the dystopian anthology drama series explores the terrifying concepts of subscription services for consciousness, having your consciousness trapped in a video game, and more unsettling collisions of humanity and technology. Issa Rae delivers an all-time great performance as A-list actress Brandy Friday in the episode “Hotel Reverie,” in which she digitally enters black-and-white movie Hotel Reverie to recreate it with AI programming, only to develop a sentimental connection with her unreal co-star Dorothy (Emma Corrin) that rivals the fan-favorite romance of past Black Mirror episode “San Junipero.” Even though the world’s madness is starting to be stranger than what the show can produce, Black Mirror is still in a class of its own.
3 / 16
The most criminally underrated series of the last five years is Oscar-winning actor Forest Whitaker’s 1960s drama Godfather of Harlem. As drug kingpin and unofficial mayor of Harlem Bumpy Johnson, Whitaker delivers steely stoicism whether staring at a man shot dead or helping his daughter recover from heroin addiction. His captivating performance gives the show the type of verisimilitude that helps transport you to a time when street justice reigned supreme. In the fourth season, Whitaker’s attempt at legitimization hits a snag when the money flow can’t match his ambition for bettering Harlem, and his struggles between doing what’s right and doing what’s effective are a point of compelling tension. Outside of Bumpy Johnson, the show has a constellation of characters that could be the leads of their own shows. Stella Gigante (Lucy Fry) is surreptitiously developing her own prowess in the criminal underworld, Elise Johnson (Antoinette Crowe-Legacy) gets involved with the Black Panther Party, and Vincent ‘Chin’ Gigante (Vincent D’Onofrio) is trying to maintain his place within the mob. Godfather of Harlem routinely delivers an all-star lineup of incredible actors, and season 4 is one of its best showings.
4 / 16
Hacks always feels like that one friend you go to when you want to be smacked with the truth and then stunned by the strangest joke you’ve ever heard right afterwards so the sting feels like a warm embrace. After three award-winning seasons of putting larger-than-life and colder-than-corpses comedian Deborah Vance (Jean Smart) and woke prodigy Ava Daniels (Hannah Einbinder) in an odd couple relationship, the fourth season has them as enemies who must maintain a working relationship or face mutually assured destruction in the form of losing their opportunity at a late-night talk show. The genius of Hacks is in the way the show digs into a joke, seemingly to generate more laughs, only for you to realize it’s peeling back layers you didn’t know were there. For example, Ava engaging in a throuple creates humorous moments like her answering a work call during sex while the other two tend to each other, and being the butt of Deborah’s barrage of “three-way” jokes at dinner. Before you know it, the couple tells her she’s masking her emotionally unavailability as hypersexuality due to unresolved issues with her last breakup. From ageism battles to trauma bonds, Hacks is an incredible series.
5 / 16
Daredevil: Born Again had a lot to live up to. As the first series about Matt Murdock’s costumed crimefighter since Netflix’s series Daredevil ended over six years ago, the Disney+ revival needed to either match or exceed the gritty realism and character depth of the original series. After nine episodes, Daredevil: Born Again more than lives up to the hype. Wilson Fisk (Vincent D’Onofrio) is now the mayor of New York City while Matt Murdock (Charlie Cox) struggles with his vigilante impulses that have sometimes had lethal consequences. The season started with the sudden and heartbreaking death of Foggy Nelson (Elden Henson) and ended with Fisk crushing the police commissioner’s skull with his bare hands in front of his rogue team of cops to establish he was taking over the city by force. At no point did Daredevil: Born Again allow you to get comfortable with any sense of normalcy. Matt even jumps in front of a bullet to save Fisk’s life. It’s unquestionably one of the best first seasons in Disney+’s history.
6 / 16
Common Side Effects is an animated series follows two former lab partners, Marshall Cuso (Dave King) and Frances Applewhite (Emily Pendergast), who discover a mushroom that can cure all diseases, so you can imagine the government cover-ups and Big Pharma conspiracies that follow. In one scene, the show delves into medical suppression with a surreal “mushroom trip” in which Hildy (Sue Rose) consumes the blue angel mushroom to test its healing powers, only to have a vivid and disturbing vision of her head rapidly aging before exploding into bacteria repeatedly, symbolizing the mushroom’s overwhelming power to reverse death and decay. Through graphic surrealism like this, Common Side Effects unflinchingly explores the tension between the potential benefits of alternative medicine and the profit-centric healthcare. No show on TV in 2025 has been as daring with its messaging or delivery than Common Side Effects.
7 / 16
Season 1 of Mo, which focused on Mohammed “Mo” Najjar and his family, was the rare dramedy to tackle a Palestinian family’s displacement trauma, their experiences with cultural and religious differences in relationships, and the hustle of the American dream, all through the lens of strip club panic attacks and treating gunshot wounds with olive oil. The second season takes Mo’s experience as an undocumented immigrant and expands it without losing the homegrown humor. The show takes you inside the inhumane conditions of an ICE detention center where Mo hilariously shows resilience by singing a karaoke rendition of Hank Williams’ “Your Cheatin’ Heart” and, on top of everything else, must put up with a cellmate who inexplicably meows like a cat. The second season doesn’t sugarcoat the truth, especially the history of conflict between Israel and Palestine. But it does expertly show how true resistance involves not letting tragedy define you, and it does so with some of the best comedy writing of the year.
8 / 16
Death and sex normally don’t go together on television, but the FX dramedy miniseries finds a liberating place where they collide. After Molly Kochan (Michelle Williams) is diagnosed with Stage IV metastatic breast cancer, she leaves her sexless marriage in search of exploring her sexuality and finding lost parts of herself. As Molly has hilarious sex romps in hospital beds and encounters requests for a kick in the dick while she confronts sexual trauma from her childhood, her best friend Nikki Boyer (Jenny Slate) deals with the guilt of feeling overburdened by taking care of her dying friend. The show is grounded in a true story and presents a remarkably honest look at how the end can be a gateway to a new beginning, even if that includes dildo shopping and orgasms.
9 / 16
Andor Season 2 is a satisfying slow burn that frequently erupts into some of the best television viewing around. At times it rivals HBO’s Game of Thrones in its Machiavellian scheming and gripping character portraits, while also leaning into the best parts of Star Wars lore and fan service without over indulging. Its set-piece peaks are even higher than the best action moments of season 1 while still managing to tunnel deeper into the compelling human dramas that imbue the formation of the Rebel Alliance with meaning and emotion. You could strip away all of the red blaster fire and Wookiepedia name-dropping and Andor would still be a world-class TV thriller worthy of everyone’s time. —Ethan Gach
10 / 16
If you’d told me last year that Invincible would deliver some of the most emotionally complex character developments of any TV show so far in 2025, I would’ve thought you were one of those brainwashed ReAnimen. But it’s true. After a subpar second season that largely felt like a setup for this third one, Mark Grayson (Steven Yeun) wrestles with the morality of murder, his half-brother Oliver (Lincoln Bodin) exhibits the same homicidal pragmatism as their exiled father Omni-Man (J.K. Simmons), and Cecil (Walton Goggins) blurs the lines of right and wrong by enlisting rehabilitated criminals as protectors of society. And that’s only scratching the surface. Let’s not forget that the last two episodes of the season feature an epic war between evil Invincibles from across the multiverse, as well as the good Invincible and Conquest (Jeffrey Dean Morgan) engaging in a staggeringly brutal fight. Through it all, Conquest drops shockingly profound quips like “I don’t even get a real name, only a purpose” and says “there is no greater pleasure than feeling the warmth of my fists drenched in blood,” making him the villain who most effectively combines wit and bloodshed since Thanos.
11 / 16
Paradise turned Sterling K. Brown from America’s dad on This Is Us into Hollywood’s latest badass as Secret Service agent Xavier Collins by having him lead a paramilitary coup against the fascist government of a city built inside of a Colorado mountain. Brown’s ability to go from doting father to fierce protector to disgruntled employee while exhibiting the same dutiful passion for doing what he feels is right helps the series transcend some of the one-dimensional pitfalls of most post-apocalyptic shows. But it also helps that Paradise intricately examines how the titular city is formed, from the hierarchical selection of its residents to the artificial ways they recreate normal life, all so well-developed and thought through that they make this world feel lived-in and fun to explore.
Brown isn’t alone. Julianne Nicholson plays Samantha “Sinatra” Redmond, chief decision-maker and mastermind of the mountainous bunker, as a woman who funnels her grief over her son dying into her efforts to exert total control over the world around her in order to prevent ever having to experience anything like that again. Such character nuances are pervasive throughout the show. Also the penultimate episode, in which Collins has to forcibly get the President of the United States out of the White House through a mob of governmental officials who just found out the world is ending, is not only one of the best TV episodes of 2025. It’s one of the best episodes in Hulu’s history.
12 / 16
At this point, if you see Noah Wyle in a Chicago emergency room, either hand him lidocaine or hand him an Emmy. The ER legend is leading a fresh group of doctors and nurses through an eventful and exhausting 15-hour shift during which disgruntled patients assault nurses, a mass shooting happens at a music festival, there’s a car chase involving a stolen ambulance vehicle, and Dr. Trinity Santos (Isa Briones) dishes enough dry humor to rub anyone the wrong way. What makes The Pitt special is that nothing happens yet everything happens. Since each episode is one hour of the 15-hour shift, there is no central plot point that is wrapped up by the end of each episode. That, paired with the type of immersive camera work that made ER great, makes each episode an unflinching look at the many different human experiences that can fit into one hour in an emergency room.
The Pitt eschews distracting medical drama tropes. There are no make-out sessions in Exam Room 1, or jokes that last beyond a chuckle. There’s no holiday-themed episode in which Christmas cheer makes the doctors forget there’s a terminally ill patient wasting away in triage. The Pitt is a beautifully self-contained drama that can break your heart more times in one hour than the best shows can in an entire season.
13 / 16
Honestly, The Studio shouldn’t work this well. A comedy series about the hijinks and chaos of running a movie studio should only be appealing to industry insiders and those who have read one too many Hollywood Reporter op-eds. Seth Rogen plays Matt Remick, the new head of Continental Studios, and transforms this show into the best comedy of 2025 so far by satirizing annoying industry trends and the ways in which famous people can be obsessive about made-up stories. In the real world, someone turned Winnie the Pooh into the star of a bloody slasher film, hoping to capitalize on our collective fixation with legacy IP; The Studio spoofs such things by having Remick try to convince Martin Scorsese to turn a film about the Jonestown cult mass murder of 1978 into one about the Kool-Aid brand. Elsewhere, Olivia Wilde shows up, spoofing the real-life scandal about her directorial work on Don’t Worry Darling by playing a manic version of herself who would steel reels of scenes she wants to reshoot. And those are just a few episodes.
The supporting cast of Kathryn Hahn, Bryan Cranston, Ike Barinholtz, Catherine O’Hara, and Chase Sui Wonders (in what could be her breakout role) are sensational. But it’s Remick’s earnest love of cinema that adds a level of profundity to the comedy. In one episode, he becomes enraged when a group of doctors dismiss his career as less important than theirs because Remick honestly believes movies can improve people’s lives. In that way, The Studio is a love letter to films during a time when the medium’s importance outside of cell phones and TVs is being questioned.
14 / 16
After its second season, Apple TV+’s cultural phenomenon Severance has reached a point where its so inseparable from the world (and mystery) it has created that you either love the show or never want to watch another episode again. The sci-fi workplace drama about the consequences of compartmentalizing the human experience took the first season’s look at the machinations behind splitting people’s consciousnesses in two and expanded it outwards to truly look at the issues raised by its core concept on a macro scale. The first season made us believe the Innies and the Outies were two halves of the same person. The second season beautifully illustrates how we’ve been falling in love with people who are diametrically opposed to parts of themselves as a means of survival.
That’s the brilliance of Severance. On the surface it’s a never-ending search for clues about what exactly Lumon is doing with these severed workers, and why the hell there’s a fucking child working there. But, it’s through this extreme and fantastical lens that we’re able to explore how identity is as important as air, and love transcends all even in the most improbable circumstances. Britt Lower conveys more emotions in slight facial twitches as Helly R/Helena Eagan than some of the best actresses can do in full scenes. Tramell Tillman is the runaway pick for every Best Supporting Actor award for his scene-stealing realism (and unmatched dance moves) as Lumon shill Seth Milchick. And this might truly be the best role of Adam Scott’s career.
Don’t try to figure out Severance. Just enjoy the ride.
15 / 16
It wasn’t until midway through the first episode, when shock-riddled 13-year-old Jamie Miller (Owen Cooper) goes through the emotionless procedure of being arrested after having his world rocked, that I realized the entire episode has been one long, continuous shot. The delay in my recognition of this fact wasn’t due to viewing passively as I lazily scrolled on a second screen. It was because, at its best, Adolescence gets a stranglehold on your attention with its drama, to the point that you’re only focused on what happens next rather than how it’s being presented. The Netflix drama focuses on a troubled teenage boy accused of killing his classmate Katie Leonard (Emilia Holliday), and the multi-layered ramifications that has on a family, a police force, and a school. That’s where the one-shot approach becomes essential.
Most shows take a fragmented approach to offering up the perspectives of different characters on the inciting incident that puts the season in motion. In one episode of such a show, you may get 10 different perspectives that all come into focus by the end of the season. On Adolescence, you spend an entire episode with Jamie and his psychologist Briony Ariston (Erin Doherty), from her entering the facility to the two of them playing a game of chess to them having a session to her sitting in the shocked aftermath of seeing a young boy riddled with volatile self-hate. All of that, without the camera blinking or allowing you to divert from the drama that was unfolding. Also, that episode is on the shortlist of best episodes in Netflix’s history.
When all is said and done, no TV show so far this year has been nearly as impressive or emotionally arresting as Adolescence. And I’m not sure one will be.
16 / 16