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Afi Awards Tv Top 10 Shows Of 2025 Adolescence The Pitt Andor

Leo Migdal
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afi awards tv top 10 shows of 2025 adolescence the pitt andor

The American Film Institute is out with its annual list of Top 10 outstanding TV programs, and this year’s streamer-dominated model is as different as it could be: None of last year’s recognized shows... All but one of the honorees are dramas, and nine are either freshman or sophomore series, following the AFI‘s usual pattern. The shows it singles out are deemed culturally and artistically representative of this year’s most significant achievements in the art of the moving image, per AFI. Netflix and Apple TV lead with field with three of AFI’s Top 10 apiece. Netflix has the Emmy-laden limited series Adolescence, Season 3 of The Diplomat and new drama Death by Lightning. Apple TV’s offerings are Season 2 of Severance, freshman drama Pluribus and rookie comedy The Studio.

Also making AFI’s Top 10 this year are HBO Max’s The Pitt, which won the Emmy for Outstanding Drama Series in its first season; Season 2 of Disney+’s now-wrapped Star Wars series Andor; FX/Hulu’s... The 2025 list is dominated by streaming shows, with only HBO’s Task and FX’s The Lowdown making the cut, though they also stream on HBO Max and Hulu, respectively. Broadcast networks were shut out after ABC’s Abbott Elementary was honored last year. The American Film Institute has revealed its picks for the best 10 films and TV shows of 2025. Its top films are, in alphabetical order: Avatar: Fire and Ash, Bugonia, Frankenstein, Hamnet, Jay Kelly, Marty Supreme, One Battle After Another, Sinners, Train Dreams and Wicked: For Good. AFI’s top 10 TV shows of the year are, in alphabetical order: Adolescence, Andor, Death by Lightning, The Diplomat, The Lowdown, The Pitt, Pluribus, Severance, The Studio and Task.

In addition, AFI is honoring It Was Just an Accident, from dissident filmmaker Jafar Panahi, who earlier this week was sentenced by Iran to a year in prison in absentia, with a special award. AFI’s honorees, which will be celebrated at a Jan. 9 luncheon in Los Angeles, recognize movies and TV shows deemed culturally and artistically representative of this year’s most significant achievements in the art of the moving image. Is it possible, at this late date, to put aside all of the after-the-fact reaction to Adolescence—the four-part Netflix miniseries that won a ton of Emmys and prompted a cycle of worry about phones,... In four hours, you come to care about so many characters: Stephen Graham as the devastated father, Ashley Walters as the debonair, befuddled detective inspector, Erin Doherty as the evenhanded, professional psychologist rattled by... And, more than anything else, the rookie actor Owen Cooper as Jamie, the apple-cheeked tween who committed an awful crime whose gravity he barely seems to register.

Once the show’s one-continuous-take episodes start to carry you along, you realize that the magic of Adolescence lies in making an utter nightmare—imagine that your kid killed a classmate, for reasons nobody, even he,... And although the show has since become a teaching tool used to prompt conversation between adults and teens about the dangers of the internet, it’s actually not didactic. Just like Jamie’s parents, we viewers never really know why he did what he did. —Rebecca Onion A decade and a half after NBC’s hit medical procedural ER ended, some of the drama’s key players—John Wells (executive producer), R. Scott Gemmill (writer), and Noah Wyle (lead actor)—decided that it was time to revisit the chaos of emergency medicine.

Thus, The Pitt was born—but it diverged from its predecessor in several key ways. Namely, The Pitt is set in Pittsburgh, and its entire season takes place over the course of one ER shift, with an episode capturing each consecutive hour of the most stressful workday imaginable. But the alchemy behind the series’ success goes beyond its format. The show has been praised for both its cast of characters—a gaggle of newbie students and residents on their first day at the Pittsburgh Trauma Medical Center, led by the lovable senior attending physician... Robby (Wyle), who is suffering from COVID-era PTSD—and its accuracy. The Pitt refuses to shy away from true-to-life depictions of health care realities, from medical anomalies to responses to too-familiar traumatic events, like a mass shooting.

This means that the series can be a hard watch, but it should be, given its mission to highlight how the concerns of the medical professionals saving our lives have deepened in the years... Just be grateful the writers pepper the strife with just enough relationship drama to keep you wondering what will happen when everyone clocks out for the day. —Nadira Goffe When, this fall, The Studio won 13 Emmys, the most ever for a comedy, let alone a comedy in its first season, the cynical take was that this was just Hollywood rewarding the show... But, as someone who laughed so hard at this Apple TV series that he frequently worried he was bothering the downstairs neighbors, I would offer an opposing view. After all, The Studio, co-created by, starring, and often co-directed by Seth Rogen, isn’t exactly the love letter to La-La Land that those movies are—or if it is, it’s written with a poison pen.

More accurately, it’s a spiritual sequel to Robert Altman’s 1992 satire The Player, right down to the fact that the grizzled old studio exec played by Bryan Cranston has the same name as the... It has the brainy, knowing, insider-y quality of Altman’s film, as well as its look-at-me long takes, but it’s simultaneously the kind of gag-filled spoof that’s unafraid to do a runner about a zombie... (The zombie film is, of course, as Johnny Knoxville explains in one of the show’s many cameos, “a dark satire about medical disinformation.”) If you can’t stomach cringe comedy, then maybe it’s not for... But for the rest of us, I could go on. Did I mention that it co-stars our era’s two great comedy Katherines, Kathryn Hahn and Catherine O’Hara? —Forrest Wickman

Tony Gilroy’s excellent first season of Disney’s most grown-up Star Wars title was enough to cement Andor as, in my opinion, one of the best television shows of all time. The second and final season, while slightly more bogged down by requisite Star Wars trappings, is nearly as good. This thrilling, heart-wrenching story of how a rebel is made and a revolution cultivated isn’t just thematically relevant in this current moment of politics we find ourselves in. It’s intrinsically, eternally human, drawing from a deep well of historical events and movements to capture the essence of what it means to live with hope and to fight for good, no matter the... (And it costs a lot, as the fates of many characters make clear.) There has never been a Stars Wars show like this; in all likelihood, there never will be again. —Jenny G.

Zhang Chair, AFI Jury for Motion Pictures Wesleyan University AFI Board of Trustees Scholar University of California, Los Angeles Scholar University of Southern California Chair, AFI Jury for Television Producer AFI Board of Trustees Scholar University of California, Santa Cruz

The American Film Institute released its AFI Awards for 2025, which include its AFI top 10 lists for film and television, and, yes, Paul Thomas Anderson’s “One Battle After Another” made the former. Moreover, as expected, Emmy favorites “Andor,” “The Pitt,” “The Studio,” and “Adolescence” landed on the latter. As always, there were a surprise or two. READ MORE: “Peter Hujar’s Day,” “Sorry, Baby,” “Train Dreams” and “Adolescence” Top 2026 Independent Spirit Awards Nominations [Complete List] AVATAR: FIRE AND ASHBUGONIAFRANKENSTEINHAMNETJAY KELLYMARTY SUPREMEONE BATTLE AFTER ANOTHERSINNERSTRAIN DREAMSWICKED: FOR GOOD ADOLESCENCEANDORDEATH BY LIGHTNINGTHE DIPLOMATTHE LOWDOWNTHE PITTPLUR1BUSSEVERANCETHE STUDIOTASK

It should be noted that international films do not qualify for the AFI Top 10 lists. Hence, the Palm d’Or winner “It Was Just An Accident” earned a Special Award. Andor has been recognized for its excellence by the American Film Institute (AFI), with its second season included in the organization’s list of Top 10 TV shows of 2025. Via Deadline, it’s one of only two Disney-owned shows to make the cut, and the only Disney Plus show in the US. The Lowdown also made the list, which debuted on FX/Hulu (it will eventually arrive on Disney Plus overseas). Netflix had three shows make the top 10, as did Apple TV, while HBO/HBO Max had two of its own.

Andor is actually being recognized in this annual list for the first time; according to Deadline, Season 1 didn’t make the cut, and neither did previous seasons of The Diplomat or Severance. Strangely, Pluribus has made the list despite the fact it’s only halfway through its debut season. All 10 honorees will be recognized on Friday, January 9 at the annual AFI Awards private luncheon in Beverley Hills, along with the Top 10 Motion Pictures of the Year. It might not hold quite the same cachet as The Emmy Awards, but it’s still nice to see Andor Season 2 getting its flowers regardless. Earlier this year, Andor Season 2 won the award for Outstanding Writing for a Drama Series at the Primetime Emmys, though it lost out in Outstanding Drama Series and Outstanding Directing for a Drama... Shortly before that, it scooped up four awards at the Creative Arts Emmy Awards, the fourth-most successful series on the night.

Those awards included Outstanding Production Design, Outstanding Fantasy/Sci-Fi Costimes, Outstanding Picture Editing and Outstanding Special Visual Effects. TAGGED AS: Academy Awards, AFI, Awards, Emmys, Oscars, streaming, TV The American Film Institute (AFI) announced its official selections of the top 10 movies and TV shows of 2025 today, and the best picture race has come into sharper focus, with Wicked For Good,... On the TV Side, Emmy Favorites The Pitt, Severance, and The Studio earned recognition. Netflix, Universal Pictures/Focus Features, and Searchlight were the big winners on the film side, taking home two prizes each. With an equal mix of blockbusters and indie fare, most moviegoers would likely be pleased if this list translated to the Best Picture lineup.

Last year, Oppenheimer was honored just days before it took home the top film prize, while Shōgun and Hacks were dubbed two of the best shows of 2024 by AFI before their respective Emmy... Read below for the full list of AFI winners, and if you’re as obsessed with awards as we are, check out our Awards Leaderboard for 2024/2025. On an Apple device? Follow Rotten Tomatoes on Apple News.

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