Best Tv Shows Of 2025 Rolling Stone

Leo Migdal

-Dec 9, 2025, 10:50 PM

Just when you thought the post-Peak TV glacier of shows had melted into a puddle of mediocre algorithm-feeders, the medium snapped back to form in 2025. We may not be in the midst of a new golden age — streamers and cable networks alike are muddling their way through a very uncertain media landscape (see Netflix’s acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery just this morning!) — but this year delivered a handful of truly original shows that did more than throw A-list stars at a paper-thin plot and try to pass it off as prestige. The series that stood out were daring, stylish, and had something to say about the world we live in today. Oh, and they were damn entertaining, too. Whether dissecting Hollywood or the health care industry, exploring history or an alternate universe, making us laugh or making us cry (and sometimes both), these 15 shows, presented here in alphabetical order, proved that...

This four-part British limited series, about a kid accused of murdering a classmate, hit Netflix on a Friday with little to no advance fanfare; by the end of the weekend, it was the most... A labor of love from director Philip Barantini and co-writer and star Stephen Graham, Adolescence starts with cops bursting into the home of an average suburban family and arresting 13-year-old Jamie Miller (newcomer Owen... Each episode then focuses on the aftermath via a different perspective, from Jamie’s fellow students to his family members; Episode Three, a standoff between Cooper’s incarcerated teen and a psychologist played by Erin Doherty,... And as with Barantini and Graham’s previous collaboration, the proto-Bear chef drama Boiling Point, everything is shot in a single extended take. There’s a reason this import dominated the 2025 Emmys, but even if it hadn’t walked away with armfuls of statues, it would still leave you feeling like you’ve been gut-punched. —David Fear

The sophomore (and final) season of Tony Gilroy’s Star Wars prequel series doubled down on the revolutionary spirit, delivering an even deeper sausage-factory view of how the Rebellion was made while still giving fans... The fact that Diego Luna’s Cassian and his fellow freedom fighters were fighting a fascist empire a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away almost feels incidental; few works of mass entertainment... These 10 episodes had their share of thrills and chills, first-class villains (especially Denise Gough’s imperial apparatchik), highly memeable moments — dance like no one’s watching, Mon Mothma! — and a sequence inside an enemy hospital that played like a stand-alone heist movie. But the season also offered a chilling look at how authoritarian governments use misinformation and manipulate certain populations into enemies. The I.P.

will be with us, always, but Gilroy’s contribution to the canon will be missed. It was even more invaluable the second time around. —D.F. Writer Mike Makowsky, best known for his zippy 2019 HBO film Bad Education, took one of the oddest side plots in American history and made it one of the most riveting shows of the... Based on Candice Millard’s book Destiny of the Republic, Death By Lighting chronicles, over a tight yet expansive-feeling four episodes, the 1881 assassination of President James A. Garfield (played with stoicism by Michael Shannon) by an unstable fan turned hater named Charles Guiteau (Matthew Macfadyen, better than ever).

It’s an original story of standom gone wrong that tackles the scourge of American violence. It’s also deeply amusing, featuring basically every character actor you know and love (lookin’ at you, Nick Offerman, Bradley Whitford, and Shea Whigham) in a big bushy beard, absolutely killing it. —Esther Zuckerman One of the year’s most delightful surprises was this sleeper hit in the vein of Slow Horses — it centers on a group of misfit cops in Scotland — but with a bit more... Matthew Goode, who’s bounced around in rom-coms and period pieces and legal dramas, absolutely melts into the lead role of Carl Morck, a prickly and misanthropic detective returning to work after an on-the-job shooting... Banished to a basement office and saddled with a bunch of dead-end cold cases, he becomes the leader of a motley crew of crimefighting wannabes.

At home, meanwhile, he’s saddled with an annoying roommate and an angry teenager — the son of an ex-wife who up and left him. With The Queen’s Gambit creator Scott Frank at the helm, the writing is assured and the pacing is swift. The show builds suspense but never at the expense of feeling; some of the most quietly poignant scenes are between Morck and his hospitalized partner (played by Jamie Sives), two men communicating a lot... The case the Dept. Q oddballs end up solving is less memorable than the characters themselves — a recipe for a show with legs. —Maria Fontoura

Rolling Stone: The 15 Best TV Shows of 2025 Year-end lists are fingerprints; aggregate statistics are smudges. Therefore, I make no tallies. Fourteen years ago, Emily Nussbaum, one of my esteemed predecessors in the TV-critic chair, notoriously titled her Top Ten list “I Hate Top Ten Lists.” I’ve seldom felt the same. I’m not much of a holiday person, but, for most of the time that I’ve been a working critic, I’ve loved the end-of-year ritual of sorting the so-so from the superb and the overhyped... I’ve always taken seriously—probably too seriously—the privilege of giving hidden gems another chance to shine.

New Yorker writers reflect on the year’s highs and lows. But, in 2025, I can’t say that curating such a roundup was much fun. This year, as executives backed away from the kind of risky, ambitious programming that marked the last golden age of television, the industry’s decline was evident from its output. TV felt smaller. There were few epics like “The Last of Us” and “Alien: Earth,” which, while entertaining, were ultimately constrained by their source material. Several of the year’s most prominent prestige series—“Severance,” “Andor,” “Adolescence,” “The Bear,” “The White Lotus,” and “The Studio”—were, to my mind, ponderous, shallow, or both.

I was especially disheartened by the dearth of straightforward sitcoms, as the comedy ecosystem continues to migrate online and becomes increasingly, sometimes incomprehensibly, niche. In the past, keeping tabs on all the boundary-pushing shows could be a lonely affair; there were always series that I felt sure were only being watched by other TV critics. But, in such an uninspired year, I found my yardstick for what constitutes great television shifting. Though the traditional standards of excellence—innovation, ambition, execution, distinctiveness, and relevance—still apply, I was more inclined to highlight projects that I wanted to discuss (and debate) with other people. The water cooler may never be reinstalled, but these shows made me crave its return. In 1881, a man named Charles Guiteau assassinated President James Garfield in a bid to be remembered in the history books; instead, he consigned both himself and his victim to the footnotes.

This lively excavation of the entwined fates of Guiteau (Matthew Macfadyen) and Garfield (Michael Shannon) makes for a twisty, political period drama, as well as a haunting parable for our violent times. The killer’s obsession with achieving glory isn’t the only element that feels startlingly modern, with anachronistic touches lending the series an unusual brio. A focus on Garfield’s sense of duty and grand agenda underscores what was lost with his death—and invites the question of what he might have achieved had he lived. In real life, 2025 has been a chaotic year. We've navigated the beginning of a divisive presidential term, the longest government shutdown in U.S. history, witnessed a pope from Chicago get elected, a pop star in space, natural disasters and history-making events almost daily.

In the fictional worlds that fill our TV screens when we look for just a little distraction at the end of our days, things haven't been particularly calm, either. But in a good way. We're talking about Emmy- and hearts-and-minds-winning "The Pitt" on HBO Max. We're talking about a tiny British drama on Netflix that took off with viewership and cultural conversation. And we're also talking about a couple of shows you've probably never heard of at all. While TV this year has been full of viral hate-watches (like Hulu's disastrous-but-renewed "All's Fair") and some of the biggest shows of all time (like the final seasons of Netflix's "Squid Game" and "Stranger...

As the year winds to a close, we hope you'll give these 10 absolutely superb TV shows a watch. You might be surprised by what you find. To see our longer list of the top 20 picks for the best TV shows of the year, scroll through the gallery below. In cultural criticism, every year ends the same way—with a deluge of top 10 lists for every imaginable art form, as though music and literature and film and TV and theater and dance all... It’s a benign fiction, one that gives critics an excuse to issue a final endorsement for the art that has stuck with us over many months and readers help prioritizing their various queues as... Still, some years do feel more resistant to culling and ranking than others.

This one, for example. Television certainly felt more abundant in 2025 than it has in a while, now that the industry has mostly moved past the delays caused by the major writers’ and actors’ strikes a couple years... Top creators, from Vince Gilligan and Sterlin Harjo to Liz Meriwether and Mara Brock Akil, were back on our screens with exciting new projects. Movie stars like Seth Rogen, Ethan Hawke, and Michelle Williams came to TV with the kinds of smart, character-driven stories big studios rarely put in theaters anymore; Noah Wyle revived the doctor show. Returning series such as Severance and Mo proved worth the years-long wait. At the same time, as political and financial tides pushed Hollywood towards conservative decision-making—never an optimal environment for creativity—it felt as though fewer new and outsider voices were breaking through.

Quality shows came to U.S. platforms from everywhere in the world, though the ongoing consolidation of multinational media giants increasingly limited their variety. It speaks volumes that the best international series I watched this year, Italy’s Mussolini: Son of the Century, was only available stateside on the arthouse streaming service Mubi; the globally renowned Hong Kong auteur... The result, for me, was a schedule packed with shows I very much enjoyed—why yes, that is a 20-item honorable mention list, featuring many titles that would’ve made the top 10 on a different... There was no I May Destroy You, no Underground Railroad, no Succession, no Twin Peaks: The Return (remember Showtime?). That doesn’t necessarily qualify as an emergency.

Every year is, after all, different. The next paradigm-shifting series could be just a month or two or 12 away. If it isn’t, though? Then it might be time to worry. The old-school, network-style drama is so back. That was the consensus when The Pitt—conceived by and starring ER alums, with a real-time premise like 24 and a weekly rollout—became both a critical favorite and a bona fide hit.

But if nostalgia drew viewers to Noah Wyle’s hospital homecoming, what kept us riveted were storylines and characters that resonated in the present. There is no equalizer like an emergency room (at least until the bill arrives), where plagues ranging from gun violence to misogyny to an austerity-starved safety net catalyze life-threatening crises. To the extent that this series constitutes comfort viewing, one reason is because it indulges the timely fantasy that, no matter how broken our society gets, competent, caring people will always work through their... Rolling Stone has crowned ‘The Studio’ as the premier television series of 2025, praising its incisive satire of Hollywood’s corporate underbelly amid a year of industry upheaval. The Apple TV+ comedy, starring Seth Rogen as a beleaguered studio executive navigating mergers and algorithm-driven decisions, edges out dystopian thrillers and medical dramas in the magazine’s 15-show list. Critics highlight its 22 celebrity cameos and eight-episode arc as a timely skewering of streaming economics, released just hours after Netflix’s Warner Bros.

Discovery acquisition. The list, compiled by Rolling Stone critics David Fear, Maria Fontoura, Claire McNear, and Esther Zuckerman, spans platforms and genres, reflecting a rebound from Peak TV’s decline into formulaic content. ‘The Studio’ leads with its critique of executive suites, featuring Kristen Wiig as a cutthroat consultant and 200 scripted improvisations across 45-minute episodes. Production filmed on recreated Burbank lots totaling 15,000 square feet, incorporating real-time script tweaks based on 12 focus groups averaging 85 percent approval ratings. Second place goes to ‘The Pitt,’ HBO Max’s Emmy-winning medical drama set over a single 15-hour ER shift, reuniting Noah Wyle with producers R. Scott Gemmill and John Wells.

Best Tv Shows Of 2025 Rolling Stone

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