Crandi

Best Tv Shows Of 2025 The New York Times

Leo Migdal
-
best tv shows of 2025 the new york times

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...

James Poniewozik: Best TV Shows of 2025, as published by The New York Times and arranged somewhat alphabetically but in pairs [see also 2024 • 2023 • 2022 • 2021 • 2020 • 2019 • 2018 • 2017 • 2016] Year-end lists are fingerprints; aggregate statistics are smudges. Therefore, I make no tallies. Giovana Gelhoren is a High-Trending Topics Writer at Collider, where she covers all the most-talked about stars, movies and TV shows. She’s a proud Latina, hailing all the way from Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, and graduated from Northwestern University with a degree in Journalism and International Studies.

She’s known among her friends as an encyclopedia of celebrities and will watch just about every type of media (especially if said friends are around to watch it with her). She's also interviewed many celebrities during her career, some favorites including Anne Hathaway, Halle Berry, Pamela Anderson, Jamie Lee Curtis, Brenda Song, Jordin Sparks, and many more. Every year, The New York Times releases their list of Top 10 TV shows of the year. The 2025 list, which was released on December 4, has a mixed bag of the world's most talked-about shows, like HBO Max's breakthrough hit The Pitt or Apple TV's latest success Pluribus, and some... In the list for the Top 10 International TV shows, for instance, a few underrated, hidden gems are finally being put on the map. Among them is Mafia, a Swedish crime drama that follows the looming presence of organized crime in the country back in the 90s.

It's compelling, impeccably done, and offers a slice of European history that TV has rarely portrayed. Directed by Tomas Jonsgården and Mani Maserrat-Agah, Mafia follows two antagonistic characters: lone police detective Gunn Thörngren (Katia Winter) and the Yugoslav criminal Radovan "Jakov" Jakovic (Peshang Rad). Spanning nine years in Sweden in the 1990s, the storyline starts off when Gunn busts a truck full of cigarettes, which she later finds out is worth a whopping 1.3 million króna. And while the police department then moves Gunn to more pressing crimes, like armed bank robberies, she becomes determined to investigate and track down the cigarette scheme, with a hunch that it could lead... As the season goes on, Gunn and Jakov, both stubborn and hardened by their past in their own way, develop a unique and wary connection with one another, with each of them believing they're... In the background, as the violent Yugoslav Wars continue to disintegrate Yugoslavia, the criminal underbelly of Sweden and Europe shifts, establishing a cigarette smuggling network worth billions, and leading to Sweden's first-ever gang war,...

In addition to Winter and Rad, the series also stars Helena af Sandeberg, Nemanja Stojanovic, Jens Hultén, Christian Hillborg, Cedomir Djordjevic, and Dragomir Mrsic. While making The New York Times Top 10 International Shows of 2025 is certainly enough to make Mafia a must-watch, the series is layered and gripping, and still manages to surprise viewers, even though... According to The New York Times itself, the show finds its success because the protagonists don't fall into classic romantic clichés, and make for engaging characters who drive the show. Of course, that's especially the case given Winter and Rad's powerful performances. While Winter delivers a nuanced performance of a woman who's determined to follow her intuition, even if it's against police protocol or threatens her own life, Rad's performance of a precise, cunning criminal is... What a year it’s been for television.

The small screen has dominated the pop-culture conversation in 2025, with watercooler shows like The Pitt, Severance, and Adolescence proving that people still sat down together to watch the tube. Meanwhile, genre shows dominated, with sci-fi TV like Pluribus, Andor, and Alien: Earth proving to be the escape we need in an increasingly dystopian reality. But what makes a TV show great in 2025? Is it its willingness to push the boundaries that television usually lays down? Is it sharp and provocative messaging that draws parallels to our current reality? Or is it simply the amount of alien goop and human gore that it’s willing to throw at its audience?

Maybe it’s all of the above. After much careful deliberation and a very democratic polling process, Inverse has chosen its top 25 TV shows of the year. Here are Inverse’s top TV picks of 2025. Mark my words: “Wilderness reform schools” will become the next big thing in horror, and Mae Martin’s Netflix series just confirmed that with a twisting tale of small-town cults, the “wayward teen” industry, and... Add a spine-tingling performance by Toni Collette on top of that, and you’ve got a great weekend watch. — Dais Johnston

Faster, bloodier, and funnier than Season 1, Twisted Metal Season 2 also managed to tell a tender family story. Come for requisite vehicular mayhem. Stay for Anthony Mackie reading vintage Babysitter’s Club paperbacks. — Ryan Britt 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. 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. As the freshman comedy that won more Emmys than any single season of a comedy ever, it’s easy to take “The Studio” down a few pegs. Its satire isn’t that biting, its casting can cover up any oversights, and its insular appeal to Hollywood obsessives may not speak to the masses like other shows do.

But it’s still really, really funny. Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg’s Apple series is devoted to getting laughs and consistently snags them. Following recently promoted studio head Matt Remick (Rogen) as he suffers through the first year of his dream job, “The Studio” chooses a prime subject to be skewered in each half-hour episode. The throwback episodic structure matches the nostalgia-tinged vibes Matt and his cronies give off, while they work up a big presentation for CinemaCon, sweat through the Golden Globes, fight to preserve films shot on... Perhaps “The Studio’s” greatest asset is its insider vantage point of an industry in decline. Making movies is harder than ever, and no one knows that better than Rogen & Co.

People Also Search

In Cultural Criticism, Every Year Ends The Same Way—with A

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...

Movie Stars Like Seth Rogen, Ethan Hawke, And Michelle Williams

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 optima...

The Result, For Me, Was A Schedule Packed With Shows

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....

Then It Might Be Time To Worry. The Old-school, Network-style

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 ...

James Poniewozik: Best TV Shows Of 2025, As Published By

James Poniewozik: Best TV Shows of 2025, as published by The New York Times and arranged somewhat alphabetically but in pairs [see also 2024 • 2023 • 2022 • 2021 • 2020 • 2019 • 2018 • 2017 • 2016] Year-end lists are fingerprints; aggregate statistics are smudges. Therefore, I make no tallies. Giovana Gelhoren is a High-Trending Topics Writer at Collider, where she covers all the most-talked about...