Rolling Stone The 15 Best Tv Shows Of 2025 Year End Lists

Leo Migdal

-Dec 9, 2025, 11:36 PM

rolling stone the 15 best tv shows of 2025 year end lists

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. The year 2025 saw some amazing TV shows dominating the headlines and ratings, making it a great time to be a TV lover. With network TV and streaming platforms like Peacock and HBO Max offering strong content, narrowing down a best-of-the-year list seemed impossible. Thankfully, the editors at Rolling Stone magazine curated a list of the 15 best TV shows of 2025.

Rolling Stone named the 15 best TV shows of 2025 in a post shared on social media, highlighting the shows that skewered Hollywood, hailed everyday heroes, and explored flaws in human nature. The post emphasized how these shows made viewers feel a range of emotions and reminded us of the complexity of being human. “Adolescence” (Netflix) was a tense four-episode one-take crime drama that delved into the emotional fallout of a 13-year-old boy accused of Peace Nero is a writer and blogger who loves to explore different topics of self-development. She shares her personal experiences in order to help people discover their true purpose in life. Save my name, email, and website in this browser for the next time I comment.

2025 has been an exceptional year for television, delivering everything from long-awaited finales to bold new originals. We’ve been eating good all year round, with Stranger Things, Severance, The Last of Us, Squid Game, Pluribus, and Alien: Earth just a few of the TV hits from the past 12 months. Some of the biggest success stories have been the releases no one saw coming. Adolescence blew our minds with its one-shot story that delivered a gut-punch of emotions, while The Pitt breathed new life into the medical drama sub-genre. But that hasn’t overshadowed the returning heavyweights, with 2025 seeing the arrival of the fifth and final chapter of Stranger Things, the last season of Squid Game, and the long-awaited second runs from Severance,... So, as 2026 fast approaches, we’ve rounded up our favourite series of the year — the shows that genuinely stuck with us, had us counting down the days for new episodes, or, in many...

Below, you’ll find our picks for the best TV shows of 2025, ranked in order of preference. What it’s about: This prequel to Stephen King’s It explores the origins of Pennywise and the titular town’s sinister past as a new generation encounters horrors lurking beneath its surface. 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. Each year, TV networks, cable channels, and streaming services release their content to the masses, and much of it is entertaining. We used to complain that there was never anything good on, but these days, there's an overabundance of amazing content. This makes it challenging to find your next show to watch, as there are many excellent options. Whether it was a fresh season of an existing series or something entirely new, 2025 saw the arrival of some of the best television in recent years.

Disney+ released more Marvel and "Star Wars" content, while a new "Alien" show introduced the menacing monsters to Earth. Several long-awaited season follow-ups finally debuted, reinvigorating each series for a wider audience of viewers. Whatever your preferred genre, there was something great to watch in 2025, and as of this writing, there's still room for more amazing entries. But until those appear, each of the following shows blew away the competition and should be on everyone's "must see" list of 2025 TV series. Be sure to binge them before 2026 comes along with its own incredible content. Marvel knocked it out of the park when it debuted "Daredevil" on Netflix in 2015.

The gritty street-level superhero story was personal, tragic, hopeful, and remarkably dramatic. But when Marvel Studios began generating new content for Disney+, "Daredevil" was one of many characters who didn't initially make the leap into the next phase of the Marvel Cinematic Universe's television output. Fortunately, that decision was eventually reversed when Charlie Cox reprised the role of Matt Murdock for a brief cameo in "Spider-Man: No Way Home." He then popped up in "She-Hulk: Attorney at Law" and... In 2023, Such Brave Girls’ first season introduced the series as British TV’s next unhinged and unfiltered comedy, no trauma seemingly off limits, no joke too dark to make. Following sisters Josie (writer and creator Kat Sadler) and Billie Johnson (Lizzie Davidson), and their mum Deb (Louise Brealey), it navigated mental health, toxic relationships and the struggle to survive with arch humour. Season two didn’t make things easier for the Johnsons, ramping up their personal tensions and raising the stakes on the family’s future, the wicked touch that made the first episodes so funny intact.

Whether it was Billie deluding herself into thinking she was in a sugar baby arrangement with a married man or Deb’s constant desperation to lock down boyfriend Dev (Paul Bazely), there was a continued... Watercooler moment: Josie’s various schemes to spend as little time as possible with her cloying boyfriend Seb, including when she tries to get sectioned by claiming to have overdosed. RD TikTok comedian Benito Skinner transports his own coming-out story into this ribald and unexpectedly tender six-part twist on American Pie college raunch comedies. Executive-produced by his mate Charli XCX, Overcompensating sees him star as Benny Scanlon, a golden-boy jock who tries to convince the world (and himself) that he’s straight. Every unconvincing frat-bro utterance of “I love pussy” feels like a distress flare he’s sending into the world.

The masc-mask starts to chip when he tries to sleep with fellow freshman Carmen Neil (Wally Baram), and the pair strike up an us-against-the-world friendship, as he falls for film student Miles Hari (Rish... Peppered with likeable characters, Overcompensating is astute on the queer coming-of-age experience – including the end-of-the-world fear people can see you’re gay before you’ve fully accepted it yourself – and is further bolstered by... Best episode: ‘Welcome To The Black Parade’ The votes have been cast and counted, and here are the GamesRadar+ picks for the very best TV shows of 2025 When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission. Here’s how it works.

Rolling Stone The 15 Best Tv Shows Of 2025 Year End Lists

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