The 25 Best Tv Shows Of 2025

Leo Migdal

-Dec 9, 2025, 10:52 PM

Your browser does not support the video tag. Our Annual Report recap of 2025 continues with the 25 Best TV Shows of the Year, ranked. Keep it tuned here all month for more accolades, interviews, and lists — including our 50 Best Albums of 2025 and 25 Best Movies of 2025. Vote for your own favorite pop culture of the year by taking the 2025 Consequence Reader’s Survey. TV excels at serving as a time capsule for society. Whether in development for years or produced live on a weekly basis, it’s a medium that can capture the mood of the world better than most.

The best shows of 2025, including The Rehearsal, Andor, Pluribus, Adolescence, and Severance, all rose to the occasion of this wild year. They also never failed to surprise us. As the world continued spinning in its off-kilter way, the year’s best television often made off-kilter choices or came from unexpected places. Dormant franchises were resurrected for the better, against all odds. Genres blended together, sci-fi and comedy and horror and drama combining for fresh takes on classic narratives. The year’s biggest twist: Consequence literally saw ourselves in one of these shows, playing a bigger role in the narrative than anyone here could have anticipated.

For so many, including the protagonists of more than one Apple show, TV offers an escape. The most exciting shows of the year still found ways to make us think and feel, one episode at a time. 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. December is upon us, which means it's time to take stock of the year in TV.

And what a year it was. From long-running series celebrating landmark final seasons, to new players making their mark on the prestige TV landscape, there was no shortage of shows to lose yourself in across the year. The GR+ team came together to determine our TV Show of the year for 2025. Each member submitted a ballot of their pick of the 10 best TV Shows of the year in order. We then took those results to help form the ranked list below. The only criteria for inclusion: we must have been able to publish a written review of the season between Dec 1, 2024 and Nov 30, 2025.

But with hundreds of seasons of TV released in 2025, and only 25 spots to fill on our list, competition was understandably fierce, with several major titles failing to make the cut. If you're wondering where the likes of Stranger Things season 5 or Fallout season 2 are, they weren't eligible for inclusion this year, as we've yet to review those seasons of TV in full... 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 The latest: Stranger Things: Season 5, Landman: Season 2, The Mighty Nein: Season 1 , A Man on The Inside: Season 2, I Love LA, Nobody Wants This, Down Cemetery Road, It: Welcome to... Welcome to our guide of the Best TV Shows of 2025, featuring every Certified Fresh series as they come in week by week! (If you were looking for the previous edition to this list featuring the best of 2024, see its new home as every 2024 Certified Fresh series.) Find Something Fresh! Discover What to Watch, Read Reviews, Leave Ratings and Build Watchlists.

Download the Rotten Tomatoes App. 25 Most Popular TV Shows Right Now: What to Watch on Streaming 30 Most Popular Movies Right Now: What to Watch In Theaters and Streaming 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. 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 25 Best Tv Shows Of 2025

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