A top-10 list can't contain all the great TV of 2025

Review TV Reviews A top-10 list can't contain all the great TV of 2025 A top-10 list can't contain all the great TV of 2025 Audio will be available later today. Owen Cooper stars as Jamie Miller in Adolescence . Netflix hide caption toggle caption Of everything I saw on TV in 2025, the one show I thought was the very best, and has haunted me ever since, was the four-part Netflix drama Adolescence . It's the story of a young teen accused of murdering a classmate, and it's told in such a way, emotionally and technically, that I can't and won't forget it. It's the show I recommend most highly, but with a major caveat. It's grim. And it's almost unbearably intense. Intensity, it turns out, is a common factor among many of my very favorite shows from this year. HBO Max's The Pitt was a medical show with an impressively credible tension factor. So was Netflix's , with its unpredictable, high-stakes plot twists. And so was FX's The Diplomat The Bear , even though it wasn't about life or death, just appetizers and entrees. The Bear even calls itself a comedy, but it's not. Much, much too dramatic for that. A couple of my other favorite TV dramas, almost equally intense, featured ragtag, mismatched investigative teams thrown together to solve specific crimes. One, HBO's Task , was headed by a brooding, intelligent guy with lots of emotional baggage, played by Mark Ruffalo . Another, Netflix's was headed by a brooding, intelligent guy with even more emotional baggage, played by Matthew Goode. Dept. Q, And maybe it's just me, but this year I definitely gravitated to dramatic shows that made me uneasy. It was another great season for Netflix's Black Mirror , and the end-of-year final episode of another dark Netflix fantasy series, , is eagerly awaited by many. Including me, because I've seen all the new episodes leading up to it, but the finale is being kept under wraps. Stranger Things Stranger Things has been around since 2016 - almost a decade - but other terrific genre productions were new takes on old ideas. Guillermo del Toro 's Frankenstein , on Netflix, was an excellent and very different adaptation. And what Noah Hawley did by reinventing the Alien movie franchise, for the FX TV series Alien: Earth , was thrilling - and, at times, truly scary. And still churning out weekly episodes, brilliant ones, is , the new, indescribably original Apple TV sci-fi series from Pluribus Vince Gilligan . The comedies I liked best this year? Some were set behind-the-scenes of show biz - like the new Apple TV series The Studio , starring Seth Rogen as a bumbling but well-meaning studio head, and the returning HBO Max series , starring Hacks Jean Smart as a female comic landing a job as a TV talk-show host. The other comedies were lighthearted mysteries benefiting greatly from their veteran cast members: Hulu's and Netflix's Only Murders in the Building ....

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