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 produce precisely that many works worth commemorating per 365-day period. 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 we all mark time together. Still, some years do feel more resistant to culling and ranking than others.
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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 ago. 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 Wong Kar Wai is currently rolling out his first TV project, Blossoms Shanghai, to American audiences via a similar platform, Criterion Channel.
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 day—but light on ones that felt challenging or revolutionary or consumed my thoughts for weeks after I finished them. 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.
10. The Pitt (HBO Max)
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 exhaustion to cure what ails us.
9. Such Brave Girls (Hulu)
Kat Sadler’s British traumedy about a household of unhinged women—a show I have never heard anyone mention in real life—comes by its spot on this list honestly, as one of my most cherished viewing experiences of 2025. But it also stands in for the dozens of small, strange, auteurish, boundary-pushing, female-led shows we enjoyed in the post-Fleabag Peak TV era. They’ve been steadily disappearing for a while now, especially on American TV; it’s hard to imagine even recent gems like Somebody Somewhere could still get made. For the moment, the UK continues to bankroll the occasional subversive black comedy; Such Brave Girls’ titular characters are a lesbian (Sadler) repeatedly pressured into leveling up her relationship with a guy, her delusional and destructive side-chick sister (Lizzie Davidson), and their desperate, destitute mum (Louise Brealey), who will stop at nothing to keep a meal-ticket man. An ocean away from girl-power propaganda, the show is just about as stark and pessimistic and hilarious in its wrongness as feminist humor gets. Let’s enjoy it while we can.
8. Forever (Netflix)
The teenage experience has become unrecognizable to adults. Who are these strange creatures we call Gen Z, with their inscrutable stares and inane catchphrases? Yet certain universal facts of adolescence persist, and in Forever, creator Mara Brock Akil builds a great romance around them. An adaptation of Judy Blume’s groundbreaking 1975 novel, it transforms a white, suburban coming-of-age classic into a contemporary chronicle of young, Black love at opposite ends of a vast L.A. wealth spectrum. Akil’s expansion of the story’s perspective beyond Blume’s female narrator (played beautifully here by Lovie Simone), allowing equal access to the struggles of her boyfriend (Michael Cooper Jr.) as well as insight into their caring parents’ worries, yields an empathetic portrait of first love that is wise beyond its protagonists’ years. Sure, there’s social media intrigue. More remarkable, though, are the observations about how our early relationships shape and surprise us that still cut deep half a century later.
7. The Studio (Apple TV)
No topic consumes Hollywood like its own ongoing financial crisis, which snowballs each year with rising production costs, political pressures, and successive waves of disruption from the tech industry. So, of course, it’s making a lot of art about its devolution. Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg’s showbiz comedy is TV’s best entry in the subgenre yet, casting Rogen as a doofy, insecure, idealistic but cowardly studio head trying futilely to make good movies amid cutthroat colleagues played by Catherine O’Hara, Ike Barinholtz, Kathryn Hahn, and Chase Sui Wonders. The show is truly funny. It uses A-list guest stars to great, never gratuitous effect. Its homages to classic films, from Chinatown to The Player, are on point. But what really sets The Studio apart is its genuine reverence for cinema, which cuts through the cynicism about the business of moviemaking that fuels so many similar stories and gives stakes to the characters’ fumbling.
6. Mo (Netflix)
This year’s second and final season of comedian Mo Amer’s semi-autobiographical series begins in Mexico City and ends at Israel’s Ben Gurion Airport. In each scene, Amer’s gregarious alter ego, Mo Najjar, endures an infuriating encounter with a border-enforcement bureaucrat. They make apt bookends for eight darkly comic episodes that trace his family’s slog through the U.S. immigration system, as Palestinian refugees in Houston with a decades-old asylum case. Despite his statelessness, Mo has cobbled together a quintessentially American life, rooted in a community where a white Texan farmer, a Latina auto mechanic, and a young Black family can, in one lovely episode, gather around the same Thanksgiving feast. This scene offers a utopian alternative to immigration hell: a vision of borders transcended, rather than policed. That it comes from one of vanishingly few Palestinian American voices with a national platform, at a time of such great suffering in his homeland, makes the image all the more affecting.
5. Severance (Apple TV)
When a new TV creator delivers a knockout debut season, then takes three years to release the follow up amid reports of behind-the-scenes acrimony and ballooning budgets, you worry. So it was a wonderful surprise when the second season of Dan Erickson’s sci-fi drama of bifurcated consciousness in the white-collar workplace defied expectations of a sophomore slump. In the wake of a cliffhanger “Macrodat Uprising” that alerted the public to the misery of severed workers’ office-bound innies, well, not much changes at Lumon Industries. Back at their austere desks, Adam Scott’s Mark S. and the coworkers who comprise his only family are left with little to do but resume investigating their sinister employer. As they dig, storylines unfold that take them on journeys through the frozen wasteland surrounding Lumon, showcase Emmy-winning performances from Britt Lower and Tramell Tillman, and raise ambitious questions around love and death that further Severance’s central inquiry into what makes us human.
4. Mussolini: Son of the Century (Mubi)
The rise of fascism shouldn’t make for cozy viewing, so when I call this Mussolini biodrama abrasive, I mean it as a compliment. In a miniseries based on Antonio Scurati’s novel, Pride & Prejudice director Joe Wright embraces darkness, often literally. Tracing Il Duce’s ascent, after World War I, from newspaper editor to autocrat, the show shrouds his machinations in ominous chiaroscuro. Tom Rowlands of Chemical Brothers adds a clanging score. Arrogant soliloquies and fourth-wall-breaking confidences dominate Stefano Bises’ chilling script. Anchoring it all is Luca Marinelli in a maximalist turn that conjures so many strongmen, real and fictional—the abjection of Richard III, the calculation of Putin, the coarseness of Trump, the bearish physicality of Tony Soprano in his bathrobe. As Mussolini crushes foes, betrays friends, and sells out his stated principles, Son of the Century dispels the confusion that perennially surrounds fascism as an idea. It is nothing more complex, Wright argues, than the nihilistic accumulation of power.
3. The Lowdown (FX)
Reservation Dogs creator Sterlin Harjo has moved on from a genre-defying opus about Indigenous teens on a rural rez to an urban neo-noir whose would-be white savior is played by Ethan Hawke. Yet the shows have plenty in common. Both use Harjo’s home state of Oklahoma as an object lesson in America’s long history of arrogance, oppression, and possibility. A shaggy ramble through the juke joints and 24-hour diners of Tulsa, The Lowdown follows Hawke’s self-identified “truthstorian” (read: journalist), Lee Raybon, on a perilous investigation of the apparent suicide of a prominent local family’s black sheep. This is a world populated by outsize personalities and packed with rollicking performances from Hawke, Keith David, Jeanne Tripplehorn, Kyle MacLachlan, and many more. As you might expect, Harjo’s layered storytelling locates in the present echoes of formative atrocities against the city’s Black and Native American communities. What you probably won’t predict is its brilliant ending.
2. Pluribus (Apple TV)
A show that reunited Breaking Bad creator Vince Gilligan with Rhea Seehorn, the breakout star of its brilliant spinoff, Better Call Saul, could’ve consisted solely of artful shots of Seehorn staring at a wall, and fans of their collaboration still would’ve eagerly tuned in. Instead, Gilligan swung for the stratosphere with this globe-spanning, sci-fi thought experiment: What if world peace suddenly broke out, people everywhere started living in harmony, and you were the only grouch among billions of humans who couldn’t be happy about it? Built around Seehorn’s virtuosic, often solo performance as a curmudgeonly romantasy author who proves immune to an extraterrestrial virus that fuses the consciousnesses of nearly everyone on Earth, the cinematic Pluribus (which might have been my No. 1 if I’d had a chance to see the season finale before this list came due) dares to argue that our stubborn individuality is what makes our species worth saving.
1. Dying for Sex (FX)
Every terminal diagnosis presents a choice: Will you spend your last days living as you always have, or will you chase your wildest dreams? Faced with metastatic breast cancer, Molly Kochan fled a sexless marriage, followed her starved libido through dozens of kinky trysts, and recorded it all in an unfiltered podcast called Dying for Sex. Creators Kim Rosenstock and Liz Meriwether honor Kochan by preserving this ragged but revelatory mix of tones in this remarkable dramedy, which entrusts the role of Molly to Michelle Williams—an actor whose ability to magnify everyday travails to epic scale has fueled her many collaborations with the indie auteur Kelly Reichardt. She’s absolutely radiant opposite Jenny Slate, who plays the fiercely loving part of Molly’s best friend, nonsexual soulmate, and caretaker; Rob Delaney, Sissy Spacek, Jay Duplass, Esco Jouléy, and Robby Hoffman add their own memorable performances to a cast of singular characters. A fat slice of life devoured in the face of death, this is the rare story of end-stage illness that eschews inspirational moments and tear-jerking monologues in favor of the bracing honesty that defines great art.
Honorable mentions:
Adolescence (Netflix), Alien: Earth (FX), Andor (Disney+), Asura (Netflix), Best Interests (Acorn), Common Side Effects (Adult Swim), Étoile (Amazon), Long Story Short (Netflix), Mr. Scorsese (Apple TV), Mythic Quest (Apple TV), Outrageous (BritBox), Pee-wee as Himself (HBO), The Real Housewives of Salt Lake City (Bravo), The Rehearsal (HBO), Squid Game (Netflix), Task (HBO), The Traitors (Peacock), Wayward (Netflix), The White Lotus (HBO), Wolf Hall: The Mirror and the Light (PBS)
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