Note: This concludes my 2025 coverage. If you haven’t, be sure to check out my lists of top songs, top albums, and top episodes of the year.
It’s a shame that I’m tardy to get these out, because TV in 2025 was ridiculous. I thought of expanding the list beyond twenty but decided making more work for myself wasn’t the way forward, so just know that things that would be worthy of the top twenty, top ten, top five in any other year are numerically under-praised. So please do not yell at me about so-and-so’s placement! Believe me, I know.
All right, just know that if you end up watching anything off my recommendation, you owe me a reaction.
20. Long Story Short
season 1
10 episodes
stream: Netflix
After BoJack Horseman, creator Raphael Bob-Waksberg and production designer Lisa Hanawalt each made follow-ups (Undone and Tuca & Bertie, respectively), and now finally reunite with Long Story Short, a more traditional animated sitcom about an upper-middle class Jewish family that goes back and forth in time episode by episode. If Long Story Short has a fault, it’s that the BoJack comparison – composer Jesse Novak also returns, making the aesthetic similarity even harder to miss – sometimes threatens to crush this far less ambitious show.
But it’s actually a breath of fresh air that Long Story Short is so much lighter, finally giving us a Bob-Waksberg show that will let you breathe (not a lot of people saw Undone, but it’s somehow way more intense than BoJack). Finally you can appreciate Bob-Waksberg going slightly too far with a pun without the specter of physical assault hanging about. But while this variant on the BoJack style is what will get people in the door, Long Story Short is especially memorable because it unyieldingly revels in the Schwoopers’ Judaism, from how that culturally shapes the parents and therefore the siblings to how these characters grapple and reel from major life events.
19. Mussolini: Son of the Century
limited series
8 episodes
stream: MUBI
Be forewarned, Mussolini: Son of the Century doesn’t touch on World War II, not even close, and it seems unlikely that they’ll continue the series. Focusing instead on Mussolini’s rise to power from 1919 to the start of 1925, Mussolini is so much for the sickos that they’ve even relegated it to MUBI. This might be just as well. Given that it’s arty, dramatic, and cinematic in a way that made it appropriate to premier at the Venice Film Festival, Mussolini might be a challenge to an American viewer, not just for being in Italian but for trudging through historical moments many of us aren’t as familiar with.
But Mussolini is well-timed. It recalls the rise of fascism back when the word referred to a nebulous anti-socialist third way politics. It painstakingly show that Mussolini didn’t rise out of a coherent ideology but through gangsterism, his men fighting random socialists in the streets and every step in his rise to further power coming from dismantling the checks and norms Italy had in place, always supposedly in the name of enacting what the Italian people had entrusted him to do. But more than just a history lesson, Mussolini adapts history boldly and creatively, with Luca Marinelli absolutely killing it as Il Duce. And Joe Wright’s direction makes the project fascinatingly disorienting, especially when Marinelli is giving alarming monologues to the audience, revealing that Mussolini is a self-obsessed weirdo who is so dangerous in part because he truly believes in nothing beyond his own image and power.
Good thing it can’t happen here.
18. Fujimoto 17-26
limited series
8 episodes
stream: Prime Video
What a couple of years for Tatsuki Fujimoto. Last year, his masterpiece one-shot manga Look Back was adapted into a beautiful feature film (seriously go watch it if you haven’t, it’s just an hour). This year, his series Chainsaw Man continued its anime adaptation with Chainsaw Man – The Movie: Reze Arc, and its blockbuster numbers enshrined Chainsaw Man as not just one of the most well-regarded shōnen in recent years but also one of the most absolutely popular alongside Demon Slayer and Jujutsu Kaisen. And all this has led to so much hype around Fujimoto as an artist and storyteller that his earlier one-shot manga stories, already collected as Tatsuki Fujimoto Before Chainsaw Man, have received a full anime adaptation.
The eight stories, all written by Fujimoto between the ages of, you guessed it, seventeen and twenty-six, are about as wild and all-over-the-place as you might expect from the author of Chainsaw Man. In the first and maybe finest, human-eating aliens have taken over Earth, and when one discovers that two humans are in the schoolyard disguised as chickens, he instead resolves to help them out of their predicament. In th next, when someone storms into a classroom with a gun intending to harm the teacher, only one student with unrestrained feelings for his teacher can save the day. In another, a vampire bored of eternal life hires a young woman, the world’s greatest assassin, to try to finally kill him. In another, a young boy contracts Woke-Up-as-a-Girl Syndrome and wakes up as a girl. And so on and so forth. Fujimoto 17-26 looks awesome, and it’s just a joy to see such a wild creative mind bouncing ideas around in his salad days.
17. Common Side Effects
season 1
10 episodes
stream: HBO Max
In Common Side Effects, fungi expert Marshall Cuso runs into high school classmate Frances Applewhite, and he tells her that he’s found a mushroom that can cure anything. But telling the world becomes precarious when the pharmaceutical companies and various branches of the US Government try to put a stop to them for fear of the havoc it could wreak on the economy. The animation is unique and does wonders for some of the druggier sequences, and the affair is injected with a welcome but noninvasive level of comedy, with Mike Judge doing a particularly great turn as Frances’ pharma exec boss.
Common Side Effects quickly turns into a thriller and might not chew on the real world relevance of its themes as much as you’d want. Less than two weeks after it premiered, the US got a new Secretary of Health and Human Services, and suddenly Common Side Effects interacted oddly with the new need to defend prevailing medical consensus. But I think it’s clear that Common Side Effects isn’t promoting conspiratorial thinking about medicine so much as expressing fear about what the financial incentives of pharmaceutical giants might produce. Or might not produce.
16. Adults
season 1
8 episodes
stream: Hulu
Some comedy shows are great because they’re visionary. A lot of comedy shows rely on the bonus multiplier of being about the entertainment world they themselves inhabit. But sometimes there’s nothing particularly innovative, no driving romantic subplot, no juicy hook. Sometimes a show is just really fucking funny. Adults is about five twentysomethings living in one of their parents’ Brooklyn house, and though it’s largely about these young adults struggling to adjust to grown-up tasks and living, it’s not sentimental about it and doesn’t harp on Redditor-ass concepts like “adulting.” In any year, all fresh college grads are dumb babies who are completely insane, but the way those traits manifest varies wildly every half-decade. Adults is a worthy chronicle for our times.
15. The Righteous Gemstones
season 4
9 episodes
stream: HBO Max
For four seasons, the titular family’s demented tackiness has carved out its very special place on the television landscape, giving us the freak chimera that results from Danny McBride imbuing his ramshackle comedy with any kind of prestige approach. The Righteous Gemstones‘ final season really goes for it, premiering with a Civil War-era Gemstone family origin story that doesn’t really go for laughs.
But then it gets back to it. Judy grows resentful of BJ’s capuchin monkey service animal. Kelvin vies to win something called Top Christ Following Man of the Year. In a joke I will remember for the rest of my life, Uncle Baby Billy produces and directs a teen show about a young Jesus Christ called Teenjus (correct, not Teensus, but Teenjus). But the emotional center of this final season is the kids struggling to accept that their daddy wants to fill the absence that defines and looms over the entire series. Now so in touch with its characters, The Righteous Gemstones now gets so deep into the psyches of the three siblings that you might call this Neon Genesis Evangelicism.
14. Smiling Friends
season 3
8 episodes
stream: HBO Max
Whats left to say about Smiling Friends? Adult Swim’s reigning champion hasn’t slowed down, continuing to uplift creatives who have been toiling away on the internet doing animation and voicework for decades, continuing to rock animation that despite its natural state of simplicity demonstrates an impressive and creative love for the medium, and continuing to put forward an aggressive and transgressive brand of discombobulating mayhem. The third season felt more humble and straightforward than the second – nothing blew the pants off me like “Charlie, Pim, and Bill vs the Alien” or “The Magical Red Jewel (aka Tyler Gets Fired)” – but in another way it’s gotten more formally experimental, its episodes focusing on Mr. Frog and Glep being so unlike what the show has ever done. You could feel Rick And Morty curdling during its third season, but while the hype for Smiling Friends has hit a fever pitch, I don’t think it’s the sort of thing we’re going to get tired of.
13. CITY: THE ANIMATION
season 1
13 episodes
stream: Prime Video
Some anime studios do astonishing things, but Kyoto Animation is unparalleled in the space it’s carved out for itself, usually dealing with relatively light material and adapting it in an unflashy but incredibly precise manner, maximizing the execution of series like Sound! Euphonium, K-On!, or The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya. Here, Violet Evergarden series director Taichi Ishidate leads this adaptation of mangaka Keeichi Arawa’s follow-up to his legendary comedy Nichijou. And this is all probably why CITY: THE ANIMATION is bewilderingly wonderful to look at.
CITY largely focuses on three university sophomore girls and their comedic travails in the city of City, but the show really gets its aesthetic pop from zooming around town to focus on an impressively large cast. CITY uses bright colors, thick lines, and wonderfully show-offy shot composition to really make it feel like a manga come to life, occasionally even utilizing mixed media or getting truly stupendously conceptual with how it frames its ongoing action. It is also very funny! You will especially have a great time with a certain sequence about instant ramen. I laughed a fair bit at CITY, but sometimes I was too distracted by its awesome visual perfection.
12. Task
season 1
7 episodes
stream: HBO Max
I absolutely adored Craig Zobel’s Mare of Easttown, so I was thrilled to see another show from him. A surprising amount is the same. In Mare, Kate Winslet is still grappling with the devastation her family has felt after the loss of her son while she gets to the bottom of a local tragedy. Here, Mark Ruffalo is still grappling with the devastation his family has felt after the loss of not just his son (this son is still alive, but he’s in prison) but also his wife when he has to assemble the titular FBI task force to get to the bottom of a series of local armed robberies of drug houses.
But where Mare filters the action and information exclusively through Mare, Task gives us all three sides all the time: Ruffalo’s FBI task force, the man committing the robberies and his family, and the gang running the drugs. Zobel keeps these groups smashing into each other. Even in a banner year for the prestige drama, nothing kept the blood pumping quite like Task, which refused to ever stop exploding.
11. Haha, You Clowns
season 1
10 episodes
stream: HBO Max
Some say that Haha, You Clowns is a wholesome tonic to the cynical and irony-poisoned Adult Swim entries that have dominated in the last decade. No way, man. There is something very, very wrong here. Brothers Tristan, Preston, and Duncan (I am not totally sure how old they are supposed to be) are purehearted, simple boys who love each other and their widowed father Tom. That is all great. He raised those boys right!
But you’ll notice that the boys cannot stop saying clichéd lines, as if for a laugh track that never obliges. Indeed, Haha, You Clowns is a sort of parody of wholesome sitcoms like Home Improvement or Full House, where in the end a lesson is learned and the family is reaffirmed in their love for one another. And that usually happens here, too. But in the meantime, something or someone with the most off energy you ever did see enters the picture and Haha, You Clowns turns into a social horror. The humor behind the show’s funniest moments can end up almost too abstract to explain. Sometimes it is just about the implications of the tone that episode has wound up inhabiting. The animation – get over it, you baby! – does little to comfort us. I looked forward to Smiling Friends a bit more each week, but Haha, You Clowns was doing something truly new and exciting.
10. The Chair Company
season 1
8 episodes
stream: HBO Max
Having taken his talents to the world of film (Friendship was pretty good!), Tim Robinson has now inflicted His Whole Thing on prestige television. Middle-aged Ron Trosper, a property manager overseeing the construction of a local mall, is humiliated when his chair breaks beneath him in front of all of his coworkers. When he starts looking into the chairs to cope with his shame, he falls into a mystery that tickles his brain just right, and it both keeps him going and threatens to ruin his entire life.
“Tim Robinson Understands What The Boys Are Going Through.” “The Chair Company Is A Show About How Fun It Is To Use The Computer.” Defector published these pieces within a couple of days of each other, and their duality defines The Chair Company. It is probably too embarrassing for a show to be a cypher for why young men are so fucked up these days, so it is also about the joy of using the internet to do research, the thrill of getting somewhere in your question to nowhere.
9. The Studio
season 1
x episodes
stream: Apple TV+
The Studio is the first TV comedy in a while that actually feels different. Its music is entirely anxiety-raising percussion, and each scene is presented as one single, unbroken shot, the camera often traversing a great distance to stay with the characters and whirling around during conversations in lieu of the ability to truly do shot/reverse shot. This all serves to raise your blood pressure even further when Seth Rogen’s character makes you want to hit yourself with a hammer. Rogen plays major studio head Matt Remick, who strives to be different than other studio heads because he really likes movies. But Remick’s affection for his industry inevitably makes him more destructive and not less, with him often failing to recognize when his presence is unwanted and when his desire for love and recognition is causing everyone to despise him. To assist the illusion of movie magic, many Hollywood figures play themselves, like Martin Scorsese (he’s dying to direct a movie about Jonestown), Ron Howard (everyone is afraid to tell him about the awful extended scene ruining his otherwise perfect movie), or Ice Cube (everyone is trying to figure out if it’s racist to cast a Black man as the Kool-Aid Man). It’s not rare for an elite TV comedy to be about the entertainment industry, but The Studio puts its own spin on a well-worn subject.
8. Andor
season 2
12 episodes
stream: Disney+
Though Andor‘s second season contracts the years between its first season and Rogue One, it’s structurally very similar. Just like its first season, it neatly divides into four mini-arcs that all have awesome, hopeful climaxes. This is mostly just the same trick again, but there’s no problem with that given that Andor already so successfully explored what rebellion means and looks like in a way Star Wars somehow hadn’t before. Andor was already the best Star Wars material since probably Empire.
It’s no small feat, but episodes seven to nine do rival the incredible prison arc from the first season. I do have a couple of quibbles (I’m really not so sure about where the story leaves Cinta or Bix), but Andor very successfully makes the jump from personal and local stories of resistance to genuine revolutionary flashpoints on a galactic scale. Andor‘s biggest challenge has always been to make resistance emotional without being embarrassing (a common failure of, ahem, hopepunk), but Andor‘s deft dialogue and strong character work make it hard to be embarrassed about the era of the Star Wars story when the Empire is so lazily and callously applying great force onto the regions that happen to be irritating it that day.
Good thing it can’t happen here.
7. Heated Rivalry
season 1
6 episodes
stream: HBO Max
It is certainly enough to be an incredibly steamy gay romance series with incredibly high production value, and for its first two episodes, Heated Rivalry does the hell out of that. But Heated Rivalry insists on great heights for its final four episodes, changing gears by taking a break from Ilya and Shane with a bold, episode-length aside about Scott’s burgeoning secret romance with smoothie barista Kip. I’ll admit to a perverse sort of enjoyment in imagining that the most conservative playerbase in America’s big four sports leagues features not one, not two, but three gay stars.
Thereafter, we see Ilya and Shane’s hot and cold romance shift into overdrive with more massive highs and more crushing lows as they more fully realize how much they mean to each other and start to hurt each other while they run from that fact. And when they finally acknowledge the future they want but think they can’t have, Heated Rivalry zooms out. It’s not just the romance, the sex, or the frotting, but the shifting sands beneath Ilya and Shane’s feet that has turned Heated Rivalry into something of a phenomenon and a major landmark in queer popular media.
6. PLUR1BUS
season 1
9 episodes
stream: Apple TV+
On the off-chance that you still don’t know what Pluribus is about, I’ll refrain from spoiling the events of its pilot by telling you the premise. After all, Apple TV’s marketing went to great pains to conceal what the hell this show was gonna be. And that’s because the premise is just absolutely dynamite. Here, Gilligan has an absolutely killer sci-fi idea, and he is hell-bent on delivering Rhea Seehorn her long-deserved Emmy Award by having her inhabit a sad lesbian who is just normal enough but just unhinged enough to be both properly relatable and frustrating as we see her navigate the suddenly-quite-lonely American Southwest.
Just like in Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul, Gilligan thrives in montage and, well, just showing you a character silently performing some chore. And Pluribus is ripe for a whole lot of that. The plot in Pluribus‘ first season creeps along reliably, the drip of progression just generous enough, but the defining moments of the show are the ones that seem to confuse some of its audience, where things aren’t moving forward and characters are just quietly contemplating or struggling through the new world.
5. Adolescence
limited series
4 episodes
stream: Netflix
First thing in the morning, the police turn up to arrest thirteen-year-old Jamie Miller. It seems ridiculous, but we soon learn that he definitely did it, and in the subsequent episodes we travel through his schoolyard and (basically) his mind to learn the horrifying ways that kids his age are innovating in the sordid space of early teen gender dynamics. It is hard to think of a show in recent times that rings truer and rings more unsettlingly than Adolescence. We can all feel the creep of this stuff.
Director Philip Barantini uses true oners for each entire episode to keep you upsettingly psychologically close to all of this, and a few of the performances here are just all-timers. In an all-time year for prestige drama, there were a few of those this year that I thought were finer than Adolescence while they were on, but in most cases, Adolescence just lives in my head more. I wish we could get it out of ours.
4. The Pitt
season 1
15 episodes
stream: HBO Max
By plugging 24‘s conceit into ER without making too much of a fuss about it, The Pitt has finally realized a place for medical drama in the streaming era (outside of people unceasingly rewatching Grey’s Anatomy). Most impressively, The Pitt successfully activates so many characters, making each patient-subplot absolutely hum. The Pitt is also violently addictive, staggering its stories in such a way that an episode can end with resolution while still holding back another thing you’re dying to see conclude. Things move forward so well that each episode is over so quickly that you’re frustrated enough to fire off one more. Other than the blood and guts, it’s really such a breezy watch. The Pitt makes its complex undertaking feel so simple.
3. Severance
season 2
10 episodes
stream: Apple TV+
Right away, Severance‘s second season heralded a complete vibe shift. In its first season, its characters are charting their own course, the shape of their discoveries entirely in their own hands. In its second season, there’s a collision course to an inevitable showdown. Things fall away and apart, the show seeming more and more lonely and empty as the clock counts down to Cold Harbor.
In the meantime, Severance tries on formal exercises. In the mid-season climax “Woe’s Hollow,” the Lumon employees are spirited away to the frozen wilderness for a teambuilding exercise. “Chikhai Bardo” completely shifts perspective to answer so many of our questions in one of the year’s best episodes. “Sweet Vitriol” sucks and I hate it, but it’s great that Severance has become the sort of show looking to try that sort of thing. Finally, finale “Cold Harbor” is so excellent and satisfying, one of the best season finales from the past few years. Severance remains wonderfully acted, impeccably executed, and above all fascinatingly imagined.
2. Takopi’s Original Sin
limited series
6 episodes
stream: Crunchyroll
Wait, wait, don’t go away! I expect so many eyes to glaze over when they see a weird anime above the best prestige dramas that 2025 had to offer. But I’m actually so serious that Takopi’s Original Sin could be one of the most unforgettable viewing experiences you ever have.
The premise seems cliché at first. Cute alien Takopi comes from a planet of happiness. He arrives on Earth and meets a depressed young girl and tries to make her happy. But Takopi is completely out of his depth, as he does not understand (or even notice his lack of understanding of) the nuance of human conflict and despair.
Takopi might just be the most intense show I’ve ever seen. Its point of view character being the infuriatingly innocent and naive Takopi makes it all the more jarring when it unflinchingly portrays child abuse and suicide, and you watch in real time as the abuse the three children suffer warps them and leads to cycles of violence. Your jaw will frequently hang open in a “what am I watching” sense.
Takopi will likely be too much for many of you reading this, but I have had few viewing experiences more jarring and memorable.
1. The Rehearsal
season 2
6 episodes
stream: HBO Max
I liked The Rehearsal‘s first season, but I thought it fumbled a great concept. I held it in less esteem than Fielder’s previous show Nathan For You and then his awesome miniseries The Curse. It was structurally unsound, and it felt like Fielder didn’t get enough payoff from his extended rehearsal with his fake family.
But even in a career with “Dumb Starbucks,” The Curse, and “Finding Frances,” The Rehearsal‘s second season is the fullest realization of Fielder’s peculiar vision. Fielder has studied plane accidents and theorizes that nearly all could be prevented if co-pilots felt properly empowered to speak up to their pilots. And he happens to be just the guy for facilitating rehearsals of complex social situations like this. Fielder’s approach is comically extensive and unnecessarily expensive, but whereas building, say, an identical bar last season was obviously going way too far, the sets here often feel impressive but appropriate. The only way Fielder can do anything fun in an airport, after all, is to build one himself, and the strong throughline of pilots and airlines does so well to keep the limitless possibilities of the concept on rails.
Fielder does also go on some wonderful tangents. He puts on an entire singing competition just to see how a judge might reject a contestant while making them like you anyway. He painstakingly recreates the conditions in which the original dog was raised so that its clone (yes, its clone) might adopt some of the same behaviors. He experiences the entire life of one Chessley “Sully” Sullenberger. He…he…you’ll have to just watch to see what he pulls off in the finale.
At its essence, though, things have truly not changed all that much since Nathan For You. Yes, the mind-bendingly bizarre interpersonal interactions are still here, but Nathan For You was actually about (the character) Fielder’s twisted perspective, how his unconventional solutions to problems were ultimately a manifestation of his inability to cope with who he is. After running up against it while wondering whether one can learn something like likability, Fielder explores how pilots seldom receive therapy or psychological testing because the wrong diagnosis can pull them out of the air permanently, and he hones in on an autism diagnosis in particular. It is plain for any viewer to see that Fielder is a strong candidate for an autism diagnosis, and it’s hard to think of a stronger expression of this than his newfound obsession with elaborately rehearsing social situations. The Rehearsal‘s second season is hilarious and brilliant like nothing else, but its most emotionally lasting moment is Fielder considering whether to take an autism test, whether to better know himself and risk being forever grounded or to flinch and carry on like he is. Obviously Fielder chooses flight.
Wings of Voice. “Bring Me To Life.” The Miracle Over the Mojave. It is absurd that The Rehearsal‘s second season produces three storylines as instantly immortal as these. It is the strongest demonstration yet that Fielder see the game so differently. I wonder why he can.
Honorable Mentions, tier 1
Adventure Time: Fionna And Cake, season 2
Alien: Earth, season 1
Bob’s Burgers, seasons 15 & 16
Dandadan, season 2
Dying For Sex, limited series
Friendly Rivalry, limited series
Hacks, season 4
I Love LA, season 1
Invincible, season 3
It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia, season 17
King Of The Hill, season 14
Orb: On the Movements of Earth, limited series
Paradise, season 1
Pee-wee As Himself, limited series
Poker Face, season 2
Slow Horses, season 5
The Apothecary Diaries, season 2
The Bear, season 4
The Last Of Us, season 2
The Lowdown, season 1
The Summer Hikaru Died, season 1
The White Lotus, season 3
Yellowjackets, season 3
Joey Daniewicz 