That’s right. Once again, I did not watch that much TV over the course of the last year, so I’m keeping it to a top 5 again. I came close to watching 10 shows this year, but couldn’t quite muster up the will to marathon Andor after putting off watching it for nearly half the year. Which isn’t to say there weren’t TV shows I enjoyed in 2025, since I feel good about the 5 I’ve chosen. I just think I ended up making a concerted effort to spend more time on hobbies that forced me to stop looking at screens in 2025, and it was hard for TV to not feel like just another distraction that could be easily interrupted by another distracting screen. Anyways, here are the shows I couldn’t turn away from.
Honorable Mentions:
The Studio
Hacks
Severence
Look, I could’ve just added The Studio to my list just as my colleagues did, but I guess I’ll mix things up and risk getting cancelled. English Teacher came to an end in 2025, perhaps unsurprisingly, since there were some allegations that came out a while ago about star and creator Brian Jordan Alvarez, which honestly made it a little surprising that the show was renewed for a second season. But somewhat annoyingly, the second season was just as good as the very funny, very topical first season, and the show did a great job continuing to build out its roster of very talented people (Carmen Christopher’s emergence in this season was well-earned). It was a very consistently funny show in a way that very few shows are these days (if only Abbott Elementary crafted as hilarious of school-oriented jokes as we see here), even if it wasn’t long for this world.
I am amazed and delighted to just now learn that Long Story Short was renewed for a second season, since I feel like it got dumped onto Netflix with very little fanfare. Which is perhaps understandable, since its concept of being about a Jewish family taking place over the course of many years and jumping back and forward in time feels like an amalgam of many other shows in recent memory. However, you can never count out creator Raphael Bob-Waksberg, who created what I still think is Netflix’s greatest show in BoJack Horseman, and which is probably the thing that made Netflix willing to bankroll another one of his shows.
His team brings the same penchant for pathos combined with wacky comedy that was seen in BoJack, but here the tone feels a little more streamlined and much more like a slice-of-life comedy. I feel like we’re getting more and more media that deals with what the pandemic was in a more grounded way that doesn’t feel like a topical gimmick, and Long Story Short managed to do this with surprising poignancy. Also, because it takes place over several decades, it feels like there are an unlimited amount of stories to tell here, even if it feels likely that the show’s run will be less long than short.
Season 2 of The Rehearsal went in all sorts of strange directions, and I love that the formula of this show is so malleable that it feels like it’s rewriting the rules of what a comedy or a documentary series can look like. I will truly never look at a pilot the same way as I board a flight after Nathan Fielder did such a deep dive into the psyche of someone tasked with flying a commercial plane. The finale, of course, was insane and you certainly have to question the reality of it. But in the end, it doesn’t really matter. The show went to such insane depths to show Fielder’s penchant for pushing himself into whatever insane scenarios he can. This wasn’t the first time I feared for his safety on one of his shows and almost certainly won’t be the last.
Sterlin Harjo is lowkey becoming one of the most essential voices in scripted TV. After concluding his wonderful Reservation Dogs in 2023, he came back with another show set in Oklahoma, this time in the local politics of Tulsa. The regional specificity for a city that no one thinks too hard about (other than a particular race massacre that gets mentioned here) is really what makes this show special. You can tell Harjo has a real feel for the city and what makes it tick, as well as how its checkered history impacts the people living in it today.
It’s also not much of a surprise that Ethan Hawke absolutely shines in the role of Lee Raybon, a smartass hippy local reporter, or “truthstorian” as he obnoxiously describes himself. It’s the kind of role he seems built for, and the rest of the cast (which includes Keith David, Jean Tripplehorn, Tracy Letts, Tim Blake Nelson, and a one-off Peter Dinklage) are uniformly great. It’s also the kind of story that felt timely with its dissection of white supremacy, the press’s increasing irrelevance, and rampant political corruption. “There’s nothing sadder than a white man who cares”, indeed.
I wouldn’t say that the first season of The Pitt was perfect by any means, with its many characters and storylines, many of which consisted of pretty common medical practices. However, its messiness felt true to the experience of working in an E.R., and just the overall feeling of watching this show felt very akin to the post-Covid world we’ve been living in. Everything’s a mess, the healthcare industry’s a joke, people are pissed, but there are plenty of good people out there just doing the best they can under the circumstances.
But in addition to that, it was just very watchable television. It took the hour-by-hour format of 24 and applied it to a profession that’s a little more grounded in reality, and the show’s attention to detail felt a bit more believable than your typical medical show (and a little more gruesome at times). Yet, it still escalates over the course of the season in a way that made you want to tune in to see what happened with each successive episode. Also, I’m not sure the feeling of exhaustion these doctors felt at the end of their shift before going home in the season finale felt as cathartic (or weirdly relatable) as anything I streamed this year.