When I think back to TV in 2025, the thing I’ll most likely remember are the Seattle Mariners. I love to have M’s games on during the half of the year that baseball exists and this most recent team was actually worth watching all the way into October. Mostly that’s because they won the division and Cal Raleigh was the best player in baseball, set a bunch of home run records for catchers and switch hitters and American Leaguers who aren’t Yankees, and won over much of the nation with his prodigious dumper. I managed to go to a whole bunch of games and saw some iconic moments in-person, including Naylor’s playoff clinching double and Geno’s grand slam, but I’ll remember just as many amazing moments watched in the comfort of my own home. Except that one playoff game I decided to watch at my parents’ house…
Other than live sports? I dunno. There are always lots of good stuff to watch and I feel like I’m never in sync with anybody anymore. Oh well. Here are some shows I thought were pretty good.
Honorable Mentions
The Bear
The Chair Company
Heated Rivalry
The Righteous Gemstones
The White Lotus
There was plenty of new anime to check out (particularly I enjoyed the bananas fight scenes in Solo Leveling) but nothing was as important to me as One Piece. For everyone else, 2025 was maybe the year with the least One Piece ever, since it went on break for a few months and re-released an edited down version of one of its worst-paced earlier seasons. For me, it was the year I finally caught up – just in time for season 1 to officially end on December 28 after 26 years and 1,155 episodes. The episodes that came out this year showed the anime at its worst (gratuitous butt shots, agonizingly paced battles) and its best: Kuma’s moving, devastating backstory reveal. The fact that the highlight of the year was finding out more about a mysterious character we barely knew anything about despite the fact that he debuted in 2003 shows just how crazy epic One Piece is. I can’t wait to start watching it as a weekly show this spring!
I missed Peacemaker‘s first season because it was released at a time when I didn’t have a Max (or whatever we were calling it) subscription and even though everyone seemed to love it, it didn’t seem worth the price at the time. But the dude was in Superman so I had to go back and catch up with all the new James Gunn DC canon (I actually thought Creature Commandos was pretty good too). Peacemaker is Gunn playing to all his strengths (especially multitasking, how the hell has he written like three seasons of TV and two Superman movies in the time it’s taken Marvel to figure out how to bring back Shang-Chi?) and that turned some fans off as he played up the emotion and pathos instead of just giving us more comedy and violence. But it really worked for me, I think the last few episodes of the season were the best. Do I wish that this story would wrap up with a season 3 instead of some confusing movie tie-in? Yes I do. Is that a knock against season 2? No, I don’t think so.
So, uh, it turns out I like what Apple TV is doing? At least, you’re going to see me write about a bunch of their shows today. Meanwhile I totally missed whatever was going on on FX this year? Something about how someone is lowdown dying for sex? It also goes to show you how far we’ve already fallen that the worst-case scenario disaster the characters of The Studio try to prevent during the season finale is now the lesser of two evils outcome we’re all rooting for in real life. An all oner show isn’t a totally unique concept, but it is a fun one and I think it really helps the comedy but heightening all the actors’ performances. Also the first episode is about a cinema nerd making Martin Scorsese cry. What’s not to love?
I’ve watched enough shows built around huge mysteries to know that Severance wasn’t going to make paying off the huge season 1 cliffhanger easy. But man, it was a brutal few weeks getting back into Severance‘s flow. Eventually I locked back in and man was I hooked when that season 2 finale rolled around. Who knew that the secret to great storytelling was making Adam Scott run a lot?
Dropout continues to be the best subscription in the world of streaming. Game Changer, the game show where the game changes every show, has been topping itself every year, but I don’t know how they’ll do it after season seven. This season started – STARTED – with an episode where the contestants had to complete 15 challenges over the course of an entire, actual calendar year. The stand up comedy episode was so funny they spun the concept off into a whole other show, Crowd Control. They did a viral video episode and then updated it as the videos in it actually started going viral. I think my favorite episode was a spoof of The Traitors where everyone is drunk except for one “secret sober” player who has to sabotage all the games. Sometimes all you want is dumb fun, and I don’t think anyone put more thought into that in 2025 than Game Changer.
lol they let him fly the plane
It’s all about episode 3, right? Adolescence is the second show on my list that utilized the one-take gimmick (and the second of three to have real-time episodes), but its least flashy episode was also its most gripping. A one-hour meeting between accused 13-year-old murderer Jamie and a forensic psychologist in a single room sounds dull compared to the sprawling stories that surround it, but Jack Thorne and Stephen Graham’s script exposes a horrifyingly believable path for how a young boy can get so fucked up by social media. Adolescence is a show that wants to get conversations started but also it’s just an amazing piece of filmmaking. For fans of acting and directing and all the technical aspects of making shows and movies, this miniseries is a must-watch… and a tough watch.
It’s funny how a little twist can totally flip a familiar concept on its head. We’ve had apocalypse shows and zombie shows and even a few iconic hive mind stories (I particularly love season 4 of Angel) but I’ve never seen something exactly like Pluribus. By the time the credits rolled on the first episode, we had the kind of status quo most Twilight Zone-type stories end on: all but a dozen human beings on earth are either dead or taken over by a hive mind. The hive mind knows who the survivors are and where they are in the world. And here’s the twist: they love them and want to do everything in their power to make sure they’re comfortable. It’s a show about friendly zombies! Most of the survivors are quite happy but this is a nightmare for one person: Carol (Rhea Seehorn), the world’s biggest grump. Like the other Vince Gilligan shows, it was a delight getting to better understand these characters over the course of season one. And where are they going to go in season two? It’s more fun not knowing!
A few years ago I watched all of ER in a year. I did not think a revival was necessary — they already had made 331 episodes, not only was there seemingly no meat left on those bones, the bones themselves were gone. So it should have caught my attention when R. Scott Gemmill, John Wells, and Noah Wyle were unable to get the rights to return to Cook County General Hospital but decided to keep making a show anyway. Clearly this was more than a cash-in, they had something they believed in. What we got was The Pitt, a show about one brutal, real-time shift in the emergency department in a very modern day Pittsburgh hospital. These doctors are dealing with shitty insurance companies, budget cuts, and lots of post-pandemic trauma. It’s a show with something to say, but also, like ER, it’s just nice to watch stories about smart, dedicated people working together for the good of us all. We’re lucky that lots of amazing people actually do exist… we just rarely elect them as our leaders.
After an unexpectedly excellent first season, somehow Andor returned to a very different world. Originally conceived as a five season show, the slow pace and enormous cost of making a streaming Star Wars show turned season 2 into the end of the series. Also, in the spring of 2025, the dystopian themes of a corrupt republic being turned into evil empire felt a lot more prescient than they did back when the first season came out before the 2022 midterms. Series creator Tony Gilroy gets that George Lucas had always intended Star Wars to be political, and he’s got the chops to actually do make it happen without boring us all to death with trade disputes and parliamentary proceedings. In Revenge of the Sith, we saw “how democracy dies, with thunderous applause.” In Andor, we saw how A New Hope is actually born – through lots of hard work, sacrifice, and compromise. It’s a tough pill to swallow, but it’s one I think a lot of us need to take, and soon.