After last year, when I cobbled together a paltry five shows, I’m back in 2025 with a vengeance. Do I believe there is an underlying reason it went down this way? No. TV is weird now. Shows happen when they happen. There is little to no urgency to watch them unless it’s a buzzy show like Stranger Things. Even then, I haven’t watched the new season of Stranger Things. Why? I can always watch it later.

TV is what I put on when I eat dinner, or in the case of Heated Rivalry a cocktail. 😉 It’s background noise. But I’ll tell ya, there was good background noise this year. A few shows I would even consider for the foreground. Key word: consider. Let’s not go nuts.

Fuck it. Let’s do this.

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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.

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In 2024, TV really got away from me. A lot of it was for reasons my colleagues have already mentioned — the 2023 strikes in the entertainment industry, the further erosion of television feeling distinct from other online content we consume, living in the post-peak TV era, etc. TV also just doesn’t serve as vital of a service to me in my day-to-day at the moment. Music is something I listen to at various times throughout the day in a way that feels very personal and full of limitless discovery. Movies are something I tend to watch in a theater, so they’re a bit of an event that I get to build my day around. TV has become… just something to put on to pass the time.

That said, there were a few TV shows that I watched this year that felt like a bit more than that, so I’m more than willing to recognize their ability to stand out from the content swill, even if it felt like there wasn’t quite as much of that as in years past. Continue reading →

So many shows, so little time. Sorry Shogun and The Penguin and Da Bear. I’m very movie focused in my day-to-day media consumption so unless a show has an insane premise or more buzz than the beehive that killed Macaulay Culkin in My Girl, it’s gonna end up in the “To Do” pile.

I want to note that I did start The Penguin and The Sympathizer but I don’t have that binge me in anymore. Purge? Yes. Binge? No. Here are all the shows that escaped the purge.

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Well, congratulations Hollywood, you did it. You’ve fractured the landscape of television so completely that if you’re not watching something in the same room as someone else, no one has any idea what the hell you’re talking about anymore. And it’s not just about community: TV criticism has all but been killed off and with so many streaming services now (and the crackdown on password sharing), it’s too expensive to even try to keep up with everything anyway, so the sense of urgency when it comes to shows is just gone. It’s so bad, we decided to do top fives this year instead of 10 because this has become a futile and stupid gesture. And the saddest thing of all? While this is all happening, creatives are still making a lot of good TV, arguably too much good stuff!

I have got a long list of shows that are supposed to be great that I just never made time for, shows like Bad Monkey, The Diplomat, Jerrod Carmichael: Reality Show, Shrinking, Silo, and Slow Horses. And another list of franchise shows I definitely, actively want to watch like The Acolyte, Fallout, House of the Dragon, Penguin, Rings of Power, and Skeleton Crew. But fuck it, they just never happened for me in 2024 because I was too busy watching One Piece at the time or I wasn’t subscribed to the right streaming service at the time or I was still too burnt out on meaningless Star Wars prequel movies stretched out into miniseries.

Can we come back from this? I sure hope so. I still haven’t given up on my watchlist. Maybe we just need everyone in America/the world to start a blog and do annual top tens? Or suddenly all try to care about the Emmys at least as much as we care about the Oscars? Maybe putting some effort into thinking about the media we consumed all year instead of just letting an algorithm tell us (or an AI in Spotify Wrapped’s case) could be good for us all? In the meantime, let’s at least try to keep in mind that while the era of peak TV might be over, that doesn’t mean the medium has been reduced to just reality junk and mindless reruns.

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There was plenty of good TV to be watched in 2023, but compiling my list did not make me all that excited for the future of the medium. Mostly because basically all of the shows appearing on this list are shows that I’d already been watching, and in fact, a lot of them were shows airing their final seasons. Now, it’s certainly on me to find new shows to watch, but this year, it just didn’t seem like there were as many new buzzworthy shows that everyone was talking about.

That, of course, could be for a few reasons, the most obvious one being that there was a writer’s strike this year that kept shows both new and old from airing seasons before the year’s end. Also, it seems like a lot of streaming services in the last year or two have indicated an emphasis on profits and producing less scripted entertainment, which has foreshadowed the possible end of “peak TV”. Which, honestly, felt like it was going to end sometime soon anyway. The amount of daring, off-beat shows that we got the past decade or so just never quite seemed sustainable, even though it was fun while it lasted. Well, with that somewhat depressing preamble out of the way, here are the shows that made 2023 memorable while it lasted. Continue reading →