The streaming era has produced its share of pathologies, including bloated running times and narratives padded with filler. The best dramas of 2025, though, are a reminder that television has become our predominant cultural medium.
‘Adolescence’
The life of the Miller family is overturned one morning when the police raid the house and arrest 13 year-old Jamie (Owen Cooper) for the murder of his classmate, Katie Leonard (Emilia Holliday). But this isn’t some by-the-numbers British procedural.
It doesn’t take long for footage to prove that Jamie did it, and the series instead explores the disturbing social milieu that made Jamie a murderer and the ways his sister, Lisa (Amélie Pease), and parents, Eddie (Stephen Graham) and Manda (Christine Tremarco), come to terms with what happened. Its four episodes are nightmare fuel for parents, each filmed in a single take, an approach that “contributes real-time immediacy to the story being told, as well as a certain astonishment at the methods, choreography and endurance of the cast,” said John Anderson at The Wall Street Journal. (Netflix)
‘The Bear’
After the long-awaited and largely negative review of the titular upscale Chicago restaurant finally comes out, co-owners Carmy (Jeremy Allen White) and Syd (Ayo Edebiri) are given two months to turn it around before Uncle Cicero (Oliver Platt) cuts off the cash. While many see “The Bear” as an homage to the art of cooking for others, it is also a show about adrenaline junkies whose love-hate relationship with the restaurant business destroys their personal lives and ability to function.
It forces viewers to confront the wreckage that happens just offstage before they receive their amuse-bouche. In the fourth season of “The Bear,” the “chemistry and love for one another” of the ensemble explains “why we as an audience keep returning to one of the most stressful workplaces in television history,” and makes up for the inert, self-indulgent mess of season 3, said Alan Sepinwall at Rolling Stone. (Hulu)
‘The Diplomat’
If you can get past some of the silly and implausible plotting, “The Diplomat” is a marvelously acted, snappy and engrossing drama about married foreign service officers Hal (Rufus Sewell) and Kate (Keri Russell) Wyler. The pair is swept up in White House intrigue, propelled by a potboiler narrative about a terrorist attack on a British aircraft carrier.
If nothing else, the show is comfort food for anyone who misses policymakers and believes there is more to American foreign policy than cruelty and blunt military force. When season 3 begins, the president has died, making Grace Penn (Allison Janney) POTUS. Penn then unexpectedly picks Hal rather than Kate to serve as her veep, sending their marriage entertainingly sideways. The series is “as ridiculous as it is compelling” and “joins a lineup of shows that make little sense but are entertaining because of it,” said Saloni Gajjar at The AV Club. (Netflix)
‘Dying for Sex’
Adapted from the documentary podcast of the same name, “Dying for Sex” stars Michelle Williams as Molly, who leaves her husband and embarks on a riotous journey of erotic discovery after her cancer comes back, this time with a terminal diagnosis. Her best friend, Nikki (Jenny Slate), is so devoted to Molly and her determination to squeeze as many encounters as possible into her final months that it eventually takes its toll on Nikki’s own life and relationships.
The series explores death in ways that are almost unique to commercial television, without losing sight of the audience’s need not to be needlessly brutalized. It is “hilariously funny, guttingly sad and somehow also tingling with joy about the preciousness of life,” said Phillip Maciak at The New Republic. (Hulu)
‘Forever’
Adapted from Judy Bloom’s beloved novel, this is the rare series that can be enjoyed by both the YA demographic and adults. High school seniors Keisha (Lovie Simone) and Justin (Michael Cooper Jr.) have an off-again/on-again romance complicated by their wildly different social classes.
Wealthy Justin’s overbearing mother (Karen Pittman) doesn’t want anything to get in the way of a potential elite basketball scholarship. Keisha’s mom, Shelly (Xosha Roquemore), a single, overwhelmed nurse, pressures Keisha to stay with NBA-bound Christian (Xavier Mills), who unbeknownst to Shelly, ruined Keisha’s reputation by releasing a sex tape. A “charming slow burn,” it is “one of Netflix’s few shows to have a predominantly Black cast,” enabling it to be “specific in its exploration of the Black teen experience in America,” said Michel Ghanem at The Cut. (Netflix)
‘The Narrow Road to the Deep North’
Most winners of the heady Man Booker Prize, like Richard Flanagan’s moving and brutal 2014 novel, aren’t easy adaptations. But Prime hired Australian auteur Justin Kurzel (“The Order”) to direct, and the result is riveting.
The show is set in three timelines, and follows a medical student named Dorrigo Evans (Jacob Elordi), who marries Ella (Olivia DeJonge) but then has a destructive affair with his uncle’s wife, Amy (Odessa Young), before a harrowing stint in a Japanese POW camp in then-Indochina. Ciarán Hinds plays Evans as an older man in the late 1980s, when he is a renowned surgeon and still a womanizer. By depicting a group of people who “experience the war and come away with very little greater understanding of life,” the series is “gorgeous, ugly and stirring, with parts that seared themselves into my brain,” said Rebecca Onion at Slate. (Prime)
‘The Pitt’
After years of networks pouring resources into imitating cable and streamer prestige TV, HBO Max flipped the script with a throwback hospital procedural. “The Pitt” even borrows “ER” staple Noah Wyle as Dr. Michael Robinavitch, a grizzled emergency physician at struggling Pittsburgh Trauma Medical Center.
Buoyed by an outstanding ensemble cast, the season cleverly depicts a single 15-hour shift of hospital mayhem, and its big heart and superb performances will win you over. It strikes a nerve not just with nostalgia but by serving as a searing indictment of the inequities, waste and greed that plague America’s medical system. The show “pinpoints the widespread feeling that everything now is sick and broken, from systems to people to social compacts,” said James Poniewozik at The New York Times. (HBO Max)
‘Pluribus’
Showrunner Vince Gilligan (“Breaking Bad”) takes a seemingly unlimited pile of Apple TV+ cash and turns it into the kind of talked-about event television that is so rare in today’s fragmented streaming landscape. Carol Sturka (Rhea Seehorn) is a successful but jaded “romantasy” writer who returns home to Albuquerque from a miserable book-signing tour just as a virus turns all of humanity into a blankly happy hive mind.
Carol is one of just a handful of people on the planet who are immune and retain their individuality. A show that “feels not just original but wholly surprising,” Gilligan’s mysterious series “wrestles with big philosophical questions of morality, contentment, purpose and meaning,” said Lacy Baugher Milas at Paste. (Apple TV+)
From the horrors of death to the hive-mind apocalypse, TV is far from out of great ideas
