10 Best Shows of 2025 So Far

In Lumon, a company that resembles the increasingly intrusive oligarchs of Big Tech, Mark (Adam Scott) and his colleagues undergo a procedure that allows them to separate their work memories from their non-work memories. It sounds like a dream: the perfect work-life balance. But things get complicated when one colleague mysteriously leaves and is replaced by confused new hire, Helly (Britt Lower). Mark and Helly dig into shocking truths about what they really do, and for whom.

Just like the endless halls of Lumon, Severance is filled with twists and turns, many of which are impossible to see coming. Slow, smart, and sneaked with a dystopian eerieness that doesn’t feel all that far off, Severance is sure to leave you wary of corporate slavishness, if you aren’t already.

Each episode of the medical show The Pitt follows an ER team over the course of an hour. There are no time jumps or montages, this is real-time for them. Countless patients come and go, their injuries ranging from terrifying to deadly, and whether they live or die depends on how fast the team responds. Leading everyone is Dr. Robby Rabinavitch (Noah Wyle), who is himself recovering from the trauma of losing a colleague during the COVID pandemic. However, unlike Grey’s Anatomy, the drama of the characters in The Pitt takes a backseat to the patients’ issues. That’s not to say we don’t get to know the characters well, just that the writers have very smartly and subtly found a way to integrate who they are into what they do. Much like the medical staff who front it, The Pitt is a highly efficient show. We experience a roller coaster of emotions and get what feels like a lifetime’s worth of medical exposure in a span of an hour. It’s intense, chaotic, disturbing, and at times even triggering. But it also feels essential to watch. It’s a welcome reminder of our mortality and the humanity needed to keep it at bay.

Asura is a very particular period piece about the typical, rule-following Japanese family in the 1970s, and yet it feels universal too in its tales of family, marriage, and above all else sisterhood. Based on a novel by Mukoda Kuniko, Asura captures the frustrating, odd, exhilarating, and reassuring specificity of having a sister. You could be in a severe argument one second but laugh about an accident in the next. You could get mad at your sister for staying in a toxic relationship while offering her a place to stay and promising not to judge her in the same breath. And as we witness the dynamics of these four sisters, we also get to see the relationships they pursue (or run away from) all while trying to stay afloat amid Japan’s rigid societal rules. “Is it happiness for women to not make waves?” their mother asks. The entire series sees the women try and fail and try again to answer that all-important and ever-relevant question.

You’ll have to trust us on this: it’s best to know absolutely nothing about this show before you start watching. There’s a reason all the promos you see on it say near to nothing about it, and it’s a reason you’ll be thankful for at the end of the first episode. What we will say is that Paradise is a refreshing take on political thrillers, and the cast–mainly Sterling K. Brown and Julianne Nicholson–are compelling in their flexibility, confidence, and vulnerability. The show is genre-defying, but what drives it above all else is mystery. Creator Dan Fogelman (This Is Us) might have slightly gone haywire with the flashbacks, but he’s careful not to give anything away too quickly. Instead, we’re left with mysterious puzzle pieces, unpredictably solved by Brown’s character.

From the creators of Scavengers Reign and Veep comes Common Side Effects, a show that’s at once quirkily funny and chillingly relevant. It’s about Marshall, a fungi expert who finds a mushroom that heals all wounds and illnesses. As a result, he becomes a target of big pharma, insurance companies, and even government agencies, all of whom, according to Marshall, insist on keeping the mushroom from the public so they can continue to profit off people’s sickness. It sounds silly at first, like the kind of fearmongering, fact-less posts you roll your eyes at when they hit your timeline. And the show is silly, but in a different way. It has the absurdity and quirks that make adult cartoons so delightful, yes, but as a condemnation of capitalist exploitation and greed? It can’t be any sharper, especially now that medical costs are skyrocketing and the public are starting to fight back.

Black Snow has the sleek style of a modern murder mystery, but its concern with Australia’s colonial past that sets this show apart. As a neo-noir series centered on a murder, the show has all the classic elements: the hardboiled detective, the suspicious townsfolk, and the murder. As the murder is set in 1994, nostalgic summer-tinged high school scenes make it easy to root for justice for the show’s young victim.

But the series stands out as it’s always mindful of Isabel Baker, always concerned with her and her dynamics with her friends, family, and her South Sea Islander (ASSI) community. Supported by the strong performance of newcomer Talijah Blackman-Corowa, and even consulting the ASSI community personally in the show’s development and production, Black Snow is excellent not just as a murder mystery but also as a depiction of a community that’s rarely portrayed on screen.

Apple Cider Vinegar follows Belle Gibson, the real-life convicted scammer who founded a wellness empire based on alternative medicine. The series is an interesting character study as it paints Gibson in different shades, which Dever brings so much life into. Here she’s an exploitative scammer, tech visionary, psychopathic liar, hustler, and mother all rolled into one, so it’s not as easy as hating or feeling sorry for her character. Along with Gibson, we also follow Milli (Alycia Debnam-Carey) and Lucy (Tilda Cobham-Hervey), actual cancer patients battling the sickness in their own ways. At times, the show takes on a Mean Girls tone as Milli and Belle go head to girlboss head, but the show is at its strongest when it softens up and gives the women space to feel their specific pains. The show is sharp, entertaining, and moving enough, but I do wish it didn’t have to bury its message in layers of satire. It revels too much in that gray area between alternative living and pseudoscience when it should’ve made the dangers of the latter explicit.

Lockerbie is a devastating time-hopping journey that tells the story of how the UK’s deadliest terror attacks came to be and how the victims’ loved ones coped and pursued justice, despite all odds. It takes on multiple perspectives—political, psychological—and resembles many genres at once—thriller, mystery, drama. But more than anything, it’s a story about grief, trauma, and as the title suggests, an inspiring pursuit of the truth. at its core, it’s a story about grief. Swire’s family is traumatized, and they all cope in different ways. It’s about what people, a community, can do when they’re sad and wronged. They can band together and demand justice in inspiring ways. It’s moving, but it has teeth too. It takes down the apathy and the secrecy of institutions more interested in protecting their own than the greater good.

With the fresh-faced cast and the sleek camerawork, Black Warrant, at first, didn’t seem to be the gritty adaptation of the exposé outlining the systemic corruption of the Tihar Jail in the 1980s. But, aesthetic aside, that’s precisely what Black Warrant is. Opening to Zahan Kapoor as Sunil Gupta being interviewed for the job as jailer, the show takes him and the audience to the tour of the notorious prison, and it’s a gripping one not because of the usual prisoner shenanigans, but because of the way the officers themselves happen to be in on the drugs and alcohol trade inside– and they’re ready to pin it all on Gupta if things go down. Showrunner Vikramaditya Motwane pulls it all together with excellent performances from the cast, an eerie score, and the real life headlines of some of India’s notorious prisoners.

Hitmen are just cool. But rather than bring us the same fists and bullets that we usually see with these killers, Sakamoto of Sakamoto Days does his best to keep to his normal humdrum life, rather than jump back into the bloodshed. It’s an interesting twist to the gangster thriller. Rather than try to surpass any choreographed fights, or bring up the angst by killing everyone dear, the series humorously contrasts the over-the-top drama these assassins have over the straightforward ordinary life, which, as Shin realizes, is actually great. Sakamoto Days celebrates ordinary life as something worth protecting, and it’s pretty fun to see the crew do so.