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Some years I might look for a more polished, conventionally satisfying top choice, but unsubtle times call for unsubtle art, and Stefano Bises and Davide Serino’s chronicle of the rise of Italian dictator Benito Mussolini is an audacious and orgiastic warning about the mechanics of encroaching fascism. Joe Wright directs the eight-part series, borrowing aesthetic devices from opera, German Expressionism and the primordial ooze of early cinema, and fusing it all into a cacophonous piece of horror propaganda, elevated by Seamus McGarvey’s breathtaking cinematography and a uniquely unnerving soundtrack from Chemical Brothers veteran Tom Rowlands. Towering over the whole thing is Luca Marinelli’s terrifying, animalistic performance in the title role, perfectly pitched for a series that was probably the year’s best and definitely its MOST show.

Poor Andor has to be satisfied with being only the year’s second-best warning about the mechanics of encroaching fascism, though it’s hard to equal creator Tony Gilroy’s audacity in using Disney’s Star Wars universe to deliver something this smart, this angry and this thrilling. Gilroy’s great gift in the 12-episode sophomore season — split into four three-episode arcs — is providing both the epic excitement the franchise demands and a prism through which to view the rise of Trump 2.0, the quagmire in Gaza and any future conflict pitting authoritarian governance against civilian unrest. Andor is now the standard by which the aspirations of all future Star Wars projects must be judged.

The mechanics of encroaching fascism are only in the background of the essential third installment of this essential Civil Rights Movement history, which HBO effectively buried in February. In the six-episode docuseries, a sextet of directors look past the uproar of the ’50s and ’60s at more recent struggles including community activism in the South Bronx, the fight for affirmative action and the organization of the Million Man March. Each chapter is a reminder that progress isn’t always linear, with every hard-earned gain contextualized by the audience’s awareness of the steps taken by the Trump administration to undo the good work.

Underestimate Nathan Fielder at your own peril. The first season of The Rehearsal was already a dazzling fusion of comedy, reality TV and autobiography, but the second season took and landed a precarious leap. Fielder started with a jokey (if timely) premise about fixing communication between airline pilots and co-pilots and somehow leveraged it in directions as serious as sit-down meetings with actual DC politicians and as surreal and silly as a recreation of Sully Sullenberger’s life, as impersonal as an ambitious fake singing competition and as heartbreakingly personal as the attempts to diagnose his possible autism.

It isn’t surprising that Raphael Bob-Waksberg’s first solo creation post-BoJack never felt as buzzy as his exploration of Hollywood and depression. Built on a foundation of family and Judaism, Long Story Short is elliptical and evasive, playing with memory and time to illustrate what is often so infuriating and so necessary about family. It’s a show that works well from episode to episode — Bob-Waksberg’s love of puns, wordplay and silliness infiltrates even the darker chapters — and works even more beautifully as the pieces come together in a true animated tapestry.

Sterlin Harjo follows up perennial list-topper Reservation Dogs with a shaggy-dog mystery comedy that’s ostensibly a convoluted whodunit with Tim Blake Nelson as the verbose victim, but turns out to really be a love letter to Oklahoma’s melting pot of cultures and the unique pleasures of watching Ethan Hawke repeatedly getting beat up. It’s more a collection of magical moments and immaculate vibes than a tightly composed narrative, but every second of The Lowdown looks and feels right.

Returning to his X Files roots while retaining his Albuquerque grounding, Vince Gilligan riffs on Invasion of the Body Snatchers with a very funny, very sad, very inventive meditation on loneliness and the allure of monoculture in a fragmented world. It’s a simple premise, executed with thrilling versatility through a uniquely dyspeptic heroine. As that grumpy protagonist, who was uncomfortable with the old world and likes the cheery new world even less, Rhea Seehorn completes the transition from Your Favorite TV Critic’s Favorite Actress to National Treasure.

The combination of just enough profundity to avoid being simply a technical stunt and more than enough televisual pyrotechnics to avoid being simply a polemic helped make Jack Thorne and Stephen Graham’s Netflix four-parter into 2025’s buzziest show. Director Philip Barantini’s one-shot wizardry — sometimes navigating great distances without blinking, other times turning a one-room conversation into a claustrophobic thriller — never upstaged stars including Graham, Erin Doherty and breakout newcomer Owen Cooper, nor did it distract from the cautionary tale of youthful masculinity in chaos.

No show currently makes me laugh as frequently, as hard or as guiltily as Kat Sadler’s BBC Three/Hulu comedy (season 2 aired this year) about two generations of women — played by Louise Brealey, Lizzie Davidson and Sadler — united by the sense that their shared family trauma is unparalleled, even if their lives are, at worst, complicatedly ordinary. Sadler’s confident voice, turning domestic toxicity into perfectly honed, invariably scathing punchlines, finds the humor in mental illness, romantic dysfunction and death.

If this list is topped by the year’s most aggressively uncomfortable shows, it ends with a slice of comfort in the form of Stacey Aglok MacDonald and Alethea Arnaquq-Baril’s thoroughly heartwarming CBC/Netflix comedy. Set and filmed in an Inuk community in the Canadian Arctic, North of North is an utterly distinctive spin on countless coming-of-age tropes, anchored by a star-making performance by Anna Lambe. The series manages, in only eight episodes, to build a fictional community characterized by eccentric togetherness at an otherwise turbulent moment.

***

Honorable mentions (in alphabetical order): Abbot Elementary (ABC), The Bear (FX/Hulu), The Chair Company (HBO), Common Side Effects (Adult Swim), Dark Winds (AMC), Everybody’s Live With John Mulaney (Netflix), Hacks (HBO Max), Katrina: Come Hell and High Water (Netflix), The Pitt (HBO Max), Severance (Apple TV) 

I’ll just say it: This was not a great year for television. 

We’ve been talking about the big TV slowdown for a couple of years now, but the past several months have been especially sparse, with the release calendar alternating between weeks of drought and days-long flurries of activity. 

Supposedly “safe” bets like IP extensions, dramas about miserable rich white families and ripped-from-the-headlines true crime fare yielded more forgotten duds (remember The Rainmaker? Or Good American Family? Me neither) than lasting hits. When the medium did grab headlines, it often did so for upsetting reasons, like the ousting of Stephen Colbert, the suspension of Jimmy Kimmel or the indefinite postponement of Apple TV’s The Savant. 

There were some thrilling high points — thank you, Major League Baseball, for giving us one of the year’s most unforgettable plot arcs — but at least from my perch on my living room couch, Hollywood in 2025 has felt defined more by anxiety and uncertainty than optimistic confidence. Nor is it obvious that the immediate future’s going to be much brighter, seeing as two of the big storylines at the moment are industry consolidation and the rise of generative AI. 

And yet. Just because TV as a whole isn’t doing amazing doesn’t mean there haven’t been amazing TV shows. I fell in love over and over this year with series that spoke to the moment with shocking lucidity, series that comforted me in their sturdy familiarity, series that did the exact opposite and delighted me with their originality. The TV business will have its ups and downs. But as long as our species is capable of producing creative minds and brilliant talents, there will always be something to watch. 

How bleakly appropriate that in a year when too much of mainstream media seemed loathe to call American authoritarianism what it was, it should take a Star Wars spinoff (of all things!) to reflect the moment with clarity and purpose. Tony Gilroy’s Disney+ drama leveled up in its second season with a searing examination of the means through which fascism is spread and the heavy toll paid to fight it — and with a rousing call about the necessity of doing so anyway.

Medical shows were a dime a dozen in 2025. Still, none were doing it quite like R. Scott Gemmill’s don’t-call-it-an-ER-clone HBO Max series. Though Noah Wyle’s sturdy and empathetic Dr. Robby served as the anchor, it was the vast ensemble that truly brought the Pittsburgh hospital setting to life, from seasoned vets like Katherine LaNasa’s weary charge nurse to fresh-faced newbies like Gerran Howell’s beleaguered intern — rooting the real-time drama in an immediacy that was occasionally devastating, frequently thrilling and always marvelously human.

The latest animated dramedy from Bojack Horseman creator Raphael Bob-Waksberg may not have seemed like anything terribly unique to start, following as it does the mundane lives of an ordinary Jewish family. But first impressions can be deceiving. Jumping between characters and across decades, the Netflix series painted a portrait of a family in all its strengths and flaws and minor traumas, so richly specific that their memories became our own and so brimming with love that their joys and losses did too.

Only combining the minds behind one of the most thoughtful sci-fi shows in recent memory and some of the best-loved workplace comedies of the past several decades could yield a brew as intoxicatingly original as this Adult Swim animated series, about the destructive battle for a magical mushroom capable of curing death itself. I never knew where this show, darkly hilarious and frequently thrilling, with disarming moments of tenderness and surreal beauty, was headed next — just that I couldn’t wait for my next dose.

Can a showbiz send-up be simultaneously an indictment of an industry in crisis, a tribute to a rosier past and a love letter to a storied medium and the people who keep it running? Starring and co-created by Seth Rogen, Apple TV’s exhilarating comedy mined gasps, giggles and surprising heart from the conflict between a studio chief’s passion for the craft and his professional obligation to the bottom line. (Try not to think too hard about the fact that from the back end of 2025, an exec who actually gives a shit about cinema sounds increasingly like a cryptid.)

You could read Vince Gilligan’s gorgeously shot Apple TV sci-fi apocalypse as being about any number of things, from AI to the loneliness epidemic. But at its heart lay the more fundamental question of what it means to be human at all. Rhea Seehorn’s Carol may have been a misanthrope, but in her quest to save a world that insists it doesn’t want to be saved, she forced us to consider what makes us who we are and why we might be worth fighting for in all our ugly, messy glory.

There is no one like Tim Robinson. Except, of course, what makes his comedy so brilliant is that all of us feel a little like him sometimes. His latest painfully awkward creation was Ron Trosper, a businessman who spirals into conspiracy theory after a minor humiliation at work. His journey was surreal in its unpredictable detours and bizarre characters — and yet, in its overarching sense of discomfort with a world that’s ceased to make sense, also strangely relatable. 

Who’d have thought one of the year’s warmest shows would spring from one of the world’s harshest climes? The series, following the daily rhythms of a primarily Inuit village deep in the Canadian Arctic, might not have reinvented the small-town comedy. But it certain gave the genre a fresh spin with its unusual-for-TV setting, its vibrant cultural specificity (bet you’ve never heard the phrase “walrus dick baseball” before) and its breakout lead actor, the absolutely radiant Anna Lambe. 

It would not be inaccurate to describe this BBC drama, which made hardly a splash in the U.S., as a triumph for underrepresented voices, chronicling the fallout when a septuagenarian Antiguan Londoner (an incredible Lennie James) leaves his long-alienated wife (Sharon D. Clarke) for his lover of several decades (Ariyon Bakare). But that would be selling short the wryness of its humor, the awesome complexity of its characters, the exquisite beauty of its costumes and sets and the palpable, even sexy chemistry between its trio of leads.

There was no wrapping your head around the shocking crime at the heart of this Netflix drama, of a sweet-faced teenager (Owen Cooper) murdering a classmate in cold blood. There could only be attempts to understand the culture that produced him, and the shockwaves his actions sent through his family and his community. Creators Jack Thorne and Stephen Graham found the humanity underneath the inhumanity, yielding a series of both breathtaking technical accomplishment (those seemingly impossible long takes!) and devastating emotional effect.

***

Honorable mentions (in alphabetical order): Alien: Earth (FX), Forever (Netflix), Hacks (HBO), The Hunting Wives (Netflix), The Lowdown (FX), Overcompensating (Prime Video), Pee-Wee as Himself (HBO), Platonic (Apple TV), The Rehearsal (HBO), Severance (Apple TV)