📺 Best TV Series of 2025
🔒 Archived ranking: voting and adding items is closed.
Full ranking
1
Adolescence
Drama miniseries - Jack Thorne and Stephen Graham - Netflix - 13/03/2025 - 16+ A thirteen-year-old boy is arrested for the murder of a female classmate, upending his family and the small English town where he lives. Four episodes, each filmed in a single continuous take, reconstruct the hours and months that follow.
Adolescence was created by actor Stephen Graham together with screenwriter Jack Thorne, with direction by Philip Barantini, who previously worked with Graham on the film Boiling Point. Each of the four episodes is shot in one continuous take with no editing cuts, a demanding choice that forces the camera to follow characters in real time through police stations, school corridors and family homes, heightening the emotional pressure of every scene. At the center of the story is the arrest of thirteen-year-old Jamie Miller, played by newcomer Owen Cooper, accused of murdering a female classmate, an event that devastates his father Eddie, played by Graham himself, while the investigation led by detective Luke Bascombe, played by Ashley Walters, intertwines with the work of psychologist Briony Ariston, played by Erin Doherty. The series uses the crime as a starting point for a broader look at the toxic online culture surrounding parts of male adolescence today, from the manosphere to incel language to digital bullying that slips past adult supervision, shifting point of view with every episode, without ever offering easy answers or a single culprit. Owen Cooper's performance, his first major acting role, has been singled out by much of the critical press as one of the year's revelations, while Graham confirms his ability to convey with restraint the grief of a father unable to understand what happened under his own roof. Barantini's direction, together with Matthew Lewis's cinematography, turns the single take into a narrative tool that denies the viewer any escape, keeping them trapped inside each scene as long as the characters are. The reception has been nearly unanimous, with international critics praising both the writing and the staging, and the series sparked a public debate involving schools, media and even the British government, with screenings organized in classrooms to discuss online radicalization, turning it within weeks into one of the most watched and talked-about titles in Netflix's recent history.
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10votes
2
Severance
Science fiction thriller - Dan Erickson - Apple TV+ - 17/01/2025 - 16+ Employees at Lumon Industries undergo a procedure that splits their work memories from their personal life, creating two identities within the same person. Season two follows the Macrodata Refinement team as they try to uncover the company's real purpose.
Severance was created by Dan Erickson, a screenwriter making his debut as showrunner, with most episodes directed by Ben Stiller, who also serves as executive producer. The series imagines a near future in which the Lumon Industries corporation offers employees a procedure called severance, a surgical operation that cleanly separates work memories from personal-life memories, creating two distinct consciousnesses within the same person, an inner self that exists only inside the office, and an outer self with no memory of what happens within its walls. At the center of the story is Mark Scout, played by Adam Scott, head of the Macrodata Refinement department, alongside Helly R., played by Britt Lower, Irving, played by John Turturro, and Dylan, played by Zach Cherry, a small group of employees who in season one began to sense the sinister nature of the company they work for. Season two picks up right after the first season's explosive finale, with the balance between the characters' inner and outer lives now upended, and deals with the fallout of the group's rebellion, as Lumon attempts to regain control through fresh manipulation. Alongside the core cast, Patricia Arquette plays the ruthless manager Harmony Cobel, Tramell Tillman plays floor supervisor Milchick, and new additions Gwendoline Christie and Merritt Wever expand the show's mythology, deepening the history of the Eagan family that founded the company and the near-religious cult around it. Visually the series keeps the cold, symmetrical aesthetic that has made Lumon's offices one of recent television's most distinctive settings, while Erickson's writing keeps balancing workplace satire, long-form mystery and an almost Orwellian unease about corporate control over personal identity, digging deeper into what remains of a person's identity once their memories are artificially split. The reception has matched the enthusiasm of season one, with reviews praising thematic consistency and bold storytelling choices, and Severance has confirmed itself among Apple TV+'s flagship productions, generating fan theories, online discussion and an ever-growing cult following with every new episode.
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9votes
3
The Last of Us
Post-apocalyptic drama - Craig Mazin and Neil Druckmann - HBO - 13/04/2025 - 18+ Five years after season one, Joel and Ellie live in Jackson, Wyoming, but a new wave of violence tied to Joel's past forces them to reckon with the choices made years earlier, in a world still ravaged by the Cordyceps infection.
The Last of Us returns for a second season written and produced by the same creators behind the first, Craig Mazin and Neil Druckmann, the latter also the creator of the Naughty Dog video game the series is based on, here loosely adapting the second half of the story from The Last of Us Part II, released in 2020 and met at the time with a divided reception due to its more drastic choices regarding its characters. Pedro Pascal and Bella Ramsey return as Joel and Ellie, now settled in the fortified community of Jackson, while the season introduces Kaitlyn Dever as Abby, a pivotal character in the second half of the story, alongside Isabela Merced as Dina and Young Mazino as Jesse. Made up of just seven episodes, compared to nine in season one, this new run covers only part of the source game's material, a production choice Mazin and Druckmann announced early on, opting to spread a particularly complex and structurally non-linear story across multiple seasons. The story opens with a traumatic event that shatters the fragile peace Joel and Ellie had found in Jackson, setting off a cycle of violence and revenge that forces Ellie to leave the community with Dina to hunt down those responsible, a journey that confronts her with her own moral blind spots. The series keeps the production polish and thematic faithfulness to the source material that defined its first season, with high-impact action sequences and violence that is never gratuitous but always in service of the story's themes of trauma and grief, central to both the game and its television adaptation. The decision to split the second game's story across multiple seasons has divided critics somewhat, who praised the quality of the staging and performances but noted a less compact narrative pace than the debut season, further weighed down by a structure that leaves several arcs open heading into future chapters. Despite these reservations, the season confirmed the series' enormous audience following, sparking extensive, often heated, online debate over the choices made in adapting one of the most discussed video games of the past decade.
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8votes
