It's the most wonderful time of the year, everyone, when we gather together to celebrate the most wonderful television of the year.
Over the next few weeks, I'll be celebrating lots of things I loved on TV in 2025, including my favorite episodes and a lot of terrific newcomers. But we have to start out with the big list, covering the 10 best shows I watched this year. We're still settling into this strange new post-Peak TV landscape, where there are fewer shows being made overall, and fewer chances being taken. But some fantastic work still made it to our screens. Some of it was finding ways to reinvent famous IP, while others managed to go to amazing places with wholly original ideas. There were throwback dramas, and fascinating hybrids of comedy with other genres.
Best of all, while a few of these entries very much aspired to XX-Hour Movie status, the majority of them — including three shows at the top that would be classics in any year — were made by people who know and love television for the specific things that make it television, and who approached their projects accordingly. Let TV be TV again!
Honorable mentions
Again, I'll be doing several more lists, which will give spotlight opportunities to some shows that didn't make this top 10. (So save the, "What, no love for..." complaints at least until the end of the month, if you can restrain yourselves.) But there were a few shows that were particularly tough cuts from this group, and I wanted to single out here. FX's The Bear had a welcome bounceback season after its extremely messy third year, and offered some fantastic individual episodes, though the whole felt slightly less than the sum of those parts. Apple's Slow Horses had one of its best seasons, and arguably its funniest. Adult Swim's drug trip comic thriller Common Side Effects was both inexplicable and wonderful. And you can add Hulu's King of the Hill to the extremely small list of TV revivals that managed to creatively justify its own return after so many years away.