2025 felt like a particularly good year for television. I sit down every Tuesday and Saturday with my wife to watch whatever our chosen show at the moment is (we’ll have a “Tuesday show” and a “Saturday show”—Saturday usually allows us to get two or three episodes in, while Tuesday is better for shows we want to digest a little more slowly) and there were definitely parts of the year where we were spoilt for choice. In addition to Tuesday and Saturday I also carved out some other mid-week slots to watch particular shows with one or other of my kids.

As such I managed 33 complete seasons of TV this year (a season being typically 10 episodes or less) and most of it was very good. I want to talk about some of my favourite TV watches this year below.

Favourite weirdness

I love shows that are a little bit off the beaten track. For example, One of my favourite shows of the last several years was Devs, starring Nick Offerman and Sonoya Mizuno) which few people seem to be aware of and which I probably wouldn’t have heard of had I not learned about it from a podcast.

I probably heard about Mrs. Davis from the same podcast that told me about Devs, but forgot about it for several years. I spotted it in one of my lists earlier this year and decided it needed to be checked out. It’s a bizarre, hilarious, baffling tale of a Nun charged by a global AI to find the holy grail. I’d be tempted to expand on that, but there are so many hilarious twists and turns that you’re probably best going in with no preconceptions whatsoever. If you enjoy the opening of the first episode the chances are you’re going to love the rest of the ride too. It’s inexplicable to me that there isn’t more buzz and awareness of this unique one-and-done show.

I also loved Tales From The Loop. In this case I didn’t quite get it from the first episode, but I persisted because I was fascinated by the look and tone of the show (a compelling blend of melancholy, small-town America and science fiction trappings). It’s one of those shows that tells a different story each episode, often following a different character, but the episode intertwine with one another meaning that seemingly random occurrences in an earlier episodes will receive payoffs later. If David Lynch had decided that quiet, reflective sci-fi was his thing then the result might have been something like Tales From The Loop.

I’m also going to include season one of Severance here which I watched for the fourth time this year (this viewing was with my youngest son) and I don’t think I’ll ever get tired of watching it. It’s just so good, so dark, so funny and so weird.

Favourite new show

Of the new shows I watched this year I’m not sure I had a standout favourite but naturally Alien: Earth was a highlight for me. However, given I’ve written about that one extensively elsewhere I won’t add anything else in this post.

Murderbot was the kind of funny science fiction that I generally have a weak spot for. I don’t think I loved the show–it felt like something was still missing from the formula–but I did really, really enjoy it and I’m keen to see more.

Finally Shogun was one of those shows I watched because I generally like to see what the fuss is about (at least, if the genre and premise of the fussed-about-show is one I’m into). Having jumped into some of Akira Kurosawa’s classic Samurai movies elsewhere in the year I was definitely in the right place to enjoy a glossy, colourful, epic show about feudal Japan. I’ve never seen the original (and highly acclaimed) TV adaptation, nor am I likely to ever read the books, but I can say this was a hugely satisfying few hours of television that I suspect I will enjoy watching again before season two rolls around. 

Favourite returning show

I’m going to add a little whinge here about how long it takes to make TV these days. Back in the days when I was hooked on things like Buffy and Star Trek: The Next Generation you’d get up to 26 episodes of your favourite show every year. Of course, the flipside of that is that half of those episodes would be average (at best) and there remained a marked difference in quality between TV and movies. TV was still the cheap cousin.

These days the quality of TV shows is at least comparable to movies; probably better in a lot of cases. Plus, I can honestly tell you I wouldn’t have the attention span for 20 plus episodes of something any more. In addition, the model has changed: it’s no longer about those advertising dollars; it’s about getting those streaming subscriptions. Shows are no longer constrained by strictly mandated running times making them little more that containers for commercials: they just need to be good enough that people will pay to watch them.

So, naturally, I want to have my cake and eat it: top quality TV with the turnaround time of old school syndicated productions. At the very least, I don’t want to have to wait two years (or more) to find out what happens next.

Season 1 of Squid Game (which I watched with my eldest at the time) aired in September of 2001. It wasn’t until Boxing Day of 2024 that we got the next batch of episodes (and then the final batch in June of 2025, because Netflix loves to string us along these days). In that time I had watched the whole of season one again, with my youngest this time, and we were keen to see what the next season would entail.

Now, I don’t really think Squid Game needed a second season—it worked perfectly well as a one-and-done—but I still quite enjoyed what they did with this one. It wasn’t perfect by any means but in terms of finding a fresh journey for the main character to go on, expanding the world, and introducing interesting new characters: mission accomplished. We enjoyed watching it, it kept us hooked, and that’s really all you need.

Andor is a show that my eldest and I devoured the first season of back in late 2022. Simply brilliant. Unlike other shows (*cough* Stranger Things *cough*) that my eldest and I watched together at one point, this time my eldestdidn’t lose interest and we eagerly awaited the second season, which finally arrived in April of 2025. It was well worth the wait (and well worth its position at the top of many, many “best TV of the year” listings). The production values in every aspect were incredible, but most importantly the writing was superb. There are very good reasons right now to be telling stories about how fascism can creep in and Andor does it so very, very well. This season also featured probably one of the best single episodes of television that I had ever seen, one that left me virtually speechless and which I had to watch again the following week just because it was that good.

Finally one of my favourite shows returned this year for its third season. Foundation debuted in September of 2021, season two arrived in mid 2023, and season 3 kicked off exactly two years later. It’s a long journey but this one is undoubtedly worth it. I’ve never read the books and that’s probably a good thing—several of my favourite things about this universe (so I’ve learned) were created specifically for the show. I gather the budget has been trimmed a bit for this latest season and there were one or two moments where the CGI compositing perhaps wasn’t as flawless as previous efforts, but that was it. This show looks, and has always looked, incredible.

While I might admit to finding that each season is slightly less good than the previous one (season one of Foundation is up there with season one of Severance as something I could probably watch on endless repeat and never get tired) the story has evolved in dramatic and convincing ways. As such you never quite know what you’re going to get from season to season, or even episode to episode which is a rare thing; for a TV show to be this expensive and to still avoid the easy path of doing the same thing on repeat.

And is probably one of the reasons why we have to wait so long between seasons 😉

Late to the Party

As a big Anne Rice fan I naturally got very excited about the new TV adaptation of Interview With The Vampire, which debuted in 2022 … and then I completely failed to watch it. On the plus side, by the time I did get started there were two seasons ready to devour. I love meta-storytelling so the premise of this show—a second interview with the titular vampire in order to address various issues and inaccuracies with the first interview (the subject of the original novel)—allows the TV adaptation to tell its own version of the story while still keeping true to the basic premise and key plot points. Somehow this approach allowed the show-runners to tell a version story which felt even more authentic to the characters, This was easily one of my favourite shows of recent years.

I’m going to give a shout out to The Pitt here. Yes, it turns out it did debut at the start of 2025 (and kudos to the show-runners for only taking a year to get season two out) but I’m including it here because I wasn’t particularly aware of it until my eldest binged it and started raving about it. Then I saw that everyone had been raving about it and figured it might be worth seeing what the fuss is all about.

And it was!

Up for 2026

Sadly most of the shows I enjoyed in 2025 won’t be coming back this year. One exception is The Vampire Lestat (the third season of Interview With The Vampire, renamed to match the subsequent novel in Anne Rice’s Vampire Chronicles upon which it’s based). I’m excited for this because The Vampire Lestat, more than anything, is the novel that made me want to try my hand at being a writer. Also there are some elements of the book that I’m intrigued to see if they’re able to pull off.

As mentioned, season two of The Pitt has kicked off and we have just started watching that. We will also be checking out Starfleet Academy in short order (reviews of that have been pretty positive so far) as well as A Knight Of The Seven Kingdoms.

There’s a Blade Runner show on the way which I will obviously be watching, and I’m hoping that the Buffy reboot might happen this year (and that it will be good!). Beyond that I expect to be catching up on shows that I’ve previously missed and keeping an eye out for the shows that everyone else starts talking about.