The streaming era has produced its share of pathologies, including bloated running times and narratives padded with filler. The best dramas of 2025, though, are a reminder that television has become our predominant cultural medium.

‘Adolescence’

The life of the Miller family is overturned one morning when the police raid the house and arrest 13 year-old Jamie (Owen Cooper) for the murder of his classmate, Katie Leonard (Emilia Holliday). But this isn’t some by-the-numbers British procedural.

It doesn’t take long for footage to prove that Jamie did it, and the series instead explores the disturbing social milieu that made Jamie a murderer and the ways his sister, Lisa (Amélie Pease), and parents, Eddie (Stephen Graham) and Manda (Christine Tremarco), come to terms with what happened. Its four episodes are nightmare fuel for parents, each filmed in a single take, an approach that “contributes real-time immediacy to the story being told, as well as a certain astonishment at the methods, choreography and endurance of the cast,” said John Anderson at The Wall Street Journal. (Netflix)

‘The Bear’

After the long-awaited and largely negative review of the titular upscale Chicago restaurant finally comes out, co-owners Carmy (Jeremy Allen White) and Syd (Ayo Edebiri) are given two months to turn it around before Uncle Cicero (Oliver Platt) cuts off the cash. While many see “The Bear” as an homage to the art of cooking for others, it is also a show about adrenaline junkies whose love-hate relationship with the restaurant business destroys their personal lives and ability to function.

It forces viewers to confront the wreckage that happens just offstage before they receive their amuse-bouche. In the fourth season of “The Bear,” the “chemistry and love for one another” of the ensemble explains “why we as an audience keep returning to one of the most stressful workplaces in television history,” and makes up for the inert, self-indulgent mess of season 3, said Alan Sepinwall at Rolling Stone. (Hulu)

‘The Diplomat’

If you can get past some of the silly and implausible plotting, “The Diplomat” is a marvelously acted, snappy and engrossing drama about married foreign service officers Hal (Rufus Sewell) and Kate (Keri Russell) Wyler. The pair is swept up in White House intrigue, propelled by a potboiler narrative about a terrorist attack on a British aircraft carrier.

If nothing else, the show is comfort food for anyone who misses policymakers and believes there is more to American foreign policy than cruelty and blunt military force. When season 3 begins, the president has died, making Grace Penn (Allison Janney) POTUS. Penn then unexpectedly picks Hal rather than Kate to serve as her veep, sending their marriage entertainingly sideways. The series is “as ridiculous as it is compelling” and “joins a lineup of shows that make little sense but are entertaining because of it,” said Saloni Gajjar at The AV Club. (Netflix)

‘Dying for Sex’

Adapted from the documentary podcast of the same name, “Dying for Sex” stars Michelle Williams as Molly, who leaves her husband and embarks on a riotous journey of erotic discovery after her cancer comes back, this time with a terminal diagnosis. Her best friend, Nikki (Jenny Slate), is so devoted to Molly and her determination to squeeze as many encounters as possible into her final months that it eventually takes its toll on Nikki’s own life and relationships.

The series explores death in ways that are almost unique to commercial television, without losing sight of the audience’s need not to be needlessly brutalized. It is “hilariously funny, guttingly sad and somehow also tingling with joy about the preciousness of life,” said Phillip Maciak at The New Republic. (Hulu)

‘Forever’

Adapted from Judy Bloom’s beloved novel, this is the rare series that can be enjoyed by both the YA demographic and adults. High school seniors Keisha (Lovie Simone) and Justin (Michael Cooper Jr.) have an off-again/on-again romance complicated by their wildly different social classes.

Wealthy Justin’s overbearing mother (Karen Pittman) doesn’t want anything to get in the way of a potential elite basketball scholarship. Keisha’s mom, Shelly (Xosha Roquemore), a single, overwhelmed nurse, pressures Keisha to stay with NBA-bound Christian (Xavier Mills), who unbeknownst to Shelly, ruined Keisha’s reputation by releasing a sex tape. A “charming slow burn,” it is “one of Netflix’s few shows to have a predominantly Black cast,” enabling it to be “specific in its exploration of the Black teen experience in America,” said Michel Ghanem at The Cut. (Netflix)

‘The Narrow Road to the Deep North’

Most winners of the heady Man Booker Prize, like Richard Flanagan’s moving and brutal 2014 novel, aren’t easy adaptations. But Prime hired Australian auteur Justin Kurzel (“The Order”) to direct, and the result is riveting.

The show is set in three timelines, and follows a medical student named Dorrigo Evans (Jacob Elordi), who marries Ella (Olivia DeJonge) but then has a destructive affair with his uncle’s wife, Amy (Odessa Young), before a harrowing stint in a Japanese POW camp in then-Indochina. Ciarán Hinds plays Evans as an older man in the late 1980s, when he is a renowned surgeon and still a womanizer. By depicting a group of people who “experience the war and come away with very little greater understanding of life,” the series is “gorgeous, ugly and stirring, with parts that seared themselves into my brain,” said Rebecca Onion at Slate. (Prime)

‘The Pitt’

After years of networks pouring resources into imitating cable and streamer prestige TV, HBO Max flipped the script with a throwback hospital procedural. “The Pitt” even borrows “ER” staple Noah Wyle as Dr. Michael Robinavitch, a grizzled emergency physician at struggling Pittsburgh Trauma Medical Center.

Buoyed by an outstanding ensemble cast, the season cleverly depicts a single 15-hour shift of hospital mayhem, and its big heart and superb performances will win you over. It strikes a nerve not just with nostalgia but by serving as a searing indictment of the inequities, waste and greed that plague America’s medical system. The show “pinpoints the widespread feeling that everything now is sick and broken, from systems to people to social compacts,” said James Poniewozik at The New York Times. (HBO Max)

‘Pluribus’

Showrunner Vince Gilligan (“Breaking Bad”) takes a seemingly unlimited pile of Apple TV+ cash and turns it into the kind of talked-about event television that is so rare in today’s fragmented streaming landscape. Carol Sturka (Rhea Seehorn) is a successful but jaded “romantasy” writer who returns home to Albuquerque from a miserable book-signing tour just as a virus turns all of humanity into a blankly happy hive mind.

Carol is one of just a handful of people on the planet who are immune and retain their individuality. A show that “feels not just original but wholly surprising,” Gilligan’s mysterious series “wrestles with big philosophical questions of morality, contentment, purpose and meaning,” said Lacy Baugher Milas at Paste. (Apple TV+)

In an era of limitless streamed “content”, it can be hard to settle on anything to watch. Here are nine shows worth trying.

Suspect: The Shooting of Jean Charles de Menezes

Jeff Pope’s dramatisation of the events, in the febrile weeks after the 7/7 bombings, that led to the police shooting an innocent 27-year-old Brazilian electrician makes for gripping, harrowing viewing, said The New Statesman. It is not perfect: the depiction of Met Police commissioner Ian Blair as a “ridiculously camp” fool is misguided. But the account of how de Menezes came to be mistaken for an Ethiopian terrorist, and the lies told afterwards, is starkly told. This is a “J’accuse” that is “both subtle and grand”.
Disney +

Leonard and Hungry Paul

Rónán Hession’s debut novel, about two men still living at home in their early 30s, became a word-of-mouth hit – and was so loved by Julia Roberts that she agreed to narrate this TV adaptation. In this “droll Dublin dramedy” nothing happens, said The Irish Times, yet it is far from boring. Those totally allergic to whimsy may find it trying; for the rest, it amounts to a sweet, wry, “quietly uplifting” celebration of the “bittersweet banality” of ordinary life.
BBC iPlayer

Adolescence

A massive global hit, “Adolescence” is near-perfect TV, said The Guardian. Consisting of four episodes, each filmed in a single take, it begins with police bursting into an ordinary family home at dawn, to arrest a 13-year-old boy (Owen Cooper) on suspicion of murder, as his shell-shocked parents look on. Superbly acted and brilliantly written, this is not a police procedural, said The Telegraph. It is a devastating exploration of the pressures on boys today, including the malign influence of social media, and the nonsense peddled about what it means to be a man.
Netflix

The Great Art Fraud

In May 2022, the disgraced young art dealer Inigo Philbrick was sentenced to seven years in jail for defrauding collectors and investors out of $86 million (£63 million). This “riveting” two-part documentary looks at how he did it, with much of the story told by the former wunderkind himself, said the Financial Times. It does a great job in explaining how his fraud worked (broadly, he sold more shares than existed in the same valuable pieces), and sheds light on a little-regulated market, where relationships rely largely on trust.
BBC iPlayer

The Beast in Me

Watchable but silly thrillers come along all the time on Netflix – with “Sirens” among the better ones this year. “The Beast in Me” is also on Netflix, but this psychological thriller is a cut above, said The Guardian. Taut and convincingly scripted, it stars Claire Danes as a troubled writer, living alone in a big house in a wealthy exurb, and Matthew Rhys as the suspected wife-killer who moves in next door. They are both so good, you can hardly look away.
Netflix

Riot Women

In Sally Wainwright’s latest series, she pulls together a group of women who are feeling sidelined and invisible in middle age – and has them form a band. Set (like “Happy Valley”) in Hebden Bridge, this is an upbeat story painted in bold colours, said the FT, yet it goes into dark places. There are lots of twists, and it barrels along at a great pace. Some of the messaging about menopause is heavy-handed, said The Telegraph. Still, this is crowd-pleasing fare, and in the central role Joanna Scanlan is typically excellent.
BBC iPlayer

What It Feels Like for a Girl

An eight-part adaptation of Paris Lees’ often shattering memoir of her life as a trans teenager in Nottinghamshire, this show is not for everyone, said The Telegraph: it contains many disturbing sex scenes, and it strives a bit too hard for attention. But it brims with energy; Ellis Howard is “magnetic” in the central role; and though Lees’ story is “caked in the grime of life on the margins”, it also has “the sprinkled-in- stardust quality of a real-life fairy tale”.
BBC iPlayer

The Narrow Road to the Deep North

Richard Flanagan’s novel, about an elderly Australian haunted by memories of being a Japanese POW used as forced labour on the Death Railway in Burma, is a gruelling read. And this TV adaptation, starring Jacob Elordi and Ciarán Hinds, is no less shocking, said The Times. Many scenes in it are truly “soul sickening”. But the series is “terrific” – even “magnificent” at times.
BBC iPlayer

Amandaland

This enjoyable spinoff from the hit comedy “Motherland” is focused on snobby, glossy Amanda (Lucy Punch), the alpha female in the old gang, said The Guardian. Now a single mum, she has had to move to grotty South Harlesden (SoHar); and is trying to make it as a wellness influencer. Punch is brilliant in a show that is very funny, and also surprisingly “life affirming”, said The Times. And though we miss some of the old characters, there are welcome returns from Philippa Dunne as Anne, and Joanna Lumley as Amanda’s mother.
BBC iPlayer

“Tea with Judi Dench” is “the most touching TV you’ll watch all Christmas”, said Stuart Heritage in The Guardian.

On the surface, it doesn’t sound that exciting. This is a show where “someone comes to visit Dench for a cup of tea and that’s literally it” – which could be “dispiriting” were it not so “relentlessly charming”.

Kenneth Branagh goes to see Dench at her home in Surrey, and the pair – who have been friends for almost 40 years – have a “lovely, easy, breezy relationship”. Over the next 45 minutes, the actors “natter away pleasantly with no real direction”.

“At one point, they potter over to Dench’s parrot, Sweetheart, in the hope that it will call Branagh a ‘slag’.” But mostly they “reminisce” about their stage careers and the people they’ve lost, and “quote Shakespeare to each other, at length”.

Blending “personal anecdotes” with “rarely seen archive material”, it’s an “unflinching” documentary that opens the doors to the Oscar-winning actor’s “stunning” country home, said Emma Guinness in the Daily Mail.

Dench gets “tearful” as she reflects on the loss of her late husband Michael Williams, who died of lung cancer in 2001. Elsewhere, we’re “treated to more lively conversation, humorous insights and moments of genuine candour and emotion”.

The parts that “interested me the most are when she talks of memory”, said A.N. Wilson in The Times. Like many nonagenarians, she explains how she often can’t remember what happened the day before – but the “consoling thing” is that her head is still filled with Shakespeare.

Dench is an “extraordinarily intent listener” and a “nimble” interviewer, said Heritage in The Guardian. She manages to tease out details from Branagh that might otherwise have been left unsaid. It’s a style that risks encouraging “indulgent waffle”, but for “Tea with Judi Dench”, an edited show about two very old, close friends, it’s “perfectly pitched”.

Rowan Atkinson claims not to care what the critics say about him, said Carol Midgley in The Times. He’d be unmoved, then, to learn that I found his new Netflix series quite “charming”.

A sequel to 2022’s “Man vs Bee”, it’s a “comedic survival drama” in which Atkinson reprises his role as hapless everyman Trevor Bingley. In the run-up to Christmas, Trevor loses his job as a school caretaker in a pretty village. He’s about to close up for the last time when he finds a baby abandoned there, and feels obliged to take it home.

‘Unpleasantly stressful’

Lonely and broke, Trevor is thrown a lifeline when he’s offered a house-sitting job in a London penthouse, said Rebecca Nicholson in the Financial Times. There’s just one problem: he can’t offload the baby; the police are too busy and social services think he’s delusional. So he brings the infant with him. The baby proceeds to explore the lethal potential of every item in the flat, leading Trevor in a dance to save it. The series amounts to a succession of “nightmarish” scenarios; I found it unfunny and actually “unpleasantly stressful”.

Silly and ‘trite’

When Trevor went to war with a bee, his no-holds-barred approach to eliminating this nuisance led to some enjoyably farcical scenes, said Rachel Aroesti in The Guardian. Here, he is not, of course, pitted against the baby, so the laughs are thinner on the ground, while sentimentality abounds – as does the product placement. It amounts to four cynical episodes that trade on “Cosy British Christmascore” in a way that is “nauseatingly schmaltzy”, silly and “trite”.

Comedy writers had their work cut out for them in 2025, with the United States in political crisis and a mass culture that increasingly revolves around short-form video and manufactured outrage. It was also the year that studios tackled some of these problems directly, resulting in a crop of astute and sometimes discomfiting comedy offerings.

‘Adults,’ season 1

Anton (Owen Thiele), Billie (Lucy Freyer) and Issa (Amita Rao) are twenty-something friends living together in the Queens-based family home of Samir (Malik Elassal), all trying and failing to launch careers, relationships and even Zoom job interviews. An episode in which the helpless quartet attempts the seemingly simple task of roasting a chicken for a dinner party deliriously walks the line between critique and mean-spirited generational warfare.

With their brains “poisoned with all the anxieties of their internet-obsessed cohort,” the characters on FX’s Gen Z hang-out comedy connect most successfully when their antics are “just straight-up zany,” said Esther Zuckerman at The New York Times. (Hulu)

‘The Chair Company,’ season 1

Tim Robinson has cemented himself as an auteur of workplace cringe humor, In “The Chair Company,” Robinson plays Ron Trosper, a middle-aged mall designer for a firm called Fisher Robay whose wife, Barb (Lake Bell), and children, Natalie (Sophia Lillis) and Seth (Will Price), treat him with a mixture of bemusement and resignation.

At a presentation to unveil the firm’s newest shopping center, a desk chair collapses under him, sending Ron down a rabbit hole trying to figure out whether its shadowy manufacturer, Tecca, is the leading edge of a global conspiracy. A comedy about “man who will invent circles upon circles of spiraling conspiratorial lore to mask his inability to deal with the way his life has turned out,” it is ultimately a commentary on a world “designed to make it easy for you to go insane,” said Phillip Maciak at The New Republic. (HBO Max)

‘Deli Boys,’ season 1

Mir (Asif Ali) and Raj (Saagar Shaikh) are brothers who inherit what they believe to be a Philadelphia-based convenience store and retail empire when their father, Baba (Iqbal Theba), is killed in a golfing mishap. But Aunt Lucky (Poorna Jagannathan) is forced to share the bad news that the whole enterprise was a drug-running operation, and if they don’t right the ship quickly they’ll all be killed.

A lot of the laughs stem from the wildly mismatched brothers: Mir is an MBA-wielding straight man, while Raj is a brain-addled failson who spends most of his time curating his own drug experiences. Highlighted by the “genuine warmth of the relationships within this murderous crime family,” the Hulu comedy “balances bloody knuckles with a tender heart,” said Judy Berman at Time. (Hulu)

‘English Teacher,’ season 2

This uproarious ensemble comedy about a group of Austin, Texas, high school teachers went out with a bang with its second and final season after sexual assault allegations against creator and star Brian Jordan Alvarez (as well as an inability to find a larger audience) led FX to pull the plug. Alvarez is Evan, a gay English teacher delicately navigating various Trump-era fixations as the school’s principal, Grant (Enrico Colantoni), tries and usually fails to keep the school on the right side of whatever culture war has erupted most recently.

It’s mostly a buddy comedy, with fellow teachers Markie (Sean Patton) and Gwen (Stephanie Koenig) participating in hijinx or joining together to battle the students as in a memorable episode where the students launch an off-books, R-rated scavenger hunt at an overnight lock-in. A show whose “characters, comedy and rhythm seemed to come into the world fully formed,” its second season “continues to thrive in a comfortable groove,” said Ross McIndoe at Slant Magazine. (Hulu)

‘I Love LA,’ season 1

Another Gen Z hangout comedy that feels like a concerted effort to lure its target demographic away from their phones, “I Love LA” stars social media sensation Rachel Sennott as Maia, an office assistant at Alyssa 180, an eponymous talent agency overseen by a self-satisfied millennial boss (Leighton Meester) who refuses to give Maia a promotion.

When Maia’s best friend, Tallulah, an influencer perpetually riding the Hot Mess Express, returns to Los Angeles, she gives Maia a new career opportunity while also upsetting the delicate friendship dynamics of her band of hapless young narcissists. A show “populated by delusional strivers running on the fumes of substance-free hype,” it succeeds best as a “piece of sociology about the influencer era,” said Alison Herman at Variety. (HBO Max)

‘Mo,’ season 2

A comedy about a Palestinian refugee seeking immigration status in the United States couldn’t possibly have turned out to be more timely when its second season was released in January 2025. Comedian Mo Amer plays Mohammed “Mo” Najjar, a somewhat aimless Palestinian who was brought to the U.S. as a child.

In the second season he is marooned in Mexico City, performing in wrestling matches to get by, while his family fights to find him a legal pathway to residency in Houston. “Mo,” which concluded with this season, “excels in humanizing people of all stripes, and in being as sidesplittingly funny as it is unapologetically dark,” said Hannah J Davies at The Guardian. (Netflix)

‘Platonic,’ season 2

Friendship is the essence of virtually every project that Seth Rogan has ever been involved with and so it is fitting that he tackles the subject head-on in the underrated “Platonic.” Rogan is Will, a forty-something doofus who reconnects with his college buddy Sylvia (Rose Byrne at the top of her comedy game) after he gets divorced.

Sylvia is a stay-at-home mother of three married to a tightly-wrapped lawyer named Charlie (Luke Macfarlane). Season 2 picks up where the first left off, with Will set to marry straight-edge girlboss Jenna (Rachel Rosenbloom) and Sylvia agreeing to serve as the wedding planner. Anchored by leads “who excel at physical-comedy hijinks, electric banter and sincere conversations,” the Apple TV+ comedy is “rooted in laughs, crafting a chill, low-stakes story along the way,” said Saloni Gajjar at The AV Club. (Apple TV+)

‘The Studio,’ season 1

“The Studio” is both a showcase for Seth Rogan’s nervous, socially awkward talents and a love letter to a Hollywood striver whose creative integrity is being destroyed. Rogan plays Matt Remick, thrust into the role of chief executive at fictional Continental Studios, where he is immediately faced with a demand to turn “IP” into franchises, starting with the Kool-Aid Man.

Ike Barinholtz, Chase Sui Wonders and Kathryn Hahn steal scene after scene as his hapless underlings, with each episode centered around some massive screw-up, including Remick wrecking a delicate sunset shot for Sarah Polley, one of many stars who play versions of themselves in single-episode arcs. “The Studio” succeeds not just because of its ”attention to craft and its uniformly strong ensemble cast” but also because of its “unironic love for the medium of cinema,” said Dana Stevens at Slate. (Apple TV+)

Just because it’s December doesn’t mean you are required to watch holiday-themed television. Some of this month’s new releases are distinctly non-traditional, zagging where you expect them to zig. They include the second season of a dystopian video game adaptation, a behind-the-scenes look at history’s most profitable concert tour, and a hot love story between two hockey players.

‘Heated Rivalry’

It’s officially cold season, but if you’re craving content that will steam things up in a hurry, look no further than the aptly titled “Heated Rivalry.” Created by director Jacob Tierney for the Canadian streaming service Crave (but premiering on HBO Max), the series follows two male hockey rivals who are secretly hooking up off the ice.

“The story begins in 2008, before mainstream acceptance of queer relationships, and speeds through the years,” said Cat Zhang at The Cut. “Every so often, a match brings the nemeses to the same city, where they face off in the rink then disappear to a hotel room for kinky illicit sex.” (on HBO Max now)

‘Man vs. Baby’

British comic Rowan Atkinson, the man best known for playing the illustrious Mr. Bean, stars in this festive follow-up to 2022’s “Man vs. Bee.” The four-part show again tails Trevor Bingley, a character who has “left the stressful world of housesitting for the quieter life of a school caretaker,” said a plot synopsis.

The problem: “On the last day of term, when no one comes to collect the Baby Jesus from the school nativity, Trevor finds himself with another undersized and very unexpected companion.” Tune in for cozy sweaters, London lit up at Christmastime and Atkinson’s desperate attempts to wrangle a baby. (In the trailer, he pops a wine bottle cork in the tot’s mouth in place of a pacifier.) (Dec. 11 on Netflix)

‘Taylor Swift: The End Of An Era’

Taylor Swift’s “Eras” concert tour, which ran for an exhausting one year and nine months, broke all kinds of records and earned the distinction of being the highest-grossing tour of all time. Now the pop star is rewarding her fervid fans with a peek behind the curtain of her life as a showgirl: a six-episode docuseries that delves behind the scenes, showcasing everything from tour planning to rehearsals to Swift’s budding relationship with NFL player (and now fiancé) Travis Kelce. Alongside the series, Swift is releasing a separate film of her final “Eras” tour concert in Vancouver. (Dec. 12 on Disney+)

‘Fallout’

In its witty first season, Amazon’s “Fallout” transported viewers to a nuclear wasteland where survivors lived in underground bunkers. The series, “one of the most faithful — and best — video game adaptations,” said Ash Parrish at The Verge, is “ploughing further into its postapocalyptic mythology” in the second season, said Ben Travis at Empire. The show’s three central characters — “Ella Purnell’s Vault dweller Lucy, Aaron Moten’s mech-suited Maximus and Walton Goggins’ irradiated Ghoul” — are teaming up for a trip into “Sin City 2.0,” or New Vegas as it is now known, where Lucy will search for her father, Hank. (Dec. 17 on Prime)

‘The Copenhagen Test’

This stylish but secretive sci-fi thriller created by Thomas Brandon and blockbuster horror titan James Wan (“The Conjuring,” “Insidious”) promises a “sleek collision of psychological paranoia and high-tech espionage,” said The Playlist. “The Copenhagen Test” follows Alexander Hale (Simu Liu), an intelligence operative “who discovers his brain has been hacked, giving unseen operatives access to everything he sees and hears. Trapped between the intelligence agency he serves and the digital ghosts tracking his every move, Hale must perform his loyalty to both sides until he can expose who’s pulling the strings — before his thoughts stop being his own.” (Dec. 27 on Peacock)

“We’re finally here,” said Vicky Jessop in London’s The Standard. Nearly a decade on from the first episode of “Stranger Things”, the Duffer Brothers are “finally bringing the curtain down on their blockbuster hit show. What a ride it’s been.”

The fresh-faced kids “aren’t so little anymore”, which is “appropriate because this feels like the most adult the show has ever been”. Series five veers into “much darker territory”: the town of Hawkins is now under full military quarantine and Demogorgons are “slashing people around like pinatas”, blood and guts flying everywhere.

Robin (Maya Hawke) and Steve (Joe Keery) now work for a local radio station, while Eleven (Millie Bobby Brown) is on the run from the armed forces who understandably see her as a “massive threat”. Meanwhile, Mike (Finn Wolfhard) and his friends are helping Hopper (David Harbour) conduct “elaborate ‘sweeps’ of the Upside Down” to find and defeat the evil Vecna (Jamie Campbell Bower).

From “dark humour” to “whimsy” and the “poetry of trauma and hard-earned resilience”, the show’s “trademark” ingredients remain intact, said Leila Latif in Empire. “Most reassuring of all is how quickly the show proves it has not lost its sense of fun.” The performances are “largely excellent”, and Nell Fisher as Mike’s little sister, Holly, is a “delightful” addition to the cast. “Grander and gorier” than previous series, the latest season proves that “both our heroes and their deadliest foes still have thrilling new tricks up their sleeves”.

But there are “plot snags” that “cumulatively eat away at our suspension of disbelief”, said Angie Han in The Hollywood Reporter, and the main characters “look very much like the 20-somethings they are, rather than the roughly 16-year-olds they’re meant to be playing”.

Some of the show’s elements are becoming “repetitive”, said Laura Martin on BBC Culture, and “surely even Kate Bush is exhausted by ‘Running Up That Hill’ by now”. However, this is “poking small holes in a giant televisual beast. No ‘Stranger Things’ fan is going away disappointed” from the first four episodes, which means “anticipation for the rest of the season”, when it drops over Christmas, will be “at fever pitch”.

Episode four, leading up to an “epic battle between the demons, the military and the people of Hawkins” is the show at its very best. With grenades, gunfire and “two explosive twists in the final minutes”, it’s a “thrilling” watch – and, if it’s a sign of how the Duffer Brothers plan to conclude the show, then we “are in for an all-time great TV ending”.

Two hundred and fifty years after his birth, Joseph Mallord William Turner remains an “enigma”, said James Jackson in The Times: “a grunting curmudgeon, an establishment outsider, a visitor of prostitutes”, and an artist whose work “touches the sublime”. This new BBC2 documentary seeks to shed light on Turner’s character through close examination of his rarely seen sketchbooks: not just landscape studies and preliminary compositions that he would later turn into paintings, but also reams of “pornographic sketches”. The result is a show that zips “rather fascinatingly ... in and out of Turner’s id, ego and superego”.

An eclectic range of contributors offer their interpretations, said Roland White in the Daily Mail. Psychoanalyst Orna Guralnik, for instance, suggests that Turner’s detailed early depictions of buildings represented “a search for stability after a difficult childhood”. His background was indeed troubled: his mother suffered psychotic episodes at a time when madness was believed to run in families. Fearing it would hinder his career, he committed her to a hospital and never saw her again.

Not all the observations are worthwhile, said Jack Seale in The Guardian. Ronnie Wood, for instance, says of “Fall of the Rhine at Schaffhausen”: “It’s very dramatic.” But Tracey Emin convincingly discusses Turner’s working-class origins, while Chris Packham is highly insightful about Turner’s view of nature, and the effect of industry on it. This programme “balances accessibility with analytical muscle”, allowing us to see the artist “afresh”.

“Prisoner 951” is a “harrowing watch”, said Carol Midgley in The Times. The four-part series dramatises the nightmarish six years Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe endured as a political prisoner in Iranian custody before eventually being reunited with her husband and young daughter in the UK.

It is “perhaps as close as we’ll get” to imagining “how much she suffered, physically and mentally” – thanks largely to a “powerhouse performance” by Narges Rashidi as Zaghari-Ratcliffe.

The story begins in Tehran where Zaghari-Ratcliffe has been visiting family. When she arrives at the airport to catch her flight back to the UK, she is stopped by officials. “Wrenched from her crying baby daughter”, Gabriella, she is taken away and “shoved in a filthy, dark prison cell in solitary confinement”, accused of spying for the British state.

Meanwhile, her husband Richard Ratcliffe (Joseph Fiennes) is at home getting ready for his wife’s return and “putting her favourite ice cream in the freezer”, said Anita Singh in The Telegraph. As his wife despairs from her prison cell, we watch him gradually realise that “the Foreign Office is useless”, and start to mount his own passionate campaign for her release.

The first episode of the “illuminating” series is “gripping”. It’s followed by three slower instalments that provide crucial political context. Based on “A Yard of Sky” – the soon-to-be-published book by Zaghari-Ratcliffe and her husband – the drama makes it plain that this British-Iranian mother is a “political pawn”. Iran is putting pressure on Britain “to repay a £400m debt for military equipment, owed to Tehran since the 1970s”.

“Mercifully”, Boris Johnson is “left uncast”, said Sean O’Grady in The Independent. The former prime minister’s blundering declaration that the imprisoned charity worker was “teaching journalism” – which landed Zaghari-Ratcliffe in even deeper trouble with Iranian authorities – is relayed by real-life news footage. Johnson is “buffoon enough without needing an actor to camp things up.”

The “excruciating passage of time” is vividly portrayed, and you “lose count of the number of times Nazanin is tormented by dashed hopes”. Appeals are lost, promises of imminent release are broken, husband and wife go on multiple hunger strikes “but their bond is unbreakable, and portrayed in the many flashbacks to their early romance and marriage”.

Fiennes and Rashidi have “impressive chemistry given that they hardly have any scenes together”, said Vicky Jessop in London’s The Standard. “The ending, when it comes, is less a moment of euphoria than a slow release of breath. ‘Prisoner 951’ might not be uplifting, but it’s a testament to two extraordinary people who never gave up fighting for each other – and that’s definitely worth celebrating, too.”

A generation ago, sci-fi aficionados were lucky if there were one or two remotely watchable shows released a year. Today, the streaming economy serves up a reliable supply of lavishly produced, inventive science fiction. It includes many shows, like the tremendous new Apple TV+ release “Pluribus,” that carry on the tradition of great speculative storytelling.

‘The Twilight Zone’ (1959-1964)

Rod Serling’s sci-fi anthology series is one of the few shows from the early television era that maintains a lasting cultural footprint. Many of the best episodes are remembered for their final act twists, like a third-season classic in which two people traveling to the home world of seemingly benevolent aliens discover that their tome “To Serve Man” is actually a cookbook and that human beings are being harvested as food.

Other episodes, like “The Shelter,” tackled fears of the still-new nuclear age, with neighbors turning savagely against one another to get into a bunker only to discover that the nuclear attack warning was a false alarm. A show that “belongs in some ways to a golden age of its own,” it is “still available and watched and loved for its stories and characters and insights into human nature,” said Brian Murray at The New Atlantis. (Paramount+)

‘Star Trek: The Next Generation’ (1987-1994)

Few of the most ardent fans of the short-lived “Star Trek” could deny that “The Next Generation” is a vastly superior concoction. Set a century after the original, its most important decision was casting the magnificent Shakespearean actor Patrick Stewart as the Starship Enterprise’s Captain Jean-Luc Picard. With dazzling special effects and a stellar ensemble cast that included a cyborg officer named Data (Brent Spiner), the series offered commentary on everything from the waning Cold War to the nature of humanity and the trauma of war.

The crew’s encounters with a terrifying hive mind race, the Borg, were among the best. That’s why “almost anyone would appreciate the smart, original storytelling” of the show’s seven seasons, said Phelim O’Neill at The Guardian. It was a “less violent, more cerebral show, with a cast of rare chemistry and ability.” (Paramount+)

‘The X-Files’ (1993-2018)

When by-the-book FBI agent Dana Scully (Gillian Anderson) is assigned to a secret unit investigating paranormal phenomena with the more excitable Agent Fox Mulder (David Duchovny), the pairing kicks off eleven seasons and 217 episodes of case-of-the-week sci-fi mayhem that became one of the most beloved series of the 1990s. While the show had a somewhat inscrutable throughline about alien abductions and a government cover-up, the heart and soul was always Scully and Mulder navigating their sexual tension to battle everything from a mysterious outbreak on an Arctic research base to camouflaged forest monsters. It was a “well-made creep show” that “grew into one of television’s most tender love stories,” also offering “meta-fictional commentary on the formulas of science fiction and the conspiracy thriller,” said Mike Hale at The New York Times. (Disney+)

‘Battlestar Galactica’ (2004-2009)

Showrunner Ronald D. Moore’s reboot of the iconic ’70s-era show channeled post-9/11 political paranoia in the story of how a single military vessel survived a nuclear holocaust inflicted by human-created robots called “Cylons.” That ship, the Battlestar Galactica, becomes the sole defender of a convoy that contains the entire remaining human population of just over 50,000 people, led by the civilian President Laura Roslin (Mary McDonnell), and the ship’s crew including Admiral William Adama (Edward James Olmos) and fighter pilots Starbuck (Katee Sackhoff), Boomer (Grace Park) and Apollo (Jamie Bamber).

The third season was a particularly incisive commentary on the U.S. invasion of Iraq. A “thrifty U.S./UK co-production peppered with mostly unfamiliar faces,” the show is a cult classic of the 21st century because “something gritty, thrilling and politically resonant became part of an irresistible underdog story,” said Graeme Virtue at The Guardian. (Prime)

‘Black Mirror’ (2011-)

Showrunner Charlie Brooker delivers, at last, a worthy successor to the “Twilight Zone” brand of anthology-based science fiction. Over the course of seven superb seasons, “Black Mirror” has shown us the dark side of many existing or speculative technologies, and can already claim to have predicted a number of disturbing social trends, including using AI to resurrect a deceased loved one, seemingly drawn directly from the season two episode “Be Right Back.”

The show alternates trippy think-piece episodes with more traditional science fiction yarns, like the season 4 barnburner “Metalhead” about humans being hunted down by robotic dogs. Yet the series’ occasional lighter moments “suggest that there may be hope for us yet if we’re willing to learn from the mistakes we’re on the verge of making,” said Jenna Scherer at The AV Club. (Netflix)

‘The Expanse’ (2015-2022)

“The Expanse” offered a novel twist on science fiction storytelling by asking “what if we reached the stars, and brought all of our problems — xenophobia, class inequities, our innate knack for self-destruction — along with us?” said Clint Worthington at Roger Ebert. In the show, humans have colonized the solar system, and the series depicts familiar rivalries between the powerful planets like the United Nations of Earth and Luna and the outer planets, whose exploited masses are called “Belters.”

Holden (Steven Strait) is the captain of a rogue ship called the Rocinante, which becomes a critical force in the battle against a mysterious pathogen called the Protomolecule that threatens to wipe out civilization. The show was cancelled by SyFy after three seasons but then picked up by Amazon for another three well-regarded seasons. (Prime)

‘Andor’ (2022-2025)

“Andor” depicts the series of events that led to the formation of the rebellion against the Galactic Empire, creating a propulsive and suspenseful drama that now has especially uncanny resonance for viewers struggling to make sense of the political present. Stellan Skarsgard is Luthen Rael, a recruiter for the nascent rebel alliance who convinces Cassian Andor (Diego Luna) to join the growing resistance.

It is the only entry in the franchise that convincingly depicts the material conditions of authoritarianism that instigated the insurgency at the center of the “Star Wars” universe. Debuting during a “creative low point for the anemic franchise,” showrunner Tony Gilroy creates a “fiercely intelligent spy thriller that rendered a galaxy far, far away in terms you could legibly graft onto the world right outside your door,” said Nicholas Quah at Vulture. (Disney+)

‘Severance’ (2022-)

A show that feels like an extended buildout of a “Black Mirror” episode, “Severance” follows Mark (Adam Scott), who works in “macrodata refinement” at the mysterious Lumon Industries. Like most Lumon workers, though, Mark is “severed,” meaning that a chip implanted in his brain separates his at-work consciousness, rendering his two selves mutually distinct.

Ingeniously setting this nightmarish premise in a bespoke version of the present, “Severance” is about Mark and his coworkers, Helly (Britt Lower), Dylan (Zach Cherry) and Irving (John Turturro), unraveling the mystery of what they do all day and eventually grappling with the philosophical nuances of cleaving a person’s consciousness in half. The “television show of our time,” its “principal subject is theft: of time and memory, of identity and humanity,” said Rachel Cooke at The New Statesman, and it is “an arrow to the heart.” (Apple TV+)

Claire Danes’s “unbroken streak of playing women in emotional extremis” continues, said Mike Hale in The New York Times. In Netflix’s new eight-parter, the “Homeland” star plays Aggie, a Pulitzer Prize-winning author grieving the loss of her son, who was killed in a drink-driving accident four years earlier. Consumed by guilt and estranged from her wife Shelley (Natalie Morales), she is living alone in a large house on Long Island, struggling with writer’s block, when Nile Jarvis (Matthew Rhys) – an infamous property developer suspected of killing his ex-wife – moves into the house opposite her. Aggie is initially appalled but soon senses that “a new book may have fallen into her lap”.

Jarvis is “very wealthy and very unpleasant”, said Anita Singh in The Telegraph. Aggie is warned that he is dangerous, a psychopath. Yet the two strike up an uneasy rapport and, in a somewhat implausible development, he hires her to write his biography. The drama appears to be heading towards “the big reveal” of whether or not Jarvis murdered his wife, and if Aggie might be next on his list. But somehow the tension fails to develop fully and, ultimately, it makes for a “dour” and “unconvincing” watch.

It may be “silly”, even “ludicrous” at times, said Rebecca Nicholson in the Financial Times, but Danes and Rhys are superb, whether “hanging out and putting the world to rights” or pitted against each other in “increasingly unsettling stand-offs”. “Gripping” and often “genuinely scary”, this “gleefully horrible story” is a lot of fun.

Pitch-black comedy has been one of the defining features of 21st-century television, as the industry moved from the earnest family sitcoms of the 1970s and 1980s — think “Family Ties” — to shows that feel like those programs’ antitheses in both spirit and tone. While this can be a delicate balance to strike, TV’s best dark comedies are genuinely funny while offering sharp critiques of politics and society.

‘The Office’ (2001-2003)

The better-known American remake toned down this caustic British original, which ran for just two seasons and a two-part “Christmas special” denouement. Ricky Gervais plays David Brent, the office manager of a middling paper company in Slough whose crippling insecurity manifests as constant, cringey manipulation of his exasperated employees.

The now-cliched formula of a camera crew making a documentary about the office was fresh at the time, and the supporting characters were spot on, particularly the lovelorn Tim (Martin Freeman) and Dawn (Lucy Davis). The “amazingly realistic, amazingly awkward, amazingly embarrassing” show is powered by Brent’s “desperation to be cool, to be seen, to be recognized, to be famous,” which turned a “basically decent idiot into an engine of humiliation,” said Willa Paskin at Slate. (Hulu)

‘It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia’ (2005-)

“It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia” is still airing new episodes even though its debut episode is almost old enough to drink. The formula hasn’t changed: Charlie (Charlie Day), Dennis (Glenn Howerton), Mac (Rob Mac), Dennis’ sister Dee (Kaitlin Olson) and the Reynolds patriarch, Frank (Danny DeVito), are ”the gang,” a group of shallow, self-destructive narcissists who run a Philadelphia Irish dive bar called Paddy’s.

A representative plot line from season two sees the gang trying to get someone from the Church to bless a stain in the bar that resembles the Virgin Mary. Dee seduces a priest (David Hornsby) to get the blessing and then spurns him when he leaves the priesthood for her. A show about “venal borderline alcoholics who would be actively hateful if they weren’t so hilarious,” it is consistently both “transgressive and ingenious,” said Graeme Virtue at The Guardian. (Hulu)

‘You’re the Worst’ (2014-2019)

Even for a genre whose stock-in-trade is repellent characters, FX’s “You’re the Worst” tests the audience’s tolerance with the theatrically cruel and flailing novelist Jimmy (Chris Geere) and depressed, ironically detached music publicist Gretchen (Aya Cash), whose one-night stand at a wedding eventually becomes much more than either intended. While it never softens its blunt edges, the show eventually allows itself some more earnest exploration of trauma, mental illness and emotional avoidance. Gretchen and Jimmy are “photonegatives of saccharine rom-com protagonists” in a show that deftly mixes bleak humor “with moments of surprising tenderness,” said Michael Haigis at Slant Magazine. (Hulu)

‘Search Party’ (2016-2022)

TBS’s comedy (later rehomed by HBO for its third and fourth seasons) is a unique take on the formula of a friendship group composed entirely of narcissists. Dory (Alia Shawkat) is a failing-to-launch Brooklyn Millennial who convinces her boyfriend, Drew (John Reynolds), and their friends Portia (Meredith Hagner) and Elliott (John Early) to join her strange, obsessive quest to find a college acquaintance, Chantal (Clare McNulty), who has gone missing.

But because Dory barely knew Chantal, it’s clear that the “search” is really a stand-in for the hollowness at the core of these characters. The “pitch-black” show’s ultimate target is the “tendency to confuse the ego-stroking virtual busywork of the text- and social media-driven era for actual, meaningful action,” said Matt Zoller Seitz at Vulture. (Hulu)

‘Fleabag’ (2016-2019)

Despite its short, two-season run, “Fleabag’ was an enormously influential and successful series. Phoebe Waller-Bridge delivered an Emmy-winning performance as the fourth-wall-breaking title character, a thirtysomething London cafe owner nursing a bitter secret about her role in her best friend’s suicide.

The show’s frank and graphic depiction of the way that Fleabag uses sex to distract from what she calls a “screaming void inside my empty heart” was both hilarious and sad. It also turned Waller-Bridge into a bona fide star. A show with “almost feral energy,” it combines “naked confessionalism and comic artifice” to “tap veins of honest emotion,” said Mike Hale at The New York Times. (Prime)

‘Barry’ (2018-2013)

Barry Berkman (Bill Hader) is a hitman who joins an embarrassingly terrible Los Angeles acting class led by Gene Cousineau (Henry Winkler) to take out a target for Chechen mobster NoHo Hank (a scene-stealing Anthony Carrigan). But Barry soon becomes involved with aspiring starlet Sally (Sarah Goldberg) and then decides he actually wants to be an actor rather than a killer, setting off a series-long effort to extract himself from the murder business.

Simultaneously an organized crime satire and a send-up of LA’s meat-grinder performance culture, “Barry” “unfurled into something of an existential epic” by its time-jumping fourth season, with comedic elements that provided “ideal backdrops for the series’ explorations of the inconvenience of truth,” said Inkoo Kang at The New Yorker. (HBO Max)

‘The Great’ (2020-2023)

If the tone of “The Great” feels instantly recognizable, it’s because series creator Tony McNamara is the writer of both “The Favourite” and “Poor Things.” Elle Fanning plays Catherine the Great, who in season 1 schemes to depose her husband, Peter (Nicholas Hoult), depicted here as a shallow, stupid libertine whose tagline is “Huzzah!”

A show that is much more interested in lampooning the habits of aristocrats than in historical accuracy, “The Great” was a showcase for its leads and featured tremendous supporting performances from actors like Douglas Hodge, playing the fictional military leader Velementov. The series is best enjoyed if you allow yourself the pleasure of watching “hot people having sex, plotting against one another, having an occasional bout of feminist thought and killing people,” said Delia Harrington at Den of Geek. (Hulu)

‘Beef’ (2023)

Lee Sung Jin’s devastatingly funny black comedy follows the fallout from an escalating feud between struggling contractor Danny Cho (Steven Yeun) and gilded girlboss Amy Lau (Ali Wong) that starts with a routine road rage incident. Before long, Danny and Amy are obsessively trying to destroy one another in a series of set-piece revenge plots that combine terrible decision-making with pinpoint comic timing.

It’s also one of the first major commercial successes in U.S. television featuring Korean-American leads. A “thought-provoking and insidious character study,” the show is propelled by a “daring script elevated by flawless performances from both actors,” said Saloni Gajjar at The AV Club. (Netflix)

‘Such Brave Girls’ (2024-)

In the third episode of Hulu’s boundary-shredding British comedy, teenage Billie (Lizzie Davidson) pauses her raunchy text-messaging only long enough to have an abortion. She lives with her aimless, deadpan, suicidal older sister, Josie (Davidson’s real-life sibling Kat Sadler), and their hapless mother, Deb (Louise Brealey), who is desperately trying to land a man to pull them out of economic precarity. “Brutally honest, narratively unhinged and utterly fearless,” the show and its “deeply unlikeable” characters skewer “everything from feminism and self-help platitudes to sisterhood and mental health services,” said Lacy Baugher Milas at Paste Magazine. (Hulu)

“Glee” co-creator Ryan Murphy is “the high priest of tacky, tasteless television”, said Ed Power in The Daily Telegraph. Yet with this latest series for Disney, he has really outdone himself, turning in “a show of mind-bending horror sure to trigger nightmares in the unsuspecting viewer”.

It stars Kim Kardashian and Naomi Watts as high-flying divorce lawyers, and Niecy Nash as their investigator, who have left a smart firm to set up an all-female practice in California. And it’s an “abomination”.

‘A long-form commercial’

The series could be seen as a post-#MeToo “Sex and the City”, said Judy Berman in Time Magazine, if “the sex were all talk, the city irrelevant” and the humour unintentional. Or perhaps it’s “The First Wives Club for psychopaths”. Either way, it “functions primarily as a long-form commercial for a long list of brands”. Strangely for a legal drama, we don’t see much law being practised; instead, much time is devoted to the partners’ personal lives and vendettas.

An ‘embarrassment’ of a script

The script is an “embarrassment” and the performances are no better, said Lucy Mangan in The Guardian. Kardashian, while predictably “expressionless”, is at least “inoffensively useless”. The Oscar-nominee Watts, by contrast, ”preens and pouts” and delivers her lines “so archly that you can almost hear her joints cracking”. And you wonder what Glenn Close, who appears in cameo, was thinking. Camp, lurid drama played with gusto can be fun, but with its dismal plots and characters, this really is not that. Truly, “I did not know it was still possible to make television this bad”.

Louise Kennedy’s “passionate love story”, set amid the “bombs, bullets” and “punishment beatings” of the Troubles in Northern Ireland, was “beautifully told”, said Carol Midgley in The Times. Now her novel has been adapted for the small screen “and, happily, the TV series does not let it down”.

It’s 1975 and, in a small town outside Belfast, Catholic teacher Cushla (Lola Petticrew) is living with her alcoholic mother (Gillian Anderson) and juggling her school job with evening shifts at her brother’s pub. It’s here that she first crosses paths with Michael (Tom Cullen), an older, married Protestant barrister who is known for taking controversial cases on both sides of the sectarian divide. The pair embark on a “lusty affair” – a “Romeo and Juliet-style couple, madly in love but forced to meet in secret”.

With his “tousled hair and tight waistcoat”, Michael is a “dreamy old goat”, said Jack Seale in The Guardian. But it’s Petticrew who “steals the show”, said Michael Hogan in London’s The Standard. She gives an “impressively nuanced performance – courageous yet flawed, wise beyond her years but youthfully idealistic”. She has a “magnetic screen presence” and, when “tragedy strikes”, delivers a “viscerally raw portrait of grief and trauma”.

I didn’t feel the “supposedly electric connection” between the pair, said Keith Watson in The Telegraph. The age gap made me feel as if Michael was “grooming Cushla rather than charming her”, and the “imbalanced relationship” never quite seemed “plausible”. Despite offering much “food for thought”, the series missed the “emotional mark”.

Occasionally it “tips into cliché” said Nick Hilton in The Independent. Anderson “possibly overdoes the doom-laden drunk act”. But this is balanced by the show’s “sweet, sincere undertone”. “Trespasses” is also “unusually sexy” for a terrestrial TV drama: “this is grown-up fare, in both tone and substance”.

It’s “devastating” at times but it’s “anything but misery porn”, said Hogan in London’s The Standard. “It’s warm, made with love and ultimately uplifting, complete with a spine-tingling coda. A deeply human drama about a highly charged slice of history.”

This month’s new releases run the gamut. There’s a delving into history, with a series about the assassination of our 20th president and another about the defiant bloodshed of the American Revolution; science fiction, with the return of “Stranger Things” and a new show from TV legend Vince Gilligan; and a palate cleanser with a silly, salient look into the complicated lives of modern-day twentysomethings.

‘I Love L.A.’

Lena Dunham’s “Girls” spoofed life for privileged and rudderless twentysomething women living in New York City. Rachel Sennott’s new series provides a similar service to Gen Zers living amid the excess and squalor of Los Angeles.

Sennott, who previously starred in “Shiva Baby” and “Bottoms,” both created and stars in “I Love L.A.,” which follows a group of zillennials anchored by Maia (Sennott) navigating their careers and love lives. “The heart of a series” like ‘I Love LA’ lies in its “ability to capture what it feels like to be young — when your heart still sings with possibility and ambition, a vital defense in a world all too ready to pelt you with disappointments,” said Nicholas Quah at Vulture. (out now, HBO)

‘Pluribus’

Created by Vince Gilligan, “Pluribus” is the long-awaited and mystery-cloaked follow-up to “Breaking Bad” and “Better Call Saul.” This series is a little different than those others: It’s a sci-fi mystery rather than a gritty crime drama.

This shift may not be entirely surprising, as Gilligan wrote for “The X-Files” before creating “Breaking Bad,” and was “responsible for some of the show’s weirdest and funniest episodes,” said Linda Holmes at NPR. Most of the plot of “Pluribus” was “kept intentionally vague in marketing,” but it is clear the series is set in Albuquerque and stars Rhea Seehorn as Carol, a “miserable woman investigating a strange contagion that has turned the population of the city (and the world) unrelentingly happy,” said Wilson Chapman at IndieWire. (out now, Apple TV)

‘Death by Lightning’

Based on Candice Millard’s 2011 book “Destiny of the Republic: A Tale of Madness, Medicine and the Murder of a President,” this Netflix historical drama spotlights U.S. President James Garfield (Michael Shannon), who was assassinated just 199 days into his first term and thus tends to be forgotten in the grand scheme of American politics. “That tragedy set the table for one of U.S. history’s great ‘what ifs’ with Garfield’s lost potential felt most acutely in the area of civil rights, where his commitment to equality for African Americans might have altered the nation’s post-Reconstruction trajectory,” said David Smith at The Guardian. Matthew Macfadyen also stars as the assassin, Charles Guiteau, who brings about Garfield’s untimely demise. (out now, Netflix)

‘The American Revolution’

Documentarian Ken Burns, renowned for his epic explorations of American history and culture, has already covered the Civil War, World War II and Vietnam. Now he’s turned his unrelenting gaze on one of our country’s most important battles: the American Revolution. The series “uncovers brand new information, tidbits and fascinating facts about this fraught time in our history,” said Amy Amatangelo at Paste Magazine.

Although it’s “hard to watch” the show “without awareness of the anti-monarchic sentiments shared at recent rounds of “No Kings!” protests — to hear the noble egalitarian sentiments that launched the American experiment without pondering the ways the fulfillment of our freedoms has fallen short of our loftiest aspirations — the doc does not overtly acknowledge Donald Trump,” said Daniel Fienberg at The Hollywood Reporter. (Nov. 16, PBS)

‘Stranger Things’

It’s hard to believe that “Stranger Things” is only returning for its fifth — and final — season. The show, about a group of friends in 1980s Indiana who become entangled in a secret government experiment and discover a supernatural dimension, has burrowed its way deep into pop culture consciousness. It launched a group of unknown kid actors to fame, gave Winona Ryder the kind of starring role she hadn’t seen since the ’90s and introduced Kate Bush’s 1985 masterpiece “Running Up That Hill” to a whole new generation. This last season is leading toward the final battle with humanoid monster Vecna, the series’ main antagonist, and the feature-length series finale will also screen in theaters on Dec. 31, a first for Netflix. (Nov. 26, Netflix)

“As one door is pushed shut by a grimy MI5 boss, another creaks open,” said Tim Glanfield in The Times. The fifth season of “Slow Horses” may be over “but that doesn’t mean it’s time to mothball your television” while you wait for your next Mick Herron instalment. Another of Herron’s books – this time, his debut novel – has been adapted for the small screen. And, if you’re a fan of the Slough House “outsiders” and their “battles against the system”, you’ll enjoy this new show.

The action kicks off in Oxford, where “bored art restorer” Sarah Tucker (Ruth Wilson) is hosting a dinner party with her financier husband for one of his “particularly important and irksome” clients. But the evening is “cut short” by a deadly gas explosion at a neighbouring house. When Sarah realises that an injured child has “mysteriously disappeared”, she turns “amateur sleuth” to “find the girl, and some answers”. She soon stumbles on the offices of private investigator Zoë Boehm (Emma Thompson), and the pair discover they are “up against a lot more than they first thought”.

Thompson is “every bit as bright, brilliant, cynical“ and “unlikely” as Gary Oldman’s lead spy Jackson Lamb in “Slow Horses”, said Benji Wilson in The Telegraph. And Wilson delivers a performance that is just as “mesmeric”. Both are “unforgettable” female characters.

It’s “great stuff”, said Lucy Mangan in The Guardian. “There is not a wasted moment, not a wasted word.” Stuffed with plot twists, it “smooths out the book’s few technical problems” while retaining all of the “dry humour and acuity” that “Slow Horses” fans “will surely have been hoping” for.

I found some of the episodes too “padded” and, in the first half, the “momentum meanders in frustrating ways”, said Daniel Fienberg in The Hollywood Reporter. However, the flaws become “minor irritants and not deal breakers”, thanks to the “perfectly cast” Thompson and her “top-notch” supporting cast.

Yes, it is a bit “messy here and there”, said Patrick Smith in The Independent. But that didn’t stop me “bingeing the whole lot, in thrall to the cast chemistry”. “Down Cemetery Road” is not “Slow Horses” but this crime thriller is “its own beast: faster, funnier and unrelenting”.

Unlike in the real world, where politics can often be dreary, on the small screen, writers can spice up political fiction and nonfiction with potboiler plots and ripped-from-the-headlines drama. Case in point, Netflix’s soapy but glorious transatlantic political thriller “The Diplomat” returned on Oct. 16 for a third season. These are some of the other stellar political series of late.

‘Borgen’ (2010-2022)

A political thriller that doubles as an extended lesson in comparative politics, “Borgen” is the rare show that takes both politics and plot seriously. In season one, Birgitte Nyborg (Sidse Babett Knudsen) and her moderate Danish political party unexpectedly emerge as the winners of parliamentary elections. As she ascends to the country’s top political position, she has to maintain her fragile coalition with the help of her “spin doctor” Kasper Juul (Pilou Asbaek) and keep her marriage to Philip (Mikael Birkkjaer) alive as they raise their two children. “Borgen” is “one of the greatest TV series of the past decade” in large part because “you have to navigate” the country’s fascinating multi-party political system, said Vanity Fair. (Netflix)

‘Homeland’ (2011-2020)

The first season of Showtime’s “Homeland” dropped near the tail end of America’s Global War on Terror, and the show didn’t waste time diving into the story of Nicholas Brody (Damian Lewis), a U.S. Marine captured in Afghanistan who may or may not have been turned into an al-Qaida sleeper agent. Claire Danes won two Emmy Awards playing Carrie Mathison, a CIA agent struggling with bipolar disorder who’s convinced that Brody is not on the level.

Mandy Patinkin shines as Saul Berenson, the CIA’s Middle East Division Chief. A “gripping premise that’s delicately explored with all the ambiguity viewers felt at that time about America’s legacy of still lengthening Mideast misadventure,” the show was “arguably perfect,” said David Crow at Den of Geek. (Hulu)

‘House of Cards’ (2013-2018)

A show that was integral to the rise of Netflix’s original programming empire, “House of Cards” is an especially cynical look at the inner workings of Washington, D.C. Frank Underwood (Kevin Spacey) is the Democratic House Majority Whip whose promised role as Secretary of State under newly elected President Garrett Walker (Michel Gill) is rescinded. Stung by the betrayal, Underwood and his wife, Claire (Robin Wright), plot their rise to power using any means necessary, including blackmail and murder. The show “revels in the familiar but always entertaining underbelly of government” and delivers a “delicious immorality play with an excellent cast,” said Alessandra Stanley at The New York Times. (Netflix)

‘Bodyguard’ (2018)

Richard Madden is David Budd, a father of two small children and an Afghanistan veteran suffering from PTSD. He’s tapped to be head of security for U.K. Home Secretary Julia Montague (Keeley Hawes) after stopping a suicide bombing in the show’s gripping opening. Budd, however, is nursing explosive resentment against the government, and his assignment to protect the hawkish and conspiratorial Montague sends him further down the path of doubt and possibly madness. When Budd and Montague end up more than professionally involved, it all gets even more complicated. This six-episode limited series “excels at both the daring gasp-inducing twist and the methodical construction of slower-burning thrills,” said Variety. (Netflix)

‘Say Nothing’ (2024)

A taught nine-episode limited series, FX’s historical thriller is told through the eyes of Irish Republican Army leader Dolours Price (played by Lola Petticrew and as an older woman by Maxine Peake). Structured as a series of flashbacks as she’s interviewed in 2001 for a Boston College oral history project, the show traces her radicalization after she and her sister, Marian (Hazel Doupe), are attacked by unionist police forces during peaceful protests in Northern Ireland. The sisters join the IRA, where they meet charismatic revolutionaries Gerry Adams (Josh Finan) and Brendan Hughes (Anthony Boyle). The show’s “longitudinal account of political disillusionment makes it one of the year’s finest shows,” said Inkoo Kang at The New Yorker. (Hulu)

TV adaptations of the American author Harlan Coben’s “extravagantly plotted” thrillers tend to attract A-list casts, said Rebecca Nicholson in the Financial Times. And it is often the case that the actors are “more believable” than the plot lines. This is very much the case with “Lazarus”, a new six-parter on Amazon Prime.

Cold-case murders

Bill Nighy and Sam Claflin play father-and-son psychiatrists Jonathan and Joel Lazarus, both of whom are haunted by the unsolved murder of Joel’s sister 25 years earlier. The series begins with Jonathan’s death, an apparent suicide – but “it doesn’t take a super-sleuth to work out that Nighy was never going to join the cast for a mere two-minute cameo”.

It soon gets “a bit ‘Sixth Sense’”, said Anita Singh in The Telegraph. Joel starts receiving spectral visits, not only from his dead father, but also from his father’s former patients. He becomes convinced that his father was murdered. The apparitions then draw him into “a series of cold-case murders” that may or may not be connected to the death of his sister, said Katie Rosseinsky in The Independent. Helpfully, he has a cop friend who can give him access to old files, to make sense of all this.

Ridiculous but addictive

It’s utterly ridiculous, convoluted (flashbacks of flashbacks) and “often clichéd”, with far too many scenes “where suspects stand lurking in dark corners or stare moodily from under hoods”. There’s some dreadful dialogue, too, and Nighy is under-used. But “it’s plotted as if it has been precision-engineered to hook you in”. And as ever with Coben, it’s “embarrassingly compelling”.

Police procedurals have been one of the most consistently popular genres since the early days of TV, with shows like “Dragnet” and “The Plainclothesman” thrilling audiences during the dawn of television. Starting in the early 1980s, TV showrunners began adding nuance and social criticism to their stories of police officers fighting crime — sometimes even turning a critical eye on the institution of policing itself. That created not just great police stories but some of the best series ever aired.

‘Hill Street Blues’ (1981-1987)

NBC’s “Hill Street Blues” invented the gritty police drama in an era when squeaky clean cops and black-and-white narratives were the norm. Set in a deliberately unnamed large American city, the show features an ensemble cast of police officers, including a woman, Officer Lucy Bates (Betty Thomas) and fully realized Black characters like Officer Bobby Hill (Michael Warren) and Detective Neal Washington (Taurean Blacque) — another pioneering element of the show.

But the way the series changed TV history was to foreground the characters’ personal lives and struggles, including alcoholism, divorce and depression, and make them an integral part of the narrative. The show “ushered in a new golden age of television, and its ripples are still felt now,” said Lorne Manly at The New York Times. (Prime)

‘NYPD Blue’ (1993-2005)

One of the first police procedurals to take police misconduct and racism seriously, ABC’s “NYPD Blue” is cocreated by “Hill Street Blues” showrunner Steven Bochco, and its style was designed to compete with cable TV that would “push up against the limits of what ABC’s censors would allow, and perhaps a little beyond that,” said Rolling Stone.

It’s willingness to show its main cast, including troubled Detective Andy Sipowicz (Dennis Franz), Detective Bobby Simone (Jimmy Smits) and Detective Greg Medavoy (Gordon Clapp), engaging in extra-legal behavior to solve crimes made it “one of the most influential TV dramas ever made,” Rolling Stone added, even if by its later seasons the show seemed to sometimes be endorsing the bad behavior it once criticized. (Hulu)

‘Homicide: Life on the Street’ (1993-1999)

Series creator Paul Attanasio adapted a book by journalist David Simon (who would go on to create “The Wire”) into a story about a Baltimore homicide unit that, like “Hill Street Blues,” gave viewers an intimate look at emotionally tortured police officers and the way their jobs often destroyed their personal lives. The unit is led by Lieutenant Al Giardello (Yaphet Kotto), with renowned performances from Andre Braugher as Detective Frank Pembleton, Melissa Leo as Detective Kay Howard and Richard Belzer as Detective John Munch, among others. “There is television before ‘Homicide: Life on the Street,’ and there is television after ‘Homicide: Life on the Street,’” said The Guardian. “Uber-cynical, darkly funny, highly literate,” NBC’s show is never better than “when staring straight into the tragic heart of its premise.” (Peacock)

‘The Wire’ (2002-2008)

HBO’s “The Wire” is a persuasive contender as the best TV show ever made. A sweeping look at the intersection of the drug trade, urban poverty, racism and policing, the show is set in a complicated, unvarnished Baltimore. Detectives Jimmy McNulty (Dominic West), “Bunk” Moreland (Wendell Pierce), Lester Freamon (Clarke Peters) and Kima Greggs (Sonja Sohn) are part of a unit tasked with using surveillance to take down a notorious Baltimore drug ring. But the show also tackles themes like addiction, the drug war, the plight of urban public schools and political corruption in its five seasons. Through its “unflinching depiction of power, race, class and American life,” the show stands as “the greatest show of the 21st century,” said the BBC. (HBO Max)

‘The Killing’ (2011-2014)

The series that launched a thousand streaming imitators, AMC’s “The Killing” (adapted from a Danish series) is both police procedural and bleak noir rolled into one highly addicting package. Joel Kinnaman is Detective Stephen Holder, who partners up with the self-destructive workaholic Sarah Linden (Mireille Enos) to solve the murder of a teenage girl. The rainy, Pacific Northwest setting is almost its own character, as the detectives zero in on a conspiracy that collides with the Seattle mayoral campaign of Darren Richmond (Billy Campbell). The show’s red-herring-per-week structure kept audiences guessing, but it works because a “large part of its suspense is generated through the careful management of expectation,” said Phillip Maciak at Slant Magazine. (AMC+)

‘True Detective’ (2014-)

The first season of HBO’s anthology series “True Detective” is a narrative, cinematic marvel. Set in two timelines, it is one of the first streaming shows to poach A-list Hollywood movie talent for the small screen rather than creating its own stars. The series follows two detectives, Rust Cohle (Matthew McConaughey) and Marty Hart (Woody Harrelson), as they solve a grisly murder in 1995, and then again in 2012, when they are being interviewed as part of a murder investigation that could be tied to the one they thought they solved. The show combines hints of the supernatural with quotable philosophical ruminations, like Cohle’s observation that “Time is a flat circle.” The “artfully written, remarkably acted, stunningly visualized” series is also a “recruitment video for nihilistic pessimism,” as well as an “express elevator to the sub-sub-subbasement of human degradation,” said James Poniewozik at Time. (HBO Max)

‘Happy Valley’ (2014-2023)

Sarah Lancashire turns in a career-defining performance as Sergeant Catherine Cawood, a Halifax police officer with an almost unimaginably bleak backstory. Her daughter committed suicide after being raped by Tommy Lee Royce (James Norton) and delivering his child, and Catherine is raising their young son, Ryan (Rhys Connah)—a sequence of events that destroyed her own marriage and life. When Tommy is released from prison, Catherine must both protect herself and Ryan and unravel a gruesome kidnapping plot that involves Tommy. The show’s “psychological grip lingers longer than expected” because it “treats violence not as power but as chaos, an inevitable psychological decay,” said Emily Nussbaum at The New Yorker. (BritBox)

‘The Break ‘(2016-2018)

RTBF’s crime show combines elements of playful humor with a menacing rural setting to create a unique French-language police drama. Detective Yoann Peeters (Yoann Blanc) and his teenage daughter, Camille (Sophie Breyer), move to an isolated village in the Belgian Ardennes after the tragic death of his wife. Almost immediately, he is plunged into a murder investigation when a young football player, Driss Assani (Jérémy Zagba), is found dead in the river.

Peters enlists inexperienced officers Marjorie (Lara Hubinont) and René (Tom Audenaert) in an investigation that, like most rural noir stories, involves uncovering locals’ long-held secrets and greed. Challenging stereotypes of a tidy, prosperous Europe, viewers are treated to “corrugated iron estates, decaying stadiums and people living in trailers,” said Karolina Nos-Cybelius at Film Folly. (MHz Choice)

Several movies about mobsters, including “The Godfather” and “On the Waterfront,” are considered among the finest pieces of cinema ever produced. But organized crime has made its mark on television too, helping to turn a medium once regarded as creatively and commercially subservient to movies into the preferred outlet for both auteurs and stars.

‘The Sopranos’ (1999-2007)

Widely credited with ushering in the so-called “golden age of television,” HBO Max’s groundbreaking drama told the story of mid-level New Jersey mob boss Tony Soprano (James Gandolfini) and his efforts to rise up the ranks while dealing with panic attacks, a tumultuous home life and an extended clan of violent knuckleheads. Perhaps the most memorable gimmick was the portrayal of Tony’s therapy sessions with Dr. Jennifer Melfi (Lorraine Bracco). The show “lowered the bar on permissible violence, sex and profanity,” at the same time that it “elevated viewers’ taste, cultivating an appetite for complexity, wit and cinematic stylishness,” said Alessandra Stanley at The New York Times. (Prime)

‘Love/Hate’ (2010-2014)

RTÉ’s mob drama, largely unknown outside of Ireland, is a gritty look at the Dublin criminal underworld. Small-time gangster Darren (Robert Sheehan) returns from Spain, where he had been on the lam from a gun charge, and is drawn into the gangland rivalry between his group’s boss, John Boy (Aidan Gillen), and Nidge (Tom Vaughan-Lawlor), a rival for control of the city’s drug operations.

The series is distinguished by its unflinching portrayal of violence and its willingness to remove plot armor from key characters, often leaving viewers in an unsettling position. Featuring “compact seasons and episodes that don’t leave room for fluff,” the little-known series thrives on a “mix of drama and willingness to keep the stakes perilously high,” said Danielle Bartlett at Collider. (Prime)

‘Peaky Blinders’ (2013-2022)

Set in England immediately after the First World War, “Peaky Blinders” is the story of the titular street gang led by Tommy Shelby (Cillian Murphy) and his hatchet man and brother Arthur (Paul Anderson), following their violent quest to expand from Birmingham to the rest of the United Kingdom and beyond. The show’s instant success led to a series of Hollywood A-listers appearing for long arcs in later seasons, including Tom Hardy, Anya Taylor-Joy and Adrien Brody. Being a fan of this “big, dumb and brilliant show,” featuring “big jackets flapping in the wind while an Arctic Monkeys guitar riff roars through the Midlands air,” ultimately gives you a sense of “roaring satisfaction” if you stay with it, said Kevin Clark at The Ringer. (Netflix)

‘Gomorrah’ (2014-2021)

“Gomorrah” shares a name but little else with the award-winning 2008 Italian crime film. When Naples mob boss Pietro Savastano (Fortunato Cerlino) is arrested, a power struggle erupts between his wife Immacolata (Maria Pia Calzone), their son Gennaro (Salvatore Esposito) and ambitious outsider Ciro Di Marzio (Marco D’Amore).

Perhaps more than any other series, “Gomorrah” offers insight into the bizarre rituals and toxic culture of organized crime, including a season one scene where Ciro is forced to drink Pieto’s urine to prove his loyalty. Ciro and Gennaro are “perfectly cast, perfectly written, dual orbiting spheres of charisma and terror that electrify each scene,” said Shane Ryan at Paste Magazine, in the “best crime show you’ve never seen.” The show was a massive hit in Italy, and a prequel series is set for release early in 2026. (HBO Max)

‘The Penguin’ (2024)

A completely unrecognizable Colin Farrell plays Oz Cobb, nicknamed “The Penguin,” as he tries to sweet talk, kill and scheme his way to the top of Gotham’s Falcone crime family. In the premiere of HBO Max’s limited series set in the Batman cinematic universe, Oz impulsively kills Alberto Falcone (Michael Zegen) shortly after the clan’s patriarch, Carmine, is murdered and forces a wrong-place-at-the-wrong-time teenager named Victor Aguilar (Rhenzy Feliz) to help him cover it up, then keeping him on as a protege.

When Alberto’s sister, Sofia (Cristin Milioti), is released from Arkham Asylum, she and Oz have to decide whether they are rivals or allies. Their performances are part of what make the series not “just another comic book spin-off money grab” but rather a “genuinely excellent, stand-alone miniseries,” said Drew Magary at SFGate. (HBO Max)

Some of us have got so used to punchy, “heart-pounding” television, that when something “nice and simple and genuinely uplifting comes along”, we might approach it with “suspicion”, wondering when it’s going to get “complicated”, said Chris Wasser in the Irish Independent. But this six-part adaptation of Rónán Hession’s charming novel “tells a refreshingly tidy tale”.

Not everything works out for the “affable Irish protagonists”, and the show is peppered with “tragedies, big and small”. On the whole, though, “it’s about ordinary, everyday people, with ordinary, everyday problems”, and the “funny little things we do to keep the soul ticking over”.

The series is an “ode to introversion”, said Sarah Dempster in The Guardian. “And yet”, Leonard (the “sublimely idiosyncratic” Alex Lawther) feels a “creeping ‘need to open the doors and windows of my life… a little”. Reeling from the death of his “beloved” mother, the 32-year-old ghost writer “launches himself on a quest for emotional fulfilment” with his “slightly bolder” pal, Hungry Paul (Laurie Kynaston). (We never find out how he got his nickname.)

Then, “into Leonard’s gentle world cartwheels Shelley” (Jamie-Lee O’Donnell of “Derry Girls”), a fiery new colleague who “cheerily offers to kill Leonard’s appalling boss”, and he finds himself developing a major crush.

“There are no raucous belly laughs in this mildest of comedies”, said Carol Midgley in The Times. “But it is strangely calming and immersive”. Written with “great charm”, it’s a “warming, relatable watch, and a paean to the non-sharp-elbowed”. There is something “reassuring” about there still being a place for this type of “gentle, unshouty TV”, which isn’t packed with “exhausting cliffhangers” or dramatic plot twists.

The “craziest” thing about the show is that Julia Roberts is its narrator, said the Irish Independent. The Hollywood star was a fan of the book and is said to have “jumped at the opportunity” to be involved. Her voiceover is “warm and comforting”, and doesn’t distract from the action: “it’s a lovely little bonus”.

“Funny, charming and unexpectedly profound”, the “remarkable” show is far more worthwhile than many of the dramas that “clog up our evenings”. This is “beautiful, heartfelt television”.

Americans seem to like shows about drug runners almost as much as they like the drugs themselves. And while many of the greatest narco stories are police procedurals like “The Wire,” there are a handful of standout shows that focus at least as much on the criminals and cartels as they do on the cops or agents trying to catch them. But beware: These violent delights definitely have violent ends.

‘Weeds’ (2005-2012)

The only comedy on the list, Showtime’s “Weeds” memorably repurposed Malvina Reynolds’ folk classic “Little Boxes” as the theme song in this story of suburban housewife Nancy Botwin (Mary Louise Parker). Botwin becomes a marijuana kingpin when her husband dies unexpectedly, leaving her with a pile of debt and no way to support their children, teenage Silas (Hunter Parrish) and younger brother Shane (Alexander Gould) as well as her shiftless brother-in-law Andy (Justin Kirk).

Parker’s Golden Globe-winning performance was the heart and soul of the series as Nancy falls deeper and deeper into the violent drug trade. The hit show not only “played a role in shifting public attitudes about marijuana,” said Joshua Alston at The AV Club, it contributed to prestige TV-era audiences expecting “high-speed narratives full of twists and shocking rug-pulls.” (Prime, Apple TV+)

‘Breaking Bad’ (2008-2013)

Now considered one of the greatest TV series ever produced, AMC’s “Breaking Bad” stars Bryan Cranston — until then best known for his work as a goofy Dad on the sitcom “Malcolm in the Middle” — as high school chemistry teacher Walter White, who responds to a terminal cancer diagnosis by stumbling into the meth business so he can leave resources to his wife Skyler (Anna Gunn) and his son Walt, Jr. (RJ Mitte).

White enlists his former student Jesse (Aaron Paul) and eventually becomes involved in an international cartel fronted by Los Pollos Hermanos, a fast-food restaurant led by Gus Fring (Giancarlo Esposito), all while trying to prevent his brother-in-law Hank (Dean Norris), a DEA agent, from figuring it all out. The show “felt like the crucial linking ring in a decade of cable meditations on masculine pathology,” said Emily Nussbaum at New York magazine. Watching it “ended up being one of the best experiences of my life.” (Apple TV+, Netflix, Prime)

‘Narcos’ (2015-2017)

An “irresistable drama” whose success is built on “sharp acting and equally sharp writing,” this story of Colombian drug lord Pablo Escobar is anchored by a “prize-worthy performance by the Brazilian actor Wagner Moura,” said Neil Genzlinger at The New York Times. The Netflix show follows a pair of U.S. DEA agents, Stephen Murphy (Boyd Holbrook) and Javier Peña (Pedro Pascal) as they pursue Escobar and his Medellín Cartel. Its first two seasons trace Escobar’s rise and eventual fall, as his criminal exploits destabilize Colombia and lead to a wave of cartel-driven violence that compromises the judicial and criminal justice systems. A third season, starring Pascal, was set in Mexico in the 1980s and tackles the Cali Cartel. (Netflix)

‘Ozark’ (2017-2022)

Like several other prominent cartel stories, Netflix’s Ozark begins with something going terribly wrong for an otherwise normal person, drawing them into the netherworld of drug violence. Marty Byrde (Jason Bateman), a finance whiz laundering money for a Mexican cartel, escapes execution in the premiere by making up a preposterous plan to instead launder money on the Lake of the Ozarks.

“This place right here has more shoreline than the whole coast of California!” he proclaims hilariously as he then moves his broken family, including his estranged wife, Wendy (Laura Linney), and kids, Charlotte (Sofia Hublitz) and Jonah (Skylar Gaertner), sight unseen to Missouri. Julia Garner is a standout as Ruth Langmore, a local who gets caught up in Marty’s criminal enterprises. By the end of the show’s four seasons, the Byrdes have set aside their qualms, destroyed countless lives and become power players in the region’s politics and economy. Both a “tightly wound thriller and a compelling family drama,” the show succeeds as a plot-driven thriller whose bleak, beautiful rural setting “is hypnotic,” said Michael Haigis at Slant Magazine. (Netflix)

‘Snowfall’ (2017-2023)

Still mysteriously underappreciated, FX’s “Snowfall” is the story of the crack cocaine epidemic in 1980s Los Angeles, as seen through the eyes of young street dealer Franklin Saint (Damson Idris), who is trying to break into the more lucrative cocaine trade and pioneers a newer, cheaper form of the drug. His operation is a subsidiary of a Mexican cartel led by Lucia Villanueva (Emily Rios) and her enforcer, a wrestler named Gustavo Zapata (Sergio Peris-Mencheta). A seemingly separate narrative follows CIA operative Teddy McDonald (Carter Hudson), who helms a trafficking operation to fund the Reagan administration’s support for right-wing guerrillas fighting the left-wing Sandinista government in Nicaragua. A show that is “rich with details,” it demonstrates the ugly “cycle of the American government financially supporting the drug trade,” said Ben Travers at IndieWire. (Disney+, Hulu)

‘ZeroZeroZero’ (2020)

Based on a book by the Italian journalist Robert Saviano, who also wrote the book that the 2008 film “Gomorrah” was drawn from, Prime’s limited series follows a shipment of cocaine from Mexico to Italy via American shipping magnates Emma Lynnwood (Andrea Riseborough) and her brother Chris (Dane DeHaan). The Mexican cartel led by Enrique and Jacinto Leyra (Victor Hugo Martin and Flavio Medina) shipping the product out, as well as the Italian crime family led by Don Minu (Adriano Chiaramida) receiving it, are riven by violence, rivalries and jockeying for power. A kaleidoscopic look at the international drug trade, the show’s intricately plotted eight episodes are “primed for attentive viewing even more than binge-viewing” and create an “expansive and bleak epic,” said Nick Allen at Roger Ebert. (Prime)

‘Griselda’ (2024)

Based loosely on the true story of Colombian drug lord Griselda Blanco, Netflix’s limited series stars Sofia Vergara as the title character. In the program, which takes considerable creative license to alter Blanco’s horrifying life story, she initially flees Colombia with her children after killing her abusive cartel husband and falls back into drug dealing.

Alberto Guerra also turns in a strong performance as Blanco’s lover and henchman in her burgeoning drug operation. The series ultimately does not stray too far from the well-worn rise-and-fall narco narrative, but it somehow hits differently to see a woman as the cold-blooded anti-hero. The six-episode series is executed as “stylized pulp semi-fiction played fast and loose, whose direction falls just the right side of flashy,” said Lucy Mangan at The Guardian, but is also “hugely enjoyable, well-paced and gorgeous to look at.” (Netflix)

“It used to be that famous people would turn to social media to correct the record,” said Rebecca Nicholson in the Financial Times. “Now, you’re nobody without a multi-part Netflix documentary that allows you to illustrate, at length, ideally from the mansion, how wronged you have been.” Two years ago, David Beckham allowed cameras into his home to do that. Now, his wife Victoria has got in on the action.

Broadly likeable

Celebrating the 20th anniversary of her eponymous clothing brand, the series follows Beckham as she prepares for a big fashion show in Paris, looping in multiple industry figures (Anna Wintour, Tom Ford and others) to vouch for the fact that she is more than “a celebrity interloper”.

Beckham comes across as broadly likeable, said Helen Coffey in The Independent. This is a woman so self-conscious, she “hasn’t felt confident enough to smile in a picture for a quarter-century”. Yet here, she cracks jokes and does a dance routine with her daughter.

Boring advert for Brand Beckham

As the series goes through her rise from stage-struck child to pop star to WAG and fashion mogul, we do get glimpses of the real Beckham, said Lucy Mangan in The Guardian – a sober, industrious, drily humorous woman who loves making beautiful clothes.

But the interesting questions raised by the show – how we find our true calling in life; why the media takes against some women – are not ones it is interested to explore. This a carefully controlled “three-hour advert for brand Beckham” and it’s boring, which is a shame, as Victoria herself is clearly more interesting than she allows herself to be here.

It’s officially cozy season, which presents the perfect excuse to silence your phone and watch TV all day — and night. October releases include three new original series: one explores the experience of being gay in the military, another spotlights famed serial killer Ed Gein and the last gives Tim Robinson free rein to be his weirdo self. This month also brings docuseries about Michelin star-hunting chefs and one of America’s greatest living filmmakers.

‘Boots’

The setting for Netflix’s “Boots” is a 1990s U.S. Marine Corps boot camp, where 18-year-old Cameron (Miles Heizer) has enlisted alongside his best friend Ray (Liam Oh). The problem: Cameron is secretly queer, and it is still illegal to be openly gay in the military. Created by Andy Parker, the eight-episode series is based on Greg Cope White’s 2015 memoir, “The Pink Marine,” and the resulting adaptation is a “compelling action drama that examines masculinity and internalized homophobia while winking at other cinematic portrayals of military life, most notably Stanley Kubrick’s 1987 film ‘Full Metal Jacket,’” said Curtis M. Wong at HuffPost. (out now, Netflix)

‘Knife Edge: Chasing Michelin Stars’

Many a restaurant lover adores a Michelin-starred restaurant. The title’s prestige is legendary — but have you ever wondered what it takes to earn Michelin’s approval? This Gordon Ramsay-produced docuseries “embeds for three months at a time in the kitchens, dining rooms and homes of about two dozen chefs in North America, Europe and the U.K.,” said Laurie Woolever at Rolling Stone, capturing the “emotional, physical and financial sacrifices required of those who pursue Michelin stars.” It’s the perfect binge for fans of FX’s “The Bear” who crave more high-stakes restaurant content. (out now, Apple TV+)

‘Monster: The Ed Gein Story’

In the latest addition to Netflix’s “Monster” anthology, co-showrunner Ryan Murphy makes a case for “Ed Gein as a flashpoint in American true crime,” said Eric Francisco at Esquire. In the aftermath of Gein’s murders in 1950s Wisconsin (also known as the Butcher of Plainfield, he is played here by Charlie Hunnam), “American filmmakers, musicians and other artists” seemed to take “inspiration from Gein's monstrousness.”

The show also features an unexpected figure: the character of Ilse Koch, or "The Witch of Buchenwald," the wife of a Nazi commander who “allegedly hand-picked Jewish prisoners and turned their bodies into lampshades.” The reason for her inclusion? “The Ed Gein Story” goes to “great lengths to suggest that Gein was inspired by Nazi atrocities, which made headlines in American newspapers at the end of World War II.” (out now, Netflix)

‘The Chair Company’

If “Friendship,” the strange Tim Robinson comedy flick from earlier this year, was the actor’s “first real character study,” his new HBO series “The Chair Company” is the “logical next step,” said Ben Rosenstock at Vulture. This is the third show co-created by Robinson and Zach Kanin (also collaborators on “Detroiters” and “I Think You Should Leave”), and as usual, Robinson stars in the project as an “anxious, insecure weirdo.” Ron Trosper is a “hard worker and a family man, doing his best to project confidence and competence at the office and at home,” but when Ron falls out of a chair at a pivotal company meeting, his resulting humiliation kicks off chaos. (out now, HBO Max)

‘Mr. Scorsese’

The Oscar-winning filmmaker behind “Goodfellas,” “Taxi Driver” and “The Wolf of Wall Street” is the subject of Rebecca Miller’s docuseries “Mr. Scorsese.” Across five episodes, the 82-year-old Martin Scorsese “talks matter-of-factly about his professional and personal shortcomings, often laughing at himself,” said Caryn James at the BBC.

Many celebrity collaborators appear to discuss their friend’s outsized impact, including Robert De Niro, Leonardo DiCaprio and Paul Schrader. But the documentary also “offers a reminder that [Scorsese’s] career has had more ups and downs than most people might think,” despite his eventual acclaim. “It's also easy to forget how controversial some of his films were, often because of their violence,” said James. In covering “everything from his near death from drugs to the religious vision that shapes his work,” the series emerges as “essential viewing.” (Oct. 17, Apple TV+)

After countless rumours, the creators of “The Inbetweeners” have confirmed the cult show will return to the small screen.

It’s been 17 years since the Channel 4 sitcom about the “adolescent travails of four foul-mouthed teens” first aired, becoming so successful it “spawned two blockbuster films”, said The Independent. Now, Damon Beesley and Iain Morris’ hit show is set to return; in an announcement the pair said they were “plotting more adventures” for the awkward friends.

‘Leave the past in the past’

“The Inbetweeners” specialised in that “specific brand of toe-curling cringe humour” that British sitcoms are known for, said Helen Coffey in The Independent. Unlike “Skins”, where the teens were all “beautiful yet permanently angst-ridden”, the uneasy group of friends at the centre of the show “struck a cultural chord because they painted a fairly accurate, if exaggerated, portrait of the specific nuances and humiliations required to make it through adolescence in this country”. Characters were “sick in nightclubs”; fibbed about their sexual conquests; and “casually joked about one of their teachers being a paedophile”. Whenever they did somehow manage to begin a relationship with a girl, they “very quickly ballsed things up”.

It was “completely and utterly of its time” – which is exactly why news of the reboot “brings me no pleasure whatsoever”. I want to be “supportive” of British comedy but “there is not one single atom of me that wants to see those characters all grown up, nor that particular brand of toilet humour translated to adult life”. The problem isn’t just that you “risk forever damaging the original legacy with a botched job” but also that “grasping attempts to cash in on” the nostalgia means there’s less space and money for truly “groundbreaking” new projects. Much as this group of “disgusting” teenage boys will always “hold a weird place” in my heart, “I wish we could leave the past in the past”.

A millennial dream

“I’d argue that there couldn’t be a better time to unite the four unlikely friends,” said City A.M.’s Adam Bloodworth. Yes, there’s an argument that the reunion “definitely wouldn’t have happened” had the four main actors – Simon Bird, Blake Harrison, Joe Thomas and James Buckley – found more success after the show.

“But there’s more to it than that. ‘The Inbetweeners’ went on to epitomise the millennial cliche: the backpack-wearing, binge-drinking nomad who didn’t quite fit in with the idea of growing up.” Like many of my peers, I’m still trying to work out what I want to do with my life. It turns out that for many of us, “not much has changed” in the last decade. “If there was ever more of a reason to bring ‘The Inbetweeners’ back, I don’t know what that would be.”

As a “socially maligned” teenager growing up “out in the sticks of Ireland”, the show was an “equal parts comic and cathartic watch” for me, said Almha Murphy in The Mirror. I just hope the comeback can do the show “justice”, and that it doesn’t lose the “relatable edge that allowed disjointed teenagers like myself to see themselves in it”.

“I am genuinely worried that the woke Gen Zers are instantly going to hate it”, said Rod McPhee in The Sun. Of course, they won’t bother watching it: instead they’ll “fleetingly consult the social media hive and decide it’s ripe for cancelling”. But I think we deserve a reboot “without any censoring of the swearing, smutty gags and obscenity we loved”.

While news of a reboot often comes with a great deal of “fear”, said Milo Pope in Metro, as loyal fans are nervous of “hackneyed” attempts to revive beloved characters, this revival could be an “exciting next step in the show’s history”. Don’t let other failed comebacks convince you it will be a disaster. The show’s creators have an opportunity to explore a “treasure trove” of themes from parenthood to ageing. “If you’re a fan of the original series and movies, ‘The Inbetweeners’ deserves a chance to prove it still has something to say.”

Crime television can be bleak, often relentlessly so. For those who enjoy a good murder mystery but don’t want to walk away from their limited leisure time feeling like humanity is hopeless, a competing genre has arisen.

“Cozy crime” series typically combine Etsy-friendly backdrops, quirky characters and frequent levity to defuse some of the tension inherent in the depiction of brutal crimes. From “A Remarkable Place to Die” to “High Potential,” the current TV landscape is awash in crime narratives with a lighter touch, often with episodic structures more reminiscent of a bygone era of network television.

‘Murder, She Wrote’ (1984-1996)

The iconic mystery-of-the-week series ran for 12 seasons and remains one of the most well-known pieces of crime television in history (so much so that it’s getting a reboot with Jamie Lee Curtis). Angela Lansbury played Jessica Fletcher, a mystery novelist and amateur detective who consistently outwits the police in the implausibly violent (and fictional) Maine small town of Cabot Cove. Jessica had a “genius-level intellect for crime solving and an innate kindness,” said Paul F. Verhoeven at The Guardian.

There was also “something deeply edifying about having an older woman play the hero” in a show that was ultimately “wholesome beyond measure.” The series was a ratings hit for CBS throughout its run, and Lansbury's character remains instantly recognizable to people of a certain age. (Apple TV+, Amazon, Philo and Tubi)

‘Agatha Christie’s Poirot’ (1989-2013)

Adapted from Agatha Christie’s books about private investigator Hercule Poirot, ITV's television adaptation ran for 13 seasons over 25 years, anchored by David Suchet’s beloved portrayal of the title character. Set in interwar London, the show follows Poirot, who hails from Belgium, as he investigates crimes with the help of his secretary Miss Lemon (Pauline Moran) and friend Captain Hastings (Hugh Fraser).

The episodes are “classic mysteries in many ways,” succeeding by “nicely balancing serious matters and humorous asides and subplots, such as Poirot’s dental adventures or obsessive fiscal concerns,” said Shlomo Schwartzberg at Critics At Large. The show’s family-friendly, “old-fashioned virtues are highly appealing and pleasurable.” (Acorn TV, Apple TV+, Amazon Prime, BritBox, MHz Choice and Roku)

‘Miss Fisher’s Murder Mysteries’ (2012-2015)

Based on Kerry Greenwood’s novels, Acorn TV’s series is set in 1920s Melbourne, Australia, and revolves around the adventures of well-to-do Phryne Fisher (Essie Davis), who tackles a new murder in each episode, set against the backdrop of a series-long effort to find her sister’s killer. The series “not only follows through on its initial, delightful premise’s promises but manages to fill a pop culture void in the process,” said Kayti Burt at Den of Geek. It also provides a “rare fictional example of what life can be like for women who choose not to get married and/or have children.” It led to a 1960s-set spin-off, “Ms. Fisher’s Modern Murder Mysteries,” which lasted two seasons. (Acorn TV, Apple TV+, Amazon and PBS)

‘Father Brown’ (2013-)

A show that is the “scheduling equivalent of a vitamin D shot,” BBC One’s long-running episodic crime series “lands like a warming ray of sunshine” when a new season is released every winter, said Jasper Rees at The Telegraph. The show moves the source material, G.K. Chesterton’s early 20th century novels, into the 1950s, when the titular priest (Mark Williams) solves crimes in the fictional English village of Kembleford. The “tone of gentle rural mayhem” frames a “structure standard in TV detective drama” and results in a “pleasant surprise,” said Mark Lawson at The Guardian. Viewers clearly agree, as the 13th season will debut in 2026, and the spin-off “Sister Boniface Mysteries” debuted on BritBox in 2022. (Amazon, BritBox, Hulu, Netflix and Roku)

‘Only Murders in the Building’ (2021-)

“Only Murders in the Building” features a group of charming amateur sleuths who try to get to the bottom of a series of murders in their Manhattan apartment building, and then make a podcast out of it. In the first season, washed-up actor Charles-Haden Savage (Steve Martin), Broadway director Oliver Putnam (Martin Short) and struggling artist Mabel Mora (Selena Gomez) are all true-crime enthusiasts who share their suspicions that fellow resident Tim Kono (Julian Cihi) didn’t commit suicide but was murdered. The show’s “vibes are immaculate,” said Constance Grady at Vox, and the series is “Nora Ephron-esque in its total commitment to atmosphere.” A fifth season premiered in September 2025. (Hulu)

‘The Afterparty’ (2022-2023)

The most structurally inventive of the shows on this list, this whodunnit comedy revolves around the murder of pop star Xavier (Dave Franco) at an afterparty following his 15-year high school reunion. An eclectic group of potential suspects, including Zoë (Zoë Chao), Aniq (Sam Richardson), Chelsea (Ilana Glazer) and Brett (Ike Barinholtz) is interviewed by the quirky Detective Danner (Tiffany Haddish), who hears the evening’s events from different (and often unreliable narrators) as well as digging into everyone’s potential grievances against their famous classmate.

The gimmick is that every episode is shot in a different genre, from romcoms to cartoons to a Wes Anderson-themed entry in the second season. A “proper Who's Who of contemporary comedy” keeps the proceedings moving along breezily by “embracing both the pastiche and the profound,” said John Nugent at Empire. The show was canceled after its second season. (Apple TV+)

‘Deadloch’ (2023-)

In a bucolic seaside town in Australia, a local man washes up dead on the beach right before the “Winter Feastival,” an event that attracts scores of liberal out-of-towners and is the source of ongoing culture clashes with longstanding locals. The brass doesn’t trust Senior Sergeant Dulcie Collins (Kate Box), a taciturn transplant whose possessive partner, Cath (Alicia Gardiner), disapproves of her job, to lead the investigation and sends the hilariously over-the-top Eddie Redcliffe (Madeleine Sami) to take over. Prime’s series, set in Tasmania, “both embraces and pokes fun at the familiar trappings of the crime drama,” said Katie Shepherd at Slate, and when the proceedings threaten to take a more somber turn, the show “deftly undercuts itself with satire.” The show was renewed but remains without a release date for its second season. (Amazon)

A con artist released from prison on compassionate grounds is reunited with her old partner in crime and begins planning one last epic heist. “How do you make this very familiar set-up feel fresh?” said Anita Singh in The Telegraph. By casting Suranne Jones and Jodie Whittaker as the leads and turning the drama into “rollicking good fun”.

Set in “dusty southern Spain”, the action kicks off as Bert (Jones) is released early from a 10-year prison sentence after being diagnosed with terminal cancer. Her old friend Sam (Whittaker) is ready to look after her in her final months, and takes Bert back to her rural home where she has been “keeping a respectably low profile with only a donkey and some chickens for company”.

But it’s not long before Bert is “back to her old tricks” and by the end of the first episode she has unveiled her “grand plan: an audacious art heist”. There’s more to the series, though, than finding out whether the pair can “pull it off”. Their friendship has a long and rocky history which is anything but straightforward. “Are they being completely truthful with one another”?

Shot against the “sweeping” backdrop of Tenerife, the show looks “gorgeous”, said Vicky Jessop in London’s The Standard. It’s also “damn good fun”. Jones and Whittaker are “excellent”: the pair have fizzing chemistry and engage in some “side-splittingly funny set pieces”.

There’s no denying the actors’ talent, but “even they couldn’t make a silk purse from the sow’s ear that was some of the dialogue”, said Carol Midgley in The Times. “My buttocks frequently clenched” during lines that “felt like ChatGPT had been working overtime”. But things “improved considerably” by the second episode, “especially when they enlist the magician and illusionist Jackie Diamond (Elizabeth Berrington)” to help with the elaborate heist.

The “bad news” is there are some “implausible” plot points, said Charlotte O’Sullivan in The Independent. Still, “the blissful moments outweigh the blah ones”. The feminism is “down to earth and visceral”; hats off to Jones and Whittaker for making the series which, although “not perfect, celebrates sly broads who fly under the radar and proves (for those of us who’d kill to see Jones conquer Hollywood) that you don’t always need a big screen to think big”.

Plot twists are carefully layered “between deepening revelations about Bert and Sam’s history”, and a “mesmerisingly intricate portrait of a friendship” emerges, said Lucy Mangan in The Guardian. In all, it’s a “fantastically stylish, emotionally rich and profoundly intelligent piece of entertainment that is feminist to its bones without preaching and in every way a triumph. More again, soon, please.”

From violence and explosions to “loads and loads of swearing”, “there are some things you expect from a historical drama written by Steven Knight”, said Pat Stacey in The Irish Independent. The creator of “Peaky Blinders” is known for his dark, gritty shows with glossy production values. “One thing you never expect, and never get, is fidelity to the historical facts.”

Knight’s latest “rip-roaring” show, “House of Guinness”, about the family behind the world-famous stout, is “hurling around falsities like barley grains in a brewery”, said James Jackson in The Times. “Or is it?”

Male lovers and sexy Irish revolutionaries

The series begins with a “full-blown riot” breaking out between nationalist Fenians and Guinness brewery workers in the streets at Sir Benjamin Lee Guinness’ funeral, said The Times. But “this never happened”, Adrian Tinniswood, author of “The Houses of Guinness”, told the paper. While it was an enormous affair with “something like a thousand people lining the streets” to pay their respects, the “burning effigy” of Sir Benjamin and “baying mob” have been added for dramatic effect. And though the family’s “ruthless fixer” and “attack dog” Sean Rafferty (James Norton) is certainly a “compelling character”, he is an invented one.

As for Arthur Guinness being stuck in a “sexless transactional” marriage and cheating on his wife, Lady Olivia Hedges-White, with “several male lovers” including the godson of William Gladstone, there is “no evidence” to suggest he was gay, said Harry Howard in the Daily Mail. In fact, “Arthur and his wife are known to have been a happy couple”.

There is also no record of Arthur’s younger brother Edward falling in love with a Fenian activist, as he does in the series. “Steven Knight seems to have a thing for fictional sexy female Irish revolutionaries”, said The Irish Independent. In “Peaky Blinders” Charlotte McKenna played “manic pixie IRA dream girl Captain Swing”, this time Niamh McCormack was brought in as the “flame-haired IRB babe Ellen Cochrane” who “lures Edward into bed”.

Edward didn’t come up with the harp symbol for the Guinness brand, either. The truth is, while it was a “savvy” move to use the Irish heraldic symbol to market the stout, Edward was just 15 at the time it began appearing on bottles in 1862 and “it is not known whose idea it was”, said Alexander Larman in The Telegraph. The (spoiler alert!) “suitably tense” ending involving an assassination attempt on a key member of the Guinness family also never happened.

Philanthropy and electoral fraud

It is largely true, though, that Benjamin Guinness’ will divided his fortune between his oldest and youngest sons, stating that they must run the brewery together or forfeit their inheritance. The brewery mogul was “trying to preserve the business” for his family, Tinniswood told The Times. Still, it was more “complicated” than its portrayal in the show and, “much later”, Arthur was able to sell his half-share of the business to Edward.

Much to Rafferty’s alarm, in the show Edward creates a pension scheme for his workers in the show. This is “rooted in truth”, said The Times. Although it isn’t clear whether he actually set up a scheme, the businessman did treat his workers in an “uncharacteristically generous” way, giving £500,000 to build employee housing in London and Dublin, Tinniswood said. He may have had “mixed” motives, though, as he was trying to “climb the social ladder” and secure a peerage at the time.

It’s also true that Arthur was tried for electoral fraud. The businessman found himself at the heart of a “sensational” trial in 1869, when a “packed-out courtroom” heard how he paid a team of campaigners to “swing the election in his favour”, said Matt Blake in Empire.

And the Guinness family really were “staunchly pro-union”, supporting British rule. Britain was a huge market for the brewery so this made “financial sense”, and the Irish independence movement threatened the social order that protected their wealth. “But it was more than just business.” Benjamin Lee “longed” to be accepted by the English aristocracy and Arthur would later go on to become the first member of the Guinness family to sit in the House of Lords and was made a Knight of the British Empire: “the ultimate status symbol of the Victorian elite”.

The undead began shuffling back to popularity in the early aughts, driven largely by the success of films like “28 Days Later” and the “Dawn of the Dead” remake and leading to the rise of cultural phenomena like “zombie walks.” But the small screen has offered many delights for revenant connoisseurs as well, especially when the success of Netflix’s “The Walking Dead” convinced studio heads there was plenty of appetite for brainy narratives about flesh-eating ghouls.

‘All of Us Are Dead’ (2022–)

Korean series can sometimes lean overlong, and “All of Us are Dead” is no exception. The sprawling series is set primarily in a high school in the fictional Seoul suburb of Hyosan. On-jo (Park Ji-hu) and Cheong-san (Yoon Chan-young) are childhood friends who join a group of surviving students as they first wait for rescue and then try to escape their besieged school after a zombie outbreak.

The consequences of bullying culture are a poignant theme. It “isn’t a show built on jump scares and surprises but instead one of constant dread” that results in a “slow-burn 12-episode odyssey about survival instinct and survivor’s guilt,” said Tori Preston at Pajiba. A second season is set to debut in 2026. (Netflix)

‘Black Summer’ (2019-2021)

The unappreciated, short-lived “Black Summer” grows from an action-packed, stressful first season to a masterful second installment that includes several of the best stand-alone episodes of television in any genre. The action follows Rose (Jaime King) and her daughter, Anna (Zoe Marlett), as the pair flee a zombie outbreak and then try to make their way to safety amid the collapse of civilization.

As winter descends in season two, Rose and Anna (minus most of the ancillary characters from season one) travel north, running into other groups of survivors. The show’s superior execution “hinges on two things: long one-take sequences and excellent stunt work and choreography,” said Dylan Moses Griffin at Death of Film Criticism. “Black Summer” never found an audience, sadly, and was canceled after two seasons. (Netflix)

‘The Last of Us’ (2023–)

The first season of this video game adaptation is a well-deserved critical and commercial triumph. Years after a zombie apocalypse collapsed human civilization, jaded smuggler Joel (Pedro Pascal) is given a mission by a rebel group, the Fireflies, to transport Ellie (Bella Ramsey) across a U.S. loosely controlled by the military junta Fedra to find a cure for the fungal infection to which she is mysteriously immune.

“The monsters are barely the focus” of a phenomenal series that is ultimately “more of a buddy road trip show than yet another show about a zombie apocalypse,” said Gene Park at The Washington Post. The second season received somewhat more mixed reviews, and a third installment is not anticipated until 2027. (Max)

‘Santa Clarita Diet’ (2017-2019)

When real estate agent Sheila (Drew Barrymore) dies and returns to life as a zombie of sorts, her fellow house-hawking husband, Joel (Timothy Olyphant), and daughter, Abby (Liv Hewson), are forced to navigate the reality that the family matriarch needs to eat people to stay alive. The gimmick in “Santa Clarita Diet” is that, unlike the mindless, shuffling or sprinting revenants in most of the zombie canon, zombie Sheila is “full of energy, sexually supercharged and very, very hungry for human flesh,” said Mike Hale at The New York Times. Buoyed by a “funny premise and appealing performances,” the show succeeded by gleefully subverting the formulas of the suburban comedy.” (Netflix)

‘The Walking Dead’ (2010-2022)

When it became a sprawling “universe” of related (and not very good) shows and spinoffs, “The Walking Dead” lost a lot of what made its first season groundbreaking. But the gripping feature-length pilot alone is a standout piece of zombie cinema. Georgia cop Rick Grimes (Andrew Lincoln) is wounded in a shoot-out and wakes up from a coma to a world destroyed by a zombie outbreak.

Searching for his family, Rick links up with a ragtag group of survivors, including Daryl (Norman Reedus) and Carol (Melissa McBride), who try to find safety and community among the ruins. The six-episode first season is “one of the finest pieces of programming ever produced for television,” said Gerri Mahn at Den of Geek. (Netflix)

“Swagger, menace, a modern soundtrack, actors walking in slow motion while wearing stylish hats...” Yes, Steven Knight, the creator of “Peaky Blinders”, is back with a new drama, only this time it’s not a gangland tale set in prewar Birmingham, but a “Succession”-style piece, loosely based on fact, set in 19th-century Dublin, said Anita Singh in The Daily Telegraph. It opens in the year 1868, and Benjamin Guinness, who built his family’s enterprise into a brewing behemoth, has just died. He has left behind three sons and a daughter, and it’s not clear who stands to take the reins of the business.

The series begins with a mass brawl as the brewery’s Catholic and Protestant workers prepare to smash their fists against each other during the funeral cortege, said James Jackson in The Times. You may slightly roll your eyes as the music of Fontaines D.C. blasts out, and you realise you’re in for another “rip-roaring” costume drama. “But then something happens. With a dash of ‘Downton’ as well as ‘Succession’, the mix of familial scheming and wider political ruptures (in this case anti-British hostility) starts to coalesce” into something that is dark and really quite quaffable.

The family’s plight is hard to take seriously and the republicans “are drawn cartoonishly”, said Rebecca Nicholson in the Financial Times. It’s all “a little soapy” – and, like a pint of stout, it “requires a bit of patience”. The first two episodes are a bit of a slog, but “House of Guinness” eventually settles into “something a little more smooth and robust”.

Netflix has been searching for a new “dark crime drama” since “Ozark” concluded in 2022, said Tim Glanfield in The Times. And with the “glossy” thriller “Black Rabbit”, it feels like it has finally struck gold.

Jude Law stars as Jake Friedken, a “slick operator” whose fashionable restaurant-cum-nightclub Black Rabbit has made him the toast of Manhattan society. When his dishevelled, gambling addict brother Vince (Jason Bateman) comes back into his life, Jake’s first instinct might have been to cast him adrift; but they share a complicated past (including a stint in a band) that binds them – and so instead, he offers him a job.

Their fraternal bond is severely challenged, however, when a gangster turns up, demanding that Vince repay his huge gambling debts, said Lucy Mangan in The Guardian. Successful as Jake’s restaurant appears to be, he can’t stump up that much cash, so the pair resort to ever-more high-stakes schemes in an effort to find it.

We know how all this sort of thing goes, and “the law of diminishing returns for the viewer sets in pretty quickly”. To make it worse, the brothers are so “unlovely”, it is hard to care about either of them; many of the supporting characters “are little more than ciphers”; and the whole thing is decidedly cheerless.

The series ratchets up the stress levels, said Rebecca Nicholson in the Financial Times; it ably conveys its sleazy nightclub milieu, and along with the splashy violence, it has an intriguing strain of melancholy about squandered potential. But it never quite adds up to the sum of its parts.

“It takes a certain swagger to make a thriller about terror attacks, online radicalisation and the rise of the far-right in Britain, and then to make that thriller very funny indeed,” said Rebecca Nicholson in the Financial Times. But “Slow Horses” has returned to the small screen for its fifth season with a “renewed sense of nihilism and wit”.

Following a “fun but functional” fourth series, Jackson Lamb (Gary Oldman) and his team of disgraced MI5 misfits are “licking their wounds” at Slough House. River Cartwright (Jack Lowden) is feeling “understandably glum” after discovering the real identity of his biological father, while the rest of the team are “burnt out, disaffected and tired of their friends dying all the time”.

So it’s a “treat” that the latest series focuses on Roddy Ho (Christopher Chung), said Nick De Semlyen in Empire. “Is there a more gloriously entertaining idiot on TV?” The cringy hacker has landed himself in “deep trouble” due to his “mysterious” new love interest who appears to be a honeytrap.

I found the latest instalment to be “strangely lacking in substance”, said Hannah J. Davies in The Guardian. The “will-they-won’t-they” between two of the leads “adds absolutely nothing to proceedings”, and MI5’s icy second-in-command Diana Taverner (Kristin Scott Thomas) is given little to do “apart from frown and drink large amounts of wine”.

It’s possible the show’s producers chose to forgo “foreign dalliances” because of concerns about the environment, “but having watched a scene set entirely at London Zoo’s penguin enclosure, I can’t help but feel that the amount of CO2 emissions expended by the series is proportional to its dramatic chops.” The plot “pinballs around far too much, and far too frivolously”, and even the major plot twist later in the series comes “too late” to “salvage” things.

I disagree, said Anita Singh in The Telegraph. “Slow Horses” is the only show I can think of that can skip from a devastating terrorist attack to the “unfortunate demise” of a group of penguins “without any jarring change in tone”.

The “villains” of the show are never predictable, and Lamb – who is even “tetchier” than normal – “continues to mock political correctness”, delivering his lines with a “zing”. Remarkably, the “impeccable” show isn’t seeing its quality tail off; season five returns with the same “supreme sense of confidence” as the earlier instalments.

The script is “as sharp as they come” and the blend of comedy and action is “handled beautifully”, said Chris Bennion in The Independent. With showrunner Will Smith leaving, and Gaby Chiappe taking over, it remains to be seen whether the next series – which has already been filmed – will reach the same heights. But look at what she has to work with: “the best group of characters on British TV”.

“The Girlfriend” – Amazon Prime’s latest “deliciously unhinged” drama – is about a mother whose relationship with her son is just a bit too close for comfort, said Anita Singh in The Daily Telegraph. Laura (played by Robin Wright, who also directs) is an impossibly rich American art gallery owner who lives in a fabulous pad in London, complete with pool.

She dotes on her only son Daniel (Laurie Davidson), who has just qualified as a surgeon, and the two share a relationship that may well give viewers “the ick”. When Daniel brings home gorgeous new girlfriend Cherry Laine (Olivia Cooke), his mother’s “expression doesn’t change, but we can all see the horror in her eyes” – and she duly starts to compete with Cherry for Daniel’s attention.

Laura is convinced that working-class Cherry isn’t who she says she is, said Rebecca Nicholson in the Financial Times, and that her motives in dating Daniel are not pure. For her part, Cherry is “defensive, cagey and sure that Laura is out to sabotage her relationship” because she doesn’t come from her “elite world” – and as a result she is, in fact, not being straight about her identity. So who do we believe? That events play out from both women’s perspectives adds to the fun, in a twisty, glossy six-parter that is ”more subtle in its understanding of social and financial tensions” than its package suggests. “A guilty pleasure? Probably,” said Tim Glanfield in The Times. Far-fetched, and even bonkers? Perhaps. But this is compelling stuff. “You’ll want to binge the lot.”

Director-general Tim Davie has refused to say whether the BBC will take part in next year’s Eurovision Song Contest as controversy grows over Israel’s participation.

The national broadcasters of Ireland, the Netherlands, Slovenia, Iceland and Spain have all threatened to boycott Eurovision if Israel is allowed to take part. The European Broadcasting Union is consulting with members on how to “manage participation and geopolitical tensions” around the 2026 event.

‘Hypocrisy and division’

I don’t “just watch” Eurovision, said Pablo O’Hana in The Independent, I host an annual party with “custom LED wristbands, marquees, food from 35 countries and over 250ft of homemade bunting”. But it is impossible to overlook the “double standards” of organisers the EBU so far refusing to ban Israel after throwing out Russia in 2022 over its invasion of Ukraine.

Unless the EBU “rediscovers its backbone”, Eurovision risks becoming a “stage for selective storytelling, hypocrisy and division” at a moment when our continent “most needs unity”. If the EBU doesn't act, the show “may still sparkle”, but “the soul will be gone”.

But Azerbaijan was not suspended during its war in Nagorno-Karabakh, nor “Turkey during its incursions into northern Syria”, said Jack Simony in The Jerusalem Post, even though “both countries initiated the wars they fought, while Israel was attacked”. That the 7 October attacks took place at a music festival only makes Eurovision’s “selective standard” more painful. If Eurovision singles out Israel, it would be “undermining its own ethos” as a “festival of inclusion”.

“A nation that is perpetrating genocide cannot continue to sing,” said Gideon Levy in Israeli daily Ha'aretz. The justification for Russia’s suspension in 2022 “was considered self-evident”, and Israel’s conduct in Gaza has been “far crueller and more genocidal than Russia’s invasion of Ukraine”. The very fact that Israel imagines it would escape similar censure “shows that it has lost its way”.

‘Gravest threat’

Tim Davie told MPs on the Public Accounts Committee this week that Eurovision has "never been about politics”, but “history says otherwise”, said Vox; Eurovision has “always been a space for political performance”.

Boycotts and bans are “almost as old as the contest itself”, said historian Tess Megginson. In the 1970s Greece and Turkey boycotted Eurovision over Turkey’s invasion of northern Cyprus, and while there were songs about “peace and unity and breaking down walls” as Eastern European countries started joining in the 1990s, Yugoslavia was banned from the contest following the siege of Sarajevo.

Most recently, the suspension of Russia in 2022 symbolised the “awkward intersection of politics and culture at which Eurovision sits”, said Politico. The row over Israel’s participation “amounts to the gravest threat” to Eurovision in its history, but it also ties into a wider European debate over “whether cultural bans on Israeli artists and athletes are legitimate sanctions”.

The “intensifying cultural backlash” highlights the tension between what some see as “proportionate responses to the war in Gaza” and others see as “crossing into antisemitism”.

Conrad or Jeremiah? That has been the question on every fan’s lips ahead of the series finale of “The Summer I Turned Pretty”.

Few would have predicted that the love-triangle teen drama between Isabel “Belly” Conklin and two brothers, set in the too-good-to-be-true fictional beach town of Cousins, “would eventually become the source material for a Taylor Swift-approved, viewership-topping, crash-out-inducing television series”, said C. T. Jones in Rolling Stone.

Now in its third and final season, Amazon Prime Video’s "The Summer I Turned Pretty" (TSITP), based on Jenny Han’s bestselling trilogy published between 2009 and 2011, has evolved from a “relatively unremarkable show amid a sea of romance offerings to an era-defining piece of media” driven by a wave of fandom.

‘A certified phenomenon’

For the uninitiated, the show’s premise is “faintly preposterous”, said The Economist, “but its popularity is real.”

It has topped Amazon’s charts in the US, Australia, Britain, Canada, France and Germany, among other countries.

“That devotion has spilled off-screen and into the real world,” said Elle, “inspiring ‘TSITP’-themed watch parties, bachelorette trips, dinner parties, and even bar nights.”

Most of all, the “hype” has been “fuelled by social media, particularly on TikTok where fans of the books speculate about the ending of the TV series”, said the BBC. Legions of devotees post memes and create videos of the couple they want to see together. #TeamConrad has 13.5 billion views on TikTok.

“‘The Summer I Turned Pretty’ is especially appealing to Gen X, Millennials, and Gen Z because it’s tender, layered, and psychologically rich,” Deborah Robbins, a therapist who specialises in relationships and attachment, told Elle. “It blends nostalgia, emotional intensity, and romantic fantasy in a way that taps into our earliest understandings of love and longing.”

It also connects adult viewers to the TV they grew up on, she said, highlighted by the fact its main audience is women aged between 25 and 54.

Perhaps a part of what turned season three into a “certified phenomenon” is that each episode is released weekly, said Lauren Aratani in The Guardian. “The wait encourages anticipation, what feels rare in an era of endless, bingeable content online,” and is also “proof that old-fashioned scripted TV shows” can still “have pull over younger audiences who are increasingly drawn to platforms including YouTube”.

‘The summer we started acting normal online’

But what the final season of “TSITP” will mostly be remembered for “is driving some of the most bonkers and unhinged online energy in the history of the internet”, said Jones in Rolling Stone.

Amazon has taken the unusual step of asking fans to stop hurling insults, and even death threats, at actors who play characters they do not like.

“The show isn’t real but the people playing the characters are,” reads a message on the show’s TikTok account, adding: “The summer we started acting normal online.”

“There have always been toxic sides of fandom in certain corners of the internet,” said Jones, but what is different about “TSITP” is “the aggressiveness of the reaction when put next to the reality of the source material”.

“Viewers have lost their hearts to Jeremiah and Conrad. It seems they have lost their heads, too,” said The Economist.

Expectations were low when the American version of “The Office” first aired in the US in 2005, said Tim Glanfield in The Times. But despite initially unfavourable comparisons to the British original, it “developed across nine years into a television behemoth”. Now we have a spinoff that uses the same mockumentary format to explore the inner workings of a local newspaper in the Midwest.

The Toledo Truth Teller once employed more than 1,000 people, but “now finds itself situated in the corner of one floor of its former grand Ohio offices alongside a toilet-roll brand”. Its output consists largely of clickbait and wire copy; its managing editor (Sabrina Impacciatore) presides over a tiny, dysfunctional staff; and its future seems uncertain. Then, an idealistic new editor is hired (Domhnall Gleeson) with aspirations to bring the paper back to its former glory, though he has never worked for a newspaper before. The show (on Sky), exudes confidence, and has just the right balance of silliness, satire and thoughtful characterisation.

“The Paper” has some of the pathos of “The Office”, said Hannah J. Davies in The Guardian, and it does “classic misdirection quite well”, but it is just not funny enough. If you’ve seen “The Office”, everything from the single-person interviews to the “warmth and the goofiness”, will feel “comfortingly and wearyingly familiar”, said Chris Bennion in The Telegraph. They’ve even transplanted a character, the accountant Oscar (Oscar Nuñez). Much like the show itself, it’s nice to see him, but you are not sure what he is doing there.

We're shooting straight into fall without a cushion. September TV comes in hot with four brand new crime shows: a "Mare of Easttown" follow-up, an Ethan Hawke-starring deep dive into Tulsa crime, an Irish brewery scrabble and the fictionalization of a terrorist tracker's life. There is also a bit of respite with one lower-stakes new show from the creator of "The Office."

'The Paper'

The U.S. version of "The Office" ended 12 years ago, but the absurdist mockumentary about a local paper company remains one of the most rewatched shows of all time. Capitalizing on its ever-continuing popularity, the original series' creator, Greg Daniels, returns as the co-creator, executive producer and co-showrunner of new spinoff "The Paper." The first season stars Domhnall Gleeson ("Ex Machina") and Sabrina Impacciatore ("The White Lotus") as workers at Ohio newspaper The Toledo Truth Teller. Oscar Nuñez  alone reprises his NBC "Office" role. "The series takes a moment to work out its kinks," said Aramide Tinubu at Variety, "but by the season finale, it has all the makings of being as witty and iconic as its predecessor." (out now, Peacock)

'Task'

Brad Ingelsby, the creator of HBO's hit 2021 series "Mare of Easttown," is back with his second original crime show about a small-town Pennsylvania detective — a pretty specific niche! "Mare" starred the fantastic Kate Winslet, and "Task" puts Mark Ruffalo in the lead as Tom, a priest-turned-FBI-agent tracking a gang of home invaders. "Casually shedding the clichés it's built upon, HBO's crime saga mounts a potent blend of cat-and-mouse chase, bleak family drama and a character study," said Ben Travers at IndieWire. "The laughs may be hard to come by, but the emphasis on caring — not as a burden to escape, but a responsibility to embrace — more than makes up for the hardships along the way." (out now, HBO)

'The Lowdown'

This neo-noir starring Ethan Hawke was created by Sterlin Harjo, whose previous show "Reservation Dogs" emerged as "one of the best TV series of the 2020s," said Noel Murray at The New York Times. In "The Lowdown," Hawke plays a freelance journalist in Tulsa, Oklahoma, who hopes to expose the seedy underbelly of corruption in his city and becomes embroiled in a murder mystery.

"Instead of asking viewers to invest in a whodunit or howdunit or whydunit, 'The Lowdown' offers immersion in Tulsa and its environs," said Daniel Fienberg at The Hollywood Reporter. Here, "artistic oddballs, fringe right-wing bigots, deep-rooted Indigenous communities and more butt heads." (Sept. 23, FX; Sept. 24, Hulu)

'House of Guinness'

Missing the epic period gangster violence that was "Peaky Blinders" or the foppish familial dramatics of "Succession"? "House of Guinness" is a new show from "Peaky Blinders" creator Steven Knight that spotlights the real-life Guinnesses and their wild interpersonal dynamics. The series was "inspired by one of Europe's most famous and enduring dynasties, The Guinness Family — i.e., the family behind the famous Irish brewery," said Good Housekeeping. Set in 19th-century Dublin and New York, the show "reimagines the period immediately following the death of Sir Benjamin Guinness, the man responsible for the Guinness brewery's storming success," and covers the "far-reaching impact of his will on the fate of his four adult children." (Sept. 25, Netflix)

'The Savant'

Jessica Chastain stars in "The Savant" as Jodie, a character based on a real person profiled in the fascinating 2019 Cosmopolitan piece "Is It Possible to Stop a Mass Shooting Before it Happens?" Created by Melissa James Gibson ("The Americans"), the series follows Jodie's career as an undercover investigator who tracks white supremacists and online hate groups in an effort to stop them from committing mass crimes. "She should be safely infiltrating the groups from her desk, interacting with them using a false persona, but her work becomes more immediate than she expected," said Caryn James at the BBC — ultimately putting a "strain on her home life, which includes two children and a husband in the military." (Sept. 26, Apple TV+)

It's been over a decade since "Educating Yorkshire" first "melted the nation's hearts", as we watched English teacher Mr Burton help his stammering pupil, Musharaf Asghar, to "find his voice", said Helen Brown in The Telegraph.

Channel 4 has returned to Thornhill Community Academy where Mr Burton has been promoted to headteacher. "And, despite calls for our education system to be overhauled since Covid, high-school life seems largely unchanged since the cameras last trundled down the corridors."

Mr Burton is still "jovial and dedicated, if a little wearier", and the "sturdy" format of the show remains intact. Much like the first series, the "unheard and unseen" production team behind the camera "do a great job of coaxing moving insight" from individual pupils.

The revival is "perfectly timed", said Phil Harrison in The Guardian. Earlier this year, Netflix's "Adolescence" prompted a "national orgy of hand-wringing" about the state of education, with its portrayal of "overstretched" teachers as "little more than crowd control" for their maladjusted pupils.

It is comforting, then, that "plenty" has stayed the same at Thornhill since season one. We're introduced to Amy, a "thoroughly eccentric and entirely charming kid grappling with Tourette syndrome and the absurd (but, at 12, deadly serious) micropolitics of schoolyard friendships". And we get a snapshot of dilemmas faced by the "very clever and very disruptive" Riley, who keeps "clowning" in class.

Great care has been taken with the editing "to make these children hilarious, but never the butt of the joke; to show their vulnerability, but also their strength". Gradually a picture emerges of their "muddled impulses and motivations", and the factors that feed into their developing personalities. Many of the kids are supported with carefully tailored pastoral care. "Does it feel like a necessary blast of optimism? You bet it does."

The streamlining of footage into "simple, uplifting narratives" is part of the show's appeal, said Louis Chilton in The Independent. But its inability to "scrutinise the institution it depicts" is also what leaves it "ultimately superficial as a work of documentary filmmaking".

Still, there is something "heartening" about watching kids behave in much the same way they always have. Young people are often portrayed as "inscrutable beings, half-human, half-mobile phone – and yet, here, we can see they're just children being children".

The show isn't particularly inventive, said Emily Baker in The i Paper. However, when generational divisions are so "fraught", and "new moral panics" about the world our kids are growing up in crop up constantly, "this understated, quietly groundbreaking documentary is a tonic. Its message is clear and undeniable: the kids are all right."

The past few years have seen a proliferation of political thrillers reflecting fears that democracy "is in a state of peril", said Rebecca Nicholson in the Financial Times. The latest is Netflix's "Hostage", "a fun, fast and brash potboiler" starring Suranne Jones as decent, idealistic British prime minister Abigail Dalton. Eight months after she takes office, the NHS is on the verge of collapse due to a shortage of cancer drugs; France has the goods, but its right-wing president, Vivienne Toussaint (Julie Delpy), makes a delivery conditional on Britain taking in more refugees from Calais.

The tempo is suddenly upped when Dalton's doctor husband (Ashley Thomas) is kidnapped in French Guiana, and his assailants threaten to kill him unless she resigns. Protocol demands the government won't negotiate with terrorists; but will this stand when it's the PM's husband's life that is at stake?

The real "hostage" turns out to be Dalton herself, said Keith Watson in The Daily Telegraph. She is "forever at the centre of a damned if you do, damned if you don't dilemma", and Jones does a great job of "looking battered, bruised and relentlessly defiant". Alas, the series soon loses focus, throwing up endless plot twists and "an overflowing kitchen sink of contemporary issues".

"I really, really wanted to love 'Hostage'," said Helen Coffey in The Independent. But the storyline is "wonky" and often silly. "I kept waiting for the 'aha' moment when I would finally get why all this was happening, and it never quite arrived."

Most on-screen friendships between men and women ultimately turn romantic — even if it takes seven seasons, as it did with Agents Fox Mulder and Dana Scully in "The X-Files." But Apple TV+ comedy "Platonic," whose second season began airing in early August, is unique in that it's based on a purely non-amorous relationship. Rose Byrne plays Sylvia, a suburban mom suffering quietly from middle-aged ennui who reconnects with her free-spirited college buddy Will (Seth Rogen) after his divorce. The show's most persuasive gimmick is that Will and Sylvia, whose hilarious, drug-fueled hijinks often jeopardize both their jobs and relationships, have absolutely no interest in one another romantically. This makes them part of a very small group of TV characters who maintain such boundaries. Here are five of the most memorable.

1. Ted and Rebecca, 'Ted Lasso'

When the Apple TV+ series "Ted Lasso" wrapped its third season in 2023, it left some fans disappointed that Jason Sudeikis' goofy, titular soccer coach and AFC Richmond team owner Rebecca Welton (Hannah Waddingham) never got together. When they first meet, Rebecca believes that Ted, an American football coach hilariously miscast as a European soccer chief, is the "biggest wanker that has ever wankered" — but soon "finds herself unable to resist interacting with him," said Kaleena Rivera at Pajiba. Ted and Rebecca eventually forge a bond of mutual respect and support that remains firmly in the friendship camp throughout the series; although with a fourth season in the works, it is still possible that they pair off.

2. Leslie and Ron, 'Parks and Recreation'

Leslie Knope (Amy Poehler) and Ron Swanson (Nick Offerman) turned themselves into good-government icons of the mid-aughts as officials in the parks department of made-up Pawnee, Indiana. Ron, who exudes powerful pre-MAGA vibes as a gun-toting conservative, nevertheless forms a sincere and non-romantic bond with his underling, the idealistic Leslie. The fact that they "both love breakfast food and believe in eating it at all hours — the purest bedrock for friendship" eventually outweighs their ideological differences, said Joey Keogh at Birth.Movies.Death. By the end of the series, Leslie "champions him to be true to himself while also growing as a person."

3. Liz and Jack, '30 Rock'

On the celebrated comedy "30 Rock," Jack Donaghy (Alec Baldwin) is the imperious, fictional boss of NBC, and like Ron Swanson, a political conservative to Liz Lemon's (Tina Fey) committed liberal. The debilitatingly neurotic Liz is the head of a flailing sketch comedy show that hires a loose cannon comic (Tracy Jordan) to boost ratings.

Despite their temperamental and political differences, Liz and Jack develop a close mentor-mentee dynamic without even a whiff of romance discernible throughout the show's seven seasons. The series crafted such a convincing companionship between Liz and Jack that the "very idea of anything other than a friendship seems, well, gross," said Meredith Blake at the Los Angeles Times.

4. Joey and Phoebe, 'Friends'

The original sextet of 20-something New York City pals Ross, Rachel, Chandler, Joey and Phoebe produced two marriages by the end of the show's 10-season run, leaving Phoebe (Lisa Kudrow) and Joey (Matt LeBlanc) on the outside looking in — just not at each other. Even though they "understand one another in ways that nobody else does, with their slightly kooky and eccentric logic and personalities," the duo remains just friends, much to the disappointment of some fans, said Jay Snow at Collider. This was partly because the showrunners thought it "would have been too perfect for all the friends to end up with another person in the group."

5. Mark and Carol, 'ER'

The friendship between mild-mannered Chicago emergency room doctor Mark Greene (Anthony Edwards) and nurse Carol Hathaway (Julianna Margulies) is perhaps best illustrated by the way he serves as her birthing partner during her pregnancy in season six, which she must endure without her ex, Dr. Doug Ross (George Clooney). When Carol goes into labor, Mark rushes to be by her side. As she apologizes for interrupting his Thanksgiving dinner, he replies, "Are you kidding? I'd rather be here." The pair "have a real connection with one another that forms the foundation of a captivating platonic relationship," said Sabienna Bowman at Bustle. Edwards' character was killed off in season eight, so even if there is a reboot or reunion special, we'll sadly never get to see how their friendship evolved through middle age and beyond.

If real-life politics fills you with despair, try diving into one of these tense thrillers. Packed with plot twists, power struggles and political scandals, these bingeworthy shows will have you hooked from the start. Here are our top picks.

Hostage

Suranne Jones stars as the "no-nonsense" newly elected prime minister in this "globetrotting" political thriller, said Lucy Mangan in The Guardian. When her husband, a doctor working to distribute vaccinations in French Guiana, is kidnapped by "unknown terrorists", she must try to save him while managing a national emergency. "Hostage" is a "rollicking, propulsive and compulsive yarn", and Jones is "terrific" as an "everywoman in extraordinary circumstances". While I sometimes find myself wishing she would "treat herself and us to a comedy", when television is "this much fast, furious, intelligent fun, I suppose we shouldn't ask for more".
Netflix

Paradise

Many TV shows struggle to make an impression but occasionally "one comes along that has such a striking opening episode that there is no doubt you'll be watching until the big finale", said Jacob Stolworthy in The Independent. Enter "Paradise": an "intriguing mystery" delving into the murder of President Cal Bradford (James Marsden). Secret Service agent Xavier Collins (Sterling K. Brown) was the last person to see him alive and quickly becomes the prime suspect; he must attempt to prove his innocence while tracking down the real culprit. What first appears as a "run-of-the-mill espionage thriller" soon unfurls into something far more interesting. It's a must-watch.
Disney+

Zero Day

A cyberattack strikes the US for one minute, causing widespread devastation in this "handsomely made" political thriller, said Sophie Butcher in Empire. "Cars crash, planes fall, hospital equipment fails." It's a catastrophic event on an "unprecedented scale" which brings former president George Mullen (Robert De Niro) out of retirement to track down the perpetrators by "any means necessary". The pace slackens around the halfway mark but "once the truth starts unravelling, the show kicks back up a notch and the last two instalments are truly nail-biting".
Netflix

The Night Agent

This gripping political thriller became the most watched show on Netflix in 2023. Peter Sutherland (Gabriel Basso), a lowly FBI agent, was tasked with manning an emergency phone line that never rang in the basement of the White House. But one day it did, thrusting him into a deadly conspiracy. The second instalment picks up with the "newly promoted" leading man, who is now a fully fledged member of the "top secret" Night Action team, said Tilly Pearce in The i Paper. Netflix isn't trying to "reinvent the wheel" here, but with its "slick visuals, fast pacing and heart-stopping shoot-outs, it really doesn't have to".
Netflix

The Diplomat

The first season of this "political-thriller-cum-marital-dramedy" was an "unexpected pleasure", said Richard Lawson in Vanity Fair. It followed Kate Wyler (Keri Russell), a US diplomat juggling her new job as ambassador to the UK with her turbulent marriage to a political star. Season two is just as successful, satisfying a "perhaps previously unknown itch for something higher-grade than mere streaming chum, but not so demanding as a dense, cerebral, premium-cable series". The action charts the fallout from series one's "shocking bombing", with Wyler and her team working tirelessly to "try to uncover the nefarious forces behind the attack". Hovering over the second season is the question: "what cost are we willing to pay, how much principle and decency will we barter away, in pursuit of security (imagined or not)?"
Netflix

Say Nothing

This absorbing adaptation of Patrick Radden Keefe's non-fiction book of the same name "excels" at telling a good story, said Benji Wilson in The Telegraph. The nine-part drama sketches a "complex and devastating portrait" of Northern Ireland during the Troubles, that "spans four decades of murder and betrayal". While the early episodes have a "needling sense" the conflict is being romanticised, the series "soon develops into something more elegiac and profound". It's well worth watching the whole way through.
Disney+

This small-screen prequel to "Alien" "should not be as good as it is", said Rebecca Nicholson in the FT. Ridley Scott's 1979 classic spawned "a sprawling franchise" of sequels and spin-offs, mostly offering "diminishing returns". But "Alien: Earth" (shown on Disney+) is a genuinely "bold and imaginative" effort that ranks among "the most enjoyable TV series of recent years".

Set two years before the original, it pays "homage" early on, when the cargo of alien life runs amok on a space vessel – which crash lands in a futuristic Bangkok. Thereafter, though, the series enters new territory. It imagines an Earth divided between rival tech corporations. The boss of one, Boy Kavalier (Samuel Blenkin), a magnate obsessed with eternal life, seizes the aliens for research purposes.

The nightmarish monsters from the original are just one of several deadly species on board, said Ed Power in The Daily Telegraph. There are also "horrific interstellar spiders" and "a sociopathic eyeball with tentacles". But Kavalier has been creating "spooky lifeforms" of his own: powerful androids implanted with the consciousnesses of sick children used as his guinea pigs.

The series "both fleshes out the story while, like any reboot, offering all the familiarities", said James Jackson in The Times. It also comes freighted with existential questions about AI, runaway technological development and humanity's future. But it doesn't stint on the action, and the extraterrestrial creatures remain as "horrifying" as ever. The result is scary, "nasty" and "frequently terrific".

"It's the shit I keep coming back to," said Alison Herman in Variety of one memorable scene in the finale of "And Just Like That...", yet her words could also reflect the withering reviews the series' final episode has drawn.

The much-maligned "Sex and the City" reboot had already seen one character seemingly killed off twice and another wet the bed, but several reviewers felt the finale plumbed unforeseen new lows.

'Moronic and confusing'

After a rocky start, "And Just Like That..." morphed into something decent, offering a "warm, absurd escapism" that "slipped down like a classic Cosmopolitan", said Hannah J. Davies in The Guardian. But "how, dear God, do you wrap it all up"? Messily, it seems. The "crescendo" moment is a toilet overflowing with "lots and lots of poo". Can a "faecally charged party" really be the "intended finale" to the whole franchise?

The "explosion of actual poop" invited parallels with the reboot's "shitty storylines", and was relatively apt, said David Opie on Radio Times. The end was a "rushed, stunted mess" that upped the ante for how bad the series has been at times, but at least it's over, so liberating "the cast and us alike" from "what can only be described as a legal form of torture".

The finale was "abominable", and a "mortifying last stand for a franchise that many of us once adored", said Adam White in The Independent. "By turns moronic and confusing, unfunny and hateful", it could have been "edited with a hacksaw". But having now said goodbye to Carrie Bradshaw and co – for all of those who loved you, "you deserved better".

'Bold and refreshing' 

Perhaps it was fitting that the show ended in the "offbeat, uncanny way it began", said Herman in Variety, even if it meant that characters we've known for more than a quarter of a century got a "somewhat abrupt goodbye". At least the series stayed true to the very last.

The finale "dared" to give Carrie the ending that "Sex and the City" didn’t, said Alex Abad-Santos on Vox. The climax of the original betrayed the show's "heart and soul" by ditching its positive philosophy that our best friends are "the true matches we should be so lucky to find in this world". Instead, the "four soulmates" all ended up married or "exclusively committed" to men, who were "nowhere near as magical as they are".

But at the end of "And Just Like That...", Carrie "finally stumbled upon the realisation" that she "never needed marriage, romantic love, or maybe even sex", for her life to be "fabulously beautiful". The ending was what she and her friends had over the years told us to believe in.

In 2025, single women are "still treated like broken parts that need to be put back together", said Olivia Petter in British Vogue, particularly if they dare to age beyond their late 20s. So, ending the show with Carrie single feels "a bold and deeply refreshing choice".

After a slice of pumpkin pie and "a turn on the karaoke machine she once resented", Carrie found happiness, said Opie on Radio Times, and with it the realisation it doesn't "come from being loved" but rather "from loving yourself, and that's true no matter how old you might be or where you are in life".

If you've ever watched a television show that stumbles as it tries to extract season after season of material from a creative reservoir that has already been drained, you'll have a fresh appreciation for the much rarer format of the limited series. Their definitive narrative endpoints offer viewers closure, or at least a tidiness that can't always be found in long-running programs. Often adapted from celebrated novels or works of non-fiction, the best limited series can be appreciated years or even decades after they air.

'Roots' (1977)

ABC's adaptation of Alex Haley's bestselling 1976 novel was a "social phenomenon" as well as a "potentially important benchmark in U.S. race relations," said Time. The show followed Kunta Kinte (LeVar Burton), who is kidnapped from present-day The Gambia by slavers in 1767, rendered to colonial Maryland and sold to the Reynolds family. The unflinching depiction of slavery, decades before the rise of "prestige television," was unusual for its time. "Sympathetic, even beloved, white TV stars" including Lloyd Bridges "were enlisted to play unsympathetic roles," and while the show can feel "antiquated" in some ways, it is nevertheless "still fresh and shocking" decades later, said the Los Angeles Times.

'Band of Brothers' (2001)

The success of 1998's wrenching "Saving Private Ryan" led to a flurry of ultra-realistic war films, as well as HBO's acclaimed limited series that traced the exploits of Easy Company from basic training through D-Day and the grinding months that finally vanquished Hitler's war machine. Ron Livingston ("Office Space") and Damian Lewis ("Homeland") led an enormous ensemble cast in a portrayal of the horrors of war. An "incredibly visceral and evocative piece of war drama," the ten-episode production highlighted the "brutal and horrific reality of armed conflict," said Den of Geek.

'Chernobyl' (2019)

HBO's harrowing five-part miniseries depicts the hours and weeks following the 1986 catastrophe at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in Soviet Ukraine. Perhaps its most chilling element was the portrayal of Soviet administrative inertia and delusion, as one bureaucrat after another chooses to downplay the seriousness of the crisis. Jared Harris plays Valery Legasov, a scientist sent to investigate the disaster and contain its fallout, and a large ensemble cast depicts firefighters, bureaucrats and citizens eventually forced to evacuate. While the series takes creative liberties with some events, it condemns the "Soviet system that created Chernobyl and made the explosion inevitable," said The New Yorker.

'Station Eleven' (2021)

HBO Max's "Station Eleven" hit screens while the Omicron variant of Covid-19 was prolonging the worst pandemic in a century, so the timing was perhaps not ideal for a multiple-timeline flu-apocalypse drama. Based on Emily St. John Mandel's bestselling novel, the narrative follows the aimless Jeevan (Himesh Patel), who by happenstance pairs up with a child, Kirsten (Matilda Lawler), on the night of the outbreak. Years later, a grown-up Kirsten (Mackenzie Davis) is part of The Traveling Symphony, a troupe of actors who perform for small communities of survivors, menaced by a mysterious terrorist called "The Prophet" (Daniel Zovatto). The "stark beauty of the ruined world the characters inhabit" propels this "moody, beautiful and moving" show, said Slate.

'Maid' (2021)

This Netflix series sheds light on the frequently humiliating day-to-day challenges of hardscrabble poverty in America. Adapted from Stephanie Land's memoir, the show stars Margaret Qualley as Alex, a stay-at-home mom who flees her abusive boyfriend Sean (Nick Robinson) with her toddler Maddy (Rylea Nevaeh Whittet) and takes a job as a maid to make ends meet. She must navigate the harsh realities of indigence while simultaneously undergoing the agonizing process of extricating herself from Sean. The series demonstrates that "being poor is incredibly stressful," but also "how hard it is to get help and to build upon the help one has already received," said Vulture.

August TV ushers in second seasons of two very different series: the sardonic goth girl misadventures of "Wednesday" and a tale of adult friendship between opposite genders in "Platonic." Plus, old favorites draw new inspiration, with a small-screen addition to the "Alien" cinematic universe, a dramatic — but accurate — retelling of the Amanda Knox trial and new animated heartbreak from the creator of "BoJack Horseman."

'Platonic'

The first season of "Platonic" found the immensely charming Seth Rogen and Rose Byrne playing besties navigating life together in Los Angeles. The relationship between Sylvia (Byrne) and Will (Rogen) begged the "age-old question: can a man and a woman be nothing more than friends?" said Variety. The answer was a resounding "yes." Season two picks up as Will is planning his impending nuptials — and getting a bad case of cold feet. Rogen and Byrne "create a natural and easy chemistry as best friends who are always there for one another — except when they're not, because they got into another big fight, or one of them has screwed up the other one's life in epic and horrific (and hilarious) fashion," said Richard Roeper at Roger Ebert. (August 6, Apple TV+)

'Wednesday'

Netflix fan favorite "Wednesday" is back for a second season of "horror homages, dark comedy and deadpan reactions," said Noel Murray at The New York Times. It will be split into two releases airing on August 6 and September 3, respectively. In season two, the Addams Family's gloomiest gal is back at Nevermore Academy, a boarding school for teen oddballs with monstrous superpowers. But famous loner Wednesday (Jenna Ortega) is unhappy to find she has "become popular with her classmates after saving the school from a vengeful killer" in the previous season. Steve Buscemi joins the cast as a new school principal and seasoned spook-master Tim Burton directs four of the season's eight episodes. (August 6, Netflix)

'Alien: Earth'

It was only a matter of time before the iconic "Alien" franchise made its way to the small screen. Almost 50 years after Ridley Scott's "Alien" changed the landscape of horror filmmaking forever, a new show from "Fargo" creator Noah Hawley comes to Hulu. "Alien: Earth" is set in 2120, two years before the events of Scott's film, and centers on Wendy (Sydney Chandler), a squad leader investigating a crashed research vessel. Lucky for audiences sick of reboots and prequels, "Earth" is "mostly not about rehashing 'Alien' at all," said Angie Han at The Hollywood Reporter. Instead, it "treats that familiar template less as a formula than a launchpad for its own ambitions — in this case, a heady, sprawling, occasionally unwieldy but eventually thrilling epic about personhood, hubris and, of course, the primal pleasure of watching people get absolutely rocked by space monsters." (August 12, Hulu)

'The Twisted Tale of Amanda Knox'

One of the most intriguing true crime stories of the 21st century gets the prestige series treatment with "The Twisted Tale of Amanda Knox," the story of a 20-year-old exchange student convicted of murdering her roommate in Perugia, Italy, in 2007. The real Amanda (played by Grace Van Patten here) was held in an Italian prison for four years before being acquitted, and the resulting case made her world-famous. "While Knox's story has been told many times over the years (in a 2016 Netflix documentary among others), what truly sets this series apart is the fact that Knox — along with Monica Lewinsky, who knows a thing or two about being unfairly judged — are both executive producers on this eight-episode series," said Amy Amatangelo at Paste magazine. (August 20, Hulu)

'Long Story Short'

"BoJack Horseman," a melancholy and brilliant series about a washed-up sitcom actor who also happened to be a horse, made history as Netflix's first original animated show in 2014. Now, 11 years later, creator Raphael Bob-Waksberg is back on the network with a new adult animation, and he is joined by former collaborator Lisa Hanawalt (also known for "Tuca & Bertie"). "Long Story Short" is a comedy following the siblings of one family — the Schwoopers — from childhood to adulthood. It has already been renewed for a second season ahead of the series premiere. (August 22, Netflix)

We Brits don't think of ourselves as susceptible to religious cults, said Ben Dowell in The Times. But this harrowing BBC2 documentary serves to shatter that complacency. Its focus is the Jesus Army, a sect established in Northamptonshire in 1969 by a charismatic preacher named Noel Stanton.

Hundreds of people flocked to hear his sermons, and many gave up their livelihoods and possessions to join his "evangelical rural community". Stanton, however, exploited rather than helped his followers, many of whom were young or otherwise vulnerable. He subjected them to an "increasingly doctrinaire" set of rules and punishments, based on strictly patriarchal values, and initiated a horrifying culture of ritualised sexual abuse.

As early as 1978, a cult member who'd been punished for reading books was found dead on a nearby railway line, said Madeleine Davies in the Church Times. Yet Stanton's movement kept growing; by the 2000s, it had 3,000 members and millions in assets.

The Jesus Army always seemed weird and sinister, said Rachel Aroesti in The Guardian, yet the scale of its crimes was only exposed after Stanton's death in 2009, when an investigation revealed that it was "a haven for paedophiles".

The filmmakers estimate that one in six children involved with the cult were abused; 539 ex-members have been accused of abuse, but only 11 have been convicted. The lasting message of the documentary is that, as a society, we are shockingly bad at bringing sex abusers to justice.

Are British audiences ready for a sympathetic portrayal of a convicted paedophile?

That is one question posed by Jimmy McGovern's "Unforgivable", said Barbara Ellen in The Observer. This one-off BBC2 drama introduces us to the Mitchells, a working-class family in Liverpool that is "buckling under the strain of an uncle who sexually abused his young nephew". The culprit, Joe (an excellent Bobby Schofield), is on early release from prison. He is forbidden even from attending his mother's funeral, and is spurned by his sister (Anna Friel), whose abused son is now being marked out for his unruly behaviour at school. Joe has "polluted the entire family" – and he knows it.

McGovern's script doesn't gloss over the "catastrophic impact" of Joe's actions, said Carol Midgley in The Times. But it's bracing to see the aftermath of child sex abuse from the abuser's perspective: it is spelled out for us, and we are asked even to understand it. Joe, it turns out, was himself abused as a child, and he is now living in a halfway house run by a nun (Anna Maxwell Martin) and is consumed by self-hatred. It's testament to the writing that "you actually find yourself wanting him to catch a break".

We're left to decide whether we should feel any compassion for Joe, said Anita Singh in The Telegraph. The drama ends rather too neatly: it is as if "McGovern was told he needed to wrap it up on a positive note"; but it's otherwise a "thought-provoking piece" on a subject most writers wouldn't dare touch.

"The Assassin" is an "absolute cracker", said Tom Peck in The Times. Comedy thrillers are hard to "pull off" but Amazon's new six-part show is an "education in how it should be done".

Keeley Hawes stars as Julie, a former hitwoman who is living a quiet life on a Greek island when she's "drawn out of retirement for one last job". To make things even more stressful, her son Edward (Freddie Highmore) has just come to visit her for the first time in four years.

Weaving together "thrills and laughs" in "very quick succession", episode one sees the pair take a break from a "full-on massacre", during which Edward asks his "blood-spattered, gun-toting mother: 'Are you really not going to tell me why you're some kind of perimenopausal James Bond?'"

Show creators Harry and Jack Williams ("The Tourist") have successfully breathed new life into a "familiar formula", said Pat Stacey in The Irish Independent. Packed with "corkscrew twists" and "enough shady characters to block out the Greek sun", it's "terrific fun".

"Stylish, witty" and "tightly written", the show is "perfectly crafted preposterousness", said Lucy Mangan in The Guardian. Hawes becomes even more "impressive" with every role she takes on, this time trading "barbed exchanges" with Highmore, her "nimble and perfectly pitched" son.

The pair's "spiky chemistry is off the charts", said Emily Baker in The i Paper. But the plot moves along at such a "zippy pace" that I found it difficult to keep up with the "tangled mess of storylines".

The set-up is a little "stilted", ticking off "every cliché in the book" in the first episode, said Rebecca Nicholson in the Financial Times. By the second instalment, though, the show "settles into solidly entertaining potboiler territory".

There's usually a lull in the summer television schedule, so this "tongue-in-cheek action caper" is a very "welcome" addition, said Anita Singh in The Telegraph. Yes, there are some "logical inconsistencies" and the pace "slackens" after the first two episodes. "Don't think too hard about it. Just enjoy the ride."

By this stage, you may feel you've had enough of "cosy crime", said Lucy Mangan in The Guardian, a genre that has been rather overdone lately.

But this six-part series, set in 1946, is a standout pleasure (on U&Alibi). Mark Gatiss – who created and co-wrote the series – stars as Gabriel Book, an antiquarian bookseller with brilliant crime-solving abilities. He has performed some heroic but "mysterious" service during the War, and carries a letter from Churchill which grants him permission to take part in police investigations.

Book is "a super-sleuth without a superpower", said Benji Wilson in The Telegraph: his secret is simply that he is very well-read, and as a result he understands "what makes people tick". His cases take him from Whitechapel Prison to a luxury hotel, and follow an Agatha Christie-style formula – which, though hackneyed, remains reliably compelling. Book is also gay, hiding in "a lavender marriage": this, pre-decriminalisation, risks compromising him, adding a crucial element of jeopardy to the proceedings. It's not "gritty" or "game-changing", but "Bookish" is great fun. And its starry cast – which includes Paul McGann, Daniel Mays and Joely Richardson – "adds extra lustre".

As a veteran of "Sherlock", Gatiss has form with detective drama, said Carol Midgley in The Times. This one is so full of genre clichés, it shouldn't work: but he is brilliant in it, and the dialogue – particularly between Book and his wife – is superb. The show has "depth, wit, campness, a gorgeous 1946 aesthetic – and dark bite". What's not to like?

What happened

CBS is ending "The Late Show with Stephen Colbert" next year, its host told a live audience Thursday. The late-night talk show debuted in 1993 with David Letterman as host before Colbert took over in 2015. Earlier this month, CBS's parent company Paramount settled a $16 million lawsuit with President Donald Trump over a 2024 episode of "60 Minutes" Trump alleged was deceptively edited. On Monday, Colbert slammed the payment as a "big fat bribe."

Who said what

This decision was "purely financial" and unrelated to the show's "performance, content, or other matters happening at Paramount," CBS executives said in a statement. Indeed, media companies are "growing wary of the high price tags" of production while younger audiences turn to digital video, said Variety.

But the cancellation comes "just THREE DAYS" after Colbert's monologue on the Paramount settlement, Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren said on X, adding that "America deserves to know if his show was canceled for political reasons."

What next?

"The Late Show" will officially end in May of 2026. Colbert said he was looking forward to hosting for the next 10 months.