Shows I Watched in 2025
Now that it’s officially Q4 of 2026, it’s time for me to finally get around to posting the list of TV shows I watched – in 2025. Not shows from 2025, just shows I watched last year, which I’ve been sitting on for nine months just getting around to posting. Tale as old as time. As usual, I didn’t watch that many shows – they take such a long time, and I watch so many movies instead; still I wanted to share what I did get to, ranked, in ascending order of quality: https://www.serializd.com/list/Watched-in-2025-259953
12. Moonrise
Moonrise might be produced by Wit Studio of Attack on Titan fame, but unfortunately this microwaved remix of the standard lunar revolution plot that has been done better elsewhere is about a dramatically inert as a car commercial, reminding the viewer throughout that it is cobbled together from desaturated scraps of other shows that I’d much rather be watching.
11. Star Wars: Visions
I’ll give Disney credit for pursuing a good idea and inviting accomplished animation studios to take a crack at Star Wars, and some of these are fun or flashy to look at, but ultimately it’s a missed opportunity. The shorts hew so close to the standard tropes that they aren’t interesting, and they are artistically elevated only by the style of each studio’s animation – and the problem with that is that I’ve seen most of these studios do far better work on their own, without this IP.
10. Alien: Earth
This is a frustrating show. It has the conceptual elements of something interesting: a strange corporate geopolitics; a good lead performance by Sydney Chandler; a commendable willingness to pursue a plot that isn’t just alien horror but instead adds an interesting new sci-fi concept; and, of course, the promise of the premise. It is hampered by flat writing, by a baffling inability to photograph the xenomorph in a way even remotely as scary as the movies, and most of all, by failing to deliver on its premise. The whole juice of a show about the xenomorph on earth ought to be that if one of these things ever makes landfall, that’s the end of the world and the beginning of nightmares. If that’s where the show is planning to go, I think they’ve already blown the pacing and the seriousness of that threat, and in so doing they’ve completely deflated their dramatic hook.
9. Foundation
I watched the first two season of Foundation in 2025, and I have some problems with the show, but it’s a jump up from the ones before it on this list. The writing and execution of the characterization doesn’t provide enough of an on-ramp for the audience to catch up to where the actors want to go emotionally, so the human side of it struggles a bit. But, in fairness, the books also struggled on that front, and the characters always seemed a bit like pawns moved at the behest of the plot’s ideas. And grand ideas this does have, though the tenuous logic of psychohistory is undermined by the show’s determination to keep the characters coming back and freight individuals with weighty purpose. But goodness gracious does this show ever look amazing. I want the Foundation’s wardrobe, and I want their constellated twilight skies. And I want to watch Lee Pace strut about and declaim all his imperious nonsense – I could watch that all day.
8. Shogun
Shogun is very pretty, even if it does kind of have that fuzziness and greyness that you see more and more in modern shows. If you watch any of the good samurai movies, you’ll get better images; but the kimono here are pretty unbeatable. Aside from the costume designer, the show is stolen by Tadanobu Asano, who is a real delight every minute he’s on screen. I’ve watched a lot of samurai movies, and I’m used to them whipping their swords out at any excuse to kill themselves, but watching this I still came away shaking my head and thinking that this is truly what a real culture of death looks like.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AN2SZ4H4Qzk
7. The Bear
There are moments when The Bear is too loquacious and overwrought, but then there are a couple of episodes that individually are as good as any I’ve ever seen on TV. Besides that, I love the naked sincerity of a show in love with its subject, and I love everyone in this cast – especially Ebon!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1K3z62yoiOA
6. For All Mankind
For All Mankind is perhaps actually my favorite of these shows, the one I enjoy as comfort food the most. It’s like crack for a ‘90s kid liberal who loved The West Wing, was catechized in Boomer historiography and the postwar consensus, and who longs achingly for the Space Age. It’s an alternate history made out of pure nostalgia, a kind of fantasy answer to Star Trek’s mirror universe, a world I’d like to live in – but it does all of this without becoming too silly or saccharine, and amazingly lands the spaceship again and again on planets of increasing apogee. I started the first season a few days after Trump’s return to power, and in that moment I found its depiction of people reckoning with shocking bad news that called their whole imagined future of the free world into question – reckoning with it, and moving forward, and rising above it – strangely meaningful.
5. The Rehearsal
The Rehearsal isn’t just incredibly funny and awkward; it’s so committed to its bit that I genuinely question my understanding of what about it is calculated and what is sincere. The first season has Nathan Fielder, possibly the greatest Canadian to ever live, raising a child as an experiment, among other things. The second season is entirely about airline safety, and features attempts to induce the tulpa of Sully Sullenberger in Nathan; a depiction of the show’s own production company as Nazis; and culminates in a comedy TV show genuinely testifying before Congress on a serious matter unrelated to comedy or television.
I really had no interest or desire for a prequel show about Cassian Andor, the least interesting character from Rogue One, but Tony Gilroy proved that what matters is not the story one tells, but how well one tells it. Andor is probably the single best thing to come out of the Star Wars universe since 1982 (and I say that as someone who gave The Last Jedi five stars). This show feels so desperately vital in the simplicity of its cry for freedom against tyranny, executed flawlessly against all odds.
3. Severance
Severance is a very strange show that cannot be easily described, but every little movement of it is choreographed genius. I wish every single cast member could get Emmys simultaneously.
2. & 1. Twin Peaks & Twin Peaks: The Return
I grew up a few miles from the three towns where Twin Peaks filmed: Snoqualmie, Fall City, and North Bend. I had always heard of the show that had been a sensation the year I was born, but I never really bothered to check it out until now. Actually, I was a bit milquetoast on David Lynch; I thought Mulholland Drive was very good, but I didn’t really understand the adoration it received in film circles.
Well, I watched Twin Peaks, and The Return, and boy do I get it now. I don’t care that the show is befuddlingly silly most of the time, that the bulk of the second season is preoccupied with some of the most inexplicably bad writing I’ve ever seen, or that the returning third season, twenty-five years later, spends so much time in Las Vegas – the things which are warm and special about the town, and the things which are haunting and abominable about it, are too powerful to be impeded by anything else. This show haunts you. And even though it’s not a TV show, I have to talk about the pinnacle of Twin Peaks, the thing everything hinges around – the movie Fire Walk With Me. In Fire Walk With Me, or as I call it, The Passion of Laura Palmer, Sheryl Lee gives the most agonizing and profoundly disturbing performance I’ve ever seen on screen. It reminds me of Herzog only showing his reaction to the mauling footage in Grizzly Man, and not the carnage itself; David Lynch as opened a window into Hell, and he keeps the camera pointed just away from it, so we can’t see anything but the flickering light in the corner of the eye – but Laura can, and we see it all in her face.
