My 2025 TV Rankings

Is there more new TV coming in 2025? Who can say? Right now, all but one of the shows on my Best of 2025 list have wrapped up. Barring a new series getting a surprise drop in the next few weeks or Pluribus suddenly turning to garbage, this is the list I'd be releasing in January 2026. So why not release it in December 2025?

Number 8: Haha, You Clowns
This was also on my list last year (or maybe the year before), but those episodes were part of the Adult Swim Smalls program. This year, Haha, You Clowns got a full show, and I love it.

Haha, You Clowns is an animated family sitcom where the dad looks like Tim Allen and his three sons all look like Zachery Ty Bryan, who played one of Allen's sons on Home Improvement. The family tries to move forward with life and cheer each other up after the Full House-like death of the mom character. It's a very sweet show, though the characters' naivete is played for laughs, which is to say the show isn't cloying. I can't really describe how nice it is to watch Haha, You Clowns in the ten minutes before I fall asleep on the couch.

Number 7: The Curious Case of Natalia Grace, season 3:
Look, I don't feel good about putting an Investigation Discovery show on this list. It's like saying the sixth best sandwich I had this year came out of a toilet. But this series, which I watched in full in January 2025, as the third season was airing, is extremely well-researched and extremely upsetting. And it's as manipulative as anything ID has put out, which adds an unfortunate grime to even its best moments. It is dark. It is not good that it exists.

The show starts as a mystery about whether a person was 6 or 22 years old and eventually encompasses narcissism, abuse that begets abuse and the complicity in that, the way we treat people with physical disabilities, the cost of even just being alive as a person with disabilities, the adoption and foster care processes in America and the way we treat orphans vs. the way other countries do, male pattern baldness, religious extremism in the form of a Christian cult, which a person is saved from in a daring escape, and the limits of empathy.

An episode in the third season is in part about the question of whether a person is allowed to blow up your life just because they have been traumatized. The show dispenses information to the viewer in a smart, interesting way, where you think one thing, are led to think the complete opposite and then are left to reconcile everything you've learned.

But, again, it's very clearly suffering from the issues every Investigation Discovery show has: cheap reenactments, a few morally questionable decisions from the crew and hopelessly boring camerawork. There's a woman on this show who is disconnected from the entire story and is just around to recap everything that's happened, but with a question mark and disbelieving tone, so you never forget what you just learned five minutes earlier.

My quick recap: A child is adopted and her parents are told she is 6. They decide she's actually 22 and that she is, inspired by the movie The Orphan, trying to kill everybody in her new family. She is actually the child she says she was and the Orphan angle is being made up by a profoundly twisted mom and a dad who goes along with everything she says, becoming both a victim and an abuser, but you don't really find that out for sure until a half-dozen hours in.

The dad, Mark Fischer, is maybe the single weirdest, most awkward human being who has ever lived. He starts out with a frightening wife and three sons and he mostly walks around apelike. He brags about having 13 TVs and 12 couches in his house. And then he gets divorced and is estranged from two of his sons. In the third season, ID catches up with him and he looks like Waingro from Heat.

The funny thing to me, the only thing I couldn't stop laughing at, was the scene in the first season where Mark starts making popcorn in one of those big machines in his living room.

Mark, post-divorce, talks about how the popcorn machine is a small slice of the normal, happy life he used to have. He makes popcorn and his son enters the room to get some in what I think is the only time in the series that father and son are framed in the same shot. And Mark says something where he's clearly half-crying and half-forcing out a laugh and he's like "Ope, he smelled the popcorn, here he comes!" And Mark explains that his family used to eat popcorn and watch movies together two or three times a week. And now the popcorn maker is this guy's one luxury item and the one thing that can still connect him to a sunnier time when, as we will find out in the next ten hours, he was in a profoundly abusive relationship and at the very best did nothing as a six-year-old girl was hurt and at worst was actively complicit in that abuse. And now he's watching the Wahlberg remake of The Italian Job and getting the one son who still talks to him to come into the room by making popcorn, like he's a Looney Tunes character tricking somebody else with the aroma of a pie on a windowsill.

There's something so dark there that it becomes absurdly funny. It's somebody one millimeter from the edge, and there's only one thing occupying that tiny distance and keeping him together and it isn't even human connection or anything slightly abstract.

I think about Bulletball, maybe the saddest five minutes ever consecutively broadcast on TV that didn't also feature a national tragedy or war crimes. I have watched its big appearance at least a dozen times in the last decade-and-a-half. A man goes on an invention-pitching reality show (a Shark Tank forerunner) and shows off a game he's created, which he's certain will catch on and become a tournament sport. There's nothing to the game, though. You put your hands on a bespoke playing table and slap a ball past your opponent's hands. It's a game I play with my three-year-old, but we do it on the ground with whatever ball happens to be within arm's reach.

As the segment continues, it turns out the creator of Bulletball has gone through a divorce and lost all of his money in the pursuit of turning Bulletball into the next table tennis or air hockey. He's given everything and yet has continued to cling to Bulletball. The judges practically beg him to move on and leave Bulletball behind.

He's made some moves since that TV show appearance. The dude filmed a commercial and got a Bulletball tournament set up in a St. Louis high school. I sincerely hope he's okay.

It's so chilling when the judge begs him to not lose his mind, because he says it like you can't ever get your mind back if you genuinely lose it. There won't be a redemption, it'll just be "too late." And in The Strange Case of Natalia Grace, Mark is about to lose his mind and then it would just be "too late" for the rest of his life. His first 50 years led up to this and then, with every day after that, it was too late to get anything done.

That is artisanal suffering. That is handcrafted sadness in a form and on a frequency that is rarely filmed and even more rarely broadcast. Larry Clark never shot anything this hopeless or exploitative. Ingmar Bergman never got this far under my skin. It is reprehensible that any of this was filmed, let alone broadcast, let alone edited for entertainment purposes. I hate myself for watching it.

So that's the seventh best TV show I watched this year.

Number 6: "Eulogy," from Black Mirror:

This is mostly Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind with more digital effects and Paul Giamattis, but this type of thing gets right to my heart and always has. A man remembers his life and admits some mistakes he'd purposely skewed in his memory so he came off as the good guy. If you want somebody to do that remembering, Paul Giamatti is your guy, delivering a sadness that he's almost mocking himself for experiencing until the gravity of everything forces him to strip away the tough skin artifice.

The "Eulogy" episode of Black Mirror ended up having a lot in common with Noah Baumbach's Jay Kelly, which I watched yesterday and also liked. I'm not oblivious here. I understand that I am a mark for people reflecting on their fuck-ups years down the line. I get that if a person stares into the distance and says "I wonder if you remember this the same way I do," I will forgive the schmaltz. I know that when a screenwriter has their main character mentally confront long-simmering regrets, I'll award their work an extra fifty MoviePointz. I crave it.

Number 5: Task

It felt so good to have a few weekly HBO shows this year. The next four entries were weekly HBO shows. There's a baseline of quality there and I do not take it for granted. Other things I don't take for granted: Mark Ruffalo's acting, the impossibility of mimicking the Delco accent (all of these actors are working miracles), violence that makes me squeamish but doesn't feel exploitative, fully fleshed-out subplots in crime stories, teenagers who sound like teenagers. I tried to watch so many crime shows this year: The Last Frontier and Dope Thief on Apple TV+, some Netflix bullshit I can't remember, etc. This is the only one that wrapped itself up in the perfect number of episodes.

Number 4: The Chair Company

I suspect the second season of this show will pretty dramatically change how I felt about this one, because the ending here, as funny as it was, felt more abrupt than any of the season's previous cliffhangers. It felt like The Chair Company could have wrapped itself up in one or two more episodes, but we're instead getting at least one more season, and I don't know if the show can sustain the give-and-take it handled so well before that final half hour. For now, I can say this season was one of the funniest, most exciting things I watched in 2025.

Number 3: The White Lotus

I guess people didn't like this season of The White Lotus? I saw "TheFilmMemes," an intensely unfunny Instagram account, complain that the show was just Mike White describing rich people problems, the Instagram algorithm showing me a post the way a CSI villain throws acid into a victim's face. It feels like people are either willfully misinterpreting this show or a portion of The White Lotus' viewers sneezed their critical analysis skills out of their ears midway through this season of the show. Or people just get salty when everybody likes a thing, as if that means the thing must be totally surface-level, or the people you work with and your neighbors couldn't possibly like something good. I hate that shit.

Number 2: The Rehearsal

Special mention for the Sully episode, which was the hardest I laughed all year. This was the show that best approached the TV season format in 2025. There are some funny moments in the first episode, but it really was Nathan Fielder laying out his thesis and hinting at the places he'd be going in the ensuing five episodes. In that way, this season was an essay, while still naturally incorporating things that didn't seem like they had anything to do with airline safety and pilot communication, i.e. the whole Paramount Nazis bit or dog cloning. It's exciting to think that wherever Fielder is, whatever he's doing, he's most likely in the process of making a project I could maybe, on an outside chance, predict 5% of.

Number 1: Pluribus

I wrote a long, personal thing about Pluribus here. I like knowing I'm in good hands. The week after I wrote that, Pluribus ended an episode on the kind of cliffhanger I'd normally hate, where the protagonist sees a thing that we don't, is shocked, and then the episode ends. But I like thinking about this show and I like that these writers, actors, directors, art people, etc. have made enough good work that I have confidence in where they're going. I'd normally hate that cliffhanger because it would feel like the creative team buying themselves some time. It would feel cheap. If that concern doesn't even enter my mind, because I enjoyed every episode of Better Call Saul so deeply, I can appreciate it as a little stinger.

There are two ways to look at that. One is the optimistic way I just wrote about. The other is with cynicism, thinking that I'm allowing Vince Gilligan and his people to coast. Ultimately, it doesn't matter. I'm enjoying the show and I don't need to build a perfect logic bridge to understand why.

But I also, and here's a VERY MILD SPOILER, was surprised by where the show went with that stinger. My wife and I correctly assumed what the protagonist was seeing, but I assumed the moment's storytelling purpose would allow the show to move a subplot forward by giving the other cognizant characters a reason to trust Carol. It didn't. Even when presenting a reveal they'd heavily hinted at, the writers used it to go in an unexpected direction. That's being in good hands. Those are people I trust to make art that I will think seriously about for a long time.

I'm sure I praised her the last time I wrote about Pluribus, but I can't help but mention Rhea Seehorn's work as Carol. We all know Seehorn best from her previous role as Tutorial Witch in the 1997 Magic: The Gathering video game, but I keep thinking about how different Carol is from her second-most-loved role, Better Call Saul's Kim Wexler. Because Saul was a prequel to a series Seehorn never appeared in, I spent Saul's entire run worried her character was going to be killed. Kim was more of an audience surrogate than Jimmy/Saul was, especially in the sense that she could see the good in him like we could. Here, Seehorn's playing the audience surrogate again, but in reverse: her character is the only one who realizes she's in a dystopia.

The show would fall apart if Seehorn wasn't so good at raging against everybody else's complicity. She's got character flaws I'd find annoying in a different show, i.e. if The Joining hadn't happened and this was mainly a show about a writer, I'd find her dismissal of her supporters suffocating cruel, but here, in Pluribus, I never think she's "too much." I never think she's the asshole. Given how much of Carol's dialogue is made up of complaining, that's a miracle of writing and of Seehorn's performance. I'd watch a new Pluribus episode very day of the year if I could.