It feels like the term “streaming era” is beginning to feel antiquated. It conjures a time when we were excited about the prospect of having all of our favorite shows archived and immediately available to us on the small handful of platforms we could pay a very reasonable price for without worrying about Netflix suddenly kicking you off your family’s account, or HBO sending their semi-annual email notification that their prices are going up (again) after they’ve needlessly cleansed their library of a considerable faction of content specifically made for their own platform. Or your bartender telling you that no, they can’t put on the Knicks game because they can’t figure out how to access Prime.
Taking a less medium-as-message approach, though, it’s hard not to be optimistic about the slate of shows readily available if and when you do momentarily put your frustrations aside and resubscribe, if only for long enough to watch all eight episodes of any one of dozens of can’t-miss shows originating in 2025, or returning for an epic final season. Despite being a banner year for bad streaming business deals, these 10 shows certainly don’t reflect that bleak outlook for the future.
10. Dying for Sex
Dying for Sex is far more than its provocative title suggests: It’s a poignant and uncompromising dramedy about a woman reclaiming her body and her life in the face of Stage IV cancer. When Molly (Michelle Williams) receives a terminal diagnosis, she makes the radical decision to leave her emotionally distant husband and embark on a sexual awakening. This quest for pleasure—for an elusive first orgasm with a partner—becomes a profound act of self-discovery, and challenges her concept of living one’s best life. The series masterfully balances awkward humor in its exploration of kink and dating apps with the gut-wrenching reality of a life quickly winding down.
Yet the true heart of the show is the fierce, life-affirming bond between Molly and her best friend, Nikki (a radiant Jenny Slate), whose unwavering caregiving becomes a complex love story in its own right. As Molly’s body fails, her self-determination soars, allowing her to confront past trauma and rediscover genuine connection. Dying for Sex ultimately transcends the subject of sex to offer a deeply moving meditation on what it means to be fully alive—to laugh, to desire, and to be seen—right up until the final exhale. It’s a tear-inducing, necessary reminder to embrace every messy moment. — Kyle Lemmon
9. Stranger Things
At long last, one of the only reasons to subscribe to Netflix is back! After a three-and-a-half-year wait, Stranger Things fans have been treated to four episodes thus far, with three more on Christmas and the epic finale on New Year’s Day. Far from jumping the shark—and even though most of the cast are grown-ass adults and fit the casting of It Chapter Two rather than its predecessor—Stranger Things still has quite a lot of bite. It looks and sounds fantastic, as the high budget is well spent on stellar effects and sound, and the characters are all dealing with the trauma of the series’ very dark and demented fourth season and its attack by main villain Vecna, also known as Henry or One.
Vecna has reformed himself, and the older and wiser residents of Hawkins, Indiana have to do everything they can to vanquish him for good. So far, Vecna’s plan to kidnap kids one at a time and turn them to evil was temporarily stopped by our heroes, but Vecna got away with it anyway, including Mike and Nancy’s youngest sister, Holly. Thankfully, past victim Max, who’s been in a coma until now, is alive and well in the Upside Down and ready to kick Vecna’s ass once and for all. This show is ready to go out on a high note as one of the best thriller-horror, action-comedy adventure series on streaming. Stranger Things has been a cultural phenomenon for nearly a decade without stopping, and deserves all of its accolades. — Steve Horton
8. The Studio
Since the day Hollywood was born, the need to poke fun at its own inner workings has existed. From Sullivan’s Travels in 1941 through the witty quadruple threat of the 1950s—Sunset Boulevard, All About Eve, The Bad and the Beautiful, Singin’ in the Rain—and into modernist fare such as State and Main, Wag the Dog, Tropic Thunder, Get Shorty, and even the indie film-world of Living in Oblivion, all have comically shown no mercy to their own business of show. The Studio goes just a little bit further than the scathing satires of yore, a lot faster (and on mushrooms), more organically (its real-time cinematography looks like it should be seen on a big screen), and a whole lot darker into the sad, kinky, self-absorbed abyss of the state of cinema in the 21st century.
The show depicts a depressingly familiar time and a place when classically cynical Martin Scorsese (playing himself) can be reduced to childlike sobbing over an IP (the Kool-Aid Man, of all things) gone wrong, and perennial good-guy Ron Howard can become a four-letter-word-spouting asshole. No sacred cow of Tinseltown remains sainted in the eyes of The Studio, and, as with Living in Oblivion before it, no artist is beyond corruption within the walls of the titular studio—not even indie icons such as Sarah Polley or Squid and the Whale’s Owen Kline, who gets recruited for a cheesy slasher film. This is likely because as a multi-media, multi-hyphenate pair themselves, co-creators Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg have witnessed it all and understand just how stupid, venal, precious, and insecure their showbiz peers can be. — A.D. Amorosi
7. The Chair Company
Early in The Chair Company, Tim Robinson’s character exasperatedly sums up the trouble with our modern, hypercapitalist world: “People make garbage and you can’t talk to any of them.” It’s a pretty tight thesis statement (and weirdly resonant) for a series that feels interested in looking into the sort of conspiracy-in-plain-sight that’s becoming increasingly familiar to our everyday lives as money-making grifts become more transparent. It’s as if their perpetrators have become conscious of the fact that our days are far too busy to ever find the time to venture down their criminal rabbit holes, as we struggle to keep up with exclusive menswear store group chats and perfecting RC car rope bridge stunts.
Yet in being a Tim Robinson venture, The Chair Company is far from succinct in its messaging, offering scraps of information to whet our appetite for post-neo-noir intrigue in between being treated to new characters who land just about anywhere on the spectrum from real-life figures familiar to family and white-collar life to caricatures who could only be drawn up by the man who gave us I Think You Should Leave—someone whose all-caps sense of humor contrasts with the sense we get that he’s lived his entire life completely isolated from exposure to any other humans up until this moment. If Severance opened the door for a new era of workplace-set TV series just as The Office was beginning to lose its cultural cache, The Chair Company offers an equally strange reboot of the genre for the comedy world, even going so far as to recycle the role of the goofy and seemingly incompetent boss who may or may not have had an encounter with a former high school classmate in the middle of the work day that HR should probably know about. — Mike LeSuer
6. Pluribus
Vince Gilligan's Pluribus is a sci-fi triumph that flips the post-apocalyptic script by trading zombies for hyper-agreeable, blissed-out humans. The plot follows the misanthropic romance novelist Carol Sturka (the always-brilliant Rhea Seehorn), one of the few people immune to a mysterious virus that merges humanity into a relentlessly peaceful hive mind: the “Others.” The genius of Pluribus is how the Others' collective consciousness can be read as a chilling metaphor for the creeping threat of artificial intelligence. Their utopia is a nightmare of conformity, where individuality, anger, and even creativity are rendered obsolete—or worse, lethal to the hive.
Shot in New Mexico, like Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul before it, Gilligan’s latest work is bursting with beautiful locations and taut plotting. Pluribus is rare marquee television with an actual vision, driven home by the show’s deliberate end-credit disclaimer: “This show was made by humans.” Gilligan’s story is a slow-burning thrill ride that asks a profound question: What is lost when the messy, contradictory aspects of human nature are homogenized for maximum efficiency and contentment? The answer is a world where only the curmudgeonly outlier can offer a glimmer of genuine hope. — Kyle Lemmon
5. Severance
Season two of Severance picked up right where season one’s cliffhanger left off. The first episode almost lampshades the real-life three-year wait between seasons, opening on Mark’s Innie waking up back in the elevator at Lumon, where after a long-take race through labyrinthine halls he’s told by fan-favorite Mr. Milchick that months have passed outside. Things only get twistier from there as he keeps digging to unravel what’s really going on at the company—and what happened to his Outie’s wife, Gemma. Season two doesn’t just avoid the sophomore slump, it takes the stakes of the first season to new and stranger heights, weaving in more about the mythology of Lumon, its off-putting founder Kier, and its scorned acolyte Harmony Kobel.
There are new Lumonites to meet as the mystery deepens—including a skin-crawling debut from Sarah Bock as Miss Huang and fun features from Alia Shawkat, Bob Balaban, and Gwendoline Christie—but the star-studded cast never feels bloated. There’s also a fascinating theme of love in the time of the severance procedure, this season’s emotional center. In the office, Dylan has a not-quite affair with his Outie’s wife while Mark and Helly search for Gemma as their own connection deepens. Outside, Irving navigates his Innie’s tryst with Christopher Walken’s quietly menacing Burt, while his Innie grows increasingly suspicious of Helly. Desire is a perfect pressure point for all these kaleidoscoping selves, and it makes the season’s ending on another cliffhanger (and a “Windmills of Your Mind” needle drop) feel not only earned but destined. Kier willing, we won’t have to wait quite as long for season three. — Annie Parnell
4. Task
The year’s meditative standout is a show about cops and robbers, thieves and alcoholics, good guys who aren’t so great and bad guys who want to be better. Task takes the supposed dichotomy of “good” and “bad” and spins it, exploring two fathers on opposite sides of the law. With his follow-up to Mare of Easttown, writer-creator Brad Ingelsby again finds himself in his home state of Pennsylvania telling a bleak, affecting crime story. With Mark Ruffalo as FBI Agent Tom Brandis and Tom Pelphrey as garbage-man-turned-robber Robbie Prendergrast, Task is expertly crafted in its specificity of place and character. Ruffalo and Pelphrey fill their Heat-esque roles and become intertwined over the seven-episode season, with both actors delivering internal, wrenching performances as men plagued by the past, informing each present decision, unable to move too far into the future regardless of outlandish plans or impending court dates.
Ingelsby surrounds his stars with a supporting cast that audiences might recognize, even if they may not be able to name them: Fabien Frankel, Alison Oliver, and Emilia Jones standing above the rest. Task is thrilling, certainly, and has its fair share of shock, but it’s not about gunshots and chase-downs. Ingelsby concerns himself with the consequences of that violence. Who gets left behind? Who must pick up the pieces? And who bears both the weight of guilt and responsibility moving forward? To Ingelsby, violence and death don’t seem momentary; they’re ongoing, unrelenting, spiritual, and constant. — Michael Frank
3. The Pitt
Another medical show, right? There have to be more than a dozen on the air simultaneously between network TV and streaming. But to paraphrase That Thing You Do!, this one’s special, isn’t it? The Pitt stands out from not just all medical dramas but all dramas for two primary reasons. The first is that the entire season takes place in harrowing real time during an entire work shift at an emergency hospital in Pittsburgh, with each episode covering roughly an hour. Think 24, but much, much, much more tense. You pay for the whole seat on HBO Max, but you’ll only need the edge.
The second thing is Noah Wyle. His character in The Pitt, Robby, is about as far from ER’s John Carter as possible while still being played by the same actor. Robby is troubled, fatally flawed, and prone to panic attacks and anger, but is also extremely good at his job. In short, he’s a terrific protagonist in an incredibly well-cast ensemble. I should also mention that like real-life emergency rooms, The Pitt is bloody as hell. The series’ creators and executive producers worked on ER, but unlike that show’s seemingly perfect, superhuman cast of doctors, this group of miracle workers has flaws up the wazoo but do their best to overcome them and save lives, and that’s really what the show is all about. The phrase “must see TV” was never more true. — Steve Horton
2. Pee-wee as Himself
It’s no surprise that Paul Reubens wanted complete control of his personal narrative as well as that of his more familiar, silly, childlike comic creation, Pee-wee Herman. It’s like the song “Paper Moon” with its cardboard seas and canvas skies—the illusion, the make-believe, works best when you allow it entry, make it all real. Across two documentary episodes centered (reluctantly, it seems, especially near its closing hour) on 40-plus hours of Reubens’ interviews—to say nothing of a well-kept treasure trove of rare home movies, photographs, and video footage—the documentary’s director/producer Matt Wolf gets to the central truths of both Pee-wee and Paul.
This includes, among other things, that Reubens worked out every element, tic, and nuance of who and what “Pee-wee” would be after years of showbiz failure; that the man inside the live-action cartoon was gay, but not publicly “out,” despite all of Herman’s character’s clues; that Reubens’ ruination after his 1991 and 2002 arrests were personal shocks to his system beyond his aesthetic, and were based, in his mind, on targeted homophobia. Going deeper, however, is the pull-push-and-prod of subject matter and interviewing filmmaker, that self-examining narratives are to be held dear until the end (the very end, when you consider that Reubens’ final recorded phone message to Wolf included in this docuseries came the day before his death), and that reality is for suckers, and less fun than make-believe. — A.D. Amorosi
1. The Rehearsal
The Rehearsal is Nathan Fielder’s playground. Season two of his HBO project concerns air travel, specifically communication-related, pilot/copilot plane crashes. His brand of uber-seriousness mixed with absurdism reaches new heights here, both literally and figuratively. In this season, the budget balloons, and Fielder uses his expanded resources to investigate the relationships within a plane’s cockpit. An incomplete list of insanities in the season: Fielder creates a fake singing competition, trolls Paramount, explores questions about autism, builds a replica airport terminal, mimics Sully Sullenberger, and completes a flight with the now-coined “The Miracle Over the Mojave.”
All of these actions remain in service of Fielder’s much larger ideas on self-consciousness and overconfidence, on how human connection (or lack thereof) drives every interaction, on how rehearsing life unmasks the performances we’re all putting on for one another. As with the first season, and Nathan for You before it, Fielder seeks out and somehow finds singular personalities and unbelievable everyday people. He seems committed to oddity, but it’s hard to find blame with this pursuit, as the series consistently reminds the audience that there’s no limit to shock (or cringe). Fielder is that friend who begins a comedy bit one day and continues it for an entire year; it’s funny, almost annoying, but suddenly amazing. He follows through on his promises, his ideas, and his goals. He’ll take a situation to the point of no return, dressing as a baby, breastfeeding from an animatronic mother, yet still convincing a group of actors to let him fly them over the Western United States.
The Rehearsal remains unthinkable and implausible until you watch it. Fielder operates on his own level, on his own terms, and luckily, on HBO’s dime to create a show that feels both timely and evergreen. And every once in a while, viewers are lucky enough to see his mask fall, to see the smallest smirk form on his lips, and we know that he (most likely) is laughing along with us. It’s not an overreaction to call him a mad genius, a comedian and social commentator who will delight and surprise his audience while working in the ethical gray areas of television. Fielder strings together these moral situations under the guise of comedy, but when we’re not laughing, we’re thinking—not just about airplanes and pilots, but about how all humans interact. And like his show, he’s unwilling to give easy or quick answers. Instead, he urges us to sit back, relax, and enjoy the ride. — Michael Frank
