The nine biggest TV shows of 2025 so far: Why you should watch them, and where you can catch them

Andor

Fredric Jameson said, “It’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.” And it’s easier for Disney to imagine a worker’s critique of power set in the Star Wars universe than on the slightly shabbier real planet where we actually live.

In Andor (Disney+) the series’ creator, Tony Gilroy, tells a complicated story about the dehumanising, creaking bureaucracy of totalitarianism and the flawed and ordinary humans who work within it. Because of the deranged economics of modern television, this timely analysis of fascism been put into a cinematic/televisual universe that usually gives us DayGlo space wizards and green puppets (such as the best actor of his generation, Baby Yoda).

So now we have this strange situation where Andor is the only current show about a malfunctioning fascist kakistocracy, but it’s set in space instead of in the real-life malfunctioning fascist kakistocracy where it was created (the United States).

This has got me thinking about the limits of high-concept, heavily stylised television, and I’ve decided to write about it. (Keeping true to the material realities of the age, this piece can also work with “biggest TV shows of 2025 so far” in the headline.)

The nine biggest TV shows of 2025 so far: Why you should watch them, and where you can catch them

Sanctimonious Soc Dems find themselves on shaky high moral ground

Severance is brilliant and relatable. These are eight other similar shows you might love

Daredevil: Born Again

Audiences probably just don’t want to look too directly at what’s happening around them, so for the past decade the faultlines in western culture have been explored in glossy science-fantasy forms rather than in the gritty agitprop of olden times. This means that almost every franchise property sees itself as representing “big themes”.

And so it is that the inherently ridiculous Daredevil: Born Again (Disney+) carries itself as though it were a complex allegory about the decaying American city when really it’s an incoherent yarn about a violent leather fetishist and his frenemy, a bald gourmand who is a bit sad.

I’ll still watch it, but with luck the leather fetishist and the bald gourmand get together at the end, because this show only really makes sense as a love story. (“Freaky deakies need love too,” to quote 30 Rock.)

Squid Game

The good high-concept shows, if you squint, reflect the real world. Among the best examples is Squid Game (Netflix technically released the second series in late 2024, but I consider St Stephen’s Day to be the new year), which tells the story of vividly characterised working-class debtors forced to play deadly games by feckless billionaires.

“This seems strangely familiar,” the people of Earth say while chortling along to the ultraviolence. “Are we all not, in a very real sense, imprisoned in a heartless economic system as though it were some sort of ‘squid game?’” Marx hears the people of Earth say this and begins to stir in his grave.

But then the people of Earth get distracted by the Squid Game gameshow and all the other franchise paraphernalia, and he just starts to spin instead.

The Last of Us

I like The Last of Us (Sky), and I’m glad it has returned. I can relate to a world that has been infected by a brain-infiltrating fungus intent on destroying everything. That said, it falls a little short as allegory. In the real world the fungus that’s rotting our brains has an X account.

Severance

Last weekend I was at a party at which I asked a banker about his career. “I wish I worked on the ‘severed floor’,” he said, sadly. I hadn’t expected to meet anyone who thought fondly of the dystopian shtick of Severance (Apple TV+), but it was only a matter of time.

The “severed floor” is the invention of the series’ creator, Dan Erickson, who hypothesised people having their home and work personas surgically “severed” by a nefarious company for reasons of work-life balance and, also, evil. It’s an excellent, weirdly moving story and a great metaphor for the alienation of the worker under capitalism.

Of course, Apple, which makes the show, is definitely trying to figure out how to actually build this technology. My banker friend has more or less demonstrated that there’s a market for it.

Your Friends & Neighbors

Rich people are high-concept sci-fi to most people in the world, but they are exemplars of the common man when it comes to American television producers, who’ve never met a poor person who didn’t work for them. This is why it’s hard for them to do realism.

In this new Apple TV+ show Jon Hamm plays a rich finance guy who ends up losing everything and then stealing from his rich neighbours. I think it’s meant to be a Dickensian exploration of class in the US. It’s certainly the nearest that wealthy American TV producers can come to imagining “the poor”.

“The poor? I don’t understand.”

“Imagine a wealthy stockbroker has a cash-flow problem.”

The producers break down, sobbing inconsolably and muttering bits of the Beatitudes.

The White Lotus

Mike White’s characterful tale of service-industry folk catering to the super-rich in exotic locations was, at the start, a clear-cut story about the corrupting nature of wealth.

Three series in, most of us are using it to compile a list of places we want to go on holiday. Yeah, yeah, wealth is corrupting. We get it. But couldn’t we just have some of it first, to see for ourselves? (That’s one of the themes of the new series, actually.)

Ultimately, style overwhelms content. Sky’s HBO series is still great drama, though. I plan to recite Sam Rockwell’s speech in episode five to a cello accompaniment at the next wedding I attend.

Yellowjackets

A bunch of teenage girls marooned in the wilderness create a model society built on mutual care, with each working and living according to their abilities and needs. Then they eat some people. Yum.

I quite enjoy this Paramount+ series, with its 1990s timeline of carnivorous teens and present-day timeline of excellent 1990s stars such as Melanie Lynskey and Christina Ricci covering up murders.

It’s pretty high concept, though I think the writers have given up on it being an allegory for anything, even though I imagine that for a season or so the words “Something something, feminism ????” were scrawled on the whiteboard in the writers’ room.

It’s just an old-fashioned cannibal chomp romp now. Paramount is probably making a cookery-show spin-off.

Adolescence

Which brings me to the crux of this pointed listicle. It took me watching the excellent Adolescence, written by Jack Thorne and Stephen Graham, to realise the time of high-concept satire and genre allegory is probably over.

How can whimsical frippery cut through a world filled with Silicon Valley slop, conspiratorial gibberish and governmental bullshittery? I mean, thanks to AI everyone is high concept now.

This Netflix drama points another way: good old-fashioned realism. It’s a viscerally journalistic show in which a child is charged with the murder of another child and layers of sociological cause and effect unfold in one-shot episodes. It has made more of an impact on my fragile psyche than any show I’ve watched in years.

Much as I love many of the aforementioned programmes, I think the times in which we live require a heavy dose of cinema verite. Our telly auteurs need to start writing and making programmes about real issues without setting the story in space or making it the secret sorrow of a jacked superhero.

That said, a jacked superhero who’s depressed about climate change in space? I will watch that show too.