10. I Love LA
Sky Comedy/Now
Rachel Sennott’s comedy could sound like Lena Dunham’s Girls transported to Los Angeles, but it retains its own gen-Z sting. Sennott stars as Maia, who is masterminding the influencer career of her friend Tallulah (Odessa A’zion). The cast includes True Whitaker (daughter of Forest) in a cheeky meta nepo-baby turn, and Jordan Firstman as a stylist with bitey one-liners. It’s a tale of co-dependency, spats (“You Lululemon-ass bitch!”), generational nihilism and hope springing eternal. Witty, messy and warm-blooded, I Love LA nails the unquiet desperation of twentysomethings who know they can’t keep winging it for ever.
9. Pluribus
Apple TV+
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The new offering from Vince Gilligan (Breaking Bad, Better Call Saul) turned out to be a sci-fi mystery box. After an alien takeover of Earth, Carol, played by Rhea Seehorn (Better Call Saul’s Kim), is one of the few humans left not feeling synthetically blissful. A riff on Invasion of the Body Snatchers drenched in irony, Pluribus could be provocatively slow, but dark humour and even darker themes (free will, groupthink, state control) kept the cogs turning.
BBC Three
Ellis Howard (right) in What It Feels Like for a Girl. Main image: Odessa Young and Jacob Elordi in The Narrow Road to the Deep North
Written by Paris Lees and Georgia Christou, this is a left-field comedy-drama based on Lees’s 2021 memoir about life in early 00s Nottinghamshire as a working-class boy called Byron. Ellis Howard plays Byron, a piping-hot mess of intelligence, insolence and defiance, strutting a clumpy-mascaraed, fake-furred path through LGBTQ+ nightlife, drugs, prostitution and criminality. With themes of found family and body dysmorphia and sublime ensemble playing, Howard’s central performance is star-making.
7. Smoke
Apple TV+
Ntare Guma Mbaho Mwine in Smoke
Bored of always knowing what’s going to happen next in so-called thrillers? Try this anti-formulaic outlier. Smoke reunites creator Dennis Lehane (Mystic River, Shutter Island) and Taron Egerton, who worked together on the 2022 gothic-noir Black Bird. With origins in a true crime podcast, Smoke starts as a routine procedural about an arson investigator (Egerton) but morphs into a raging fire of criminal psychopathy. One of the most unusual and startling thrillers of recent times, you’ll need protective clothing to watch it.
Channel 4
The creation of Booker-winning author Marlon James (A Brief History of Seven Killings), this is an absorbing detective series set in Kingston, Jamaica. Tamara Lawrance stars as the titular detective caught between a British sensibility (she was sent to the UK in her teens) and tough Kingston patois and street smarts. Get Millie Black evokes a world of contrasts, from the sunbaked natural beauty of Jamaica to the underground chokehold of drugs, violence and poverty. Intense, richly scripted and entirely original.
BBC Four
Mads Brügger’s extraordinary, disquieting docuseries was one of the most watched in Danish history: viewed by half the population, it prompted law changes and dismantled Denmark’s view of itself as a principled democracy. It follows business lawyer Amira Smajic, who has spent her career advising hardened criminals but now wishes to expose them and the respectable worlds of law, business and politics that facilitate them. In a Copenhagen office full of secret cameras and recording devices, Smajic lures her clients into incriminating themselves – but is everything as it seems? Hold your breath and see.
BBC One
This Australian second world war drama arrived crackling with pedigree. Based on Richard Flanagan’s 2014 Booker prize winner, it’s written by Shaun Grant (who worked on Mindhunter), and directed by Justin Kurzel (The Order). In 1980s Sydney, surgeon Dorrigo Evans (Ciarán Hinds) is plagued by memories of his time in a Japanese prison camp, building the notoriously brutal Thai-Burma railway. Jacob Elordi plays the younger Dorrigo, first poetic and reckless, then broken as he navigates the POW nightmare of torture, disease and executions. Building into a pitiless howl of survivor’s guilt, it is chilling and masterfully performed.
BBC One
The Celebrity Traitor
Sometimes genius presents itself in a green velvet cloak holding a light-entertainment lamp. After all the griping about how the Famous would ruin it, The Celebrity Traitors won enormous viewing figures – 15 million for the final alone – positioning its presenter Claudia Winkleman as the ghoulish grande dame of British television. Highlights included Tom Daley’s side-eye, Celia Imrie’s fart and Alan Carr’s transformation into a telly Machiavelli. This was a different beast from the regular Traitors, triumphantly fuelled by celebrity, proving that prestige reality TV is possible.
Sky Comedy/Now
Nathan Fielder (Nathan for You, The Curse) is a one-man conceptual comedy cult – and this second series of The Rehearsal, delivering a masterclass of absurdism, proves why. In the first 2022 series, the Canadian comedian went to surreal extremes to help people “rehearse” difficult situations. Here, he tackles aviation safety. Building a life-size replica of an airport terminal is just Fielder’s starting point for exploring a range of ethical quandaries, segueing through discussions of antisemitism and neurodiversity to scenes of masturbation and a fake singing contest, towards a finale you can’t quite believe is happening. Dry as dust, innovative, hilarious and transgressive, The Rehearsal is derangement par excellence.
1. Adolescence
Netflix
This wasn’t just TV; it was headline news around the world. A devastating snapshot of the real-world consequences of online life – a teenage girl dead and a teenage boy arrested – Adolescence hit a red-raw nerve. Created by Jack Thorne and Stephen Graham, the drama won numerous awards, including a youngest-ever supporting actor Emmy for newcomer Owen Cooper, as a disturbed Liverpudlian 13-year-old. Superb performances include Graham as his distraught father. With director Philip Barantini audaciously filming episodes in one take, it captured up close the chaos of discovery to the clammy reality of ruined family life, with that stunning two-hander between Cooper and Erin Doherty’s psychologist. Adolescence works as a distillation of 21st-century anxiety and more besides. This was 2025 television putting the internet on trial, telling the world everything it didn’t want to hear.
Photographs by Apple TV+/BBC