These shows haven’t met a critic that didn’t like ’em!
These are the most critically adored TV series of the year so far
The critics have spoken! The best shows of the year, according to the TV pros, include some you’d expect, like Apple TV+’s Severance, but the really interesting ones are those you wouldn’t expect or maybe even didn’t know existed.
Using review aggregator Metacritic, we’ve extracted the best reviewed television shows of the year from the huge mass of mid TV on our screens so you can watch something good.
A few rules and notes on how this list was made:
– Metacritic scores shows based on an aggregate of published reviews from trusted reviewers, assigns each review a score on a 1-100 scale — 100 being the best — and averages those scores for a total score called a metascore.
– Metacritic does not assign metascores to shows with less than five reviews from Metacritic’s list of approved outlets.
– We have set the threshold for making this list a metascore of 80. These scores were taken at the time the show was released; it is possible that reviews added later could affect the scores after their release.
– Metacritic notes that returning shows trend toward having higher scores, as reviewers are more likely to review a show in its second season or later because they liked earlier seasons, while reviewers who didn’t like the show in early seasons are less likely to review the show.
Asura Season 1 (Netflix)
Metacritic score: 89
Acclaimed Japanese director Hirokazu Kore-eda’s drama focuses on a family of four sisters who learn that their father was having an affair. “Asura, a seven-episode Japanese drama on Netflix (in Japanese, with subtitles, or dubbed), is the full package: a detailed, human-scale domestic drama with plenty to say, fascinating characters to say it and the stylishness to make it sing,” writes The New York Times’ Margaret Lyons. “The downside is that other shows feel paltry and thin in comparison. The upside is everything else.”
Premiere date: Jan. 9, 2025
Rogue Heroes Season 2 (MGM+)
Metacritic score: 80
Steven Knight, the prolific creator of Peaky Blinders, See, and A Thousand Blows, marched into World War II for this thrilling drama about the elite British Army’s Special Air Service. “With its sober view of sacrifice and its clever use of extreme adversity to bring out different facets of the male psyche, Rogue Heroes earns its stripes, but be reassured that with all that groundwork in place it is, primarily, a right old romp,” says The Guardian’s Jack Seale.
Premiere date: Jan. 12, 2025
Severance Season 2 (Apple TV+)
Metacritic score: 86
The second season of Apple TV+’s paranoid dissection of the corporate workplace received 16 perfect scores, with reviewers calling the second season every bit as good as the first and saying the wait between seasons was well worth it. “It all adds up to dizzying, exciting television, building to a finale that matches the thrilling highs of the end of Season 1,” says TV Guide’s Allison Picurro.
Premiere date: Jan. 17, 2025
Planet Earth: Asia (BBC America)
Metacritic score: 83
Sir David Attenborough is back again to delight us with the treasures of nature, this time hopping around the continent of Asia to expound on sperm whales, red-crowned cranes, and more, and reviewers noted the series seemed less gloomy than recent installments of Planet Earth, which have focused on climate change’s ruinous relationship with wildlife. “Was it just me or did Asia feel slightly less doomy than previous wildlife spectaculars?” says The Times’ Carol Midgley.
Premiere date: Jan. 25, 2025
Mythic Quest Season 4 (Apple TV+)
Metacritic score: 83
Rob McElhenney, Charlie Day, and Megan Ganz’s workplace comedy about a video game company toys with Ian (McElhenney) and Poppy’s (Charlotte Nicdao) professional and personal relationship in Season 4, which reviewers say is one of the show’s best yet. “Season 4 is just as refreshing as previous seasons,” says IndieWire’s Ben Travers. “It’s just also taking a fundamental dynamic and bending it as far as it can, while growing the main characters in exciting, relatable ways.”
Premiere date: Jan. 29, 2025
Mo Season 2 (Netflix)
Metacritic score: 83
Season 2 of the Netflix comedy, which star Mo Amer co-created with Ramy Youssef, improved its Metacritic score from Season 1 as it delved further into immigration politics and combined three cultures — Palestinian, American, and Mexican — into one show. “Mo is one of those comedies where the humour does not flow from a firecracker script,” writes The Independent’s Ed Power. “There is little in the way of set-up-and-delivery zingers or quotable lines. Its appeal lies in how it evokes the small absurdities of everyday life.”
Premiere date: Jan. 30, 2025
Common Side Effects Season 1 (Adult Swim)
Metacritic score: 80
The animated series from creators Joe Bennett and Steve Hely follows a man who discovers a mushroom that can cure almost anything… and the relentless pursuit of Big Pharma and Big Health Insurance to make sure his findings don’t get out to the public. “There’s a sense of the absurd throughout Common Side Effects, in which the stuff that’s real feels just as unhinged as the occasional hallucinogenic trips and freaky cosmic spirituality,” says The A.V. Club’s Kambole Campbell. “And in a healthier television landscape, there would be more shows like this one, an original work that feels no pressure to be a loud spectacle.”
Premiere date: Feb. 2, 2025
Best Interests (Acorn TV)
Metacritic score: 85
This touching, heartbreaking BAFTA-nominated drama miniseries stars Sharon Horgan and Michael Sheen as parents of a daughter with a form of muscular dystrophy, and the difficult decision over ending medical care at their doctors’ suggestion. “I defy anyone not to cry,” says The Times’ Carol Midgley.
Premiere date: Feb. 17, 2025
Eyes on the Prize III: We Who Believe in Freedom Cannot Rest (HBO)
Metacritic score: 88
This six-part anthology series is a continuation of PBS’s 1987 series about the Civil Rights Movement from Henry Hampton, inviting filmmakers to showcase those who fight for equity and racial justice. “The excellent third installment of the acclaimed historical series about civil rights in America is so full of details that each of its six episodes should sit with you for a bit,” says The Boston Globe’s Odie Henderson.
Premiere date: Feb. 25, 2025
Toxic Town (Netflix)
Metacritic score: 84
British screenwriter Jack Thorne has two shows on this list — he also co-wrote and co-created Netflix’s Adolescence — though Toxic Town, a miniseries about three mothers who fought the local government after the improper removal of toxic waste left many children in the borough suffering from horrific birth defects, didn’t get the same attention as Adolescence. The i Paper’s Emily Baker says, “Watching Toxic Town should be compulsory.”
Premiere date: Feb. 27, 2025
The Traitors U.K. Season 3 (Peacock)
Metascore: 90
Despite being an Emmy winner and huge among reality television enthusiasts, the U.S. edition of The Traitors doesn’t get the clout it deserves because it’s limited by the size of its streaming service, Peacock. The British edition, however, is massively popular in England because it’s on BBC One, and critics love the Assassin-style game in which contestants lie, cheat, and backstab each other for a cash prize. The Guardian’s Rachel Aroesti says, “For those who still believe reality TV can be truly edifying, The Traitors is manna from heaven.” (The U.S. version has only two reviews on Metacritic, each with a score of 80, which would be enough to make this list, except Metacritic requires at least five reviews for an official score.)
Premiere date: March 6, 2025
Dark Winds Season 3 (AMC)
Metascore: 84
Led by Zahn McClarnon’s performance as Navajo Tribal Police officer Joe Leaphorn, Dark Winds is an under-the-radar mystery series that has been adored by critics in its three seasons. “There are grittier, hipper, more popular crime dramas coursing through the TV/streaming ecosystem – Tulsa King, Presumed Innocent, The Rookie — but none of those shows can match the quality of AMC’s Dark Winds,” says Pittsburgh Tribune-Review’s Rob Owen.
Premiere date: March 9, 2025
The Righteous Gemstones Season 4 (HBO)
Metascore: 89
Danny McBride’s raucous comedy about a family of televangelists enters its final season with the highest metascore it’s ever received in its four seasons. Slate’s Jack Hamilton says, “The brilliance of The Righteous Gemstones, and the source of its comedy, is that it’s a show about basically decent people who are trying their hardest to be terrible and failing at it.”
Premiere date: March 9, 2025
Adolescence (Netflix)
Metascore: 90
This four-part miniseries about a boy accused of murder will rip your heart out of your chest while also delighting your brain as you try to figure out how it pulled off its big technical achievement: Each episode was filmed as a one-take, continuous shot. Variety’s Aramide Tinubu says, “Dark and brilliantly written, this show unpacks the complexities of humanity and manhood and how the rise of the manosphere has so eerily and quickly permeated itself into the lives of young people through social media.”
Premiere date: March 13, 2025
Wolf Hall: The Mirror and the Light (PBS)
Metascore: 89
The follow-up to the acclaimed 2015 miniseries Wolf Hall actually scored higher than the original on Metacritic, a good sign considering that Wolf Hall was nominated for eight Emmys. The show follows the rise and fall of Thomas Cromwell (Mark Rylance), the trusted adviser of Henry VIII (Damian Lewis). John Anderson of The Wall Street Journal said, “The dialogue is fluid and of its time, so much so that you forget someone wrote it (Peter Straughan did), or that it was directed (by Peter Kosminsky).”
Premiere date: March 23, 2025
The Studio (Apple TV+)
Metascore: 80
Seth Rogen’s sendup of Hollywood as an industry that prefers making money over making movies is a cringe comedy that plays with format and genre while pulling from Rogen’s expansive contact list of celebrities for cameos. “The most entertaining and spot-on depiction of Hollywood since Robert Altman’s The Player,” said The Playlist’s Gregory Ellwood.
Premiere date: March 26, 2025
Dying for Sex (Hulu)
Metascore: 82
Michelle Williams headlines this limited series as a woman diagnosed with stage IV breast cancer who chooses to spend the rest of her life exploring her sexuality with the support of her best friend (Jenny Slate). Variety’s Alison Herman says, “Dying for Sex is a show of big, messy, reflexively uncomfortable feelings, the kind that require a mastery of tone and a uniformly game cast to keep the viewer from flinching away.”
Premiere date: April 4, 2025
Hacks Season 4 (HBO)
Metascore: 92
HBO’s acclaimed comedy about the complicated and combative relationship between a comedy legend (Jean Smart) and her upstart writer (Hannah Einbinder) will likely add to its nine Emmy wins after Season 4, which is its highest-rated season yet. The Daily Beast’s Kevin Fallon says, “Hacks is now back for Season 4, and is unrelenting. The jokes are vicious. The relationships between its characters are toxic. It’s breathtaking television.”
Premiere date: April 10, 2025
The Last of Us Season 2 (HBO)
Metascore: 82
There’s no sophomore slump for one of the biggest shows of 2023. Season 2 of HBO’s adaptation of Naughty Dog’s bestselling video game is being praised for surfacing poignancy in the otherwise gloomy reality of its post-apocalyptic landscape. “Moving and devastating in equal doses, The Last of Us remains post-apocalyptic television at its peak. At almost every turn, it delivers,” says Empire’s John Nugent.
Premiere date: April 13, 2025
