From the modern horrors of Adolescence to the campy twists of The Celebrity Traitors UK, here’s everything we loved on TV in 2025.
It’s been another pretty weird year for television. Our local content slate was plagued by property shows and series about overseas celebrities road tripping around the country. Sky axed a bunch of channels to streamline their kids and comedy content, NZ On Air revealed that YouTube has officially killed the TV star, and just last week Netflix acquired Warner Brothers in a “paradigm shift” for the streaming age. No wonder we’re all tired and need to blob out in front of the TV for a while! But what to watch? Here are the television shows that we loved the most in 2025.
Adolescence (Netflix)
Every episode of Adolescence leaves you aching, as well as in awe of the superb acting and the director’s daring. Stephen Graham plays the shocked father of a teenager accused of murder. His wide eyes and adrenal energy course through the four episode-series, knocking up against the precocious performance of Owen Cooper, who plays the 13-year-old suspect.
Supported by an equally superb cast, they tell the traumatic story of a family forced to face uncomfortable truths and in doing so, squash our faces up against the real-life impacts of the manosphere.
Director Phillip Barantini filmed each episode in one continuous take. The effect? Like sitting in the front seat of a rollercoaster ride. / Veronica Schmidt
Andor (Disney+)
What is everyone’s problem? Andor was clearly the best show of 2025. The Star Wars spinoff series was the year’s best spy thriller, best political thriller and best war movie despite not even being a movie. It delivered us the best exploration of fascism and the best use of a Skarsgård. Despite that it usually turns up somewhere around number five on publications’ best-of lists and gets a few conciliatory pat-on-the-back Emmys while missing out in the big-time categories.
Fuck you all. Is it because of the Ewoks? Are you still bitter about the Ewoks? Is it because of the Darth Vader “NOOO” scene or because somehow Palpatine returned? Star Wars has been stupid for a long time and maybe forever, no objections your honour. But if you discarded all that space baggage and just viewed Andor on its merits, the show is a masterpiece worthy of inclusion in the GOAT conversation with prestige shows like The Wire or Celebrity Traitors UK. / Hayden Donnell
The Celebrity Traitors UK (ThreeNow)
The Celebrity Traitors UK stormed onto our screens this spring and immediately reminded us that thankfully, TV isn’t dead yet. The Traitors is the reality TV format that has it all – nail-biting suspense, thrilling surprises and prestige actors farting in sheds – but when the BBC announced they were doing a celebrity version, I was worried that famous people with reputations to protect wouldn’t commit to the game like regular people do. How wrong I was. The Celebrity Traitors UK was a symphony, and as Alex Casey and I wrote after the perfect season finale, the joy was in watching a show that was equal parts theatrical, hilarious and emotional. From the genuinely impressive cast (Stephen Fry! Alan Carr! Jonathan Ross!) to the incredible production details and batshit physical challenges, every moment was TV gold. Best of all, it reminded us that appointment viewing can still exist with the right format, inspired casting and clever editing. Brilliantly, beautifully bonkers television. / Tara Ward
The Chair Company (Neon)
When you’re in the middle of a dream, everything makes perfect sense – it’s only when you wake up and try to recall it that the logic begins to unravel. It’s kind of the same with The Chair Company, Tim Robinson and Zach Kanin’s comedy-thriller-horror-??? which truly earns the overused “dreamlike” descriptor. When you’re watching it the plot seems to make sense, but good luck trying to explain it to anybody later.
Essentially it’s like a longform sketch from the pair’s cult Netflix series I Think You Should Leave, which Robinson summarised as a show where “people get a little embarrassed and then very angry”. That very much describes his character Ron Trosper in The Chair Company, who, unable to laugh off a mildly embarrassing chair mishap at work, descends into a full-blown conspiracy spiral involving fake companies, bogus websites and a seemingly endless underworld full of total freaks. The deeper it goes the less it feels like there’ll ever be a satisfying conclusion to the mystery, but also the more time you spend in this world the weirder and funnier it gets – a show where the journey is more important than the destination. / Calum Henderson
Educators (TVNZ+)
It’s like cancel culture has passed Educators by. Take episode two of season four, in which PE teacher Vinnie pulls a basketball coach out of his wheelchair and insists it’s the coach’s fault. Or episode six, where the message is sometimes it just feels good to give a conman money. Or episode one, in which school children are exploited for free coffin-making labour.
Incredibly, much of the comic series is thanks to improvised performances by the likes of Jackie van Beek, Jonny Brugh and The Spinoff’s own Robbie Nicol. It’s deliciously naughty, very funny and, bonus, New Zealand-made. / VS
The Last of Us (Neon)
The Last of Us flipped the script on the unsuspecting last year. Those unfamiliar with the video game who signed up to watch a dystopian zombie show were shocked when one of the best standalone episodes in recent television history hit the screen in episode three. It shouldn’t have surprised people as much as it did, but it did firmly affix the prestige television seal on a show that undoubtedly suffered from the snobbery that comes with being based on a video game. It was an early signal that the show was never about the undead anyway. Season two stepped that up further, maintaining its focus on the consequences of terrible decisions, moral ambiguity, and the weight unimaginable trade-offs add to human existence. That, and some critics say, sentimentality, has always been at this show’s heart. There are still zombies to shoot, and peril is everywhere, but bubbling away beneath it is the cost to the living when survival is the name of the game.
Epilogue: For the record, when I wrote my original review, I did not know what was going to happen. No spoilers, but I would like to apologise to Pedro Pascal. / ARC
New Zealand Tomorrow (ThreeNow)
Finally someone has made an entire TV show about nitrate contamination in parts of the South Island’s water supply stemming from Nick Smith’s 2010 decision to remove an obstruction to intensive farming by sacking Environment Canterbury! Guy Williams’ New Zealand Tomorrow focuses on a quiet environmental catastrophe previously only catalogued in pop culture by Anthonie Tonnon in his Silver Scroll-nominated song ‘Water Underground’, and me, in a little-read story on Anthonie Tonnon’s Silver Scroll-nominated song ‘Water Underground’.
The show is funny, retaining New Zealand Today’s keen eye for the loveable absurdities of our small town culture. But it infuses the formula with genuine rigour. There are graphs, data visualisations (admittedly involving quite a few pissing cows), interviews about how nitrates enter water tables and at least one death. Throughout, Williams laments the death of news and pokes fun at his own lacking reporting skills, but the show is actually a deft exploration of a complicated topic that engages people along the way, and what’s that if not good journalism? / HD
Overcompensating (Prime Video)
I’ve been a longtime Benito Skinner fan – from his early days doing Jonathan van Ness as Jesus skits to his accurate star sign personality videos. so I was especially excited when he announced his new comedy-drama series. Overcompensating draws from Benito’s personal journey with identity and sexuality. He plays Benny, a closeted former football player trying to figure out where he fits in at college. The show is a hilarious time capsule of 2010s nostalgia, packed with emotional moments that sneak up on you. Who knew hearing ‘Like a G6’ today would still hit me exactly the way it did back then? It feels like a sharper version of the teen dramas we grew up on, like The OC and Gossip Girl. And if you’re having Brat withdrawals, the Charli XCX-heavy soundtrack and a cameo from the Brat Queen herself will hit the spot. This show did not disappoint and I watched all eight episodes in one day while sick. / Jin Fellet
The Pitt (Neon)
The modern world is scary and wrong. There’s photorealistic AI, a daily blizzard of disinformation, children lifting their arms up alternately while chanting “6-7” like zombies. Every day I feel like the guy who gets out of prison after 50 years in The Shawshank Redemption.
But remember the 90s? “No,” says Gen Z. “I was born in the year 2002.” Well let me tell you Sonny Jim, the 90s were a paradise so long as you ignore the events detailed in season two of the hit podcast Juggernaut. Pop culture was simple. We had one streaming subscription. It was free and called “the TV”. It contained Judy Bailey, Simon Barnett, and most of all, four thousand legal and medical dramas producing one season of 12 to 24 episodes every year without fail.
The Pitt is a trip back to a more intelligible time. Though it details an array of trauma so overwhelming that basically all its characters lose their minds over the course of the single hospital shift it covers, my viewing experience was pure Millennial nostalgic bliss. Fifteen one-hour episodes. A yearly release schedule. Literally the guy from ER. God it was comforting. I can’t wait for season two to come out January 9 so I can take another break from the horrors. / HD
The Rehearsal (Neon)
The greatest trick the devil (Nathan Fielder) ever pulled is making such staggering, genre-bending, ambitious, artful and jaw-dropping television that it is nearly impossible to summarise in a tidy little set of paragraphs. The Canadian comedian first rose to fame with Nathan For You, in which he saves small businesses in outlandish and novel ways (Dumb Starbucks, viral goat rescue videos, poo-flavoured yoghurt). But even more resonant than his joke solutions was what he revealed in the participants: a culture desperate to be on television at any cost.
In The Rehearsal, this interest in fame, performance and television itself gets dialled up to 11. Season one saw Fielder obsessing over rehearsing moments of social life and domesticity, eventually simulating a home on an HBO sound stage for himself with a fake wife and child. Although season two began with a more narrow focus – the number of plane crashes caused by miscommunication between pilots – it soon swung the emergency exit wide open and left you tumbling through all the horror, beauty, hilarity, tragedy and poetry that comes with being a person. If you thought The Curse finale was whacko last year, buckle up for this one. / Alex Casey
Stranger Things (Netflix)
Tuck me up and put me to bed in the 80s. God I love this show. It’s all in the grime for me: grimy old Upside Down with the floaty dusty bits, grimy old clothes and grimy old bikes and D&D figurines so well loved they’re… grimy. I can’t believe Stranger Things has been in my life for nigh on a decade but then again this show feels like a well-loved jumper (from the 80s) by now. I can’t imagine what it will be like over the next three years semi-forgetting about it then being jump-scared by the trailer for the next season. So far season five is about kick-ass mothers and queers and I cannot get enough. Come Christmas day I’ll be twitching to hide in my room to binge the shit out of Part Two with a grubby (chilled) red wine in my hands. I hope that Vecna gets pulverised into minute particles and that all the kids get to be kids and have a filthy 80s party at the end. / Claire Mabey
The Studio (Apple TV)
The Studio is about a rich successful studio exec willing to abandon his love of art to impress the higher-ups. That doesn’t sound fun. But then you find out it’s Seth Rogen, and he’s so likeable that you start to get where he’s coming from.
The show has a little bit of Curb Your Enthusiasm and The Thick Of It in its DNA and, like any good show about people who do bad things, it shows you that they’re only like this because the system is dogshit and it pressures all of us to make constant moral compromises.
You’ll probably enjoy the show more if you love movies. There’s an episode where Rogen’s character Matt Remick is outraged and confused at a group of supposedly brilliant medical professionals, because they don’t seem to be able to separate good movies from bad. That’s the sort of thing you probably enjoy more if you’ve felt that way, too.
The Studio can go a little too broad at times, but overall it’s a punchy, pacy satire about the movie industry, which explains why they don’t make ‘em like they used to. / Robbie Nicol
(The cancellation of) And Just Like That (Neon)
Definitely not my favourite show of the year but absolutely one of my favourite TV moments.
A shadow of its former self, And Just Like That reeked of being a franchise workhorse. Three sad, awkward and illogical seasons later, it was finally put out of its misery and cancelled this year. The show was a cacophony of clangers. More effort was put into introducing yet another fucking side character I could not care less about, than the writing and the plot. LTW’s father was resurrected after dying in season one, just so he could die again in season three. Carrie decided she wanted to write fiction and instead of something sparkling, she churned out sloppy historical auto-fiction in which “the woman” wafted around making inane observations like “There are endless adventures to be taken, if she simply dared to decide to take them.”
After reducing Miranda to a bag of bumbling punchlines, Steve to a fumbling old man and Carrie to a feeble and utterly joyless character, the show proved that Mr Big had the sweetest deal of all, done in by a Peloton bike in the very first episode. Several episodes into the final season, I gave up on it and declared it had achieved the impossible by killing the hate watch./ ARC
