How much TV does our TV critic watch? Inkoo Kang reveals how she picks her favorites of the year—and why 2025 felt a little lacking. Plus:
Illustration by Joanne Joo
Caroline Mimbs Nyce
Newsletter editor
This was not a particularly good year for TV. Our television critic, Inkoo Kang, told me that she’d probably rank it as the weakest she can remember in her time working as a critic.
Luckily, there were still some bright spots: Kang’s list of the Top Ten shows of 2025 is out now. Some of her choices may surprise you. Prestige shows such as “The White Lotus,” “Severance,” and “Adolescence” didn’t make the list, but “The Real Housewives of Salt Lake City” did.
I called Kang to discuss her process, her picks, and why “Housewives” made the cut.
This conversation has been edited and condensed.
How do you approach putting together a “best TV” list?
Every time I finish a season of television, I put it on a spreadsheet. If I think that a show has a pretty good chance at being in the running for the Top Ten, I will add a little note.
I probably should also have a list of the shows I gave up on midway through, but I think it would just be too long of a list. If I feel like something doesn’t really have a lot of promise, and it’s not in the cultural conversation, then there’s no reason for me to keep watching.
So how much did you watch this year?
A lot less than I usually do. I only finished about three dozen seasons—but I want to specify finish. It’s not the same as watch, or try out. But, in other years, I finished a lot more. My spreadsheet says that, in 2022, I finished more than a hundred seasons of TV.
Part of it is that there are fewer shows coming out. And part of it is that it was a pretty dispiriting batch of shows.
You don’t seem that jazzed about the year.
There are so many different business-based reasons for TV being bad right now. First of all, there’s been a big contraction in the industry. Because there are fewer shows, executives and creators are making safer bets, which leads to less interesting programming over all. And then, on top of that, the effects of 2023’s labor strikes are still being felt quite a bit, because the production process can be quite long.
How long have you been writing about TV? And where would you rank this year?
About eleven or twelve years. I would place this as probably the worst year since I have been working as a TV critic.
Wow.
Again, I think there are a lot of business reasons for that. One of the things that made TV such an interesting medium to write about for so long were these crazy streaming wars. People were willing to put a ton of money into TV programming, because there was such a fierce competition for attention.
It just happened to be this fun, crazy, incredibly unsustainable time in television. And the party has come to an end. That’s really what it feels like at the moment.
Let’s talk a bit about what you did like this year. What were your standouts?
There was no way that “The Pitt” was not going to be on the list. “The Pitt” encapsulates the best of this particular turn that TV has taken—meaning, we’re going back to the proven formulas. But the show is done in such a masterful way that you almost don’t feel the formula, because you’re so transported by what’s taking place.
A personal favorite of mine was “Too Much.” I really loved it, but it is one of those shows that does require a bit of investment or faith on the part of the audience. It’s got incredible writing, in a year of TV where so much of the dialogue just felt so clunky or brutally efficient.
By late November, there’s always a small list of shows that I heard great things about, but never got the time to check out. So I do have a cram session right before the list has to be done. One of the nice surprises this year was a very small show called “Big Boys.” This is the type of show I love championing on the Top Ten list. I watched a bit of it while I was sick over Thanksgiving break, and I was just crying in bed, like, every other episode. It was this nice little thing I wanted to hug through the screen.
You also put “The Real Housewives of Salt Lake City” on your list, a choice which I thought that New Yorker readers would either be horrified by—or feel validated by. Can you talk about why you chose that one?
A truism of criticism is that you have to base everything that you evaluate against what it’s going for. Perhaps controversially, “Severance” was not on my list. But I’m not going to judge “The Real Housewives of Salt Lake City” against “Severance.” I’m judging “Severance” against what I think “Severance” is trying to be, and I’m judging “Real Housewives” against what I think “Real Housewives” is trying to be. And, for me, “Severance” was so much less satisfying than “Salt Lake City,” because “Salt Lake City” was doing everything that it had promised me as a viewer, and more.