From ‘Adolescence’ to ‘South Park’ – here are the programmes that had everyone talking in 2025
Nonetheless, here, after much agonising and the necessity for quite a few omissions, is my personal selection, in no order of preference, of the 10 best shows of the year.
Gary Oldman in ‘Slow Horses’. Photo: Apple TV+
Slow Horses (Apple TV+)
The fifth season of the thrilling series based on Mick Herron’s Slough House spy novels was a standout. The final shot of Jackson Lamb’s (Gary Oldman) badly scarred feet, which circled back to an anecdote he’d told in an earlier episode, opened a door to his past and complex character in a way reams of dialogue couldn’t.
The Celebrity Traitors (BBC One)
Fears that a celebrity version wouldn’t live up to the regular series were laid to rest by this wildly entertaining season. Giggly, chatty Alan Carr turned out to be the most devilishly clever and devious Traitor, outwitting the useless Faithfuls, who couldn’t spot a cow in a field full of sheep.
Matthew Goode stars in Dept Q (Photo: Netflix)
Dept Q (Netflix)
There were echoes of Slow Horses in a fantastic crime drama that relocated a series of Danish novels to Edinburgh.
Matthew Goode oozed charisma as Carl Morck, an unpopular and sarcastic maverick copper who’s banished to the basement with a pile of cold case files and given a pair of misfits as his assistants.
Gaza: Doctors Under Attack (Channel 4)
When the BBC decided against broadcasting this documentary due impartiality concerns, Channel 4 stepped in. It’s an unflinching look at the merciless targeting of Palestinian medics. This was television that seared itself into your brain.
Pennywise in ‘IT: Welcome to Derry’. Photo: Sky
IT: Welcome to Derry (Sky Atlantic/Now)
This scary prequel about the origin of the interdimensional entity that emerges from its sleep, mostly in the form of child-eating clown Pennywise (Bill Skarsgård), every 27 years brilliantly enriched Stephen King’s universe. You’ll never look at a jar of pickles in the same way again.
Sydney Chandler plays Wendy, a hybrid with a synthetic body and a human consciousness, in the excellent series ‘Alien: Earth’. Photo: Disney+/FX
Alien: Earth (Disney+)
Using the first two Alien movies as a launchpad, Noah Hawley (Fargo) stunningly revitalised the fading franchise with a first season that gave us a terrifying new lifeform: trypanohyncha ocellus. Basically, it’s an eyeball with tentacles that embeds itself in the eye socket of its victims, including one rather unfortunate sheep.
South Park (Paramount+)
Having signed a five-year contract worth $1.5 billion (€1.27 billion) with Paramount just after the company caved in to Donald Trump, creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone went on the attack with a furious, furiously funny season that depicted Trump with a micro-penis having sex with Satan.
Buried Alive (TG4)
Daire Collins’ wonderful documentary used archive footage and new interviews to tell the bittersweet story of Mick Meaney, an Irish labourer working in London, who set out to break the world record by having himself buried alive in a coffin for 61 days. The stunt made global headlines, but Meaney’s hoped-for fame and fortune never materialised.
‘Adolescence’ was the most talked-about TV event. Photo: Netflix
Adolescence (Netflix)
This staggeringly powerful four-part drama, each episode shot in one continuous take, was the most talked-about TV event of the year. It traced the emotional fallout a 13-year-old boy (newcomer Owen Cooper, whose extraordinary performance deservedly won one of the series’ nine Emmys) murders a girl from his class. Devastating stuff.
Smoke (Apple TV+)
After their successful collaboration on Black Bird, star Taron Egerton and writer Dennis Lehane teamed up again for this gripping miniseries drama, inspired by a real case, with Egerton as an arson investigator who’s also an arsonist. The final scenes cleverly reveal the depth of the character’s self-delusion regarding the man he imagines himself to be.