10 Best TV Shows of 2025
2025 TV has been all over the map in the best way. You’ve got reality scandals breaking the internet, genre shows finally swinging for the fences again, and a wave of spinoffs and prequels that actually feel like stories instead of content dumps. And for Stardust, these 10 series are the must-watch events of the year.
Murderbot Season 1
Apple TV+’s Murderbot is short, punchy, and oddly soothing for a show about corporate space disasters. Alexander Skarsgård plays a “SecUnit” (created from cloned human tissue and mechanical parts) who has hacked its own governor module, gained free will, and would very much like to be left alone to binge serials. Instead, it keeps getting dragged into protecting the anxious PreservationAux survey team from sabotage, hostile fauna, and other bots that have not had their big existential awakening yet. Episodes are a tight twenty-two to thirty-something minutes, which gives the whole season a breezy, almost sitcom rhythm in between shootouts.
The adaptation leans into the books’ dry internal monologue, letting Murderbot narrate its own awkward attempts at being “a person” while still being very, very good at violence. Visually, the show builds a future that feels used and lived-in without defaulting to being a standard sci-fi knockoff, and the sound design does a lot of work making you believe in how this construct moves and thinks. It’s one of the few straight-up sci-fi shows this year that remembers to be fun.
Peacemaker season 2
Season 2 of Peacemaker jumps straight into the DCU weirdness. After the events of Superman, Chris Smith finds himself pulled into an alternate dimension where his father and brother are alive, and the family is celebrated as a superhero team. It’s the kind of premise that lets the show be loud and nihilistic and then sideswipe you with something uncomfortably sincere about pain, loyalty, and the idea of an alternate path.
This run is also wired directly into the new DC universe plans. The season streams weekly on Max from August through October, threads in a multiverse story that matters for future films, and still finds time for filthy jokes, obscure needle drops, and surprisingly tender Adebayo material.
The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives Season 3
Season 3 of The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives doubles down on everything that made the show a word-of-mouth machine in the first place. The new run arrives as a full ten-episode drop on Hulu (and Disney+ in some regions), inviting viewers straight back into #MomTok’s messiest friend group as divorces, custody battles, and follower counts collide.
And even though the series still had enough to unpack from last season, somehow the emotional center of gravity shifts to the fallout around yet another cheating scandal. Taylor Frankie Paul, Demi Engemann, and the rest of the core cast keep splitting into factions, shifting alliances, and weaponizing lives that were already public. What are you waiting for—go watch it, now!
Outlander: Blood of My Blood Season 1
Outlander: Blood of My Blood pulls off a neat trick: it feels like its own sweeping romance while still scratching the itch fans have for the original series. The prequel splits its time between Jamie Fraser’s parents in 18th-century Scotland and Claire’s parents in World War I–era England, tracking two love stories that will eventually echo through their children. Harriet Slater and Jamie Roy play Ellen and Brian with the exact mix of stubbornness and tenderness you want from Highland lovers, while Hermione Corfield and Jeremy Irvine bring a more modern, war-torn ache to Julia and Henry.
There is also a time travel wrinkle teased in the marketing and folded into Claire’s family arc, which keeps the show tethered to the larger Outlander mythology without turning it into a cameo parade. Premiering on Starz in August and renewed for a season 2 before it even aired, Blood of My Blood quietly became the rare prequel that justifies its existence by being properly swoony and weird on its own terms.
Yellowjackets season 3
When season 3 of Yellowjackets returned, it quickly reminded us why this show lives rent-free in people’s heads. For starters, the wilderness timeline pushes deeper into the cult logic the girls built for themselves, with new rituals, gnarlier violence, and a summer that feels even more unsafe than the winter that came before it. The present-day timeline, meanwhile, watches the surviving women crumble in new, unexpected ways as the truth inches closer to the surface.
It also became the show’s most-watched season so far, with the premiere and finale both setting well-deserved streaming highs for the series on Paramount+ with Showtime. With confirmation that the story will end in season 4, there’s also a new sense of momentum that’s bound to inspire even more chaos.
I Love LA Season 1
Rachel Sennott’s I Love LA is messy, sunburnt, and very online in a way that works. The HBO comedy follows Maia and her close-knit friend group as they reunite in Los Angeles after a few years of distance, each of them quietly lying about how well their careers and relationships are actually going. There are flopped promotions, fake flexes, and parties where everyone is pretending to be fine while silently tallying who “made it.”
Premiering in November with weekly episodes through December, the show uses LA not as a glamorous backdrop but as a pressure cooker for ambition. Odessa A’zion, True Whitaker, Jordan Firstman, and Josh Hutcherson round out the core cast, and the series lives or dies on the rhythm of their conversations more than on any big plot twist. It feels like eavesdropping on a chaotic, cliche, LA-based group chat in motion, with enough bite to keep it from becoming just another hangout show.
The Wheel of Time season 3
Season 3 of The Wheel of Time feels like the point where the show finally dives headfirst into the stranger corners of Robert Jordan’s world. In the wake of Rand’s victory at Falme, the story pushes into the Aiel Waste, sends familiar threats back toward the Two Rivers, and lets the Forsaken operate in the open. At the same time, the White Tower turns into an arena with clashing agendas, with Elaida’s Red Ajah and the secretive Black Ajah both tightening their grip.
In May, Prime Video confirmed the series had been canceled, which retroactively makes this season a closing chapter rather than a midpoint. Taken that way, these episodes feel even more striking—they go harder on eerie dreamscapes, large-scale battles, and visible channeling, while still protecting space for the original group’s shifting loyalties and old bonds. The show may be over (sigh), but its influence on modern fantasy TV is already cemented, and season 3 is proof that it was still evolving into something bold and genuinely compelling. Maybe, just maybe, we’ll be lucky enough to return one day.
Foundation Season 3
Season 3 of Foundation returns as a full-blown space opera. More than 150 years after the last major crisis, the Foundation now oversees hundreds of worlds, while the Cleonic Empire is visibly starting to come apart. That fragile balance begins to collapse with the long-awaited (and intentionally ambiguous) rise of the Mule, a psychic warlord who bends entire systems to his will through mind control and brute force.
Jared Harris, Lee Pace, and Lou Llobell are still the show’s anchors, guiding a story that jumps between imperial courts, fringe worlds, and hidden corners of the galaxy where people are still trying to steer what comes next through math, faith, and strategy. The result is dense, ambitious sci-fi that isn’t afraid to swing big, and by the time the finale lands, it feels less like just another season and more like the galactic tipping point the series has been building toward.
Spartacus: House of Ashur Season 1
Starz’s Spartacus: House of Ashur comes in with a history remix that feels right in line with the franchise. In this telling, Ashur survives the rebellion and is rewarded by the Roman Republic with his own gladiator school. Nick E. Tarabay steps back into the role, now playing a man who finally has everything he thought he wanted on paper and almost no real power in reality. He’s squeezed between sneering Roman elites and the fighters he trains, including the gladiatrix Achillia, who also emerges as a standout.
Premiering December 5 with a two-episode launch on Starz, the series delivers what longtime Spartacus fans are here for: blood, sex, and cutthroat scheming cranked all the way up, wrapped in operatic speeches and slow-motion carnage. The hook is watching Ashur try to reinvent himself as a respectable master while everyone around him remembers the snake he used to be. It works as both a sequel and a soft reboot, and it feels well-positioned to pull lapsed viewers back into this world.
It: Welcome to Derry Season 1
It: Welcome to Derry feels like the rare franchise expansion that actually earns its real estate. Set in Derry decades before the Losers’ Club era, the season tracks a new wave of disappearances and public panic as a tight-knit pocket of locals starts tugging at threads the town has spent years pretending don’t exist, only to realize some forces here don’t just haunt, they organize.
Taylour Paige is a major part of why the season works. She gives the chaos a human center, playing every scene like there’s something real to lose, even when the town is sliding into hysteria. On top of that, the show deepens the mythology with sharper, more coherent lore, then folds in a chilling government-minded “solution” that treats the horror like a phenomenon to study, contain, and potentially weaponize. Somehow, all of it comes together cleanly, and it ends up feeling like the strongest entry in this universe to date.
