10 Best Netflix TV Shows Of 2025 (So Far)

Netflix has no off-season. Something new drops almost every day, and can be forgotten almost as fast. It's still the age of binge-watching, but also one of background streaming, as many of us watch TV while doing other things. This means it can be easy for shows to get overlooked. Netflix releases more than 700 titles every year, and so far, 2025 has been a pretty solid one. What's emerged isn't a single defining hit, but a patchwork of stories that show how, alongside the big-name headline-grabbers that dominate social media, there are also smaller, stranger options on the U.S.'s biggest streaming service.

For this list, we've included shows that performed strongly in viewing figures or picked up major awards — but mostly, it's about the ones we liked. There's no way a list like this isn't going to be subjective, but we've tried to reflect Netflix's range by including a balance of different genres. The shows here include U.S. productions and standout titles from the U.K., Korea, and Australia. Some excellent series didn't quite make the cut, but Argentina's bleak sci-fi "The Eternaut," the glossy period piece "House of Guinness", and Japanese drama "Asura" were all strong contenders.

It's impossible for anyone to watch everything Netflix produces — and that's before you factor in all the other streaming services competing for attention. But Netflix's biggest rival probably isn't Disney+ or Max, it's its own wide variety of programming. Still, the best of this year's offerings remind us there are some shows worth putting down your phone for.

The most-watched and most talked-about show of the first half of 2025, the multi-award-winning British drama "Adolescence," was clearly going to make this list. It wasn't just the subject matter that made it so impactful. The four-part series jettisoned all the most obvious tropes in a show about a murder. While other shows would include scenes of the discovery of the murdered girl's body or the trial of the 13-year-old killer, "Adolescence" gave us four snapshots — the initial arrest and police questioning, the detectives' visit to Jamie's school, a harrowing session between Jamie and his psychiatrist, and the final episode showing Jamie's family trying to have a nice normal day on dad Stephen Graham's birthday while struggling with the aftermath of what happened.

Each episode was shot in one continuous take. As a viewer, I was too immersed in the story to fully appreciate it on first viewing, although I do remember thinking that it was the first time I'd ever seen a person getting a drink from a vending machine in real-time onscreen. The show addressed huge questions about online culture and toxic masculinity by focusing on the small, the specific, and the personal. The acting is incredible, especially from the two leads: co-creator Stephen Graham as Eddie and Owen Cooper as Jamie. Cooper's performance as the mercurial teenager who switches from vulnerability to menace and back again in a heartbeat in the third episode made him the youngest male to ever win an Emmy for acting.

If the dramatic opening scene of "Sirens'" first episode achieves anything (and really, it achieves a lot), it shows the perks of being rich. I didn't know that one of the things I plan to do if I marry into obscene amounts of money was to stand on my privately-owned cliff edge in a floaty ballgown and leather gauntlet and release a rescued peregrine falcon into the air. But now that I've seen Julianne Moore do it, it's right on the list.

Of course, the lives of Sirens' super-wealthy – and their staff — can't be all billowy dresses and raptors. Simone is the personal assistant to charismatic philanthropist Michaela Kell and has dedicated herself to managing her Barbie-perfect household and social calendar. The arrival of Simone's sister Devon throws a spanner in her perfectly orchestrated calendar of social events and lycra-clad wellness. Although it seems like Devon's attempts to rescue her sister from what she sees as a dangerous cult are the catalyst that brings the dream crashing down, in fact, it's clear as the show progresses that the rot was already there. Nobody is quite what they seem to others. There are plenty of laughs here, thanks to an absurd array of characters and Devon's biting wit, but it's also a story of missed chances, lost childhoods, and poor decisions. The finale is left fairly open-ended, but it also leaves the characters where they deserve to be, like a complicated and malicious game of chess. There are no current plans for a second season, and it would probably be best to leave it that way.

Everyone's favorite Addams made a return to Nevermore Academy (and Netflix) after a nearly three-year absence — and she brought most of her family with her. In the second season of Netflix's biggest hit, Wednesday had to share the spotlight with Gomez, Morticia, and Pugsley. Which, given her disdain for the spotlight and the fan-like adoration of her classmates following the antics of the first season, should have been something of a relief. The first season of "Wednesday" was the most-watched English-language Netflix show in the world, so people clearly wanted more of Tim Burton's signature style.

This show flips a major theme of previous Addams family iterations on its head. From their beginnings in the 1930s as single-panel cartoons in the New Yorker, through various animated and live-action TV shows and movies, the family was always portrayed as the weirdos in a normal world. Nevermore Academy, by contrast, places Wednesday amongst people who are a good deal weirder than she is, but her psychic powers mean that she's more than just a moody goth girl surrounded by fairytale monsters. Season 2 gave the audience more of what it loved and saw the welcome addition of Steve Buscemi and Christopher Lloyd (or at least his head). One significant and welcome change to the format was jettisoning teen-romance subplots for the anti-heroine. There are no would-be suitors flapping around her this time round, which is great. Wednesday's got murders to solve — she really doesn't need that kind of unnecessary distraction.

Season 7 of the British anthology series "Black Mirror" came to Netflix in April. The previous season had mixed reviews, some people were unimpressed with the inclusion of horror in what had hitherto been a show entirely focused on technology gone bad. Perhaps series creator Charlie Brooker took that on board as 2025's episodes stuck to the brief and dished up some superlative sci-fi tales, including "Common People", a sideswipe at dubious subscription practices, "Eulogy", a tech-assisted trip down memory lane, and "USS Callister: Into Infinity," the show's first-ever sequel episode, which offers viewers achance to follow up on the crew of the USS Callister as featured in a Season 4 episode.

The standout episode for me was "Plaything". Former game reviewer Cameron Walker — played by a haunted-looking (is there any other kind?) Peter Capaldi — is arrested on suspicion of murder, and tells the police a story only incidentally connected to either of those things. He talks about an unreleased 1990s video game that has controlled his life. It's one of the best — and most terrifying — depictions of AI superintelligence on television yet. The abrupt ending is open to interpretation, but my interpretation is that it had to end at that point. We can no more comprehend a world of AI superintelligence than a gerbil can understand a Netflix Top 10 list.

As more seasons of "Black Mirror" arrive, audiences inevitably compare their cherry-picked favorites from all the previous seasons to the entire output of the current one. There has been no word about a potential Season 8 yet, but in an interview with the BBC, Brooker expressed enthusiasm about continuing the series.

With TV as a medium rapidly approaching its centenary, it has become increasingly challenging for show creators to come up with something original. However, animated comedy "Long Story Short" has done just that. The Schwartz-Cooper-Schwoopers aren't the only dysfunctional cartoon family by a long shot, but the way their story is told feels brand new. We get snapshots of the lives of parents, Elliott and Naomi, and their three children, Avi, Shira, and Yoshi. While most of the stories take place during the kids' lives from early childhood to late middle age, the show isn't afraid to jump outside that timeline.

The format allows us to jump between small but significant events in the family's lives non-chronologically. There's no current-day framing device for these flashbacks. We're spoiled for everything; We know whether couples are going to make it or if attempts to start a family are going to be successful. And it works beautifully, injecting scenes of the characters in their younger years with an added poignancy. The animation style is simplistic and messy, and the writing is tight as a drum. Even though there have been only a few short episodes, each character is complicated and believable. And it's not just emotional, poignant, and relatable; It's also really funny. The series was created by Raphael Bob-Waksberg, the brains behind "Bojack Horseman", so he has form for this sort of thing.

"Apple Cider Vinegar" is described as "A true-ish story based on a lie". This Australian series took viewers through the stories of four women, primarily focusing on Belle Gibson, who defrauded millions by claiming to have cured herself of cancer through a natural diet, including, of course, the titular apple cider vinegar. At only six episodes, it didn't outstay its welcome and could be polished off in a few sessions as we watched Belle's rise and inevitable crash as a wellness influencer. Many of her lies are obviously improbable, but she gets away with them for so long because it's a major faux pas to dispute another person's cancer story. What if you get it wrong and accuse someone with a terrible disease of making it all up? Nobody wants to be that monster.

Luckily, a couple of journalists, Justin and Sean, are willing to take the risk. Justin's wife, Lucy, has been diagnosed with cancer and, influenced by Belle's story, wants to avoid conventional medical treatment. Distrust of the medical establishment isn't confined to the U.S. (although per capita cancer treatment costs are lower in Australia), and "Apple Cider Vinegar" allowed American viewers to see the world of wellness influencers from another country's perspective. And while you probably won't muster up any sympathy for Gibson and her self-serving fantasies, supporting characters, like the deluded-but-genuine alternative-therapy-seeking Milla Blake, desperate, scared Lucy, and Gibson's kind but weak husband Clive, all provide real, heartfelt moments.

When you're exactly the intended demographic for a TV show, it can make it difficult to judge how much it would appeal to those outside it. "The Four Seasons is a show about being in your fifties. Framed around a trio of suburban couples who vacation together, it's not just about the obvious stuff like not being able to party as hard or play ultimate frisbee without hurting yourself. It's about reaching a point in your life when you start to wonder whether you're actually happy with your life and if where you are is where you expected to be. The only improbable thing here is that the six friends regularly manage to meet up four times a year.

The friends holiday together each year, but as one couple breaks up — and a new, younger girlfriend gets brought into the mix — things get complicated. And although at some point everybody here does or says exactly the wrong thing and makes the situation worse, for the most part, they are a supportive, funny, believable bunch of friends, with all the in-jokes and no-holds-barred advice that come with decades of friendship.

Written and created by Tina Fey (although based on an '80s film starring Alan Alda), the show also stars Steve Carell, whose midlife crisis serves as a catalyst for the other characters to reassess their own lives. It's also a lot funnier than that sounds, although "The Four Seasons" is not afraid to include a gut-punching plotline that will have a significant impact on a second season that Netflix says is in the works.

"Love, Death & Robots" is one of Netflix's boldest experiments. An anthology of animation, every episode somehow connects to the topics in the title and runs the gamut of sci-fi, comedy, and horror. It first debuted in 2019, and in 2025, Season 4 was released, along with 10 new animated short films ranging in length from 6 to 17 minutes. These films encompassed traditional, CGI, and stop-motion animation, as well as a largely live-action morality tale featuring an animated alien and Rhys Darby from "Our Flag Means Death." Love, Death & Robots won multiple awards at the 2025 Emmys.

As always, with this smorgasbord of different creations, there were weaker moments. "Can't Stop" is for Red Hot Chili Pepper fans only, and "Smart Appliance, Stupid Owners" was derivative and unfunny. I also found that "The Screaming of the Tyrannosaur" was beautiful to look at, but kind of boring.

Though not every episode took off, when one did, it soared. There were two episodes this year whose main protagonists were cats, which is something you don't often see on TV. Admittedly, the two felines' motivations were a bit different. One was trying to take over the world, and the other was trying to save it from the clutches of Satan, but these are both probably things that cats would do. My two favorite episodes were "How Zeke Got Religion", a horror movie set in a Second World War bomber, and "Spider Rose", about a lonely cyborg befriending a cute alien pet, in a story that isn't as pleasant as it sounds.

"The Residence" is a whodunnit which wears its antecedents proudly. Each episode is named after a famous story, such as "The Fall of the House of Usher" or "Dial M for Murder." Early on in Episode 1, before the audience is even introduced to consulting detective Cordelia Cupp, one of the characters shouts, "I don't care if she's Miss Marple or Sherlock Holmes or whoever Daniel Craig is in that movie!" (Except their version is peppered with an impressive number of expletives, which makes it funnier). But "The Residence" is not a pastiche or a spoof — it plays strictly by the rules.

It's a screwball locked-room mystery, taking place in the White House during a state dinner with hundreds of potential suspects. There are motives, red herrings, and impressively accurate birding references. It plays with the format by splitting it into two sections and providing an official enquiry as a framing device while still delivering the full drawing room reveal that fans of the genre want to see. Each suspect's version of the events of the fateful night plays out, allowing us to see overlapping and sometimes conflicting narratives. Although the cast is huge, writer Paul William Davies has crafted a memorable collection of characters that are distinctive without being clichéd. Detective Cupp calls herself "the best", and despite strong competition from other fictional sleuths, she may have a point. All of this makes Netflix's decision not to renew the series for a second season a perplexing mystery of its own.

"Squid Game" is a streaming service phenomenon that can't be overlooked. It accounted for three slots in the top 25 most-watched series in the first half of 2025 — one for each season. Yet its inclusion on this list wasn't assured. If this were a list of the best Netflix shows in 2021, then Season 1 would likely sail to an uncontested top spot. But the series' progression saw diminishing returns. You could even say that Squid Game never needed a second season, let alone a third.

That's not to say that "Squid Game" Season 3 was all bad. It still delivered on what it always does best: transforming innocuous children's games, such as hide-and-seek and jump rope, into brutal horror scenes. Whenever the contestants were in the arena with its bright visuals and chirpy-voiced instructions, the show shone. However, the broader narrative faltered, and the second half of the season left us with too few characters to root for — outside of players 456 and 222 — and every scene featuring the VIPs was almost unwatchable. Lee Jung-jae as Gi-hun was as good as ever, often conveying unspeakable emotions with a single look, but this time around, the writers didn't give him all that much to work with.

Season 3 doesn't seem to be the end of "Squid Game", with a U.S. version foreshadowed in the series and reportedly in the works. Unlike most of the game's contestants, the money-making megalith is unlikely to get a quick death. Who knew that a show about the evils of greed and capitalism could be such a cash cow?