Great TV will not be confined nor defined by genre. That’s true both for the medium generally and here at Vulture specifically, where we are proud to bestow the label on everything from grim-and-gritty prestige dramas to campy reality competitions to weirdo animation and all points in between. Even that dustiest of TV genres, the medical procedural, proved it can still deliver the goods in 2025. Each of this year’s early standout series are distinctive in their form, tone, and appeal, and collectively showcase the breadth and depth of the best that television has to offer.
All titles are listed by season premiere date, with the most recent releases up top.
Common Side Effects (Adult Swim, Max)
In this Adult Swim cartoon created by Joseph Bennett and Steve Hely, a kind-hearted and noble naturalist discovers a rare mushroom that can miraculously heal any ailment … even death, under some circumstances. The discovery shoves him into the center of a conspiracy involving the American government and a big-pharma corporation, which both attempt to stop his efforts to produce the mushroom at scale in order to free the world of illness. King of the Hill’s Mike Judge and Greg Daniels feature as executive producers (with Judge turning in a reliably doofy performance as a pharma CEO), and the result is a wry, delightful, and poignant series that simultaneously feels like a Gen-X throwback and deeply modern satirical take on a broken world. Bonus points for the show’s psychedelic sequences, typically populated by strange miniature humanoids who look like twisted, western versions of Hayao Miyazaki’s weird little guys. —Nicholas Quah
Severance, season two (Apple TV+)
The first season of Severance ended on a cliffhanger so intense, it temporarily halted the flow of oxygen to most viewers’ brains. Then the show did the cruelest thing possible: It did not come back for three years. When season two of this dense and deeply weird workplace thriller finally dropped on Apple TV+, expectations were understandably high. These ten new episodes meet and often exceed them.
Series creator Dan Erickson, director Ben Stiller (he handles half of the season’s episodes), and their colleagues have delivered a surreal, meticulously rendered odyssey that delves more deeply into the cult-like environment at Lumon, the shadowy biotech company that has a team of severed employees whose work and personal lives are fully divorced from each other. As the members of that team — Mark S. (Adam Scott, in a career-best performance), Helly R. (Britt Lower), Irving B. (John Turturro) and Dylan G. (Zach Cherry) — continue to investigate what’s really going on at this freakishly controlling corporate enterprise. The craftsmanship on this show, from the idiosyncratic production design to the carefully composed cinematography, is sterling on every level. And while it may feel right to describe Severance as a drama, it’s got a really terrific, twisted sense of humor that feels especially suited to these dark times. If you didn’t guffaw during the office memorial service where employees were told to “each take nine seconds” to remember a former colleague, I’m sorry, but you may not be Lumon material. —Jen Chaney
➼ Read Kathryn VanArendonk’s review of Severance and Erin Qualey’s recaps of the season.
American Primeval (Netflix)
No, Peter Berg and Mark L. Smith’s gritty-grimy-ugly depiction of the American West in American Primeval isn’t perfect. There are maybe too many moments that feel derivative of The Revenant, and Betty Gilpin could have had more to do. But there’s a pureness to how committed American Primeval is to its thesis of “American history bad, actually.” Our pop culture has been so stuck in a mode of romanticizing pioneers and settlers that American Primeval, with its insistence on diving into Mormon history and rejecting the idea that violence in the name of gaining power is justified, feels like a balancing of the scales. Taylor Kitsch gives one of the most textured performances of his career, Shea Whigham is having a ball going head-to-head with Kim Coates, and the series actually takes the time to depict the Shoshone with depth and context. All the beautiful shots of the sprawling American landscape are nice, but American Primeval never lets us forget that these lands are soaked in blood. —Roxana Hadadi
➼ Read Roxana Hadadi’s full review of American Primeval and Keith Phipps’s recaps of the series.
The Pitt (Max)
Some elements of The Pitt feel surprising and refreshing because they’re a return to a kind of TV that streaming has been uniquely bad at making: a long season, a strong sense of individual episodes, with a straightforward and unfussy drama premise. Those features alone are so well executed that The Pitt would be worth notice. But The Pitt is astonishing beyond that baseline. Executed with a real-time logic and a bare minimum of emotion-juicing musical score, two things can stand out: the immediacy of the medical crises, and the show’s stellar performances especially from Noah Wyle, Katherine LaNasa, and Taylor Dearden. The Pitt would be a standout at any point in TV history. After years of streaming bloat it seems nearly miraculous. —Kathryn VanArendonk
➼ Read Kathryn VanArendonk’s full review of The Pitt and Maggie Fremont’s recaps of the series.
The Traitors, season three (Peacock)
Honestly, Lala’s outfits are enough to get this show in our best of the year. Those little tutus! But even setting aside the continued sartorial magnificence of Alan Cumming and his stylish sidekick, The Traitors’s entertainment value as a social experiment keeps on rising. Since the series has fully reoriented itself around reality-TV celebs, it’s become a fascinating analysis of how this genre’s stars perform themselves, lean into their infamy, and align based on the networks that gave them fame in the first place; The Traitors now has a layer of meta-tension that makes all of the bickering between factions feel weighted by how these people define themselves, too. Reality-TV competitions like this are all about assumptions, how we size up strangers and decide to align ourselves, and that tribalism has an even sharper edge now that we think we know these people from their appearances on other series. That’s fun! And it’s only a bonus that this season has had so much mess, from bickering Traitors who spend most of their time backstabbing each other to Tom Sandoval somehow winning us over with his transformation into a walking banana peel. —R.H.
➼ Read Tom Smyth’s recaps of the season.