TV critic David Bianculli says 2025 offered so many great shows he couldn't narrow them down. But in a year of intense TV, Netflix's haunting series Adolescence, stands apart.

In cultural criticism, every year ends the same way—with a deluge of top 10 lists for every imaginable art form, as though music and literature and film and TV and theater and dance all produce ...

Television. We watch way too much of it here, but we’re okay with that. We’re not aiming to be critics and we’re not aiming to make history here. We judge what we think is the best of the year not off ...

All this is to say that putting together a list of only the 10 best shows of the year was challenging, but not impossible.

HBO has had a reputation for creating the best shows on TV for decades. HBO Max may have diluted the brand, but that reputation is largely intact. Some shows like And Just Like That have proven to be ...