The Listener team’s round-up of the best TV from the first half of 2025, from Adolescence to Wolf Hall.
Truth be told, when it came to a Listener office discussion about the best new shows we’d seen this year, things soon went off topic. Yes, those of us who had seen Murderbot had really liked it. Others were put off by the name. There was a debate about whether the most recent seasons of The White Lotus and The Last of Us – the latter described by one detractor as “Home & Away with cordyceps” – lived up to their previous seasons. (They didn’t make the list.)
The conversation might have started with cutting-edge comedy and drama, but the talk soon headed to gentler, couch-blob staples, such as The Repair Shop and The Great British Sewing Bee.
“There’s nothing wrong with a shout-out to The Repair Shop,” said one of the team, sounding as if she ran the place.
“I do think Listener readers may already be aware of this show,” replied an underling, whose job was compiling the list. “Not enough teddy bears this season, I reckon,” he added, sarcastically. Well, previously there had been a conveyor belt of childhood toys taken to the shop for restoration, emerging dampened by the tears of happy owners.
Thus, The Repair Shop, the current episodes of which date from early 2023, has found itself with an honourable mention in the Listener’s mid-year list of best TV of 2025. Otherwise, there’s not a lot of comfort viewing on offer. But we’ve made sure to include some picks where no one dies and there are no robots. Keen-eyed readers will notice no shows that have the words “honeymoon”, “love”, “island” or “housewives” in the title. And the best local shows and documentaries, already covered extensively in past issues, we’ll ponder at a later date.
Adolescence
The British series about a 13-year-old boy accused of the murder of a female classmate struck a very loud chord. Adolescence’s examination of the pernicious effects of social media and the “mansophere” was entirely en pointe. It was immersive – care of each episode being done in one long take – and gripping, and marked by great performances, especially that of co-writer Stephen Graham as the boy’s father. Fellow writer Jack Thorne also wrote Toxic Town, a true-life environmental justice series that is also one of this year’s best British dramas.
On: Netflix
Andor
The creators of Andor – led by showrunner Tony Gilroy – were too tapped out by the scale of their endeavour to make the proposed five seasons. Instead, they brought it home in two seasons of 12 episodes each, the second season arriving a few months ago. They still made what is – to an almost embarrassing degree – the deepest, most provocative show in the Star Wars universe.
On: Disney+
Apple Cider Vinegar
Showrunner Samantha Strauss didn’t make a straightforward story of the true-life tale of deceptive Australian wellness influencer Belle Gibson, but its fourth-wall-breaking, timeline-jumping style is addictive and surprising.
On: Netflix
Asura
This beguiling Japanese series about the four very different Takezawa sisters and their family secret arrived largely unheralded, despite being yet another lovely, detailed domestic drama by Cannes-winning director Hirokazu Kore-eda. Its story might have similarities to the director’s own Our Little Sister, but Asura is adapted from a novel by the late screenwriter Kuniko Mukōda, and was previously made into a hit Japanese TV series in 1979.
On: Netflix
Dept Q
Like a collision of Rebus and Slow Horses, this adaptation of the first of Danish author Jussi Adler-Olsen’s Department Q novels has been shifted by American creator Scott Frank (The Queen’s Gambit, Godless) to an Edinburgh with its gothic filter on full. Matthew Goode, best known for playing nice chaps in Downton Abbey and elsewhere, is great fun as the angry, rude but brilliant Detective Carl Morck, who leads a makeshift cold case unit on a case about a vanished crown prosecutor who looks a lot like Alanis Morissette. Possibly not ironic.
On: Netflix
Dying for Sex
A drama based on a true story and a podcast of a woman who, after receiving a terminal cancer diagnosis – and libido-increasing hormone treatment – leaves her dour husband to spend her remaining days exploring her dormant sexuality. The sex edges close to gratuitous, but the typically wonderful Michelle Williams – funny, sad, perfect – makes Dying for Sex feel like a feminist call to arms.
On: Disney+
Long Way Home
Ewan McGregor and Charley Boorman revived their motorcycle travelogue in 2020 with the electric-powered Long Way Up. But Long Way Home – 17 European countries on temperamental vintage bikes – feels more natural, even languid.
On: Apple TV+
MobLand
Tom Hardy is Harry Da Souza, a Ray Donovan-esque fixer in a crime family headed by Conrad (Pierce Brosnan, good at playing bad) and Maeve Harrigan (Helen Mirren, the craziest, meanest of all). Irish accents, Cotswolds estates, Hardy, Brosnan, Mirren on fire, it’s the Guy Ritchie fix you didn’t know you needed.
On: Prime Video
Murderbot
On: Apple TV+
The Narrow Road to the Deep North
The weightiest screen adaptation of Australian literature in some time is this stirring epic take on Richard Flanagan’s Booker Prize winner. The story of a celebrated surgeon looking back on his life, including his time as a wartime prisoner of the Japanese working on the Burma Railway, makes for tricky timeline juggling, but director Justin Kurzel and his cast ensure it’s riveting.
On: Prime Video
The Pitt
Doctors with weighty back stories, stat! Long-suffering nurses who keep the whole place running, stat! Junior docs learning about life, stat! Despite some familiar tropes with characters, this day-in-the-life-of hospital drama set in Pittsburgh rarely resorts to cliché. A welcome return to medicine for ER star Noah Wyle.
On: Neon
Rogue Heroes
On the TVNZ+ list of its 20 most-streamed shows this year, the second season of Rogue Heroes came in fourth. The first season about the early days of the British army’s Special Air Service was set in World War II North Africa, with creator Steven Knight (Peaky Blinders) taking an approach that was more punk-rock Commando Comics than official military history. In the second season, with the squad kicking off the Allied invasion of Italy single-handedly, things are even more outrageously, entertainingly gung-ho.
On: TVNZ+
The Studio
Yes, it fairly groans with in-jokes, but there is a love for movies – for the very idea of making movies – in Seth Rogen’s frantic Hollywood studio satire, along with a lingering sense of melancholy. Cameos from Martin Scorsese and Ron Howard add to the fun.
On: Apple TV+
A Thousand Blows
And talking of Steven Knight, here he underlines his ability to create visually and thematically rich stories for TV, with a series inspired by true lives amid the scrabble of 1880s London. His leads, Stephen Graham as brutal bare-knuckle boxer and his Adolescence co-star Erin Doherty as crime queen, are exceptional.
On: Disney+
Wolf Hall: The Mirror and the Light
Peter Kosminsky, the director of the first and this, the equally good second series of Hilary Mantel’s trilogy about Henry VIII’s right-hand man Thomas Cromwell, told the Listener last month that this might be the last BBC costume drama of its kind. Best lap it up while we can.
On: Neon
Coming attractions
Outrageous
A rollicking new period drama about the lives of the Mitford sisters arrives on BBC First and Neon at the end of July.
Chief of War
A Jason Momoa-led, NZ-filmed series about inter-tribal conflict in the kingdoms of Hawai’i, and early encounters with Europeans in the late 18th century. It starts on Apple TV+ at the beginning of August.
Alien: Earth
The first television extension of the Alien franchise from Noah Hawley (who did wonders with Fargo) comes to Disney+ on August 12.
Slow Horses
The fifth season of the MI5 spy comedy-thriller starring Gary Oldman as the anti-James Bond starts on AppleTV+ on September 24.
Wednesday
The second season of the Addams Family spin-off debuts on Netflix on August 6.
Stranger Things
Part one of the final season of the Netflix supernatural hit starts on November 26, with part two on Christmas Day and the finale on New Year’s Eve.
