Each week, NPR TV critic Eric Deggans writes about what he's watching. Read last week's column about The Last of Us Season 2 here.
Whenever someone frets to me about not having time to watch the latest buzzed-about series, my response is pretty simple:
Thanks to streaming services, most great TV shows are like classic books, stacked on a digital shelf, ready and waiting for you when the time is right.
So let's say the time is right now. Before summer really kicks in and movie theaters fill up with too many spandex-wearing action heroes, let's check out a list of the ten coolest TV projects from 2025 you should see at this moment.
Admittedly, I've excluded some obvious and widely-praised choices, like Apple TV+'s Severance and Max's The Pitt, which have filled enough best-of lists to stretch from here to Hollywood. What's listed here may have missed your attention; time to slip one off the shelf and settle in for some great entertainment.
On Call
Prime Video
Thanks to an inexplicable cancellation, there's only one season available of this series – perhaps the most creatively ambitious project Law & Order creator Dick Wolf's production company Wolf Entertainment has tackled in a while. It offers a visceral, kinetic look at cops, centered on a training officer in the Long Beach Police Department who becomes unmoored when a patrol officer she trained is killed during a traffic stop. Even better, ER alum Eriq La Salle, who appears on camera as an occasional foil, also directs several episodes, lending the show its energetic, creative vision.
MobLand
Paramount+
This isn't a perfect crime drama, featuring Tom Hardy as the coolly capable fixer/lieutenant for a dysfunctional London-based mob family with Irish roots. But the overly convoluted plot – detailing a brutal gang war brewing between Hardy's crew and a rival clan — is spiced by glorious, scenery-chewing performances from Pierce Brosnan, as the family's profane, brogue-spewing patriarch Conrad Harrigan, and Helen Mirren, who tops her recent string of tough-as-nails matriarchs with a command performance as Conrad's toxic wife, Maeve. Hey, it's a British crime drama executive produced by the master of the form, Guy Ritchie. 'Nuff said.
Ladies and Gentlemen… 50 Years of SNL Music
Peacock
Co-directed by Ahmir "Questlove" Thompson – co-founder and bandleader of The Roots, the house band at The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon – this documentary kicks off with the best opening minutes I have ever seen in a music film. Questlove splices together performances from Prince, Rick James, Fine Young Cannibals and more in a DJ-style mashup that covers a huge swath of Saturday Night Live's 50-year musical history. And there's more, especially for music and/or SNL nerds, including the origin story of Eddie Murphy's James Brown hot tub sketch and an explanation for how Ashlee Simpson got caught lip synching in one of the show's most embarrassing live performance fails.
Andor
Disney+
Creator Tony Gilroy swears this story — which documents the rise of the rebellion in the Star Wars universe mostly through the eyes of Diego Luna's thief-turned-rebel agent Cassian Andor – is not specifically about today's Trumpian times. But look at the ways in which this Republic slides into authoritarianism, along with the fitful progress among often-infighting rebels, and you'll see some telling parallels with modern life. The show's second season, which just ended, connects neatly with the start of the underappreciated 2016 film Rogue One, so feel free to cue up the movie after finishing the TV show for a seamless, franchise-rejuvenating experience.
We Want the Funk!
PBS Independent Lens
Parliament-Funkadelic founder George Clinton told me that this film, which charts the rise and evolution of funk music from the 1960s to now, shows that "Funk is anything it needs to be, in the moment it needs to be that." That quote may sound confusing, but it all makes sense after one look at the story, directed by Emmy winners Nicole London and Stanley Nelson – which treats James Brown's explosive success in the mid-1960s as the starting gun for a genre which would stretch from Sly Stone to contemporary gospel artist Kirk Franklin, Afrobeat pioneer Fela Kuti, rap group De La Soul and beyond.
The Residence
Netflix
This whodunit explores the life of staff and caretakers inside the White House, giving Uzo Aduba room to play the coolest detective/birder now on TV, Cordelia Cupp. Toss in a nimble, impishly irreverent script leveraging the sharpest, driest humor on the small screen, and a roster of performers that includes Giancarlo Esposito, Susan Kelechi Watson, Randall Park, Jane Curtin and Al Franken … it all equals a superior, genre-blending TV experience.
Your Friends & Neighbors
Apple TV+
At first, this looks like yet another satire of over-privileged, wealthy white people, with Jon Hamm accessing his Mad Men reflexes to play another charismatic jerk, financier Andrew "Coop" Cooper. But things get more interesting once Cooper, who already lost his wife after she cheated on him, gets fired from his job and starts stealing from neighbors to make ends meet. Ultimately, when the story unfolds to reveal characters with complex motivations and few clear-cut villains, the narrative gains the most steam.
Hacks
Max
I'm not sure I agree with other critics who say this comedy about a legendary stand-up star and her young, often-awkward writer isn't that funny. (I do think there are many moments when the characters are not funny when the story says they should be – like the triumphant stand-up comedy sets by Jean Smart's Joan Rivers-style character, Deborah Vance.) And parts of the show's just-finished fourth season feel like a showbiz fantasy – especially when Vance takes over hosting a late night talk program and, within too short a time, boosts its ratings to the top. But Hacks is compelling and insightful when focused on its core story: the bizarre friendship/enemyship/working relationship between Vance and her talented head writer, Hannah Einbinder's Ava Daniels.
The Studio
Apple TV+
Most show business satires come off like an odd combination of Hollywood storytellers taking themselves too seriously and trying too hard to look like good sports. But this comedy, featuring Seth Rogen as a fumbling, newly-installed film studio head, feels like the culmination of everything Rogen has endured in a career ranging from writing for The Simpsons to co-directing a movie that sparked threats of war from the North Korean government. Rogen and longtime collaborator Evan Goldberg co-created and co-wrote The Studio in addition to directing several episodes, and every installment seems like something that must have actually happened to someone at some time on a film set — from Rogen's character begging Zoe Kravitz to thank him at the Golden Globes to his attempt to make a big budget film centered on The Kool Aid man.
Adolescence
Netflix
So much is outstanding about this show, from the way every episode is filmed in one long, unbroken "take," to the standout performance by novice actor Owen Cooper as Jamie Miller, a teen accused of killing a female classmate (to say nothing of co-star Stephen Graham, who co-created and co-wrote the show while delivering a spellbinding turn as Jamie's father). But it's the exploration of toxic incel culture and its effect on young men that makes the series a relevant, spellbinding exploration of a pressing moment in modern society.
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