Best of the Year list season is upon us once more! This year marks our second best of list for television, and what a year it has been. We’ve had some of the best speculative science fiction, medical dramas, absurd comedies, and mini series of the decade in 2025. We asked our 22 members to submit top-ten lists, and nearly 60 different series were mentioned, including HBO’s Task and The White Lotus, Hulu’s The Lowdown and Paradise, and notable Canadian series like Shoresy. Of those, we now present the top nine, each with a write-up from a member who ranked it highly on their list.
Our Best of 2025 coverage so far this year includes a slate of awards for film, the nominees for our annual Best Cascadian Film Award (the winner of which will be announced on December 26th!) and our ten best films of 2025.
And now, Cascadia Film & Television Critics’ Best 9 Television Series of 2025.
9. Alien: Earth, Season 1
For years, expanding the Alien universe for television seemed unanswerable if not downright foolish. Noah Hawley found the key to unlocking his series in an unlikely place: Peter Pan. This thematic commitment—the lost children, the inability to grow up by some, the refusal by others, the shadows that follow—allowed Hawley to crack source material that two years ago appeared impenetrable. What emerges, in hindsight, feels obvious.
Sydney Chandler delivers a career-making turn, carrying Hawley’s vision with quiet intensity. Timothy Olyphant matches her with exquisite character work, making moments more significant through small movements and sly facial choices in what had appeared to be nothing more than a familiar archetype. The experimental film-inspired episode introductions imaginatively convey and control the tone, while the penultimate episode, “Emergence,” is among the finest and most thrilling hours of television this decade.
“Alien: Earth” shows Hawley is as elusive and imaginative a long-form storyteller as ever.
–Taylor Baker
8. Adolescence
Philip Barantini turns real time into a pressure cooker in Adolescence, the four-episode mini-series that floored audiences with its raw immediacy and emotional intensity. Created by Jack Thorne and Stephen Graham, it opens with a nightmare: armed police tear down a family’s front door and arrest 13-year-old Jamie Miller (Owen Cooper) for the murder of a classmate. Every hour unfolds in a single, unbroken take — a choice that might feel like a gimmick if it weren’t so suffocatingly effective.
The emotional blow lands hardest in two episodes: the devastating opener and a later psychological showdown that forces us inside Jamie’s unravelling mind. That third episode, mostly contained to one room, becomes a nerve-racking duel between Jamie and Briony (Erin Doherty), the psychologist tasked with probing where insecurity curdles into something dangerous. What emerges is a chilling portrait of online misogyny and modern male rage taking root before adults even notice. Graham is wrenching as a father blindsided by his own child, while Cooper is a startling discovery. Adolescence is a bruising yet essential study of the systems that fail young people and the horrors that take root when no one is looking.
– Marta Djordjevic
7. The Rehearsal, Season 2
“There’s no way. There’s no way!” That’s what I muttered to myself when I found out that Nathan Fielder — comedian, sociopath — was reigniting The Rehearsal. How could he upstage himself? There’s no way he could find people to subject themselves to his torturous methods. After all, the first season, in reaching for some profundity beyond laughs, succeeded only in emotionally scarring a child. But then I found out Fielder was attempting something very different, something more audacious: to solve the crisis of commercial aviation disasters.
And well, I kept muttering those words through the extraordinary twists and turns of The Rehearsal’s revolutionary second season. What Fielder does is literally unbelievable, always, but here the most of all. Whether he’s building to-scale replicas of airports, baiting Congressmen, suckling at the breast of 30 foot puppets, or attempting the most dangerous and self-indulgent stunt in television history, Fielder is a madman in Kubrickian control — and yes, he found a way to reach new heights.
– Todd Pengelly
6. Severance, Season 2
Season two of the long-awaited hit Apple TV workplace sci-fi thriller lives up to the sheer novelty and originality of the acclaimed first season. How it succeeds is by deepening the mythology of this corporate-dominated world, where employees voluntarily split their personalities to forget their existing traumas while at work.
We learn more about the individual characters’ complex backstories as well as the strange, sordid, conspiratorial origins of Lumon Industries. The sheer ambition of storytelling never disappoints, with plenty of satisfying revelations about characters’ motives for continuing to participate in the problematic severing process.
Highlights include the haunting seventh episode, “Chikhai Bardo” (partially filmed on 16mm), notably directed by series cinematographer and Quebec City native Jessica Lee Gagné, featuring the heartbreaking details of Mark and Gemma’s tragic love story. However, it’s the season finale, “Cold Harbour,” and its riveting cliffhanger mission rescue that leaves us wanting more.
– Rick Chung
5. The Chair Company, Season 1
Ron Trosper (Tim Robinson) is onto something big – real big. He may seem ordinary: he’s got a wife, two kids, and a job in real estate development. But one day, after tumbling out of a chair at work, he suspects he’s caught wind of a dark conspiracy, one that endangers sedentary office workers far beyond just his slice of suburbia. In this incredibly funny show, Robinson gives what might be the finest comedic performance of 2025 as Ron, a quintessential American everyman spiralling ever deeper into a mystery of corporate malfeasance, government corruption, and shadowy, eccentric individuals – all while he also deals with workplace mishaps and responsibilities at home. If there’s a single emotion that Robinson can most hilariously express, it’s exasperation, which is something the script cleverly gives Ron plenty of opportunities to experience. A paranoid thriller played for laughs, The Chair Company is terrific small-screen entertainment.
– Michael Clawson
4. Pluribus, Season 1
What do you do when your whole show is based on one of the most common tropes in sci-fi? If you’re Vince Gilligan, you use all those assumptions to your advantage. Instead of concocting complicated lore and alternative reasons for his new take on Body Snatchers in Pluribus, he allows the audience to draw their own conclusions before twisting them upside down in the most creative, satisfying ways. This is the core of truly great writing: old stories told in new ways. Each episode somehow manages to answer our burning questions with the most logical and straightforward reasoning, delivered with a smile by an outstanding ensemble cast of happy drones, before throwing another outrageous curveball. The creative and technical technique on show is exceptional, but nowhere more than in Rhea Seehorn’s absolute masterclass performance in the lead. If anything’s better than this in 2025, then I’ll eat my HDP.
– Simon Best
3. The Pitt, Season 1
The medical drama is a staple of television, and every decade or two, we get a series that redefines the genre and what it can be. In the 1980s, it was St. Elsewhere; in the 1990s and 2000s, it was ER; and in 2025, it was The Pitt, season 1. Set in a fictional Pittsburgh ER, the series follows the fifteen hours of a twelve-hour shift in real time, from the moment Noah Wyle’s Doctor Robbie walks in the front door to the moment he leaves. It’s a day filled with broken bones, drowning victims, and overdoses. At its climax, the victims of a mass casualty event flood the hospital, and the result is one of the single best episodes of television of the year. It is a series that takes a hard look at the realities of practitioners’ day-to-day lives in a way we’ve never seen before and captures the zeitgeist of a post-COVID world in a way none of us expected.
– Matthew Simpson
2. Andor, Season 2
Dark, rich and bold storytelling encapsulates every frame of the second season of Andor, which not only makes for one riveting concluding season of the greatest Star Wars television series to date, but also marks one of the best television series of the year. Delivering a gripping, emotionally charged, epic conclusion, Andor season two fires on all cylinders thanks to its terrific cast, notably the sensational Diego Luna and Genevieve O’Reilly. This season has exceptional production value and engrossing, high-stakes storytelling that draws a chilling parallel to today’s world, making it all the more important and urgent. Star Wars has not been this spectacular since The Empire Strikes Back.
– Darren Zakus
1. The Studio, Season 1
Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg’s massive critical hit, “The Studio,” is a powerful, hilarious series about the inner workings of Hollywood.
The show is a clever hybrid of comedy and drama, pulling back the curtain on the chaotic, frustrating reality of how films are produced. It keenly showcases the abysmal truth of the current age of content consumption, where those championing quality filmmaking are constantly met by overwhelming problems of unnecessary celebrity beef, constant money mismanagement, the plague of social media, and simple studio incompetence. Featuring a vast array of Hollywood A-listers, “The Studio” brilliantly uses Tinseltown and all the brilliance it offers to make a strong case for the preservation of artistic integrity. To see Goldberg and Rogen grow as sophisticated storytellers is incredibly gratifying; they’ve perfectly nailed the tricky balance of making film education entertaining for the uninitiated! For all entertainment lovers, this series is a must!
– Nick Tiffany