The Ringer can’t stop talking about TV shows like The Studio, Severance, and Andor. And that’s fair: CR, Fennessey, Mal and crew have that right: those are all podcast chatter-worthy. But Pop Thruster is not in the “every show gets a gold star” business.
We’re here to plant a flag, crank up the gigawatts, and tell you what we really think.
We’re just gonna put it on front street, people: The White Lotus is the best TV show of 2025 thus far, and it ain’t even close.
The Belt: The White Lotus
Season 3 is pure luxury and chaos and hilarity and gripping drama in equal measures: a perfectly blended fruit smoothie using the bountiful and exotic local produce on hand, one might say.
It’s a slow, gorgeous, and glorious car crash that I plan on revisiting again and again.
Bonus I, II, and Sideways Eight: every moment Walton Goggins and Sam Rockwell share screentime.
Side note: did we shamelessly steal The Belt from The Watch? Well…
Our only hope to steal the belt (so far): Andor
I still need to catch up to Season 2, but Andor is the one quadrant of the expansive Star Wars universe that feels like its made for adults and with intent to tell dazzling and gripping stores.
Honorable mentions
The Pitt: I don’t do hospital dramas. Normally. I barely do hospitals (and my wife works in one!). But The Pitt nailed the writing, the acting, and the frantic, manic hour-by-hour pacing so hard that I’m starting to think I felt I need to get my blood pressure checked.
Adolescence: Brutal, urgent, prescient, gut punch-y. All by way of stunning writing, performances, and camera direction. Elite tier storytelling.
Buzzy but ultimately disappointing
I wanted to love the hell out of The Studio, and thought the premiere episode, “The Presentation,” was mostly really fun. But it was diminishing returns from there, and it kept nagging at me by the end that the show leaned too hard into form over function.
The category of enigma: nearly there, but not quite
The Rehearsal Season 2: still brilliant, still Nathan Fielder playing 4D chess with your emotions and your mind – but this season didn’t quite take off (see what I did there?) the way that the mesmerizing and deeply polarizing first season did.
Fun but not quite best of the half-year material
Your Friends & Neighbors, the latest Black Mirror anthology collection, and The Last of Us all had solid and very bingeable outings. None of them made me have The Chat with my wife that I mustn’t be disturbed during Thie Very Important Episode Of… so at least there’s that, I suppose.
Not a TV show, but…
Mountainhead, the first feature film directed by Succession mastermind Jesse Armstrong, is a brilliant, biting, deeply hilarious and deeply disturbing masterwork that takes place in an opulent mountain retreat that almost could have doubled for the house that (spoiler!) Pedro Pascal got got in during The Last Of Us Season 2.
The “I really should get back to this one” show
Severance remains parked in the “I’ll get to it” zone of my brain — that purgatory between genuine interest and never actually tracking it back down on Apple TV+. That’s true for a bunch of Apple TV+ shows, come to think of it…
What else should be in the mix?
Got a show you think can knock The White Lotus off the throne? Let’s hear it. We’ll revisit at the end of 2025 and see if we were prophetic geniuses, or if we just really like watching rich people get emotionally waterboarded.
Which… fun, right?
Want more best of TV, but like BEST BEST? Check out Pop Thruster’s Best 100 TV Show Ever, updated annually.