Our rankings of every TV show of 2025 continue apace. Yesterday featured two installments; you can find them here and here.
70. Stick (Apple, Season 1). Owen Wilson seems like a nice guy, and Stick—about a disgraced golfer who decides to return to the game by coaching a teenage prodigy—is a pretty nice show. Even the main antagonist is more of a rapscallion than a villain (it helps that he’s played by Timothy Olyphant). But pleasant vibes can only get you so far, and Stick has too little personal or dramatic urgency to be engrossing. Wilson’s athlete talks about the need to take chances, yet this series lays up again and again.
69. North of North (Netflix, Season 1). Cute! Cold! Cheerful and also quite insubstantial!
68. Sirens (Netflix, Season 1). This show tries to be both a twisty thriller and a biting satire about moneyed elites and how ostensibly powerful women are nonetheless subjugated by the entrenched patriarchy. It doesn’t really work; the plotting is too silly to take seriously, and the themes are clunky rather than forceful. But it’s still diverting, thanks to three watchable performances from Meghann Fahy, Julianne Moore, and Milly Alcock. (Kevin Bacon is also around for reasons that he doesn’t seem to understand.) And as you’d expect from that cast list, it’s quite pretty, with vivid pastels and glamorous costumes. Sirens may ram its ideas down your throat, but those lovely dresses make the didacticism go down easier.
67. Rogue Heroes (MGM, Season 2). The first season of Rogue Heroes hinged on the productive conflict between Connor Swindells’ fluid charm and Jack O’Connell’s fiery volatility. The problem with Season 2, which theoretically remains based in fact (sure), is that Swindells’ spy spends most of it stuck in a prison cell, transferring all of the weight to O’Connell’s commander. The latter actor is capable of shouldering it—after his wicked turns in Sinners and 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple, it’s strange to remember that he’s the good guy here—but the character dynamics have nowhere left to go. This means that Rogue Heroes now basically functions as a straightforward military procedural—bluntly effective, and also the exact opposite of the show’s purported stealth.
66. Ironheart (Disney, Season 1). Do you remember Dominique Thorne’s spunky scientist from Black Panther: Wakanda Forever? I confess that I did not, which is probably for the best, since Ironheart works better as a self-contained character study than a piece of Marvel lore. The show features a welcome sense of place, and when it stays grounded in its characters, it’s intimate and absorbing. The problem is that it’s still a product within the Marvel Cinematic Universe, with all of its endemic issues: weightless action, convoluted mythology, a general sense of obligatory franchise-moving. Some heroes are more interesting when they’re less super.
65. The Sandman (Netflix, Season 2; 2022 rank: 47 of 110). Speaking of convoluted mythology, the plotting on this show is nonsensical. But despite its laborious world-building, The Sandman is watchable, both for its eye-catching production design and its welcome episodic focus. The storytelling may be ludicrous, but its willingness to home in on particular characters at particular times imbues it with a certain rhythm. The biggest issue is the Sandman himself, a phenomenally bland hero in the middle of an otherwise intriguing universe. His sullen self-regard will make you dream of a series that centers on literally anyone else.
64. The Gilded Age (HBO, Season 3; 2023 rank: 57 of 94). I will never dislike this show. There are too many pretty costumes, too many glorious mansions, too many decorous speeches. It’s middlebrow catnip. And yet, The Gilded Age no longer possesses the steamrolling momentum it once had. Aside from the central marriage between Carrie Coon and Morgan Spector (which remains evolving and involving), the characters are growing tedious, and some of the subplots verge on insufferable. It’s still a suitably entertaining series, but it could use a track realignment.
63. MobLand (Showtime, Season 1). Technically, Guy Ritchie only directed three episodes of this series, but his signature is all over it: the steampunk aesthetic, the wanton violence, the constant double-dealing. It’s not exactly novel, and it struggles to maintain its breathless energy over the course of 10 episodes. But you know what helps? Tom Hardy as a ruthless fixer! Pierce Brosnan as a crime boss! Helen Mirren as a foul-mouthed Lady Macbeth! MobLand is a little too proud of its extremism, but it’s playful, and Hardy never wavers in his effort, even as he’s weirdly playing the only sane soul in the bunch. Sometimes brute force can be pleasurable as well as brutal.
62. Too Much (Netflix, Season 1). I mostly like Lena Dunham. She’s a genuine artist with something to say, and we need those in Hollywood. It feels almost self-defeating to complain that certain elements of Too Much, Dunham’s autobiographical-ish series that she made with her husband, are, well, too much. That’s the whole point, don’t you get it? And sure, it’s nice to see Megan Stalter in the lead as a Dunham surrogate who’s funny and spunky and unapologetically horny, even if she’s also neurotic. But while the series’ main characters are confidently drawn, its writing is a bit scattered, with shaky subplots and oddly shaped plotting. The issue with Too Much isn’t that it’s excessive, it’s that it’s inconsistent. When it comes to random digressions and unconvincing setups, the show could do with a little less.
61. Wednesday (Netflix, Season 2; 2022 rank: 67). There are moments in Wednesday when everything clicks into place—the cheerful-but-foreboding tone, the whimsical ingenuity, Jenna Ortega’s coiled precision—and the series becomes a temporary triumph. And then there’s the rest of the show: the dull storytelling, the unconvincing CGI, the unsteady supporting cast. (I’m willing to forgive some of the younger performers, but Luis Guzmán, what are you doing?) Wednesday is colorful enough to be sporadically entertaining, and even if the part doesn’t maximize her talents, Ortega is a great actor. But it feels sanded down, and it isn’t as fun or weird as it should be. It may traffic in resurrection, but its lack of risk-taking can be deadly.
60. Abbott Elementary (ABC, Seasons 4.5 and 5; last year: 48 of 88). Pass.
59. Mythic Quest (Apple, Season 4; 2022 rank: 49). I hate it when decent TV shows get cancelled, but it was probably time here. Mythic Quest is cute and appealing, with well-defined characters and a solid grasp of modern office culture. But it stopped progressing, which is fine for a sitcom but fatal in the “up or out” world of business. The final scene—which was apparently “updated” post-cancellation (weird!)—suggests a level of panic in the writers’ room, as though they knew they were in trouble. Whether the series retains replay value or just collects dust on a shelf, time will tell.
58. Asura (Netflix, Season 1). For all of Netflix’s chaff, it’s cool that the company occasionally writes checks to auteurs like Hirokazu Kore-eda and lets them do whatever the hell they want. But while Asura carries the artist’s trademark humanism, it’s less engrossing than his prior Netflix series, The Makanai. This one spins its wheels a bit, and when the four main siblings split off from one another, it can feel listless. But when the sisters share the screen, Asura envelops you with its sororal warmth, making you feel like part of its messy, loving household. The series has plenty of flaws, but in the end, it’s family.
57. Harley Quinn (HBO Max, Season 5; 2023 rank: 44). Do I have anything beyond vague memories of what actually happened in the fifth season of Harley Quinn, which premiered last January? Not really. Am I nevertheless confident that I mostly enjoyed its distinctive combination of pop-culture subversion, gleeful extremism, and genuine tenderness? Sure why not.
56. Murderbot (Apple, Season 1). In Murderbot, Alexander Skarsgård plays a security cyborg who doesn’t really care about the crew of activists he’s been assigned to protect, and who spends most of his free time watching old episodes of a hacky-looking soap opera called “The Rise and Fall of Sanctuary Moon.” I kind of get how he feels. The glimpses we get of “Sanctuary Moon” are heightened and silly, but they carry a spark of gung-ho sincerity that Murderbot proper lacks. It isn’t a bad show; it has an acidic tone regarding the cruelty of capitalism, and it looks and sounds pretty cool. But its main narrative is dull, and its nominal action isn’t worthy of its exotic setting and premise. More Moon in Season 2 plz.
Coming later today: bodyguards, revolutionaries, brewers, and football players.
Jeremy Beck is the editor-in-chief of MovieManifesto. He watches more movies and television than he probably should.