The best TV of 2025

I'm Daniel James, and you're listening to seven AM. This week, we're bringing you our annual Summer Special. Each day we'll speak to a critic with impeccable taste about the best books, TV shows, movies, music, podcasts, and games of twenty twenty five. Today we are kicking it off with writer Sarah Krasnastein

I just take my word for it.

I believe this list is deadly It's Monday, December twenty two. Sarah, thanks for joining us. We're here to talk about the best TV of the year, and you are here to lay a few things out first. In terms of your picks, tell us about your first one.

So I chose Adolescence, which was kind of the start of the year, and it's something that I keep on thinking about.

I'm going to start off with asking you, do you know a girl called Katie Lennard?

Yeah, describe each other as friends? Then is she dot?

Then why would you ask her?

It's a show about what starts off as a seemingly inexplicable, horrorfying murder. A thirteen year old boy named Jamie who's played by the actor Owen Cooper, stabs his classmate Katie, who's played by Amelia Holiday, stabs her to death. And each of these four hour long episodes are filmed in a single continuous shot, so that in a self is noteworthy because it depends on unerring acting and scriptwriting and cinematography and production design, but it also functions in the.

Story in a way where the medium is.

The message, and it gives us a long view of causation and connection where we can see this young boy's murderous violence not as inexplicable, but very much any long train coming through a social media and social landscape that had at every turn done nothing to prevent gender based violence.

The show is back to a really deep conversation, and it's back to one thousands think pieces about the mena sphere and online cell culture. How does it grapple with those very sort of esoteric but very serious and deep things.

Yeah, you know, for so many of us, these are things that we kind of know, but then when called to explain, we lack language.

And it's a very real generational divide.

Why do you have an Instagram account? Oh?

I need one?

Why to look over people's accounts?

You can't if I ever got one?

Right? And you follow lots of women on Instagram models? Yeah, you don't need to put photos up though? Why do you put photos up of yourself?

I mean, I don't know, and I'm not loud.

So we understand this thirteen year old boy is going through all the familiar awkwardness of that stage, not fitting in at school, discontent at home, and receiving everywhere in the society longstanding gendered messages about you know, what men are and what women are, much of it kind of reflected by his perfectly lovely.

And loving parents.

And then we see this tendency that he had to spend long hours in the night online alone in his bedroom. And so that's where we start understanding that manisphere, which is in the show, a version of Andrew Tate's commodified hyper masculinity, misogyny, alt right disinformation and capitalism and kind of this spratuitous oppositional defiance amy.

If you do not sit fucking don't don't tell me why to say? Don't you why look at me?

Now we see how attractive that messaging of empowerment and belonging and community would be to a disempowered, lonely teenage boy in his bedroom.

And so we're seeing that.

The consequences are diabolical, but that there's so many kind of stages before it reaches the end where somebody could have stepped in to offer what he was getting online.

Can you look a bit read? Did she wrote this or not? I mean, I'm only thirteen. I don't think it look golf.

Scary, Sarah, what's second on your list?

So Pluribus, which kind of landed very recently. We're like weeks before the end of the year, and I feel in many ways this just came out of nowhere and has blown a lot of excellent TV shows out of the water and kind of off the list.

To my twelve fellow survivors, Greetings, I'm Carol, Stirka.

Some of you know me, some of you have yet to meet. But if you're still one of us, then this message is for you.

So tell me about the world Pluribus is setting. What's it like?

So it's so strange and so compelling.

It's a suddenly glad apocalyptic thriller with a surprisingly unsympathetic lead.

We ourselves have no choice for us. It's a biological imperative, like breathing.

But every time one comes to understand how wonderful.

It is, how fucking people died during your wonderful fucking joining must of course so much.

When Earth's population is horrifyingly and almost instantaneously assimilated into this.

Benevolent hive mind.

Author her name is Carol Stirka, and she's played by Ria Seahorn, who just gives an amazing phenomenal performance. Yes, she finds herself like seemingly the last woman's standing, and her efforts to resist this like glad collective's efforts to join them form the basis of the story, and she kind of considers herself and in certain ways is very much the last bastion of humanity. If we understand that as individualized experience.

There is something else to consider.

We know what it feels like to be you, to be alone, to suffer.

We've been you, but you've never been us.

So it's the latest work from heavyweight creative director Vince Gilligan, who was most well known for Breaking Bad and Better Call Saw, which I personally believe is better than Breaking Bad myself. It's just a side point. So does Pluribus leave up to that massive legacy.

I believe it does. It's similar.

You know, it takes place in that same New Mexico landscape, and it kind of has all these Gilligan hallmarks, but at the same time, it's its own thing. And you know, I love Breaking Bad so much, I love Better Call Saul, and Pluribus does kind of earn its place in that Gilligan pantheon. We know that he likes these unlikely heroes, unlikely villains, unexpected narrative arcs, and he's really a master of storytelling.

And that's what we're seeing with Pluribus.

Coming up. Two fantastic new comedies. All right, Sarah, what's your third pick for twenty twenty five?

So this was Sterlin Harjo's The Lowdown on Disney.

This is Lee Raybon, Lee Raybon, he'll write for any publications that will humor has conspiracies.

Can you read my paper?

It's booty and bad guys.

He's rough around the hedges Sterlin.

He made Reservation Dogs, which he picked for a previous best of a few years ago. Don't real you remember that? Yes? So what's it all about.

It's a neo noir.

So it's got all of these tropes of noir, so the cynical anti hero and the fem fatale and you know, the almost mind boggling complex plot, this overhanging sense of dread.

But in a nutshell.

Ethan Hawke plays a guy called Lee Raybon who describes himself as a truth Storian.

Look, you're a journalist too, right, or some kind of writer.

I'm a true Storian.

Sorry, sag.

I am a Tulsa true Storian, a truth story.

What exactly is I'm glad to ask?

I reads.

Basically, he's part like citizen public interest journalist and part muckraker and all the time this very chaotic dirt bag. But he has these very noble elevated aims of trying to uncover dirty politics in the state. So when the brother of a local politician from a wealthy family commits suicide. Raybond finds a letter that the brother wrote before he died, and he goes in search of kind of the real story there because things aren't as simple as they seem.

So that's the that's the basic premise.

So stars Athan Hawk. He stars alongside Keith David, who was very well known for his comedy Chops. Not so much with Aithan Hawk. Can he pull off comedy?

I believe so.

I mean I wasn't expecting it. I don't think any one was really like, no offense Ethan Hawk. I don't think anyone was really expecting Ethan Hawk to be a male comedic lead here. He did have a cameo in res Dog, so obviously, like that's not out of nowhere. But he just fully inhabits this role. It is an excellent, compelling, mesmerizing performance. And you know, for Coen Brothers fans, it's undeniably Lebowski esque.

But at the end of the day, he is himself only.

And what he's done with this character I think is just brilliant.

Oh get me to a hospital. I'll come on.

You said you didn't have time. Jesus, this is the farm animals. Animals take medicine too.

All right, what do you have first? Mixed?

So this is the rehearsal season two, and I don't quite know how to uh where it would fit genre wise, but it's different to the previous picks tonally, that's for sure.

I do have some experience with creating elaborate role playing scenarios, and I do have money to put towards this.

Yeah, I think you aren't a something there.

Let's work together to save some lives, yes, Sayson.

One of three heres still introduced us to the field of method which underpins the whole show. Can you have a swing at describing what that needs? First look?

I'll try so.

Basically Fielder, who I think it's fair to describe as a comedian, he replicates an exacting, extravagant detail real life settings.

This is in season one but also season two.

To help people rehearse or like practice for challenging upcoming events and conversations. But from there it kind of spirals ever outward and becomes more and more meta.

And absurd as it goes.

But at its heart, both season one and season two are about the glories and tragedy of communication and performances that we all do at some point.

Listen, Fielder, where does your sense of alcruism come from?

Where all of a sudden you want to save lives?

You're known for pranking. What makes it particularly special different from the first season.

In the first season, he was helping people kind of deal with these issues, and also it sparkles off into how to raise a child, which again is non sequitur in the spirit of the series. In season two, he becomes a fully fledged transport pilot. But that's part of using this Fielder method at the service of improving aviation safety.

I had a theory that the start of a romantic relationship is a great parallel for two pilots meeting before a flight.

What's the longest you could go without coffee?

I mean, I could probably just go without it for a day. But it definitely helps you become intimately involved with a stranger where both people are desperately trying to read each other. But the pressure to show the best version of yourself can prevent you from sharing what you actually feel.

Yes, I think again to even describe this as to dare people who've never heard of it to be interested enough to actually watch it? But I think the result is well, firstly, it's extremely awkward, but it's genuinely hilarious and absurd. And I found the most surprising thing about this is that it is unexpectedly moving in the way that it interrogates kind of these possibilities and the limitations of practicing the selves that we would like to be.

He uses a hall of mirrors really to reflect ourselves back at each other in all sorts of weird ways.

Absolutely coming up.

Our post apocalypse stories are hopeful. And before we finish up, Sarah, You've got one war for us an Argentinian sci fi tell me about.

The annot so It's filmed in the neighborhoods of present day Buenos Aires, and it opens with a strange summer snow that kills everyone it happens to touch.

This is so are you you know?

Come on, yep, I wake up a Magnetico La.

It's got these beautiful images of the silent, frosted city where daily life is just abbreviated.

And it was noteworthy.

Because it's based on the science fiction comic strip from the late fifties by man god Hector Jerman oster Eld. If you look at that, it has these themes that called directly forward to the rise of fascism broadly and almost directly our current moment, but also what happened in Argentina later when Ouster held himself.

Was murdered in their Dirney Wars in the seventies.

Compared to the other science fiction on your list, this definitely is a bleaker side of the story. So what's compelling about this world and why would we want to spend time in another blake world?

Sarah I will always argue that post apocalyptic genre is inherently hopeful, optimistic, because it's less about what's been destroyed and it's about the possibilities of what can be created, and kind.

Of what the next draft of all this could look like with our uses and misuses of AI, these eternal questions are very much relevant at the moment, but the nature of streaming generally in twenty twenty five specifically has been like, we are spoiled for choice, So you know, you don't have to listen to me.

There's so many other things out there as well.

Sarah, thanks so much for the listener, Thanks so much for you Tom, thanks for having me