The Best New TV Shows of February 2025

After a slow start to 2025, the year in TV is finally rolling. And while returning favorites like Severance and The White Lotus may be generating the most chatter, February has also brought plenty of lower-key debuts worth noticing. Below, you’ll find three absorbing British dramas, a fun new Mindy Kaling joint, an update to a seminal documentary series, and a smart, trippy animated thriller destined to be a cult classic.  

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A Thousand Blows (Hulu)

The prolific writer, producer, and director Steven Knight, best known for the long-running BBC-Netflix period crime drama Peaky Blinders, isn’t exactly on a winning streak. His 2023 adaptation of the Pulitzer-winning novel All the Light We Cannot See was one of the very worst TV shows of the streaming era; another candidate for that title was 2019’s See, his absurd—and absurdly expensive—Apple TV+ sci-fi/fantasy epic. Marred by Elisabeth Moss’ woeful miscasting in the lead role, Knight’s quickly forgotten FX espionage thriller, The Veil, from last spring, marked only a modest improvement over those two predecessors.

But he’s back in fighting form with A Thousand Blows, whose backdrop—the 1880s London criminal demimonde—is similar enough to that of Blinders to satisfy fans of that show but different enough to be its own thing. Set in the muddy, smoggy slums of the East End, it follows a pair of young Jamaican men, Hezekiah (Malachi Kirby) and Alec (Francis Lovehall), seeking their fortune in the Old World after fleeing a bad situation back home. A combination of poverty and racism leave them few options but to risk their lives in the bare-knuckles boxing ring, where they’re the first challengers to threaten reigning champs Sugar Goodson (Stephen Graham) and his brother Treacle (James Nelson-Joyce). Also on the scene is Mary Carr (Erin Doherty, as excellent here as she was in Chloe and as Princess Anne in The Crown), the diabolical leader of the all-female Forty Elephants gang, whose ambitions go far beyond petty theft. The fates of these fascinating underdogs soon become entwined, of course, in a drama that’s all about the fight for survival. While Knight’s dialogue can sometimes be showy or stilted, Blows’ fast pace, distinctive characters, great performances, and vivid world-building make that easy to overlook.  

Best Interests (Acorn)

Preteen Marnie has been gravely ill all her life with a rare form of muscular dystrophy. Her mom Nicci (Sharon Horgan), dad Andrew (Michael Sheen), and 17-year-old sister Katie (Alison Oliver) have known for years that her lifespan will be limited, but that doesn’t mean they’re emotionally prepared when a respiratory issue puts Marnie (Niamh Moriarty) on a ventilator and her doctor, Samantha (Noma Dumezweni), gently informs them that she has virtually no chance of recovering. In Samantha’s professional opinion, the most humane option is to switch her to palliative care, rather than keep subjecting her to painful and almost certainly futile treatments. Quiet, melancholy Andrew slowly resigns himself to letting his sweet daughter go. But Nicci is fiercely committed to keeping Marnie, who has a history of beating long odds, alive, even if it means working with a Christian anti-abortion group to challenge the hospital in court.

Everyday human stories like this one, about good people facing impossible choices, are increasingly rare on TV. And this emotional but never melodramatic four-part drama, written by Jack Thorne (His Dark Materials) and directed by Michael Keillor, is an unusually empathetic and perceptive example. Nicci and Andrew love each other deeply but have devoted more than a decade of their lives to raising a sick child; their disagreement about her future inevitably becomes a schism within their marriage. A wise, calm, and caring physician, Samantha breaks down in private after Nicci questions her motives. Katie has grown up lonely, fending for herself while her parents tend to the urgent needs of her disabled sister. This is nobody’s fault, and Katie adores Marnie, too, but who could blame her for feeling abandoned? As for Marnie, one of Best Interests’ greatest strengths is its insistence on making her more than just a body in a hospital bed. Through flashbacks, we meet a bright and curious girl who savors the life she’s been given, difficult as it is. And we see why Nicci would betray her own ideals to keep fighting for her.

Common Side Effects (Adult Swim)

The animated sci-fi thriller Common Side Effects has a long list of high-profile executive producers: Mike Judge, The Office’s Greg Daniels, co-creators Joseph Bennett (of last year’s cult Max cartoon Scavengers Reign) and Steve Hely (Veep). And you can see where each of the above contributors’ sensibility feeds into the show’s lofty, quirky, lightly psychedelic, overtly political premise. Marshall (voiced by Dave King) is a crackpot genius who has discovered a glowing blue mushroom that can cure any illness or injury. His old high school lab partner, Frances (Emily Pendergast), spots him getting dragged away from the mic after disrupting a meeting of shareholders in the pharmaceutical company where, though she doesn’t reveal this to Marshall, she happens to work. Soon they’re teaming up to bring the mushroom to the masses—a mission that puts them in the crosshairs of everyone from Big Pharma to the feds.

But for all its big names and ambitious themes, Common Side Effects feels, in the best way possible, like the kind of indie-animation oddity you might‘ve stumbled upon at 3 a.m. on ‘90s MTV. The anti-Establishment vibes are strong. The animation style owes as much to Studio Ghibli as it does to Judge and Daniels’ King of the Hill. And the show’s jittery surrealism feels more evocative of contemporary paranoia than the flawed realism of so many recent thrillers (ahem, Zero Day, ahem).

Eyes on the Prize III: We Who Believe in Freedom Cannot Rest 1977-2015 (HBO)

It doesn’t exactly feel like the right moment to celebrate racial-justice wins, but that shouldn’t stop you from delving into this curiously under-publicized continuation of a classic documentary series about the Civil Rights Movement that launched on PBS in 1987. Thirty-eight years later, Eyes on the Prize is an HBO property, the ’80s are themselves history, and the centuries-long fight for Black liberation rages on, facing fierce new enemies with depressing frequency. If nothing else, this third installment demonstrates how progress and regression are cyclical.

The six episodes of Eyes on the Prize III, directed by accomplished documentarians including Samantha Knowles (Black and Missing) and Rudy Valdez (Choir), move in chronological order, taking on critical moments from Rodney King and the Million Man March to Barack Obama and the birth of the Black Lives Matter movement. But the series feels most vital when it’s dealing with more complex, less widely documented issues and figures. Intersectionality comes to the fore in an episode on environmental racism; class, gender, and LGBTQ rights surface elsewhere. Of particular note is the premiere, directed by Geeta Gandbhir (Why We Hate) is a diptych profile of the housing activists who reclaimed the Bronx in the late ’70s and an observant Muslim woman who led the fight against AIDS in Philadelphia’s Black community. 

Running Point (Netflix)

“Gordons don’t lose.” This is the motto of the dysfunctional family at the center of the new Netflix comedy Running Point. The Gordons own an iconic Los Angeles NBA team—fictionalized as the Waves but inspired by the Lakers and their owner, Jeanie Buss—that was helmed for decades by a ruthless patriarch. Now that he’s dead, his four adult children, who all work for the franchise, must decide whether his old-school way of running the business needs a more humane update. That dilemma intensifies when eldest boy and franchise president Cam (Justin Theroux) gets in a drug-fueled car crash and hands over his office to his chronically marginalized and underestimated sister, Isla, played by the charming Kate Hudson.

It sounds like Succession but for pro sports, and in some ways it is. Riddled with affluenza and competitive to a fault, the Gordons, like the Roys, were formatively deprived of that all-important kiss from Daddy. But, unlike too many recent family dramas, Running Point is not trying to be Succession. It’s a true comedy, from a team of executive producers that includes Mindy Kaling, her Mindy Project co-star Ike Barinholtz, and Buss. And it shares just as much DNA with Ted Lasso, if that fish-out-of-water sports sitcom had spotlighted Hannah Waddingham’s green AFC Richmond owner instead of Jason Sudeikis’ folksy coach. The juxtaposition of damaged characters and lighthearted tone works surprisingly well, saving the show from erring into either self-importance or saccharine—and yielding Kaling’s first consistently good series for adults. [Read the full review.]

Toxic Town (Netflix)

Two heavily pregnant women, Susan McIntyre (Doctor Who alum Jodie Whittaker) and Tracey Taylor (Aimee Lou Wood, a standout in the current season of The White Lotus), meet in the hospital shortly before giving birth to babies with disabilities. This is no coincidence. It’s 1995 in Corby, an industrial town in England’s East Midlands where the local government is in the process of redeveloping the site of a steel works whose closure in 1981 devastated the area. And though it will take years for these mothers to prove as much in court, at the root of Corby’s alarmingly high rate of birth defects is the rust-colored liquid and dust leaking from dump trucks, coating construction workers’ clothing, and collecting in puddles as a result of this project.

Another four-part sociopolitical drama from Best Interests’ Thorne, this one based on a true story, Toxic Town follows Susan, Tracey, and their neighbors’ 14-year quest for justice. While it’s interwoven with intrigue surrounding the Corby old boy network’s toxic-waste cover up, the series avoids procedural dryness by grounding its story in the daily lives of the families who were the scandal’s victims. Whittaker gives a dynamic performance as Susan, a wry, earthy straight shooter who gradually gains the confidence to lead a movement. And the supporting cast is chock-full of wonderful British actors, from Wood and Rory Kinnear to Downton Abbey’s Brendan Coyle, Bridgerton’s Claudia Jessie, Joe Dempsie from Game of Thrones, and—aptly for the period setting—’90s icon Robert Carlyle, of Trainspotting and The Full Monty fame. 

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