An all-star showbiz satire from Seth Rogen. A harrowing British miniseries Netflix subscribers can’t stop raving about. A sort of millennial Dick Cavett Show. A crime comedy centered on a dysfunctional but loving Pakistani American family. A sequel to one of the marquee miniseries of the 2010s, a decade in the making. March’s best new TV shows comprise a real variety pack—one that includes a few of the all-around greatest series we’re likely to see in 2025.
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Adolescence (Netflix)
The British miniseries Adolescence has become Netflix’s breakout hit of the season, and for good reason. Co-creator and writer Jack Thorne’s third riveting social drama to hit stateside streaming services in two months, after Acorn premiered Best Interests and Toxic Town arrived on Netflix in February, this saga of a 13-year-old boy charged with killing a female classmate speaks profoundly to the impact of social media and that oxymoron “incel culture” on sensitive young minds. The cast—led by co-creator and writer Stephen Graham (Peaky Blinders) and featuring remarkable performances from Top Boy’s Ashley Walters, Graham’s A Thousand Blows co-star Erin Doherty (The Crown, Chloe), procedural stalwart Christine Tremarco, and newcomer Owen Cooper as the diminutive defendant—is a hall of fame of undersung UK television talent. The show is also a technical achievement, with director Philip Barantini’s camera following the characters through each real-time episode in a single dynamic shot. [Read about the sweetest—and most devastating—moment in the Adolescence finale.]
Deli Boys (Hulu)
Ah, the American Dream. Step 1: Arrive in Philadelphia with $3 in your pocket. Step 2: Get a job at a deli. Step 3: Buy said deli. Step 4: Invent a ludicrously large to-go cup. Step 5: Use the proceeds to open 40 delis. Step 6: Diversify into the golf course and mango pickle industries. Step 7: Drop dead after taking a golf ball to the head, in front of your two adult sons, who have no idea that you’re a crime boss using your fleet of delis as a front for cocaine distribution.
That, at least, is how Baba Dar (Iqbal Theba) amassed his considerable fortune. The Pakistani-born patriarch (Baba is Urdu for father) gets his skull shattered within the first few minutes of the rollicking crime comedy Deli Boys, whose first season is now streaming on Hulu. Which leaves his sons, Raj (Saagar Shaikh) and Mir (Asif Ali), to claim their places atop a hierarchy of gangsters they’d been led to believe was a legitimate business. The brothers are both unsuited to succeed Baba for different reasons. Raj, the elder of the two, spends his days partying with his woo-woo “twin flame,” Prairie (Alfie Fuller), and squandering Baba’s money on drugs. A cleancut junior-executive type, Mir has an MBA; a high-maintenance fiancée, Bushra (Zainne Saleh), and ambitions of rising within Baba’s public-facing company, DarCo. [Read the full review.]
Everybody’s Live with John Mulaney (Netflix)
John Mulaney’s six-night stint as a talk show host last May, in which he assembled celebrities in town for Netflix Is a Joke Fest for an endearingly messy live Netflix broadcast called Everybody’s in L.A., was a resounding success. Accordingly, the platform has welcomed him back for 12 more weekly episodes of an hourlong program that is now called Everybody’s Live with John Mulaney. New title aside, Mulaney has made minimal changes to the original format. National treasure Richard Kind is back at the announcer’s podium. Each episode is themed, with eclectic panels of famous guests (Michael Keaton, Joan Baez, Pete Davidson, Quinta Brunson, etc.) and relevant experts responding to viewers’ live call-in anecdotes on the topic du jour (lending money, cruises, funerals). The host’s cultural geekery fuels such gloriously apropos-of-nothing segments as a discussion with 11 actors who’ve played Willy Loman in Death of a Salesman. The music is next-level; Mulaney pulled off the ultimate indie-rock flex of hosting Sonic Youth’s Kim Gordon and Pixies’ Kim Deal for their first-ever live duet. Surprise and delight can be hard to find these days, in the increasingly stale environs of late night, but Everybody’s Live is accomplishing it weekly.
The Studio (Apple TV+)
Ten minutes into the Apple TV+ comedy, just about everything we need to know about the new head of Continental is apparent. Movies are Matt’s world. As we soon discover, he has no significant other, no kids, no real social life. His knowledge of cinema, from action franchises and Oscar winners to obscure indies and the international art house, rivals that of any film geek. And, for the most part, he has good intentions; when he gets his promotion, he keeps a promise to make his assistant (Chase Sui Wonders’ Quinn) a creative exec. Yet he’s so desperate to succeed in an industry that is now, itself, desperate to succeed in the face of technological upheaval, labor unrest, audience fragmentation, and a post-pandemic slump in theater attendance, that he is in effect no better than any other spineless suit. Which is precisely how the filmmakers and actors Matt reveres see him. Worse still, he’s insecure enough that this constant rejection sends him into a spiral of self-loathing buffoonery that gives The Studio, created by Rogen, Evan Goldberg, Peter Huyck, Alex Gregory, and Frida Perez, the rhythms of a Curb Your Enthusiasm, Studio Head Edition.
The Studio is a timely, funny, and exuberantly—though not uncritically—cinephilic panorama of a business caught in the latest battle of a war between art and commerce that has raged since studios like Warner Bros. were still run by their namesakes. It’s also 2025’s best new show to date, and one of Hollywood’s sharpest self-portraits in ages—which is saying something, considering how much the entertainment industry loves to celebrate and satirize itself. [Read the full review.]
Wolf Hall: The Mirror and the Light (PBS)
Tyrants giveth when it serves their purposes, but mostly they taketh away. This is the grim lesson—one that the ambitious sycophants who attach themselves to power have always been slow to learn—of Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall Trilogy, a series of fat, dense novels that filter the reign of Henry VIII through the rise and fall of his Machiavellian advisor, Thomas Cromwell. The first BBC adaptation, which aired on PBS in 2015, covered Mantel’s books Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies, tracing Cromwell’s brilliantly played ascent. A commoner’s son, he reaches the peak of his influence over the crown in the miniseries’ finale, which finds him delivering Anne Boleyn to her gruesome death.
The pendulum swings in the opposite direction in Wolf Hall: The Mirror and the Light, named for the final volume of the trilogy and filmed in the wake of Mantel’s death in 2022. Which makes this long-awaited sequel miniseries a much more melancholy affair than its predecessor. Happily, the change in tone doesn’t mean a dip in quality. Mark Rylance reprises one of the best TV performances of all time, giving us an older, wearier Cromwell who’s prone to dark-night-of-the-soul conversations with the ghost of his mentor, Cardinal Wolsey (the great Jonathan Pryce). Damian Lewis remains wonderfully bratty as Henry. Writer Peter Straughan (Conclave) and director Peter Kosminsky return as well, pulling together a subtle, unabashedly dialogue-heavy adaptation that serves Mantel’s language and the cast’s virtuosity instead of competing with them.
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