The best TV of 2025: from Adolescence to Hacks

0:01Hi, I'm Charlie Duffield and welcome back to The Standard Podcast. if you're new here hit follow and give us a rating for all the latest news head to standard.co.uk coming up later in the show it's been a stellar year for tv but which shows stand out from the crowd in terms of like good television yeah we've had stuff that maybe didn't get the attention it should have done so we've had the narrow road to the deep north which was an adaptation of the book of the same name it stars jacob alordi as a surgeon called dorigo evans who gets abducted or at least taken prisoner by the Japanese and forced to build the infamous Burma Railway and it's so gory and so miserable and so depressing but really hard-hitting and really well acted.

0:48There's been some great television and also some great sequels. There's been more than enough good to balance out the unjust like that of the world. But first... What are you looking for? You're making a big mistake. He's only a kid. Dad, I haven't done anything.

1:15He's a good kid. Jamie, I want you to listen carefully. What's going on? I'm going to start off with asking you. Do you know a girl called Katie Leonard? Yeah? Describe each other as friends then Is she dead then? Why would you ask her? Hmm?

1:42Well, aren't you a big brain girl? I guess I am

1:50It's for the best We'll see

2:0310, 9, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1.

2:16How's our girl? She's ready. You're going to be the first person to transition from a human body to a synthetic. Because I'm special. That's right. You're very, very special. At the end of the week, you will be an entirely different person. What happens entirely stays entirely. Amen. Amen. From adolescence to Hax and Alien Earth to the White Lotus, there's been plenty on our TV screens to enjoy this year. But as the sleigh bells begin to ring and we settle back on our sofas with a glass of something festive, it's time to take stock of the year in television. Whether you're looking for some betwixt-must watching inspiration or simply to validate your opinions, we're joined by The Standards Commissioning Editor and Culture Writer Vicky Jessup to discuss the best TV that has graced our screens this year.

3:22Vicky, before we get into the best TV of the year, as it's Christmas Eve, what are your top TV picks for the festive period? The highlights would be Amanda Land for me, so that's on the 25th, that's coming out on Christmas Day itself. So Lucy Punch is Amanda, who's this kind of like, I guess a mum with aspirations. I think she's a posh mum, let's say. She is a character in the hit sitcom Motherland, and she got her own spin-off this year, everybody loved it. So naturally it's back for a Christmas special. and in that she is with her mom so played by Joanna Lumley she's going to go see her batty aunt who is played by Jennifer Saunders and all sorts of festive hijinks will unfold there I'm sure the trailer looks great so I'm excited for that also on Christmas we have the mandated by tradition animated adaptations so this year's is The Scarecrow's Wedding it's by Axel Scharfer and Julia Donaldson the book itself and this has been made into a again really lovely star-studded cartoon featuring I think voice acting from Rob Brydon, Jesse Buckley, Donald Gleeson.

4:25So that is a real treat I think. Moving on through Betwixtmas we have Stranger Things season five volume two. So they've split the last season into separate parts. So the first part of that came out in November. The second batch let's say of three episodes is coming out on Boxing Day and then the finale is coming out on New Year's Day. So if you're a big fan of that I would really recommend tuning in. It's like a nice thing to watch on Boxing Day. We don't really have much to do beyond kind of exist in a food coma. But I'd say New Year's Day is where the action really does kick off because we've got obviously the Stranger Things finale, but we also have the much-awaited first episode of The Night Manager Season 2 coming back.

5:06And of course, we have Traitors Season 4, so just the regular Joe Public version, but it's still a treat and it's just a lovely thing to watch, especially in winter. And what was your TV highlight of 2025 if you could just pick one show? Well I feel like the obvious answer that stands out is probably adolescence but I'm going to talk about that later so let's put that to one side for a second. It's going to be at the top of everyone's lists I think. So a couple of shows that I've really enjoyed this year, casting my mind back, it's been a busy year for television. So I really enjoyed Sally Wainwright's Riot Women which I think came out over the summer.

5:39So this is Sally Wainwright who wrote Happy Valley of course so she's back in the north again and she's written this kind of really lovely but also quite sad and also funny show about a group of i guess post-menopausal women all of whom are very dissatisfied with their lives in some shape or form and they decide to start a punk band it's classic sally rainbow in the sense that she can be funny one moment and then like devastating the next so yeah i love that show okay so were there any others which come to mind toxic town since Mr. Bates vs. the Post Office came out, I think a lot of shows have been kind of scrambling to create their own Mr.

6:14Bates. And this was Netflix's version. So it came out towards the start of the year. And it's about the Corby toxic waste scandal, which basically back in the 80s and 90s, there was an old steelworks in the northern town of Corby. And the town council attempted to clean up the toxic waste, but basically massively mismanaged it. And there were a whole load of babies who were born with birth defects. And the Corby mothers who were affected by this took the counseled court. And I think it's a super well-known story. So when that came out, that created ripples, let's say, but it's just a really well-made show.

6:46Jodie Whittaker is in it. She's fantastic. And I think it's just one of those TV shows that make you feel quite angry whilst you're watching it. That was the other show that I felt really stood out to me. And let's talk more about some of the standout performances of the year. Who's worth a watch? Right. So I'm going to start blowing my adolescence trumpet. I mean, for those who don't know, adolescence came out earlier this year. It is a British TV show. It's four episodes and basically it tells the story of a boy, Jamie, who is arrested and charged with killing his classmate and basically how that impacts his family, the police officers looking into the case, his classmates, all that stuff.

7:24it's filmed by Philip Barantini who filmed Boiling Point and his kind of calling card is the one shot take so in Boiling Point he did this insane one shot take film the entire film was filmed in one take which is incredibly difficult to do and with adolescence he replicated that in four one-hour episodes so as a feat of filmmaking it's fantastic but Owen Cooper as Jamie rightly has been getting all the awards all the applauded some praise for his performance because it is staggeringly good. This is his first major role. And the way he flips from scared little boy to kind of sinister, I guess, man or brainwashed man, he has been radicalized, I suppose, by the internet and by essentially incel culture, I suppose.

8:04And so his performance is staggering. And then Stephen Graham next to him as his dad is also amazingly good. I mean, Stephen Graham, I think, is maybe one of the industry's best kept secrets until this year, because he just does wonderful work every single time. And his devastation is, again, wonderful so if you've not watched it i beg you please go watch it but i feel like most of the world has watched it at this point and a couple more notable runners up i would say i don't know if it's a performance but certainly alan carr and the traitors simply for the way he mesmerized the nation i think he made the celebrity traitors like that's why it was such a good show because everyone was just so fascinated by how good he was and how he managed to escape detection so many times and then i would say the other runner up would be so there was a show that came out earlier this year called Reunion, BBC show.

8:50And it is about a deaf man who goes to prison for allegedly killing his friend. Did he do it? We don't know. We find out. But yes, and then he gets out of prison and he's trying to rebuild a life with his family, whilst also reckoning with the family of the man that he maybe killed. That was fantastic just because, again, it's a show about deaf people and maybe like half and half sign language and spoken English, which is something you don't see a lot on our screens at all really and the central actor Matthew Gurney who plays the main character Daniel Brennan is amazing again he's a deaf man all of his lines are delivered in sign language and he is really really good I would recommend watching just to see him because he he's an enigma but a really fascinating one to see do his work so yes those would be my standout performances let's go to an ad break coming up the shows to look out for in 2026 we'll see you back here in just a moment welcome back vicky i know that you're a big fan of severance it's something we've talked about before on the podcast season two of that launched this year but what other shows made a comeback.

10:03This has kind of been the year of the sequel, I would say. There has been a lot of them. Like you say, we had Severance at the start of the year. I think the greatest pleasure for me with a sequel is a sequel coming out that's actually good. It's not easy to make a good debut season of television, but I think it's harder to follow up with a second good season of television. Severance for me really did that by doubling down on the weirdness and wonderfulness inherent in the premise. You know, people have their brains, quote unquote, severed so that their consciousness is separated between their working selves and their I guess not working selves and the kind of ripple effects that unfold from that it was wonderfully bonkers I think we've had a lot of other seasons that have come out so Stranger Things that's coming out quite soon that's the last season so the first season came out gosh way back when I think 2016 and obviously all the kids are grown up now and it's coming to an end which I think marks the end of this was Netflix's first big show I think the first massive hit that they had so it'll be interesting to see how that wraps itself up and whether the spin-offs will be announced anytime soon which I'm assuming there will be we had big boys so Jack Rook's comedy based on his own life as a student at university and his kind of bromance there's not a lot of good stuff on the news right now and I think with like toxic masculinity kind of dominating our news feeds this year big boys is like the antidote to that it's lovely it's warm it's all about kind of non-toxic supportive male friendships and then there's like a horrible knockout gut punch twist ending which basically leaves you sobbing at your screen so if you're a fan of that kind of stuff I would recommend going to watch that we had the white lotus of course that's season three I would say maybe not as good as the first two seasons this one was set in Thailand and featured among other things sibling incest and toxic female friendships we had and or season two so that's the last season as well so that one kind of really doubled down I suppose on like you know this is about rebels fighting a fascist empire which I guess you could maybe take as having real life parallels and we had The Gold season two which was a massive hit for the BBC when it came out a few years ago and kind of is about the Brinks mat robbery in which thieves in I think the 1980s made off with a massive amount of gold bullion and diamonds and cash from the storage warehouse outside Heathrow and basically tracking what happened to that money and how it went on to spawn all sorts of like illicit criminal rings and enterprises.

12:23Lots of sequels this year. I'd say the best ones probably were Severance, Big Boys. There was also Hacks as well, HBO's comedy about comedy writers, but also it's a kind of satire. That's amazing consistently. And then Stranger Things, well, I'll leave the judgment up to whether the finale is any good, I suppose. And were there any surprising hits or massive flops this year? Yeah, so celebrity traitors. I don't think the BBC expected it to be as big as it got. There were not a lot of egos among the celebrities, which is surprising. That did amazingly well. And I think that was obviously like a water cooler moment for the nation when the finale came out.

12:58We've had our department cues, for instance. Netflix always excels in doing these really catchy, addictive crime dramas. Department cue was basically that. It was set in Scotland and starred Matthew Gould as a kind of washed up private detective who's also a bit of a dick and he has to solve a cold case and everyone loved that. Massive flops, I'd say there was some like surprise mehs. So The White Lotus was probably a big meh for me. Like the season was good, but I think at this point we expect excellence from Mike White, probably unfairly. And I think maybe it didn't quite reach those heights that everyone was talking about in season two.

13:32My massive flops, I think maybe the hack would be a surprise meh as well. So this was ITV's drama that came out a few months ago. So it starred David Tennant, Toby Jones. I think basically they were hoping, again, for another Mr. Bates versus the post office. And they basically decided to retell the story of the phone hacking scandal. And I think they were expecting it to be big. I don't think it got a lot of press coverage and airtime because maybe the script didn't quite come together. It was quite self-referential. It was quite smug. It featured a lot of David Tennant doing a side to camera about explaining complicated bits of legal jargon or why he couldn't name his sources and stuff like that.

14:11And I would say the massive flop, the big one I can think of at least, is probably unjust like that. So this was the Sex and the City spinoff announced with much fanfare several years ago and proceeded to kind of give us nothing or at least not much. So all the original cast returned apart from King Patral famously because she's fallen out with certainly Sarah Jessica Parker. and it never really took off and I think it got a lot of flack for maybe the fashion choices not being as quite on point as you would expect from a Sex and the City spinoff and then when the series finally ended it ended really oddly with Miranda so Cynthia Nixon's toilet overflowing and covering her apartment in essentially sewage and I think the director did say it's like it's a metaphor for like things that are oppressed bubbling to the surface and how you can't like bury them forever but I think everyone was like you finished this show which basically is supposed to stand for glamour and fashion and like lovely chic things with a toilet overflowing like what you've also just been writing about a new show called heated rivalry which i have to confess i haven't heard of before but it is premiering in january 2026 can you tell me a bit more about that and also what we can expect next year january is packed with television um so there's heated rivalry of course it's been all over my instagram feed the last few days although maybe that says more about me than it does about Instagram.

15:31But basically, it's this show that's been made by a Canadian streamer called Crave, which is an adaptation of basically, yeah, it's like a gay ice hockey drama, where the two leads are ice hockey players that fall for each other, but they have to keep their romance secret because ice hockey is quite, as portrayed in the book, and the show quite a macho and homophobic sport. So yeah, it's basically about that. And the show's genius, I think is just like mad thirst traps. So the thirst traps have been all over my Instagram. We don't get sports shows which feature queer stories or LGBT stories at all, and especially not ones with explicit sex scenes, which is what is being portrayed here.

16:10And so I think it does feel quite boundary breaking in that sense. And that now has a January release date of January the 10th. So that's probably going to be one of the big shows next year, which has been like a kind of last minute edition. But we have loads of other stuff. Industry season four is coming out next month we have a knight of the seven kingdoms which is the game of thrones spin-off that's coming out in january and there's a lot of hype for that um and it also looks exceptionally cute it's an adaptation of one of george rr martin's like novellas so completely kind of unrelated to the stories that we've had in game of thrones and house of the dragon obviously the traitors and the night manager so we've got a lot to be looking forward to i think which is nice because january is always miserable so it's good we've got some good tv to get us through it

16:55and that's the standard for all the latest news head to standard.co.uk if you'd like to get in touch please do drop us a line at podcasts at standard.co.uk we'll be back here on Monday the 29th of December have a wonderful Christmas we'll see you then