TV in 2025: Streaming, Distraction and the End of Attention
For a century, the business of running a Hollywood studio was simple. The more people watched films, the more money studios made. Box office receipts were the signal. Attention equalled profit.
Streaming broke that relationship.
Netflix audiences don’t pay for individual films or shows. They pay a monthly subscription for everything. Once you’ve paid, it doesn’t matter whether you finish a series, understand it, like it, or even watch it properly. The metric is not engagement but retention. Keep the app installed. Keep the algorithm fed.
The result is a strange new kind of television. Netflix shows don’t need to be profitable, beautiful, sexy, intelligent, funny, well-made — or even watched closely. They are consumed on sofas, in beds, on public transport, and on toilets. Often they’re barely watched at all: phones in hand, eyes flicking between TikTok and whatever is explaining the plot again in the background.
The most egregious example this year was Prime Target, in which two NSA agents periodically stop to explain the plot to each other every twenty minutes, just in case the audience has wandered off to Instagram. This isn’t storytelling. It’s audio description for the distracted.
The Golden Age of streaming services – when channels broke new shows and targeted new niche audiences to grow viewers – is over. A new age of bland is here.
Sci-Fi and Fantasy: Futures People Don’t Like
Despite that dumbing-down, science fiction and fantasy remain the genres where television is still trying to say something.
Alien: Earth was the best new show of the year — a taut corporate thriller in which kleptocratic megacorporations openly rule the planet. No aliens required. Just capitalism, fully unmasked.
Severance returned for a second season, even stranger than the first. But in an age where Elon Musk-style corporate authoritarianism is no longer satire, the show struggles to stay ahead of reality. When your villains behave like real executives, surrealism loses its edge.
Invasion limped back for season three, still dragging along the dead weight of a stale trope: the plucky band of heavily armed American civilians stepping up to save humanity. In any real existential crisis, the last thing we would need is obese Trump fans in comedy camouflage waving oversized rifles. These characters exist solely to appease sci-fi fans who think everything is “woke” if women or non-white people appear competent.
That’s the deeper shift. The political right turned against science fiction when sci-fi stopped promising them a future where white men — especially the weakest, nerdiest ones — were naturally supreme. Meritocratic futures, diverse crews, collective heroism? Suddenly the genre was “political”.
Collective Heroes and the End of the Lone Saviour
That’s why The Eternaut mattered. Based on a 1950s Argentinian comic, it tells the story of Buenos Aires under alien invasion: lethal snowfall, insectoid creatures, unseen overlords known only as Them. There is no chosen one. No superhero. The hero is a group of ordinary people organising together.
That idea — that survival is collective — now feels radical.
It was also the first TV show to openly use generative AI in production, a technology that could make epic sci-fi cheaper and more accessible. That’s fine. The danger isn’t AI visuals. It’s AI stories without scripts worth telling.
Apocalypse as Desire, Not Fear
Post-apocalyptic TV keeps multiplying: The Walking Dead, The Last of Us, Earth Abides, endless variations on collapse. Officially these shows reflect anxiety about fragile democracies and climate breakdown.
But for many viewers — mostly men — it’s not anxiety. It’s desire.
A collapsed world is appealing if you feel undervalued, ignored, or left behind. Tear it all down and suddenly guns, strength, and aggression matter again. Especially if you already own a wardrobe of tactical gear and mistake grievance for virtue.
Earth Abides was so poor I barely made it through one episode, possibly asleep for half of it. But the genre itself isn’t going away. Every streamer now needs its own apocalypse, just as every channel once needed its own cop show.
Empire, Radicalisation and Star Wars Growing Up
Two shows tackled empire properly this year.
Foundation returned for season three looking spectacular and saying very little. Isaac Asimov’s original concept — historical determinism, the inevitability of imperial collapse — is essentially Marxism in space. Apple clearly didn’t notice. The adaptation is beautiful but hollow, missing the chance to reflect on America’s own democratic decay. Trump is practically a walking Seldon Crisis, but the show never joins the dots.
Andor, by contrast, understands radicalisation. Season two leads directly into Rogue One, showing how ordinary people become revolutionaries. It’s a sharp, uncomfortable dissection of empire, repression, and resistance — and the best thing Star Wars has produced in years.
This matters because Star Wars itself has changed. The original trilogy emerged after Vietnam, vague enough that anyone could imagine themselves as the rebels. The recent films made moral lines clearer. For many thin-skinned MAGA fans, that was the problem: they recognised themselves not as heroes, but as the empire.
Crime, Comfort and the Illusion of Danger
Despite falling crime rates, television is awash with murder.
Cosy crime has gone upmarket since Only Murders in the Building. Bookish, and The Residence, were highlights, while Department Q embraced gothic horror and quietly normalising diversity without making a fuss. Akram, the Syrian asylum seeker, deserves his own spin-off.
Friends and Neighbours has a great premise – New York finance high flyer gets the boot and finds himself losing everything, including his high maintenance lifestyle. Realising how much expensive stuff his friends and neighbours own but never use he starts to steal it to get by. This could have been a slick, cool cat burglar with a message about luxury capitalism, but Jon Hamm gives the role something else – warmth, charm and vulnerability. This makes it very watchable, but dilutes the message somewhat – the people just aren’t awful enough. It takes until episdoe 8 for any of the characters to try and come to terms with how much conspicious consumption has hollowed our their lives.
Virdee. I’ve been waiting for ages for a TV adaptation of AH Dhand’s Harry Virdee detective novels. A Sikh murder squad detective in Bradford, at odds with his white colleagues, but mistrusted by his own community for marrying a Muslim. This however is a big disappointment. The BBC have turned Harinder into an Asian version of Luther – Idris Elba’s maverick cop. Sadly this doesn’t work.
Blue Lights was back and better than ever. Hard to chose between the stabbing episode or the “soft skin” car chase, but the whole series was brilliant
Meanwhile, true crime continues to inflate fear beyond reality. After decades of Midsomer Murders, Britain’s fictional villages have a homicide rate worse than South Central LA. It’s Straight Outta Trumpton.
Fear of crime remains high precisely because we are constantly bathing in stories about it.
Spies, Power and Politics
The standout political thriller was Zero Day, with Robert De Niro as a retired US president dragged back to investigate a cyberattack. It likely flew under the radar because it dared to show a Black female president standing up to authoritarian politicians and tech oligarchs.
The Agency was nearly as good. Slow Horses remains strong, if slightly less tight than before. And yes, River Cartwright is still a bit of a dick. The Savant, with Jessica Chastain was indefinatley delayed broadcast as it’s subject matter – right wing domestic terrorists and on-line radicalisation – was too unpopular with the Trump regime
Reality, Lies and the End of Truth
True crime now outnumbers real crime. Documentaries recycle familiar horrors because fear keeps people watching.
Which brings us to the show of the year.
Adolescence was devastating. Stephen Graham leads a story about a teenage boy radicalised into online misogyny — not as a monster, but as a product of loneliness, algorithmic poison, and emotional neglect. Watching it while the US president was offering asylum to the Tate brothers and welcoming Conor McGregor to the White House felt surreal.
And yet perfectly fitting.
The Problem Isn’t TV. It’s Us.
2025 wasn’t short of good television. It was short of attention.
Streaming didn’t kill quality. It removed consequences. When nothing needs to be finished, understood, or remembered, everything drifts toward the lowest cognitive effort that still keeps you subscribed.
The best shows this year resisted that drift. They demanded focus. They trusted the audience. They understood that stories still matter — especially when reality itself is being rewritten in real time.
The tragedy is that too many viewers no longer want stories.
They want noise.