2025 Streaming Roundup: Shows that surprised, entertained and redefined the craft

2025 has been a fantastic year for Hindi streaming. Though certain big-ticket sequels such as Delhi Crime S3 and The Family Man S3 didn’t live up to the hullabaloo, several others audaciously challenged the form and the craft. Shows such as Paatal Lok S2 (Prime Video), Black, White, and Gray—Love Kills (SonyLiv), Black Warrant (Netflix), Khauf (Prime Video) and Real Kashmir Football Club (SonyLiv) delivered on the promise of streaming made to the audiences about a decade ago.

With the Hindi streaming

space continuously redefining what is possible, it has been a great year for English shows as well even if a few highly-anticipated new installments such as The Morning Show S4 or Nobody Wants This S2 turned out to be blah.

This is not a ranking. It’s just a wide gamut of exemplary shows ranging from caustic commentaries and social horror to workplace dramedies. As 2025 draws to a close, allow yourself some time to snuggle in and unwind.   

Adolescence (Netflix)

Created by Jack Thorne and Stephen Graham, Adolescence is peak social horror. It’s a guttural howl for salvation, a desperate call to action, a close examination of the inner workings of impressionable young minds behind bursts of violence that shock, scare, and shatter.

Powered by career-defining acting performances by Stephen Graham, Owen Cooper, and Erin Doherty, Adolescence is what happens when every department involved brings its A-game. Directed by Philip Barantini, each of the hour-long four episodes is an exquisite one-take shot—technical wizardry—that probes the central act of violence committed by a 13-year-old innocuous-looking schoolboy from different perspectives, giving the audience a 360-degree immersive experience of the before, the after, and everything in between.

Adolescence deftly brings to the fore how little parents know about their children—what they are up to and how the analogue generation is utterly unequipped to raise kids in the digital age.

The Studio (Apple TV)

Directed by Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg, The Studio is comedy of the absurd on cocaine. In the garb of a crackling satire on the sham that is Hollywood, it is a brilliant take on all the madness behind the camera that makes the magic happen in front of it.  

It’s not for no reason that The Studio swept the Emmys with 13 wins (the highest for a comedy series in a single season so far). Brimming with star cameos (including Martin Scorsese, Charlize Theron, Zac Efron, Adam Scott, and Ted Sarandos) and self-deprecating humor, its unrelenting inanity will remind you of The Ba***ds of Bollywood. It’s only infinitely cleverer and of incomparable import.

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The Four Seasons (Netflix)

Created by Tina Fey, Lang Fisher and Tracey Wigfield, The Four Seasons is a keenly observed and thoroughly funny buddy dramedy that follows a group of three couples as they deal with the imminent divorce of one among them across four seasonal getaways taken during the span of a year.   

With eight highly binge-able episodes, it is the remake of Alan Alda’s 1981 film of the same name. An arresting peek into long-term friendships and partnerships, the limited series stars a terrific Steve Carell, Colman Domingo and Kerri Kenney-Silver along with an equally winsome Tina Fey, Will Forte and Marco Calvani.  

Black Mirror S7 (Netflix)

In the last 13 years, the Emmy Award-winning dystopian series has launched itself at the heart of the rapidly expanding genre of social horror. However, it’s not the show’s characteristic prescient hyperawareness of the digital doom but its ability to seamlessly fuse tech with emotion that sets the seventh season apart.

Of the six stories, each about an hour long, the ones that stir and stick are those that strike the sweet spot between thinking/feeling and analogue/digital, thereby humanising our imminent cyberpunk fate.