I’ve reviewed the best movies (horror, old, and new) I watched in 2025, so now it is time for television. I didn’t do a roundup of the TV shows I watched last year (because I watch more movies than TV), so this post includes shows I’ve watched over the past two years.
Tier 1: Television Masterpieces
The Rehearsal (season 2)
Nathan Fielder continues to surprise and impress me. No one else has even thought of attempting something this ambitious on television before. Nathan spent two years learning how to fly a 737 airplane for a comedy show. Except it’s not really a comedy show, it’s more like a mass psychological experiment. Like Dostoevsky, Fielder uses his art form (reality TV and comedy) to unveil great truths about human nature and expose societal problems.
Tier 2: Great Shows
3 Body Problem (season 1)
I read the book (or listened to the audiobook) several years ago and enjoyed it, but I did not remember it too well and missed a lot through the audiobook listening process. I had been wanting to re-read this book (by actually reading it), which I still might do. I love the concept and tone: an impending alien invasion story that takes more of a horror/mystery tone. And it takes the science seriously. I am looking forward to the next season, as I didn’t read the second two books in the trilogy, though I think it would have been better as a movie, as there was a lot of fat that could have been cut. Like Dune (or LoTR) adapt the trilogy into three movies, preferably directed by Denis Villeneuve (just about everything would be better if directed by Villeneuve). Watching the series, I realized how similar the story was to Childhood’s End by Arthur C. Clarke, my favorite book I read in 2022.
Pantheon (seasons 1 & 2)
A science fiction anime series based on the short stories by Ken Liu, from his collection The Hidden Girl and Other Stories, which was one of my favorite books I read in 2020. Pantheon is smart realistic near-future science fiction in the vein of Black Mirror, Ex Machina, and Her. But rather than artificial intelligence (AI), it is about uploaded intelligence (UI) — or humans who have had their brains scanned into digital form before dying and are now immortal on the internet. That is a concept I find fascinating and am exploring in much of the science fiction I write myself. I loved the first season of Pantheon, but the second season was less focused, more meandering and confusing, with too many new characters and side plots. Season one versus season two felt like The Matrix one vs. the sequels, with many of the same problems. Though the pace did pick up toward the final couple of episodes—perhaps too much so. I suspect they were planning to extend the show into more seasons, but when it got canceled, they tried to cram everything in at the end.
The White Lotus (season 3)
Mike White does it again, with another great season at the White Lotus resort, this time in Thailand, with a great collection of characters. Every season of White Lotus features some of the best writing and acting on television. The current state of Hollywood is abysmal, which is why I spend more time watching older movies. There are so many great old movies that I can watch them forever without ever running out. But White Lotus illustrates why new art is always needed—to accurately reflect the current times by capturing the unique types of people and culture that exist now.
Wormwood (miniseries)
A fascinating hybrid of a documentary intertwined with actors portraying the same events in a scripted narrative—which is needed because there is no footage of those highly secretive events. This is the true story of Eric Olson, who has devoted his entire life to uncovering the mystery of his father’s death in 1953 when he fell from the tenth-story window of a hotel. Frank Olsen was a scientist working for the CIA at the time, and the official story was that he had a “bad trip” after taking LSD (which the CIA was experimenting with) and then committed suicide by jumping out the window. Through the course of the series, we come to see that that was not the whole story, and Olsen was most likely murdered by the CIA, who were afraid he might blow the whistle on the illegal operations they were running.
Tier 3: Just Good
Bodkin (miniseries)
A cold case murder mystery gets hot, as true crime podcasters investigate a missing persons case in a small town in Ireland.
Conan O’Brien Must Go (season 2)
I was a big fan of Conan’s late-night show back in the day, and my favorite parts were always the remote segments when he would travel to different places. This show is basically only that. Conan is as funny as ever, while visiting Norway, Argentina, Thailand, and Ireland.
Creepshow (season 1)
A reboot of the horror anthology show. Pretty much all the episodes were solid, but nothing truly mind-blowing or great.
Curb Your Enthusiasm (season 12)
It’s not as good as classic Curb at its peak, but after all these years, Larry David still makes me laugh out loud like few other TV shows.
Futurama (seasons 12 & 13)
Rick and Morty (season 8)
I watched these two shows around the same time, and it highlighted how much better Futurama is. It’s funnier and more creative with more inventive sci-fi ideas. Rick and Morty was novel when it first came out, but has just been more of the same ever since, except lower in quality. It’s too crude and nihilistic. Futurama is all tier 3 (good) with some tier 4 (great), while Rick and Morty is some tier 3 (good) with some tier 4 (flawed).
Love Death & Robots (season 4)
The next iteration of this animated science fiction anthology show was a mixed bag. The bad episodes weren’t worth watching, and the good ones were too short.
Soulmates (miniseries)
A miniseries similar to Black Mirror, set in the near future, after a new technology is created that finds the perfect soulmate for everyone in the world if you take a test. Each episode is a self-contained story following different characters and how their lives change due to the Soulmates test. It’s a great format for a show that I would like to see more of: take a new sci-fi technology and speculate how it may impact society through various stories with different characters.
Tires (seasons 1 and 2)
Shane Gillis’s new comedy series is like an edgier and less politically correct version of The Office, set in an auto shop (and without the documentary gimmick). In the 90s, Gillis would have starred on SNL for years, then done massive movies like Adam Sandler and Chris Farley (Gillis is like a combo between them). Instead, he got canceled and fired from SNL before even starting—which is why modern TV and movie comedies suck. At least Netflix has enough backbone to give creatives like Gillis freedom.
Tier 4: Flawed But Entertaining
Tier 5: Disappointing (Don’t Bother)
I am combining these tiers for the following shows, as they all vary between the two tiers depending on the episode.
Alien: Earth (season 1)
I am a massive fan of the Alien franchise, at least the first two movies, and I am also a staunch defender of Prometheus. This TV series started off promising, with a decent pilot episode, but I could not believe how fast and far it fell. The tone was way off. It abandoned the franchise’s horror roots and was not scary at all. At times it veered toward comedy with the children in adult bodies, but it was not actually funny, just cringe and awkward. The only comedy was the unintentional kind. They missed the lessons of Jaws (and Alien 1) by showing too much of the monster, thereby making a complete mockery of the Xenomorphs, previously one of the scariest monsters in movie history. It’s a shame because there was the skeleton of a good show in there somewhere, and they certainly spent a lot of money to make the special effects look good, but the writing and acting (aside from Olyphant and Ceesay) were terrible.
Black Mirror (season 7)
Speaking of previously great science fiction franchises that have gone down the tubes…
- “Common People” – tier 4, flawed – A somewhat interesting premise, of a subscription app for a brain-computer interface that keeps you alive, but it was too over the top and unbelievable to take seriously.
- “Bête Noire” – tier 3, good – A good sci-fi concept I’ve never quite seen before, involving the quantum multiverse and the Mandela effect
- “Hotel Reverie” – tier 5, terrible – They could have done something interesting with AI-generated movies, but this was utterly stupid. I thought they might have done some satirical critique of how modern Hollywood does pandering remakes of classic films by simply swapping in diverse actors—but they literally just did that with no self-awareness at all.
- “Plaything” – tier 3, good – A cyberpunk horror about a video game from the 90s where the lemmings-type AI characters become conscious, similar to Ted Chiang’s great novella, The Lifecycle of Software Objects, and also like a mix of two of my stories, “Don’t Bing Roko” and “Satoshi Revealed.”
- “Eulogy” – tier 2, great – By far the best episode of the season, with a tragic love story reminiscent of my favorite movie, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.
- “USS Callister: Into Infinity” – tier 5, terrible – The original “USS Callister” was one of the better Black Mirror episodes, but this prequel to that story was one of the worst. It has all the problems of a prequel, as it wasted time explaining things from the original that didn’t need explanation. And in what has become a tired Hollywood cliche, every white male character is either extremely stupid or extremely evil.
Tales From the Void
A horror anthology based on short stories from the NoSleep subreddit. I’ve read and enjoyed several stories from NoSleep, but hadn’t read any of these, which were mediocre at best. The acting seemed amateurish. Plus these film adaptations lose the unique conceit of the NoSleep format (written in the first-person, with the commenters playing along to create a sense of verisimilitude). There could have been a more creative way to adapt the stories that incorporated that element, perhaps even using Reddit itself in a meta way.
The Twilight Zone (2019 reboot)
As a huge fan of Rod Serling’s original series, I’d been wanting to see this reboot for a few years now (it wasn’t worth the wait). The original Twilight Zone featured science fiction stories with some social commentary, but this new Twilight Zone is social commentary stories with some science fiction. As with any anthology series, certain episodes were better than others. A few were actually good and worth watching, while others were laughably bad.
- “The Comedian” – tier 4, flawed but entertaining
- “Nightmare at 30,000 Feet” – tier 3, just good
- “Replay” – tier 5, don’t bother
- “A Traveler” – tier 3, just good
- “The Wunderkind” – tier 5, don’t bother
- “Six Degrees of Freedom” – tier 3 or possibly 2 – set on a spaceship to Mars, borderline great
- “Not All Men” – tier 5, don’t bother – Like HP Lovecraft’s “Colour Out of Space” except the meteors turn all men into OJ Simpson.
- “Point of Origin” – tier 4, flawed but entertaining – Way too heavy-handed message on immigration.
- “The Blue Scorpion” – tier 3, just good
- “Blurryman” – tier 3, just good – Got meta with an episode about making an episode of The Twilight Zone.
Season 2 (slightly better than the first season):
- “Meet in the Middle” – tier 3, good – Similar to my short story, “Unwanted Voices“, but with a darker ending.
- “Downtime” – tier 2, great – An actual interesting and original sci-fi concept involving VR.
- “The Who of You” – tier 4, flawed but entertaining
- “Ovation” – tier 4, flawed but entertaining
- “Among the Untrodden” tier 4, flawed but entertaining
- “8” – tier 2, great – Similar to The Thing, but it was too short.
- “A Human Face” tier 4, flawed but entertaining
- “A Small Town” – tier 3, just good
- “Try, Try” – tier 3, good – A great premise: Groundhog Day from the perspective of someone unaware of the time loop—but it devolved into boring cliches toward the end.
- “You Might Also Like” – tier 3, just good
Previous TV lists:
Best Documentaries
Chaos: The Manson Murders (2025) directed by Errol Morris
A documentary based on the book by Tom O’Neill (which I want to read, as it goes into much greater depth) about the Charles Manson murders and their association with MKUltra, the CIA’s mind control program that experimented with LSD to brainwash people into becoming programmed killers…
Don’t Die: The Man Who Wants to Live Forever (2025) directed by Chris Smith
I’d been following Bryan Johnson online for a year or two before this documentary about him. After making billions from selling his tech company, he decided to turn himself into a human guinea pig and use his wealth to try to live forever. His core mission in life is “Don’t Die”. I am very intrigued by his Blueprint program, where he documents everything he does for diet, exercise, and supplementation—all designed to help maximize his lifespan. He probably takes it to an extreme, but we will never make groundbreaking progress in longevity science without people willing to go to extremes for research and experimentation. I will continue to follow Johnson’s journey and incorporate elements of his Blueprint that work for me.
Justin Willman: Magic Lover (2025)
This is the newest special from magician Justin Willman. Some of his tricks are too good—as in it seems like there is no possible way he could do them without cheating somehow, such as by using plants in the crowd. But still, it is mind-blowing stuff.
Mass of the Ages (2021, 2022, 2024) directed by Cameron O’Hearn
A fascinating trilogy of documentaries about the Traditional Latin Mass. I was raised Catholic but had no idea of the history of Vatican II and the massive changes made by switching from the Latin rite that had been the same for centuries to the “Novus Ordo” in the 1960s. The Traditional Latin Mass seems much more reverent and sacred compared to the Novus Ordo.
YouTube channels
Some new channels I started following:
- Basic Logic – shorts on philosophy and politics
- Better Than Food – book reviews
- Bryan Johnson – mentioned above
- Core Memory – short docs on tech startups
- easy, actually – smart and funny explainer videos on various topics
- Generic Entertainment – comedic shorts about the literary world
- Good Work – humorous videos about the world of finance
- How People Make Money – comedic videos about the title
- Lit Nomad – life advice vlog from a former quant who lives in his Tesla
- Media Death Cult – sci-fi/horror book and movie reviews
- Michael MacKelvie – deep dives into sports topics
- Michael Sikand – stocks and investing
- Solar Sands – video essays on various topics relating to art and culture
- The Wade Show with Wade – better than late-night comedy hosts
- Time Zone Weird – I started adapting old “Future Fake News” stories to YouTube with the aid of AI
- Tooky’s Mag – alt lit book reviews
- Whatifalthist – history and more
And some old favorite channels:
- ATHLEAN-X
- Baseball Doesn’t Exist
- Bright Insight
- Casually Explained
- CGP Grey
- Cleo Abram
- Cool Worlds
- Critical Drinker
- EmpLemon
- Exurb1a
- Flashgitz
- Freedomtoons
- Glink
- Hard Reset
- Kino Corner
- Kurzgesagt
- Last Things
- LEMMiNO
- Man Carrying Thing
- MrBeast
- Nerdwriter1
- Oki’s Weird Stories
- Pursuit of Wonder
- Quinn’s Ideas
- Redeemed Zoomer
- RedLetterMedia
- Sam Hyde
- Screen Junkies
- Strength Side
- Tale Foundry
- Thomas Flight
- Upright Health
- Vsauce
- Weird History
- Wendigoon
T.Z. Barry 