Action & Adventure

The Terminal List: Dark Wolf is a Prime Video action-thriller that serves as a prequel to the 2022 hit The Terminal List, shifting the spotlight from Chris Pratt's James Reece to his enigmatic friend and fellow warrior Ben Edwards. Taylor Kitsch, who introduced the character in the original series, headlines here in an origin story that charts Edwards' fateful transition from decorated Navy SEAL to morally compromised CIA operative. Adapted from author Jack Carr's best-selling novel, the series was developed by Carr and showrunner David DiGilio, who also guided the first show.

The story follows Ben as he is recruited into the shadowy world of the CIA's Ground Branch, taking on off-the-books missions across Europe and the Middle East that steadily erode the line between duty and self-preservation. Chris Pratt returns as Reece and Tom Hopper co-stars as Raife Hastings, grounding the prequel in the loyalties and betrayals that will echo through the wider saga. The series leans hard into gritty, grounded action and the psychological toll of covert warfare, trading some of the original's revenge-thriller propulsion for a darker character study.

Critics responded well, with many arguing that the prequel actually improved on its predecessor thanks to Kitsch's brooding, magnetic lead performance and a tighter sense of moral consequence. Muscular and bleak, The Terminal List: Dark Wolf is streaming on Prime Video.

Chief of War is a sweeping historical epic on Apple TV+ co-created by and starring Jason Momoa, who has described it as the most personal project of his career. Told largely from an Indigenous Hawaiian perspective, the series dramatizes the brutal, consequential campaign to unify the Hawaiian Islands in the late eighteenth century, a story rarely if ever given this scale on screen. Momoa, who is of Native Hawaiian descent, developed the show with Thomas Pa'a Sibbett as an act of cultural reclamation as much as entertainment.

Momoa stars as Ka'iana, a warrior chief navigating shifting alliances, foreign incursion, and the ambitions of rival rulers as the islands are pulled toward unification and, simultaneously, toward contact with a wider and more dangerous world. The series stages large-scale battles and intimate political maneuvering with equal attention, and its performances lean into the weight of a civilization at a turning point. Much of the drama unfolds in the Hawaiian language, an unusual and deliberate choice for a major streaming production.

Critics responded enthusiastically, with the series earning a strongly positive reception and comparisons to prestige epics like Game of Thrones for its ambition and craft. It stood out as one of Apple TV+'s most distinctive 2025 offerings, praised both for its spectacle and for centering an Indigenous story on its own terms. Chief of War streams on Apple TV+.

X-Men '97 is the triumphant continuation of the beloved X-Men: The Animated Series that defined a generation's understanding of Marvel's mutant heroes, picking up precisely where the original 1997 finale left off with the same visual aesthetic, the same characters, and an emotional maturity that the original's younger audience couldn't fully appreciate. The series reunites surviving members of the original creative team with a new generation of writers and directors, creating a work that honours its source material while taking dramatic risks that shocked even longtime fans. Creator Beau DeMayo committed to exploring the full moral and political complexity of the X-Men's metaphor for marginalized communities with uncompromising honesty.

The show's third episode became one of the most talked-about pieces of animation in years — a gut-wrenching examination of racial violence against mutantkind that many critics described as the most powerful twenty-two minutes of television of 2024 regardless of format or genre. The writing team refused to soften the team's conflicts or their enemies' cruelty in ways that might make the material more comfortable for casual viewers, resulting in a series that feels genuinely consequential rather than merely nostalgic.

X-Men '97 won multiple Emmy Awards including Outstanding Animated Program, becoming one of the most critically decorated animated productions of its year and renewing enthusiasm for a franchise that had struggled in live-action form. It demonstrated definitively that animation can be the most uncompromising format for storytelling when creators are given the freedom to pursue their vision without compromise. It streams exclusively on Disney+.

The Night Agent returns for its third season with Peter Sutherland deeper inside the machinery of American intelligence than he ever intended to be. Gabriel Basso reprises his role as the relentless FBI agent turned Night Action operative, now operating at the highest levels of a government that cannot decide whether he is its greatest asset or its most dangerous liability. Season 3 expands the show's globe-spanning scope with new allies, new threats, and conspiracies that reach into the very institutions Sutherland has sworn to protect. Creator Shawn Ryan continues to refine the series' formula of propulsive plotting, moral complexity, and the kind of tension that makes it physically impossible to watch just one episode.

Reacher is the relentlessly entertaining Amazon Prime Video action series based on Lee Child's beloved Jack Reacher novels, starring Alan Ritchson in a defining performance as the impossibly capable drifter-turned-investigator who wanders America with no phone, no plan, and an unerring ability to walk into trouble. Each season adapts a different novel from Child's long-running series, giving the show the structure of a standalone thriller while building its central character with the kind of patient consistency that rewards returning viewers. Reacher has become one of the most-watched series in Prime Video history.

The series corrects everything that felt misaligned about the earlier theatrical adaptations by casting Ritchson — six feet four, built like a tank, and possessed of a dry wit that makes the character's implausible competence not merely believable but genuinely charming. Reacher is not a brooding antihero; he is a fundamentally moral person who happens to be extraordinarily dangerous, and the show's tonal success rests on that distinction. Each season surrounds him with a strong supporting ensemble and a specific criminal conspiracy that lets the show function simultaneously as mystery, action vehicle, and character study.

Season 3, which premiered in 2025, is widely considered the most emotionally complex entry in the series, drawing on Child's novel Persuader to send Reacher into an undercover mission that requires him to work alongside the very people he has spent his career opposing. The season pushed Ritchson's performance into new territory while delivering the franchise's most impressive action sequences and its sharpest sense of human consequence — confirming Reacher as a prestige action series that continues to grow with each instalment.

Daredevil: Born Again is Marvel's long-awaited return to the character that defined the peak of Netflix's superhero era, reuniting Charlie Cox as Matt Murdock and Vincent D'Onofrio as Wilson Fisk/Kingpin in an eighteen-episode series set within the established MCU. After the critically beloved Daredevil Netflix series ended in 2018 following three acclaimed seasons, the character's return was one of the most anticipated events in Marvel television history — particularly given that Cox and D'Onofrio had already made cameo appearances in MCU theatrical projects, raising expectations that a proper series would honor both the Netflix legacy and the grander Marvel continuity.

The series follows Matt Murdock as he rebuilds his life and his practice in a New York City where Wilson Fisk has emerged from the shadows to run for mayor — a campaign that positions the series as both a superhero drama and a political thriller about institutional corruption, demagoguery, and the use of civic power as a weapon. The expanded episode count allows the show to breathe in ways that the binge-structured Netflix seasons could not, building its supporting cast — including Michael Gandolfini, Margarita Levieva, and Sandrine Holt — and its city with a deliberateness that rewards patient viewing.

Born Again premiered on Disney+ in March 2025 and received a complex critical response: the first several episodes were praised for Cox and D'Onofrio's work and the show's willingness to engage with street-level storytelling distinct from the MCU's cosmic scale, while some critics noted an unevenness in pacing across the longer episode run. Fan response was considerably warmer, with audiences responding to the return of two beloved characters and the show's commitment to the darker, more grounded tone that made the Netflix original so celebrated. A second season was greenlit ahead of the first season's conclusion.

The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power is Amazon Studios' landmark fantasy epic — the most expensive television series ever produced — set thousands of years before the events of Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings in the mythical Second Age of Middle-earth. The show brings to life the forging of the rings of power, the rise of Sauron from obscurity, and the drowning of the island kingdom of Numenor, drawing on the appendices and notes that Tolkien left scattered across his legendarium. It follows a vast ensemble including the immortal Galadriel (Morfydd Clark), the half-elven Elrond (Robert Aramayo), and the human Isildur (Maxim Baldry), along with Harfoots — ancient ancestors of Hobbits — and a mysterious Stranger who fell from the sky.

The scale and craft of The Rings of Power are genuinely staggering. Filmed primarily in New Zealand, the series deploys production design of almost inconceivable ambition — from the gleaming halls of Lindon to the volcanic Southlands that will become Mordor — and is shot by cinematographer Alex Disenhof with the same grandeur and texture that defined Peter Jackson's original trilogy. The show wears its influence openly and honors it fully.

Season two deepened the mythology significantly, with Sauron's machinations growing in sophistication and the tragedy of Numenor developing its full weight. The Rings of Power has established itself as the definitive prestige fantasy of the streaming era — ambitious, visually extraordinary, and rooted in a love for Tolkien's world that radiates from every frame.