Fire Country is a CBS firefighting drama co-created by and starring Max Thieriot, and one of the most-watched scripted series on American broadcast television. It follows Bobby Bode Donovan, a young convict who joins a prison release program that places incarcerated firefighters on the front lines of Northern California's wildfires in exchange for a shot at reducing their sentences.
Bode is assigned to work in Edgewater, his small hometown, where he must face the family and community he left behind as he fights alongside the local Cal Fire crew. The ensemble includes Kevin Alejandro, Diane Farr, Billy Burke and Jordan Calloway, and the series balances high-stakes rescue set pieces with the family melodrama and small-town tensions at its emotional core.
A breakout hit for CBS, Fire Country consistently ranks among the top-rated scripted series on American broadcast television and has spawned an expanding franchise of spin-offs. Its blend of procedural firefighting action and soapy family drama has made it a dependable ratings anchor across multiple seasons. It streams on Paramount+.
Boots is a Netflix comedy-drama series created by Andy Parker, adapted from Greg Cope White's memoir The Pink Marine. Set in 1990, it follows a directionless young man who impulsively joins the United States Marine Corps alongside his best friend and must survive the brutal crucible of boot camp while carrying a secret about who he is. Executive produced by the legendary Norman Lear in one of his final projects, it balances raw military rigor with warmth and humor.
Miles Heizer stars as Cameron Cope, an aimless teenager with no obvious prospects who signs up largely on a whim and finds himself utterly unprepared for the punishing world of Marine training. Vera Farmiga plays his loving but overbearing mother, and Max Parker, Liam Oh, and Angus O'Brien fill out the ensemble of recruits and drill instructors who become Cameron's unlikely found family. The series mines both comedy and genuine drama from the pressure cooker of basic training and the secrets its recruits carry.
Critics responded enthusiastically, and the show earned a strong 92% Rotten Tomatoes score along with a top-ten streaming run, praised for its heart, its period specificity, and Heizer's grounded lead performance. Though Netflix ultimately did not renew it beyond its first season, Boots was widely embraced as a standout dramedy. It streams on Netflix.
All's Fair is a glossy Hulu legal drama from the prolific Ryan Murphy, the creator behind American Horror Story, Glee, and Feud, built around an all-female divorce law firm in New York City. Co-created by Murphy with Jon Robin Baitz and Joe Baken, the series is a splashy, soap-operatic ensemble piece and one of the most heavily marketed television launches of the year, anchored by a cast of Hollywood heavyweights.
Kim Kardashian stars as Allura Grant, a powerhouse divorce attorney who breaks away from a male-dominated firm to launch her own practice alongside a team of formidable women. Naomi Watts, Niecy Nash-Betts, and Teyana Taylor play her partners, with Sarah Paulson as a fierce rival and Glenn Close among the ensemble, as the firm takes on high-net-worth clients, explosive settlements, and the personal betrayals that blur the line between business and vengeance. The show trades in designer wardrobes, palatial interiors, and the melodramatic power struggles that are Murphy's signature.
The series became a genuine cultural talking point on arrival: it drew scathing reviews from critics, who made it one of the most negatively reviewed shows of the year, even as it pulled enormous viewership numbers for Hulu and quickly earned a second-season renewal. Marking Kim Kardashian's first major scripted leading role, All's Fair is streaming on Hulu.
Malice is a glossy psychological revenge thriller on Prime Video, created and written by James Wood, that unfolds like a sun-drenched cross between The Talented Mr. Ripley and a modern eat-the-rich satire. Premiering in November 2025 across six episodes, it gives comedian Jack Whitehall his first leading dramatic role, cast sharply against type as a charming young man harboring a dark and patient agenda.
Whitehall plays Adam Healey, a personable tutor who insinuates himself into the household of the fabulously wealthy Tanner family, first at their idyllic Greek island retreat and later in London. David Duchovny stars as the family's tech-magnate patriarch, Jamie Tanner, with Carice van Houten as his wife Nat. As Adam makes himself indispensable, it becomes clear that his warmth masks a meticulous scheme of revenge, and the series tightens into a game of manipulation in which the audience is never quite sure who is playing whom.
Reviews were mixed, with some critics finding the plotting deliberate to a fault, but audiences made it a genuine streaming hit, drawn by its glamorous settings, its soapy tension, and Whitehall's surprising dramatic turn. Filmed in London and on the Greek island of Paros, Malice is streaming on Prime Video.
Chad Powers is a Hulu sports comedy series co-created by and starring Glen Powell, expanding a viral comedy bit into a full six-episode showcase for one of Hollywood's fastest-rising stars. Developed by Powell with Michael Waldron, the writer behind Loki and Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, the series premiered in September 2025 and leans fully into big-hearted, broad sports-movie comedy.
Powell plays Russ Holliday, a spectacularly arrogant college quarterback whose career self-destructs in a moment of infamy that makes him a national punchline. Years later, desperate for redemption and unrecognizable under heavy prosthetics, he reinvents himself as Chad Powers, an earnest, goofy walk-on who tries out for a struggling college football team without anyone knowing who he really is. As Chad becomes the heart of the team, Russ must reckon with the ego that ruined him. Steve Zahn and Perry Mattfeld co-star.
The show grew out of a character Powell originally created with Eli Manning for an ESPN Eli's Places segment, in which Manning donned a disguise to secretly try out for a college team. Audiences responded warmly to the series' underdog charm and Powell's game, prosthetic-aided performance, and Hulu renewed it for a second season. Chad Powers is streaming on Hulu.
The Lowdown is an FX drama series created by Sterlin Harjo, the co-creator of the beloved Reservation Dogs, marking his return to television with another richly regional story rooted in his home state of Oklahoma. Premiering in September 2025 and streaming on Hulu, it blends noir mystery, shaggy comedy, and social conscience into a distinctly Tulsa-flavored character study.
Ethan Hawke stars as Lee Raybon, a self-styled truthstorian, an obsessive amateur historian, rare-book dealer, and gadfly journalist who cannot stop digging into the buried secrets of his city. When his investigation into a prominent local family's death pulls him into a web of corruption, old money, and long-suppressed history, Lee's compulsive truth-telling puts him and those around him in real danger. The character is loosely inspired by the late real-life Tulsa historian and activist Lee Roy Chapman, grounding the series in genuine local lore.
Critics embraced the show as a warm, idiosyncratic showcase for Hawke and for Harjo's deep affection for Oklahoma's people and contradictions, praising its blend of mystery-of-the-week momentum and lived-in regional texture. Like Reservation Dogs before it, The Lowdown finds the universal in the specific. It streams on Hulu.
Death by Lightning is a Netflix limited series that dramatizes one of the strangest and most tragic chapters in American political history: the assassination of President James A. Garfield. Adapted from Candice Millard's acclaimed nonfiction book Destiny of the Republic, the four-part drama was created by Mike Makowsky and executive produced by a team that includes David Benioff and D. B. Weiss of Game of Thrones fame.
Michael Shannon stars as Garfield, the reluctant, principled Ohioan swept into the presidency in 1880 almost against his will, while Matthew Macfadyen plays Charles Guiteau, the delusional, chronically failed office-seeker who came to believe he was destined to kill the president. The series braids their two lives together, tracing Garfield's improbable ascent and Guiteau's descent into fatal grandiosity, before turning to the grim aftermath in which the president's own doctors may have done more harm than the assassin's bullet. Nick Offerman, Betty Gilpin, Shea Whigham, and Bradley Whitford round out the ensemble.
Critics praised the series for its dark wit, its detailed period craft, and the performances of its two leads, with Macfadyen's twitchy, tragicomic Guiteau drawing particular attention. Both a political tragedy and a mordant character study, it revives a largely forgotten American story for a modern audience. Death by Lightning is streaming on Netflix.
Washington Black is a sweeping Hulu limited series adapted from Esi Edugyan's acclaimed 2018 novel, a coming-of-age adventure that carries its hero from bondage to the far corners of the globe. Ernest Kingsley Jr. stars as the adult George Washington “Wash” Black, a boy born into slavery on a Barbados sugar plantation whose prodigious scientific gifts are recognized by an eccentric abolitionist inventor. When a death forces him to flee, Wash embarks on an odyssey across oceans and continents that transforms him from fugitive to scientist, artist, and explorer.
Sterling K. Brown, who also executive produces, plays Medwin Harris, a charismatic community leader in Halifax whose role is expanded from the novel, while Eddie Karanja plays the younger Wash and Tom Ellis, Iola Evans, and Sharon Duncan-Brewster fill out the cast. Told across dual timelines and multiple continents, the series pairs the propulsive momentum of a nineteenth-century adventure yarn with a thoughtful meditation on freedom, identity, and who gets to author their own story.
Adapting a novel that won Canada's Giller Prize and was shortlisted for the Booker, the series reaches for the grandeur of classic adventure storytelling while centering a Black hero's journey toward self-invention. Lavishly mounted and spanning locations from the Caribbean to the Arctic, Washington Black streams on Hulu.
The Chair Company is an HBO comedy series co-created by Tim Robinson and Zach Kanin, the duo behind the cult sketch phenomenon I Think You Should Leave, marking Robinson's first leading role in a fully serialized narrative rather than a sketch showcase. Robinson stars as Ron Trosper, an ordinary corporate everyman whose life is upended by a mortifying public incident, after which he stumbles onto what appears to be a sprawling conspiracy hidden beneath the mundane surfaces of everyday commerce.
What begins as one man's attempt to recover a shred of dignity spirals into an obsessive, ever-deepening investigation, and the show channels Robinson's signature comedy of social humiliation and escalating absurdity into a single continuous story. His character's inability to let go — to simply move past his embarrassment — becomes the engine that drags him, and everyone around him, into increasingly deranged territory. Produced with Adam McKay among its executive producers, the series marries excruciating cringe comedy to the structure of a paranoid mystery.
Reviewers embraced The Chair Company as a natural, ambitious evolution of Robinson's comic voice, praising its commitment to sustaining his particular brand of discomfort across a full narrative arc. A word-of-mouth hit, it was renewed for a second season at HBO Max, where it streams.
Down Cemetery Road is an Apple TV+ mystery-thriller adapted from the 2003 debut novel by Mick Herron, the author who would later become a sensation with his Slow Horses spy series. Emma Thompson stars as Zoë Boehm, a prickly, formidable private investigator, opposite Ruth Wilson as Sarah Tucker, an Oxford housewife whose comfortable life is upended when a house on her street explodes and a little girl vanishes in the aftermath. Convinced the authorities are hiding the truth, Sarah begins digging — and pulls both women into a lethal government conspiracy.
Adapted by Morwenna Banks and carrying the same wit, paranoia, and distrust of institutions that define Herron's work, the series pairs its two leads in a slow-burning investigation that steadily widens from a single tragedy into something far more sinister. Thompson is caustic and commanding as the world-weary Boehm, while Wilson charts Sarah's transformation from bored suburbanite to obsessive amateur sleuth, and the mismatched duo's crackling dynamic drives the show.
Drawing inevitable comparisons to the hit Slow Horses — also based on Herron's novels — the series was praised for its performances and its blend of dark comedy and conspiracy thriller. Apple renewed it for a second season, confirming appetite for more of Herron's Oxford-set mysteries. It streams on Apple TV+.
Butterfly is a slick, globe-trotting espionage thriller on Prime Video, adapted from the Boom! Studios graphic novel by Arash Amel. Daniel Dae Kim — who also executive produces — stars as David Jung, a former United States intelligence operative living in the shadows in South Korea years after faking his own death. His carefully hidden life collapses when he is targeted by Rebecca, a lethal young agent from a shadowy private intelligence outfit called Caddis, setting off a relentless cat-and-mouse chase across the Korean peninsula.
The series' central twist reframes the pursuit as something far more personal than a routine assignment, binding hunter and hunted together through a buried family secret. Reina Hardesty plays Rebecca with steely intensity, and the show balances wall-to-wall action — foot chases, shootouts, and hand-to-hand combat through Seoul's streets and neon-lit interiors — with a genuine interest in identity, belonging, and the ties that survive betrayal.
Shot almost entirely on location in South Korea, Butterfly showcases the country as more than an exotic setting, weaving Korean language, culture, and craft into its DNA. For Daniel Dae Kim, born in South Korea and raised in the United States, the project was a personal milestone, and the series arrived as one of Prime Video's most distinctive action offerings of the year. It streams on Prime Video.
