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+.
Tempest is a Korean political-action thriller released on Disney+ in 2025, one of the platform's most ambitious and expensive Korean originals to date. Directed by Kim Hee-won and mounted with the scale and star power of a feature film, it was among the most anticipated K-dramas of the year.
Jun Ji-hyun (credited internationally as Gianna Jun) stars as Seo Mun-ju, a celebrated former diplomat and ambassador drawn into a lethal geopolitical conspiracy, while Gang Dong-won plays a mysterious mercenary who becomes her uneasy ally. As an assassination and a web of international intrigue threaten the Korean peninsula, the two are pulled across borders in a high-stakes game of espionage. American actor John Cho appears in a key supporting role, underscoring the show's international ambitions.
Positioned as a globe-trotting tentpole, Tempest drew huge attention for pairing two of Korea's biggest screen stars and for its cinematic production values, delivering shootouts, political brinkmanship, and shifting allegiances across its run. It streams on Disney+.
The Trauma Code: Heroes on Call is a Netflix original Korean medical-action series based on a hit web novel and its webtoon adaptation. Premiering in January 2025, the eight-episode series was one of the streamer's first big global successes of the year, fusing high-stakes hospital drama with a propulsive, almost action-movie energy.
Ju Ji-hoon stars as Baek Kang-hyeok, a brilliant, unorthodox trauma surgeon with battlefield experience who is recruited into the under-funded, understaffed trauma center of a major hospital. Blunt, fearless, and often infuriating to the bureaucrats around him, he sets about transforming the department and galvanizing a demoralized team, with Choo Young-woo as the young doctor pulled into his orbit. The series balances grisly, fast-moving emergency cases with sharp humor and institutional satire.
The Trauma Code shot to the top of Netflix's global non-English charts on release, praised for its brisk pacing, dark comedy, and Ju Ji-hoon's charismatic lead performance, and a second season is in the works. It stands out as a rare Korean medical drama built for pure momentum. It is streaming on Netflix.
Maxton Hall - The World Between Us is a German romantic drama produced for Prime Video, adapted from Mona Kasten's bestselling novel Save Me, the first book in her Maxton Hall trilogy. After its first season became a breakout global hit in 2024 — one of the most-watched non-English titles in Prime Video's history — the series returned for a second season in late 2025.
The story follows Ruby Bell (Harriet Herbig-Matten), a scholarship student with Oxford ambitions at the elite Maxton Hall private school, and James Beaufort (Damian Hardung), the wealthy, arrogant heir who is drawn to her against the rigid expectations of his powerful family. The second season, adapting the darker second novel Save You, deepens their turbulent romance as grief, family duty, and class divides threaten to pull them apart.
A phenomenon particularly among young-adult and romance audiences, the series was renewed for further seasons on the strength of its passionate international fandom. Blending swoony romance with high-gloss production, Maxton Hall has become one of Prime Video's signature international franchises. It streams on Prime Video.
When Life Gives You Tangerines (Korean title Pokssak Sogatsuda) is a Netflix original Korean drama written by Lim Sang-choon and directed by Kim Won-seok, released in 2025 to extraordinary acclaim. Structured as a decades-spanning life story told across sixteen episodes and four seasonal parts, it stands as one of the most celebrated Korean dramas in recent memory.
Set in motion on the southern island of Jeju, it follows the spirited, rebellious Ae-sun and the steadfast, devoted Gwan-sik from their youth in the mid-twentieth century through a lifetime of love, hardship, and family. IU and Park Bo-gum play the couple in their younger years, with acclaimed film actors Moon So-ri and Park Hae-joon portraying them in later life, tracing the sweep of modern Korean history through the intimate joys and sorrows of a single family.
The series became a global phenomenon on Netflix and a critical darling, praised for its luminous performances, its poetic writing, and the emotional force of its multi-generational story, which moved viewers around the world to tears. Widely hailed as a modern classic of the form, it cemented IU and Park Bo-gum as one of the most beloved on-screen pairings of the year. When Life Gives You Tangerines is streaming on Netflix.
Poker Face Season 2 continues Rian Johnson's Peacock mystery series, a loving throwback to the case-of-the-week detective shows of the 1970s. Natasha Lyonne returns as Charlie Cale, the wisecracking drifter with an uncanny, infallible knack for telling when someone is lying, a gift that keeps dragging her into murder after murder as she travels across America.
Back on the road in her battered Plymouth Barracuda, Charlie stumbles into a fresh set of standalone whodunits, each stocked with a rotating roster of guest stars. Season 2's lineup is loaded, featuring the likes of Cynthia Erivo, Awkwafina, Katie Holmes, Kumail Nanjiani, Giancarlo Esposito, John Mulaney and Melanie Lynskey, with the series' signature howcatchem structure showing the crime before Charlie unravels it.
The second season drew generally positive reviews, with critics again crediting Lyonne's magnetic lead performance and the show's inventive, star-studded standalone episodes, even as some felt the formula had grown familiar. Streaming on Peacock.
Only Murders in the Building Season 5 brings back Hulu's Emmy-nominated comic murder mystery, with Steve Martin, Martin Short and Selena Gomez reprising their roles as true-crime podcasters Charles, Oliver and Mabel. After four seasons of solving killings inside their storied Manhattan apartment building, the Arconia, the trio face a case that strikes closer to home than ever.
This season opens with the death of Lester, the Arconia's longtime doorman, plunging Charles, Oliver and Mabel into a New York underworld of mobsters and billionaire power players in a scheme that threatens the very future of their beloved building. As ever, the show stuffs its whodunit with A-list guest stars, this season including Renee Zellweger, Christoph Waltz, Keegan-Michael Key, Tea Leoni, Logan Lerman, Beanie Feldstein and Bobby Cannavale, alongside returning Oscar winner Meryl Streep.
A consistent awards favorite, Only Murders continued its critical run with Season 5, which reviewers praised for returning to the series' fundamentals: warm banter, clever plotting and the irreplaceable chemistry of its three leads. Streaming on Hulu.
Slow Horses Season 5 returns to Slough House, the dead-end posting for MI5's disgraced spies, in Apple TV+'s acclaimed adaptation of Mick Herron's espionage novels. Gary Oldman is back as the flatulent, brilliant Jackson Lamb, leading a cast that includes Jack Lowden as River Cartwright and Kristin Scott Thomas as MI5's steely Diana Taverner. This fifth run adapts Herron's novel London Rules.
The season kicks into gear when a wave of seemingly random, coordinated attacks strikes London and the trail leads uncomfortably close to home after the team's own tech misfit, Roddy Ho (Christopher Chung), acquires an improbable new girlfriend. What begins as an office joke spirals into a conspiracy that pulls Lamb's misfits into the middle of a national crisis, mixing the show's trademark gallows humor with genuine menace.
Slow Horses has become one of Apple TV+'s most reliably praised dramas, and the fifth season continued its streak of strong reviews for Oldman's performance and the series' sharp, propulsive storytelling. The show's popularity has been such that Apple renewed it several seasons ahead. Streaming on Apple TV+.
Gen V Season 2 continues Prime Video's college-set spin-off of The Boys, the savagely satirical superhero universe created by Eric Kripke. Set at Godolkin University, the school for young Supes, the season brings back Jaz Sinclair as Marie Moreau alongside Lizze Broadway, Maddie Phillips, London Thor, Derek Luh and Asa Germann, and unfolds in the shadow of Homelander's tightening grip on America.
With a menacing new dean, Cipher (Hamish Linklater), now running Godolkin and training students as soldiers, Marie and her friends stumble onto a buried secret known as the Odessa Project that reaches into Marie's own origins. As the line between hero and weapon blurs, the season ties directly into the larger war between humans and Supes building across The Boys, with several cameos bridging the two shows.
The season carried real-world weight following the death of cast member Chance Perdomo, with the production choosing not to recast his character and instead writing his absence into the story. Critics responded warmly, awarding a 91 percent score on Rotten Tomatoes and singling out Hamish Linklater's villain and the show's sensitive handling of its loss. Streaming on Prime Video.
Peacemaker Season 2 marks the return of writer-director James Gunn's raucous, foul-mouthed DC series, with John Cena back as Christopher Smith, the deluded but oddly lovable vigilante who believes in peace no matter how many people he has to kill to get it. Arriving on HBO Max in August 2025, the season is the first major television chapter of the newly launched DC Universe that Gunn now oversees.
The new episodes send Chris through a portal into an alternate dimension where the family and life he always wanted seem to exist, a world in which his abusive father and dead brother are alive and celebrated. As Chris is tempted to abandon his own reality, his ragtag 11th Street Kids, including Danielle Brooks' Leota Adebayo, Freddie Stroma's Vigilante, Jennifer Holland's Harcourt and Steve Agee's Economos, grapple with the fallout, joined by Frank Grillo's Rick Flag Sr. The result blends absurd comedy, needle-drop soundtracks and surprisingly tender emotional stakes.
Widely considered a step up from the acclaimed first season, Peacemaker Season 2 earned rave reviews, including a 94 percent score on Rotten Tomatoes, with critics praising Gunn's character work and Cena's performance even as the finale sparked debate. Streaming on HBO Max.
Squid Game Season 3 is the final chapter of Hwang Dong-hyuk's record-shattering South Korean survival drama, the series that became a global phenomenon on Netflix. Picking up immediately after the events of Season 2, it brings Lee Jung-jae's Seong Gi-hun back into the deadly arena for a concluding run of episodes that Hwang originally conceived as part of one larger story.
Reeling from the failed rebellion that closed the previous season, a hardened and grief-stricken Gi-hun re-enters the games determined to bring them down from the inside, while the masked Front Man (Lee Byung-hun) tightens his grip and welcomes the shadowy VIPs. Outside the island, detective Hwang Jun-ho (Wi Ha-joon) presses on with his desperate search as the surviving players are funneled through a final gauntlet of childhood games turned lethal. The season sharpens the show's central question: what people will sacrifice, and whether any decency can survive, inside a machine built on human desperation.
Season 3 launched to staggering numbers, drawing more than 60 million views in its first three days to become Netflix's biggest television premiere ever and topping the charts in dozens of countries. Critics praised its bleak ambition and emotional payoff even as its ending divided some fans. Streaming on Netflix.
