Long Story Short is a Netflix adult animated comedy-drama created by Raphael Bob-Waksberg, his first new animated series since the acclaimed BoJack Horseman. Trading Hollywood satire for something more intimate, the show is a warm, melancholy, and very funny portrait of a single family told across the sweep of its members' entire lives.
The series follows the Schwooper family, jumping freely and non-chronologically through the decades, from childhood and adolescence to marriage, parenthood, and old age, so that a character might be a squabbling kid in one scene and a weary adult in the next. This restless time-hopping structure lets the show explore how families carry their history with them, how old wounds and inside jokes echo across generations, and how small moments accumulate into a life. Its voice cast includes Abbi Jacobson, Ben Feldman, Lisa Edelstein, Paul Reiser, and Nicole Byer.
Rooted in Bob-Waksberg's own Jewish American upbringing, Long Story Short earned strong reviews for balancing sharp comedy with genuine emotional depth, the same alchemy that made his previous work resonate. It 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.
The Waterfront is a soapy, sun-drenched Netflix crime drama from Kevin Williamson, the writer behind Dawson's Creek and the Scream films, returning to his native North Carolina for a story of family, legacy, and criminal temptation. The series centers on the Buckleys, a once-dominant fishing dynasty in the fictional coastal town of Havenport whose empire is crumbling. To save the family business, patriarch Harlan Buckley and his relatives are drawn back into the drug-running that built and nearly destroyed them a generation earlier.
Holt McCallany stars as Harlan, a hard, proud man recovering from heart attacks and desperate to hold his territory, with Maria Bello as his sharp-edged wife Belle and Melissa Benoist as his troubled daughter Bree, a recovering addict fighting to regain custody of her son. As the family's smuggling operation reignites, long-buried secrets, rival criminals, and law enforcement all close in, and the Buckleys discover how much they are willing to sacrifice to protect their name.
Williamson has said the show is his most personal, drawing on his own father's history, and that lived-in specificity gives the pulpy melodrama a surprising emotional weight. Anchored by a committed ensemble and Williamson's gift for cliffhangers, The Waterfront became a summer streaming hit and is available on Netflix.
Untamed is a gripping Netflix limited series that fuses a murder mystery with the sweeping grandeur of the American wilderness. Eric Bana stars as Kyle Turner, a special agent for the National Park Service's Investigative Services Branch — a real but little-known law-enforcement unit that polices crimes committed on federal parkland. When the body of a young woman is discovered at the base of El Capitan in Yosemite, Turner's investigation pulls him deep into the park's hidden dangers and the buried traumas of his own past.
Created by Mark L. Smith, the screenwriter behind The Revenant, together with his daughter Elle Smith, the series uses its vast natural setting as more than a backdrop — the wilderness becomes a character in its own right, beautiful and indifferent to the human violence it conceals. Bana anchors the show with a weathered, haunted performance as a man as remote and forbidding as the landscape he patrols, while Lily Santiago plays a rookie ranger drawn into the case and Sam Neill offers grounded support as the park's veteran chief.
A surprise summer hit, Untamed became one of Netflix's most-watched titles of the year and was quickly renewed for a second season set to relocate to a new national park. Praised for its atmosphere, its twisting plot, and Bana's magnetic lead turn, the series is streaming on Netflix.
The Girlfriend is a slippery, dual-perspective psychological thriller on Prime Video, adapted from Michelle Frances's 2017 bestselling novel. Robin Wright, who also directs several episodes and executive produces, stars as Laura, a successful gallery owner and fiercely protective mother whose comfortable life tilts off its axis when her adored son Daniel brings home a new girlfriend. Olivia Cooke plays Cherry, the ambitious young woman who may be a devoted partner or a calculating opportunist, depending entirely on whose version of events you believe.
The series' central formal trick is to refuse to take a side. As the relationship between the two women curdles from wary politeness into open psychological warfare, the show replays key events from each woman's point of view, subtly altering a glance, a line of dialogue, or a gesture so that the same scene reads as either menacing or perfectly innocent. The effect keeps the audience permanently off balance, unsure whether Laura is a mother rightly sensing danger or a snob poisoning her son's happiness, and whether Cherry is a victim or a predator.
Wright and Cooke are both excellent, circling each other with icy precision, and critics praised the series as a tense, morally ambiguous adult thriller elevated by its two committed leads. Stylish and coolly unnerving, The Girlfriend is streaming on Prime Video.
All Her Fault is a twisty, propulsive Peacock thriller adapted by creator Megan Gallagher from Andrea Mara's 2021 bestselling novel. It opens on a parent's worst nightmare: Marissa Irvine, played by Sarah Snook, arrives to pick up her young son Milo from his first playdate, only to knock on the door and discover that the woman who answers has no idea who she is, the address is wrong, and her little boy is simply gone. From that chilling premise the series spins outward into an eight-episode mystery about motherhood, class, and buried secrets.
As the frantic search consumes Marissa and her husband Peter, played by Jake Lacy, suspicion ripples through their affluent community and the seemingly perfect facades of everyone involved begin to crack. Dakota Fanning co-stars as Jenny, another mother pulled into the crisis, and the ensemble keeps the audience guessing as alliances shift and long-hidden truths surface. The show is structured to weaponize the assumptions viewers instinctively make, repeatedly upending expectations about who is a victim and who is culpable.
Snook, fresh off her Emmy-winning turn in Succession, headlines and executive produces, and critics praised the emotionally grounded performances at the center of the pulpy, page-turning plot. A slick domestic mystery built for bingeing, All Her Fault is streaming on Peacock.
The Beast in Me is a taut, character-driven Netflix psychological thriller created by veteran showrunner Howard Gordon, the writer-producer behind Homeland and 24. It pairs two of prestige television's most formidable performers: Claire Danes plays Aggie Wiggs, a Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist who has retreated from the world, paralyzed by grief and writer's block in the aftermath of her young son's death. Her fragile isolation is disrupted when a new neighbor moves in next door.
That neighbor is Nile Jarvis, a swaggering, larger-than-life real-estate developer played by Matthew Rhys, a man who years earlier was the prime suspect in the disappearance of his first wife, though he was never charged. Rather than fear him, Aggie finds herself magnetically drawn to him, and her dormant instincts as a writer reawaken as she begins to investigate whether the charming man next door is a killer. What follows is an intimate, unnerving cat-and-mouse game in which it is never clear who is studying whom, or who is truly the more dangerous of the two.
Anchored by the crackling, adversarial chemistry between its two Emmy-winning leads, the series drew strong reviews as a slow-burn adult thriller of a kind streaming rarely delivers. Brittany Snow co-stars as Nile's wife, and the show keeps its psychological screws turning to the final episode. All eight episodes of The Beast in Me are streaming on Netflix.
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.