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.
Wayward is a Netflix limited thriller series created by and starring comedian Mae Martin, released in September 2025. A sharp departure from Martin's stand-up and their comedy series Feel Good, it trades laughs for dread, building a slow-burn mystery around a seemingly idyllic small town and the secretive institution at its heart.
Martin plays a police officer who becomes entangled with Tall Pines, an academy for troubled teenagers run by the charismatic and unnerving Evelyn Wade, played by Toni Collette. As two students try to escape the program, the show peels back the community's wholesome facade to expose the coercive machinery of the so-called troubled-teen industry, drawing on real-world reporting about such facilities.
The series debuted at number one on Netflix and amassed well over a billion streaming minutes within weeks, even as critics were sharply divided over its tone and ambitions. Collette's performance drew particular attention and helped make the show one of the most-discussed Netflix titles of the fall. Wayward streams on Netflix.
Gen V is a Prime Video superhero series set in the universe of the hit show The Boys, trading that show's jaded adults for the ambitious, unstable young supes of Godolkin University, a Vought-funded college where students compete for ranking and fame. After debuting in 2023, the series returned for a darker, eventful second season in September 2025.
The ensemble is led by Jaz Sinclair as Marie Moreau, alongside Lizze Broadway, Maddie Phillips, London Thor, Derek Luh, and Asa Germann, as the students uncover sinister secrets beneath their school's glossy surface. Season 2 raises the stakes with a new threat at Godolkin and storylines that feed directly into the events of The Boys' fifth and final season, making it essential viewing for fans of the wider franchise.
Season 2 also carried real-world weight: it paid tribute to cast member Chance Perdomo, who died in 2024, honoring him rather than recasting his role. The season drew strong reviews and reinforced Gen V's place as a vital corner of The Boys universe. Gen V streams on Prime Video.
IT: Welcome to Derry is an HBO Max horror series that serves as a prequel to Andy and Barbara Muschietti's blockbuster IT films, expanding Stephen King's nightmarish vision of the cursed town of Derry, Maine. Developed by Andy Muschietti, Barbara Muschietti, and Jason Fuchs, it premiered in October 2025 and brings the franchise's shape-shifting evil back to the small screen.
Set in 1962, roughly 27 years before the events of the first film, the series follows the residents of Derry as a wave of disappearances and terror signals the return of Pennywise the Dancing Clown, with Bill Skarsgård reprising the role that made him a horror icon. The story weaves together a group of children and townspeople confronting an ancient malevolence that feeds on the town's buried history.
The premiere became one of the most-watched series debuts in HBO Max's history, and the Muschiettis have said Stephen King granted them broad creative freedom to deepen Derry's mythology. Its success also sent the earlier IT films surging back up the streaming charts. IT: Welcome to Derry streams on HBO Max.
Pluribus is a science-fiction drama on Apple TV+ created by Vince Gilligan, the mind behind Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul. Premiering in November 2025, it reunites Gilligan with his Better Call Saul star Rhea Seehorn in a lead role he wrote specifically for her, and it arrived wrapped in unusual secrecy about its actual premise.
Seehorn plays Carol Sturka, introduced as possibly the most miserable person on Earth, who finds herself at the center of an extraordinary global event. A mysterious contagion begins sweeping through humanity, and Carol must reckon with being one of the few people left untouched by it. Gilligan builds the show around his gift for character study and slow-burn tension, filtering a high-concept science-fiction idea through one deeply unhappy, resistant individual.
The series set a record as the biggest drama launch in Apple TV's history and drew strong reviews, with particular praise for Seehorn's performance, which earned her a Golden Globe nomination soon after the premiere. Apple renewed the show and it quickly became one of the platform's signature titles. Pluribus streams on Apple TV+.
The Institute is MGM+'s adaptation of Stephen King's 2019 best-selling novel, a chilling science-fiction thriller about children whose extraordinary minds make them targets. Developed by showrunner Benjamin Cavell and executive producer Jack Bender — the team behind MGM+'s earlier King adaptation Mr. Mercedes — the series brings one of the author's most propulsive recent books to the screen with a strong pedigree in King's particular brand of small-town dread and institutional menace.
The story follows Luke Ellis (Joe Freeman), a teenage prodigy who is abducted from his home and wakes up in the Institute, a secretive facility where children with telekinetic and telepathic abilities are held and their powers systematically exploited. Mary-Louise Parker plays Ms. Sigsby, the coldly efficient administrator who runs the operation, while Ben Barnes plays Tim Jamieson, a drifting ex-cop who takes a job as a night watchman in the nearby town and becomes an unexpected thread in Luke's fight to escape. The two storylines circle each other toward a collision.
The series became a strong performer for MGM+, holding the top spot on the platform and earning a quick renewal for a second season, extending a run of successful King adaptations. Reviews praised its faithful, unsettling atmosphere and its young cast, singling out the eerie premise as a natural fit for prestige-horror television. It streams on MGM+.
Dexter: Resurrection revives television's most famous fictional serial killer, bringing Michael C. Hall back as Dexter Morgan nearly two decades after he first picked up the role. Continuing from the events of Dexter: New Blood, the series keeps Dexter alive and relocates him to New York City, where he sets out to reconnect with his estranged son Harrison (Jack Alcott). It is a full-blooded return for a character whose original run ended on a famously divisive note, and it treats that history as fuel rather than baggage.
In New York, Dexter is drawn into a shadowy underworld that gives the show its most audacious hook: an exclusive gathering of fellow serial killers, populated by a murderer's row of guest stars. Peter Dinklage plays a powerful billionaire at the center of the intrigue, Uma Thurman co-stars, and the ensemble of killers features Neil Patrick Harris, Krysten Ritter, and David Dastmalchian, while David Zayas returns as Dexter's old friend Angel Batista. The premise lets the series interrogate Dexter's "code" against a whole spectrum of predators.
Critics greeted the revival as a genuine return to form, with several noting that Hall had never been sharper in the role and that the New York reinvention gave the franchise new energy. The strong reception helped wash away the mixed feelings left by earlier finales, and the series was renewed for another season. It streams on Paramount+ with Showtime.
The Summer I Turned Pretty is Prime Video's swooning coming-of-age romance based on Jenny Han's best-selling young-adult trilogy, and its third and final season turned the show into a full-blown cultural event. Lola Tung stars as Isabel "Belly" Conklin, whose summers at the idyllic beach town of Cousins have always revolved around two brothers — the brooding Conrad (Christopher Briney) and the sunny Jeremiah (Gavin Casalegno) — and the love triangle that has defined her adolescence. Han herself serves as showrunner and co-writer, guarding the adaptation's tone and emotional beats.
The final season leaps forward from the beach house into Belly's college years, raising the stakes from teenage summer flings to adult decisions about love, ambition, and who she wants to become. Adapting the trilogy's concluding book, the season pushes its central romance toward resolution while giving the wider ensemble of families and old wounds room to breathe. The result is a bittersweet farewell that trades some of the earlier seasons' sun-soaked innocence for genuine consequence.
Season 3 became one of the biggest streaming stories of the year, drawing tens of millions of viewers and racking up billions of minutes watched as its weekly episodes dominated social media. The passionate "Team Conrad" versus "Team Jeremiah" debate spilled far beyond the fandom, and the frenzy around the finale confirmed the show as a summer phenomenon. It streams 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+.
Ironheart is a Marvel Studios series that gives Riri Williams, the genius young inventor introduced in Black Panther: Wakanda Forever, her own headlining story. Dominique Thorne returns as Riri, an MIT prodigy whose gift for engineering rivals Tony Stark's, and the show was developed by Chinaka Hodge with Ryan Coogler among its executive producers. Trading Wakanda for her hometown of Chicago, the series roots its superheroics in a specific, textured world rather than a generic comic-book metropolis.
Back home and short on money, Riri builds a new suit of armor and is soon pulled into the orbit of Parker Robbins, better known as The Hood (Anthony Ramos), a charismatic criminal whose powers come from a sinister, magical source. The clash sets the series' central engine in motion: Riri's hard science against forces she cannot explain or engineer her way around, a collision of technology and the supernatural that pushes the young hero toward morally murky choices. The ensemble includes Alden Ehrenreich and a memorable AI companion drawn from Riri's own past.
The show generated its biggest conversation with a finale that formally introduced Mephisto, a demonic Marvel villain fans had theorized about for years, into the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Reception was mixed-to-positive, but the series was widely noted as a meaningful expansion of the MCU's roster and a showcase for Thorne's charismatic lead. It streams on Disney+.
Dept. Q is a Netflix crime drama created by Scott Frank, the writer-director behind The Queen's Gambit and Godless, adapting the best-selling Department Q novels by Danish author Jussi Adler-Olsen. In a canny twist on the Nordic-noir source material, Frank relocates the action from Copenhagen to a wintry, gothic Edinburgh, using the Scottish city's shadowed closes and grey stone as an atmospheric backdrop for a story about buried guilt and colder cases. The result is a prestige procedural with literary polish and a distinctly bleak sense of humor.
Matthew Goode stars as DCI Carl Morck, a brilliant but abrasive detective whose arrogance has alienated nearly everyone around him. After a shooting leaves one colleague dead and another paralyzed, a guilt-ridden and unwanted Morck is exiled to the basement to run Department Q, a newly created cold-case unit that is really a public-relations gesture. There, with an unlikely team including the enigmatic Akram (Alexej Manvelov), he reopens the disappearance of prosecutor Merritt Lingard (Chloe Pirrie), a case everyone else has given up on. Kelly Macdonald, Kate Dickie, and Leah Byrne round out the ensemble.
Critics embraced the series as one of the year's most satisfying crime dramas, praising Goode's prickly, against-type lead performance and Frank's patient, character-first storytelling. It became a hit for Netflix and was renewed for a second season within months of its debut, confirming appetite for more of Morck's gloomy, meticulous detective work. It streams on Netflix.
