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 Day of the Jackal reimagines Frederick Forsyth's classic 1971 thriller for the streaming era, transforming a novel about a single anonymous assassination attempt into a sprawling, psychologically complex cat-and-mouse series. Eddie Redmayne plays the Jackal — a sophisticated, emotionally unknowable assassin-for-hire operating at the highest levels of global contract killing — while Lashana Lynch plays MI5 intelligence officer Bianca, the one person who comes closest to understanding him. The series brings a commitment to unglamorous procedural realism alongside genuine thriller momentum.
Redmayne is a revelation in the role, using his natural quality of slight otherworldliness to make the Jackal genuinely disturbing rather than conventionally cool. He has a wife and family, a veneer of normalcy, and beneath it an absolute vacancy where conscience should be. Lynch matches him scene for scene as an investigator whose professional obsession with catching him begins to shade into something more complicated. The show's structure alternates between the Jackal's operations — each assignment elegant and methodical — and Bianca's increasingly desperate efforts to build a case from fragments of intelligence.
What the series does particularly well is update the story's geopolitical context for the 2020s. The targets and patrons of the Jackal's work reflect contemporary anxieties about oligarchs, populist politicians, corporate power, and the murky relationship between state intelligence and private actors. It is a thriller that takes its genre seriously while having things to say about the world in which we actually live. Available exclusively on Peacock, it arrived as one of the most talked-about new series of the 2024 season.
Slow Horses is one of television's most quietly devastating espionage dramas, adapted from Mick Herron's beloved Slough House novels. The series follows Jackson Lamb (Gary Oldman), a brilliantly slovenly and unexpectedly perceptive spymaster who shepherds a team of disgraced MI5 operatives through cases that the Service would rather forget exist. The show subverts every glamorous spy-thriller convention: there are no Aston Martins, no glamorous assignations, just the grinding tedium of surveillance work and the ever-present dread that past mistakes may never fully disappear.
Gary Oldman delivers a career-highlight performance as Lamb, a man whose physical slovenliness conceals an almost preternatural tactical intelligence. Kristin Scott Thomas is ice-cold perfection as Diana Taverner, the calculating First Desk of MI5 who views Slough House as a useful asset when politically convenient and an embarrassment otherwise. Each season takes on a new novel, escalating the stakes while keeping the character dynamics at the center.
What distinguishes Slow Horses from the crowded field of prestige espionage television is its refusal to make spying heroic. These are people who failed, who carry the weight of their failures, and who operate in moral gray zones where doing the right thing and doing the expedient thing rarely align. The show is genuinely funny in the way only deeply cynical things can be, and genuinely heartbreaking in the way only stories about human failure can be.
Ripley is a 2024 crime thriller limited series written and directed entirely by Steven Zaillian — the Oscar-winning screenwriter of Schindler's List and The Irishman — for Netflix. Adapted from Patricia Highsmith's 1955 novel The Talented Mr. Ripley, the series stars Andrew Scott as Tom Ripley, a small-time con artist scraping by in 1960s New York who is hired by a wealthy American businessman to travel to coastal Italy and convince his wayward son to return home. What he finds there changes the direction of his life entirely.
Scott plays Ripley as a man of almost no fixed identity — a hollow, supremely adaptable intelligence who can inhabit whatever social role a situation demands and whose moral blankness is the story's most disturbing and compelling quality. Johnny Flynn plays Dickie Greenleaf, the golden, careless heir living the Mediterranean dream that Ripley has always wanted, and Eleonoroe Signole plays Marge, Dickie's companion whose accumulating suspicion of Ripley drives an escalating dramatic tension. Zaillian directed all eight episodes himself — a rare achievement on a premium television production of this scale — and shot the entire series in a luminous, precisely framed black and white.
Ripley was one of the most purely cinematic television productions of 2024, winning four Emmy Awards including Outstanding Limited or Anthology Series, Outstanding Directing, and Outstanding Cinematography for cinematographer Robert Elswit. Zaillian's decision to shoot in black and white across real Italian locations — Atrani, Rome, and Venice — drew on the tradition of Italian neorealism and the noir visual language that Highsmith's novels inhabit, resulting in a series that critics described as unlike anything else on television in its year and an argument for the limited series as a genuinely cinematic art form.
The Penguin is a 2024 crime drama limited series created by Lauren LeFranc for Max, serving as a direct spin-off of Matt Reeves's 2022 film The Batman. Set in Gotham City just days after the catastrophic flood that ended that film, the series tracks the rise of Oswald Cobblepot — the cunning, physically disfigured street criminal played by Colin Farrell — from a mid-level operative in the Falcone crime family to the most formidable power broker in the Gotham underworld as he exploits the vacuum created by the family's sudden collapse.
The series stars Colin Farrell in a physically transformative lead performance requiring daily hours of prosthetic makeup application, reprising a role that had been widely celebrated as the standout element of The Batman. Cristin Milioti co-stars as Sofia Falcone, the brilliant, dangerous, and long-underestimated daughter of the deceased crime boss Carmine Falcone, who returns from years of institutionalization to press her own claim to the Gotham criminal empire. Their adversarial power struggle drives the series' central conflict, set against a Gotham rendered as a grimly gorgeous neo-noir environment of perpetual rain, waterlogged streets, and rotting Gilded Age grandeur.
The Penguin was one of the most acclaimed superhero television productions of 2024, winning the Golden Globe for Best Television Limited Series and earning multiple Emmy nominations. LeFranc's screenplay was praised for treating its crime genre material with the moral seriousness of The Wire rather than the bombast of conventional superhero properties, and Farrell's commitment to the physical and psychological demands of the role was cited as one of the year's most extraordinary sustained performances. The series demonstrated that superhero storytelling could sustain the tonal register and character depth of prestige crime drama.
Andor is a Star Wars television series created by Tony Gilroy for Disney+, serving as a prequel to the 2016 film Rogue One: A Star Wars Story. The show follows Cassian Andor (Diego Luna) during the years leading up to the formation of the Rebel Alliance. Unlike typical Star Wars fare, Andor takes a gritty, grounded approach to the galaxy far, far away, exploring the political, social, and moral dimensions of life under the tyranny of the Galactic Empire.
The first season received universal acclaim for its mature storytelling, complex characters, and cinematic production values. A multi-episode arc set in the Imperial prison colony of Narkina 5 became particularly celebrated as some of the finest television of 2022. The series introduced compelling new characters including the revolutionary Luthen Rael (Stellan Skarsgård) and the determined intelligence officer Dedra Meero (Denise Gough), painting a richly layered portrait of a galaxy on the brink of rebellion.
The second and final season arrived in April 2025, structured as three distinct four-episode arcs set a year apart, and carried Cassian's story right up to the opening moments of Rogue One. Critics called it the most sophisticated writing the franchise has ever produced, comparing it to prestige dramas like The Americans rather than to other Star Wars titles. Tony Gilroy wrote or co-wrote every episode of both seasons, and the result is a rare prequel that genuinely enhances everything that follows it.
Shōgun is a 2024 historical drama miniseries developed by Rachel Kondo and Caillin Puttlitz for FX, based on James Clavell's seminal 1975 novel of the same name. Set in feudal Japan in 1600, the series follows John Blackthorne (Cosmo Jarvis), an English navigator whose ship washes ashore in Japan, thrusting him into a world of warring warlords, samurai honor, and treacherous political intrigue.
At the heart of the story is Lord Yoshii Toranaga (Hiroyuki Sanada), a powerful daimyo fighting for political survival against a coalition of enemies. Through the skilled translation of Lady Toda Mariko (Anna Sawai), Blackthorne and Toranaga forge an unlikely alliance, and Blackthorne begins his transformation from shipwrecked navigator into a samurai warrior. The series is distinguished by its authentic use of Japanese language throughout, with more than half the dialogue performed in Japanese.
Shōgun became a landmark television event of 2024, sweeping the Emmy Awards with a record 18 wins including Outstanding Drama Series. The series was praised for Hiroyuki Sanada's powerful performance, its meticulous production design, and its commitment to honoring Japanese culture and history. It stands as one of the most celebrated and important prestige dramas of the decade.
Severance is a psychological thriller series created by Dan Erickson and directed primarily by Ben Stiller, streaming exclusively on Apple TV+. The series is set at Lumon Industries, a mysterious corporation where employees have undergone a surgical procedure called severance — a process that creates a complete separation between their work memories and their outside lives, producing two distinct versions of each person who share a body but experience entirely separate existences.
The series stars Adam Scott as Mark Scout, a severed Lumon employee whose work self begins to question the reality of his world when a new colleague named Helly (Britt Lower) arrives and refuses to accept her situation. The ensemble includes Zach Cherry, Tramell Tillman, Jen Tullock, Dichen Lachman, and John Turturro, with Patricia Arquette and Christopher Walken in pivotal supporting roles. Ben Stiller’s direction transforms Lumon’s brutalist, fluorescent-lit office into one of television’s most unsettling environments — a place that is mundane and horrifying in equal measure.
Severance premiered on Apple TV+ in February 2022 and returned for a long-anticipated second season in January 2025, both of which were met with widespread critical acclaim and a devoted audience. The show has been celebrated as one of the defining works of prestige television in the 2020s — a slow-burn corporate horror story with profound things to say about identity, autonomy, and the fracture between who we are at work and who we are when we go home.
The Mandalorian is a Star Wars series created by Jon Favreau for Disney+, set five years after the events of Return of the Jedi. It follows Din Djarin (Pedro Pascal), a solitary bounty hunter of the Mandalorian creed, and Grogu, the Force-sensitive foundling in his care.
Season 3 premiered on March 1, 2023. Having been declared apostate for removing his helmet, Din sets out for the ruined surface of Mandalore seeking redemption in the Living Waters of the Great Forge. His journey draws in Bo-Katan Kryze (Katee Sackhoff) and turns toward the larger project of reuniting the scattered Mandalorian clans and reclaiming their homeworld from Imperial remnant forces under Moff Gideon.
The season expanded the show's scope considerably, weaving in threads from The Book of Boba Fett and setting up the broader Mando-verse. Reception was more mixed than for the first two seasons, with praise for its production design, Pascal and Sackhoff's performances, and Ludwig Göransson's score, alongside criticism of its more diffuse structure.
Ted Lasso is an Apple TV+ comedy created by Jason Sudeikis, Bill Lawrence, Brendan Hunt, and Joe Kelly, based on a character Sudeikis originally developed for NBC Sports promos. It follows an American college football coach hired to manage AFC Richmond, an English Premier League club, despite knowing almost nothing about the sport — a premise that quickly gives way to a show about decency, mental health, and the slow work of repair.
Season 3 premiered on March 15, 2023, with Richmond returning to the Premier League as the bookmakers' favourite for relegation. The season follows Ted's deepening struggles with anxiety and fatherhood at a distance, Nate's tenure at rival West Ham under Rupert Mannion, and Roy Kent's reluctant move into coaching, while Keeley builds her own PR firm.
Widely understood at the time as the show's conclusion, the season drew a more divided critical response than its predecessors — some praised its ambition and emotional payoffs, others found it overstuffed — though its central performances and the show's core warmth remained broadly celebrated.
