Best of the best so far (2025 edition)

The top shows at mid-year, plus a 'Poker Face' con job, 'FUBAR' is back, and more

This week’s What’s Alan Watching? newsletter coming up just as soon as I get a job as an NBC page…

So what’s good?

As I said last week, we’re in a slow period at the moment. I’m trying to use the time to catch up on things including some of your suggestions. (First up: Common Side Effects, which I’ll hopefully write about soon.) But that means there’s only one column to link to this week, and it’s not even a review of new material, but rather a semi-perennial: my picks for the 10 best shows of 2025 so far.

If you’ve been reading What’s Alan Watching?, and/or my Rolling Stone columns, and/or if you can see the photo at the top of this week’s newsletter, you will not be surprised by some or all of the shows I picked for the list. Some years at this time, I do a top 15. But while there were a few veteran shows like Poker Face and Abbott Elementary that just missed my top 10, I felt like doing a rounder number this year for whatever reason.

As always, keep in mind that I don’t get to see everything, and also that I stick almost entirely to watching scripted TV these days. But this is your opportunity to ask why I hate your favorite show enough to leave it off the list.

Odds and/or ends

• I gave this week’s most notable premiere, Season Two of Netflix’s FUBAR, a shot, because I found the first kind of endearing, despite its creakiness. I usually enjoy Arnold Schwarzenegger in light comedy action mode, and I’ve liked Monica Barbaro’s work going back nearly a decade, since she was one of the most effective parts of UnREAL Season Two. But woof. I struggled just to finish the first episode, which is somehow much cornier, drowning in way more exposition, and cheap than before. Maybe the season gets better later, but this case, one was more than enough for me.

• I was startled and very sad to see news on Thursday that Star Trek: Strange New Worlds would be ending after an abbreviated fifth and final season. Then I remembered that the one debuting about a month from now is only the third season, because the series is produced so slowly. (Season Two finished nearly two years ago!) So we’ll still have 26 episodes to go, spread out over what I expect to be a very long period of time. It’s frustrating that Paramount can’t or won’t try to make seasons at least a bit closer in length to classic Trek, and the episodic Strange New Worlds seems particularly well-equipped for that. (Say it with me, kids: Make TV seasons longer. I am not a crackpot!) But whether it’s the choice of the studio, the streamer, the producers, or Anson Mount and his beautiful head of hair, this is what we’ve got. I’ll just have to enjoy it while I can.

• File this one under What’s Alan Reading: the great Mo Ryan, who shares both my love of For All Mankind and my frustration with its recent seasons, suggested I try The Calculating Stars by Mary Robinette Kowal, the first in what to this point is four novels of The Lady Astronaut series, saying it would scratch a FAM itch. Boy, did it. The series is set in an alternate timeline where a meteorite strike on America’s eastern seaboard in the Fifties kicks the space race off about a decade early, and makes colonizing the moon, Mars, and beyond a necessity. Most of the books are narrated by a brilliant mathematician and pilot who has to battle the institutional sexism of the era to even be considered to fly in space. I wolfed down all four in about a month. If you like this sort of thing, you’ll like this sort of thing.

• The character actor Harris Yulin passed away earlier this week. Like most character actors who can best be described as (to borrow the old Fametracker phrase) “Hey, it’s that guy,” there are probably one or two roles that would stand out to anyone skimming his filmography, even if they never knew his name. He was among the most reliably untrustworthy actors in the game; if you wanted a main character’s chief of staff (whether in A Clear and Present Danger or on 24) to be instantly suspect, you called Yulin. I’m particularly fond of his turn in a first season episode of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine called “Duet,” where he plays a Cardassian who may or may not have been a war criminal. That episode was the first to hint at how dark and deep that series was willing to go. But he was always a pleasure to watch. Somehow, despite a long career, I believe there’s only one series where he was a regular lead castmember: WIOU, a short-lived CBS drama set behind the scenes at a local TV news show in Chicago, where he played the pompous veteran anchorman.

• A bit of inside baseball that nonetheless seems worth a brief mention: longtime FX PR chief John Solberg announced that he’s stepping down from his post after 28 years. John was at FX long before The Bear, before Justified, before The Shield, even before Son of the Beach. He arrived back when, if anyone knew FX at all, it was either as the home of repeats of 20th Century Fox studio shows like M*A*S*H, or for live programming like Breakfast Time, with a young Tom Bergeron. John was there to help promote the transformation from basic cable obscurity to one of the most acclaimed, reliable brands in the TV business. He’s also one of the nicest, most genuine people I’ve had the good fortune to encounter in what can be a deeply impersonal, often cutthroat business. An incredible run.

• Tuesday night marked the 18th anniversary of The Sopranos series finale, “Made in America.” You might know that Matt Zoller Seitz and I wrote a whole lot about that finale, and The Sopranos in general, in The Sopranos Sessions. (If not, cue the Jay Sherman clip.) Coincidentally, for much of the past year I’ve had a weekly errand that takes me right past Holsten’s ice cream parlor in Bloomfield, though unfortunately after hours, so I haven’t yet seen what it looks like since they got rid of the furniture made famous by the final Sopranos scene. Obviously, I have Sopranos on the brain more than your average TV viewer, or even critic, but it’s still chill-inducing to roll past the site of that iconic moment in pop culture history. Ordinarily, this would be the point where I did my usual gag of stopping in mid-sentence, but we’ve still got Poker Face discussion to come, so I think this time I

Poker Face recaplet: “The Sleazy Georgian”

Last week, Poker Face riffed on heist movies. This week, it’s the heist film’s sibling genre, the con artist tale.

The opening sequence of “The Sleazy Georgian” is interesting in a number of ways. First, we never actually see the death of this week’s victim, Melanie Lynskey’s Reggie, and the two deaths we think we see are actually fakeouts by a couple of guys scamming Reggie. Second, while Reggie is a victim of John Cho’s Guy, all he takes is her money; she dies of suicide from the guilt of giving away $20,000 meant for orphans. And third, the first time I watched it, I wasn’t 100% sure whether Guy was playing Reggie, or vice versa. Guy seemed the more obvious con man, but Cho and Lynskey play their dialogue with each other in such a heightened manner that it felt at least possible that Reggie was, as the show put it later, the Dexter of con artists.

Once Charlie comes into the picture, it feels like this is the earliest in quite some time where the bad guy finds out about her superpower. He’s just so amoral that it doesn’t even occur to him that she might be upset about what happened to Reggie. While you can argue that he should have washed his hands of Charlie the second she started raising a fuss, he’s also convincingly portrayed as so arrogant that he doesn’t believe he can get one over on her, and also thinks that giving her a small cut of the latest job will neutralize her so his team doesn’t have to leave Philly and start over.

As with heists, con jobs are a type of story I’m usually a sucker for, and this was a well-told one. Even though I knew in the back of my mind that Charlie was going to eventually find a way to scam the scammer, I still fell for the moment when the new mark had a gun and appeared to shoot the muscle, and was pleased when he turned out to be the muscle’s spouse, who hadn’t been referred to with pronouns in earlier scenes.

Bonus points for hiring GaTa from Dave as a member of Guy’s crew. Go watch Dave on Hulu if you haven’t already. (Though keep in mind that it takes a few episodes to find itself, and that you might find the premiere very off-putting. Which I suppose means I should go watch more of FUBAR Season Two? Congratulations; I played myself.)

That’s it for this week! What did everybody else think?