While 2026 has brought breakout hits like “Love Story” and “Summer House,” there has not yet been a seismic, discourse-dominating show along the lines of “Adolescence” (2025), “Baby Reindeer” (2024), “Succession” (2023) or “Severance” (2022). But there have been some pleasant surprises along with solid seasons from returning series.
These were the best of the bunch, arranged alphabetically.
‘The Comeback’
This showbiz satire, starring Lisa Kudrow as the flighty but determined actress Valerie Cherish, put out three seasons over 21 years, allowing it to parody three distinct eras of Hollywood.
“Kudrow, who created the series with Michael Patrick King, made Valerie a character for the ages, simultaneously broad and complex, delusional but deceptively savvy,” James Poniewozik writes. “Now she’s back, summoned by the bat signal of Hollywood’s latest epochal threat, artificial intelligence.
“The bleakly funny result is the series’s most pointed yet, as it shifts focus from Valerie’s insecurities to the insecurity of the entire creative class. The first two seasons established that Valerie is a survivor. The third (and purportedly last) wonders if the rest of her business will be so lucky.”
Read the review and more coverage of the series. Stream it on HBO Max.
In the fourth season of this crime drama set in Navajo Nation, Zahn McClarnon’s Lt. Joe Leaphorn chases an assassin who is obsessed with him and his culture.
“McClarnon has a full résumé when it comes to TV tribal cops, and each one he’s played has been entirely distinct,” Mike Hale writes. “He was mocking and unamused as Chief Mathias in ‘Longmire,’ mystical and blissed out as Officer Big in ‘Reservation Dogs.’ As Lt. Joe Leaphorn in ‘Dark Winds,’ he’s tough, troubled, stoical, obsessed with justice. It’s the most conventional characterization of the three, but across four seasons (the fourth ended in April), he has built Leaphorn into a figure of nearly tragic dimension; at moments he feels frighteningly alive.
“The season-long story lines, based loosely on novels by Tony Hillerman, can get a little baroque. Season 4 stretched to incorporate a plot involving the German romanticization and fetishization of Native American culture, with Franka Potente playing a grim assassin raised on the novels of Karl May. But where else are you going to get that? Add it to Leaphorn’s dogged, heartbreaking effort to patch things up with his wife, Emma (Deanna Allison), and his tough love for his officers Chee (Kiowa Gordon) and Manuelito (Jessica Matten), and there was ample canvas for McClarnon’s understated artistry.”
This darkly comic series by Steven Conrad (“Patriot”) presents as a domestic murder mystery but morphs into something quirkier, deeper and more melancholy.
The acclaimed and prolific screenwriter Jack Thorne created this new adaptation of the disquieting syllabus staple.
“Thorne co-wrote last year’s Netflix limited series ‘Adolescence,’ a kind of surgeon general’s warning on the dangers of social media for unformed minds,” Poniewozik writes. “So his follow-up might seem like a lovely corrective — no phones, no Wi-Fi, just a group of boys touching grass and having hands-on experiences! — until you see that it is an adaptation of William Golding’s classic novel of desert-island barbarism.
“Thorne’s rendering is broadly faithful, but it resonates chillingly with today’s crises of masculine aggression and might-makes-rightism. The four episodes capture the descent into atavism with haunting imagery and heartbreaking attention to the children’s brutality and futile decency. It’s stunning and horrific and — sadly — not a touch dated.”
‘Margo’s Got Money Troubles’
In this warm dramedy by David E. Kelley (“Big Little Lies” and many, many others), adapted from the Rufi Thorpe novel, a young mother (Elle Fanning) performs on OnlyFans to make ends meet.
“Judging by TV’s past explorations of sex work — ‘The Deuce,’ ‘P-Valley,’ ‘The Girlfriend Experience’ — you might expect a series about a protagonist’s online-exhibitionism career to be provocative, dark, maybe spicy,” Poniewozik writes. “But would you believe … sweet?
This Apple TV special is a return to chaotic form for the beloved troupe, channeling the backstage energy of the original (and best) “Muppet Show,” from the 1970s.
“There’s no newfangled hook, no contrived rationalization to bring the characters up to date, no pretensions toward heft or hipness,” Poniewozik writes. “There are songs and slapstick and jokes, and nobody, blessedly, stayed up too late thinking about the reasons why. (Because Muppets, that’s why.)”
This mini-series recounts the story of Enzo Tortora, an enormously popular TV host in Italy whose career was ruined in the 1980s when he was falsely accused of being a member of the Camorra, an Italian crime syndicate.
“Today, assaulting a reputation with lies and innuendo is easily accomplished,” Hale writes. “It was not such a simple matter four decades ago, and the Italian filmmaker Marco Bellocchio has devoted six episodes and more than six hours to dramatizing all the confounding, astounding, heartbreaking details of Tortora’s story.”
This new show by Katie Dippold (“Parks and Recreation”) follows the besieged mayor of a small island hamlet (Matthew Rhys) as he contends with local ghouls, ghoulish locals and the community’s cursed history.
“The series is that tricky chimera, a horror-comedy, and it is equally — and more impressive, simultaneously — effective at both,” Poniewozik writes. “A laugh and a scare are different outcomes of the same achievement, a good surprise, and ‘Widow’s Bay’ has more of those than there are fish in the sea.
”Give me all that, and I’m ready to call this the most fun new show of the year to date. What elevates it to the best new show is how it reinvents a well-worn TV trope — the cozy backwater full of adorable kooks — and how it turns the town’s history into its biggest monster.”
‘Your Friends & Neighbors’
Jon Hamm stars as a financier turned burglar in this satirical series about the idle rich in New York’s Westchester County.
“This haute-suburban twist on ‘Breaking Bad’ is a ripe fantasy for both the 1 percent and for those who despise them; it has love and hate tattooed on its interlaced knuckles.” Hale writes. “In its simultaneous satirization and celebration — backhanded, perhaps, but potent — of traditional American greed, it captures our particular moment in a way few shows do.
“It’s hard to imagine the series, whose second season ended this month, working as well as it does with anyone besides Jon Hamm at its center. His combination of frazzled charm, unforced virility and bemused vulnerability keeps our sympathies aligned with Andy, the former hedge-fund bro whose theater of larceny moves from the money markets to his friends’ Westchester homes (and, in Season 2, encompassed both). As Andy’s emotionally unmoored ex-wife, Mel, Amanda Peet is the combative Rosalind Russell to Hamm’s harried Cary Grant.”
