Paste Power Rankings: The 5 Best TV Shows on Right Now (November 11, 2025)

5. Down Cemetery Road

Network: Apple TV
Last Week: 4
This Week: Sarah finds herself with an unexpected partner as Zoë begins to realize there’s more to this case than she thought.

Apple TV has found considerable success with Slow Horses, its Emmy-winning espionage drama that wrestles with poignant questions of morality and purpose alongside its scenes of witty banter, black humor, and offbeat camaraderie. But it’s also a largely male-oriented show, and the bulk of its characters and stories (and most especially its humor) tend to reflect that fact. Although the streamer likely doesn’t intend for us to view its new series Down Cemetery Road as an attempt to provide some gender balance in this particular genre space, thanks to its overt focus on female characters and experiences, the comparisons sort of write themselves. Down Cemetery Road is also based on a series of books by Mick Herron. The show takes its name from his debut novel, which went on to spawn several sequels, and while the vibes aren’t entirely the same, the general feel is similar enough that it’s obvious why Apple leaped at the chance to adapt it for TV. Featuring familiar acerbic dialogue, dark laughs, and another memorable lead character in the vein of Slough House wrangler Jackson Lamb (Gary Oldman) but with much less flatulence involved, the Oxford Investigations series doesn’t quite rise to the heights of his Slough House books. Still, it has all the elements to make some seriously quality TV.

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4. Robin Hood 

Network: MGM+
Last Week: 5
This Week: An unintended death increases tensions between the Normans and Saxons as Rob makes a few key new friends.

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3. The Witcher

Network: Netflix
Last Week: N/A
This Week:  Liam Hemsworth is….mostly fine as the show’s new Geralt of Rivia, but it’s The Witcher’s women that make Season 4 worth watching.

Netflix’s fantasy drama The Witcher is clearly building up to an ending. In its fourth (and penultimate) season, the stakes are higher, the losses more devastating, the political wrangling somehow even more needlessly convoluted. There are difficult choices, genuine surprises, a handful of excellent action set pieces, and an ending that leaves several of the show’s most beloved characters in dark and dire straits. And almost none of that matters. Because the only thing that pretty much anybody’s going to want to talk about when it comes to Season 4 is the fact that it swapped out its lead actor in between seasons. On some level, that’s fair—it’s a fairly unprecedented sort of move, and former star Henry Cavill was essentially created in a lab to play the show’s titular monster hunter Geralt of Rivia. But while Liam Hemsworth may gamely up Cavill’s witcher mantle for the show’s penultimate season, viewers will likely be surprised to discover that he—and, subsequently, Geralt—are actually the least interesting part of the story this run of episodes is telling. That honor, once again, belongs to the series’ women. The female characters of The Witcher have always been this show’s secret weapon, but in this penultimate outing, they’re its beating heart. From the new sisterhood that sorceress Yennefer of Vengerberg (Anya Chalotra) begins to build out of the ruins of Aretuza, to Princess Cirilla of Cintra’s (Freya Allan) furious attempts to run away from both her past and the future she doesn’t want to face, the emotional center of this season runs through the show’s women who fight—in very different ways—to shape their own fates.. —Lacy Baugher Milas   [Full Review]

2. Talamasca: The Secret Order

Network: AMC
Last Week: Honorable mention
This Week:  The best episode of the season sees Guy and Jasper forge an uneasy alliance, and features a surprisingly entertaining guest spot from Interview with the Vampire’s Raglan James.

A whole cloth creation of executive producer Mark Johnson and co-showrunner John Lee Hancock, Talamasca: The Secret Order sets the franchise on an expansive and necessary new path by putting the group that haunts the fringes of Rice’s novels center stage. And while the show never comes close to the heights of Interview—which is genuinely one of the best genre shows of (at least) the past decade—its absence of a direct source material means that it has a freedom and flexibility that Mayfair Witches often sorely lacks. And Talamasca makes the most of it, crafting a first season that feels as much like a spy thriller as it does a supernatural drama. And while the series’ back-half occasionally can find itself bogged down under the weight of several secondary storylines that it doesn’t really have the space to properly flesh out in the course of its limited run time, its story still delights in the specifics of Rice’s larger world in a way that makes the whole franchise feel richer.

But let’s be clear: The real reason to watch this show isn’t its connection to AMC’s larger Anne Rice universe — though both Eric Bogosian’s Daniel Molloy and Justin Kirk’s Raglan James appear — or the twisty premise that constantly asks us to question who we trust. It’s William Fichtner, who turns in a thoroughly magnetic performance as the show’s quasi-antagonist Jasper, the vampire who has taken over the Talamasca’s London Motherhouse in service of his own ends. Jasper is….genuinely unlike any other immortal in this franchise, a truly unique creation who feels angrier, grittier, and strangely almost more human than anyone else on the canvas — on this show or anywhere else. —Lacy Baugher Milas   [Full Review]

1. Pluribus

Network: Apple TV
Last Week: N/A
This Week: The weirdest (and possibly best) show of the year is nothing like what you expect. Go in knowing as little as possible.

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Pluribus hails from Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul creator Vince Gilligan, and though at first glance it couldn’t seem more different than those series, it ultimately contains similar complex depths. A show that wrestles with big philosophical questions of morality, contentment, purpose, and meaning through the lens of a character who is repeatedly described in the show’s marketing materials as the most miserable person in the world, it’s genuinely one of the weirdest and most strangely satisfying things on television at the moment, simultaneously heartbreaking, hopeful, and disturbing by turns. It couldn’t have possibly arrived at a better moment.

In its most basic sense, the show is the story of the apocalypse, but it won’t look like any you’ve seen before. There’s no Sudden Departure or other rapture-like event here and no kaiju rising from the sea, Godzilla-style. Instead, the bulk of the series takes place in the wake of a world-changing event that spreads happiness and peace throughout all humanity. Well, almost all of humanity. Everyone is suddenly and miraculously content, except Carol Sturka (Rhea Seehorn), a bestselling romantasy writer who recently finished a book tour that forced her to mix and mingle with the fans she secretly hates. She’s distinctly unhappy with the new status quo and immediately sets out to find a way to reverse it. What follows is an odyssey through multiple countries and her own psyche, as Carol sets out in search of answers, some of which involve questioning whether she is indeed somehow the architect of her own misery and isolation.

The show deftly balances heavy dramatic arcs and bizarre sci-fi themes with surprisingly light-hearted humor, resulting in a show that’s often as full of unexpected laughter as it is creeping dread.  Refusing to restrict itself to any particular genre, Pluribus is science fiction at its most strange and expansive, a fully ambitious swing that offers no easy answers or explanations and simply trusts its viewers enough to allow them to come along for the ride. — Lacy Baugher Milas [Full Review]