Paste Power Rankings: The 5 Best TV Shows on Right Now (October 14, 2025)
From the biggest streaming services to the most reliable broadcast networks, there are so many shows vying for your time and attention every single week. Lucky for you, the Paste Editors and TV writers sort through the deluge of Peak TV “content” to make sure you’re watching the best TV shows the small screen has to offer. Between under-the-radar gems and the biggest, buzziest hits, we keep our finger on TV’s racing pulse so you don’t have to.
The rules for the Power Rankings are simple: any current series on TV qualifies, whether it’s a comedy, drama, news program, animated series, variety show, or sports event. It can be on a network, basic cable, premium channel, Netflix, Amazon, Hulu, YouTube, or whatever you can stream on your smart TV, as long as a new episode was made available within the past week (ending Sunday)—or, in the case of shows released all at once, it has to have been released within the previous four weeks.
Below is what we’re enjoying right now. Happy viewing!
Best TV Shows for the Week of October 7:
Honorable Mentions: The Great British Baking Show (Netflix), The Morning Show (Apple TV+), Boots (Netflix)
5. Chad Powers
Network: Hulu
Last Week: 4
This Week: Chad Powers asks us to believe in the objectively impossible (like the idea that a bad wig can make Glenn Powell not look like Glenn Powell), but at least it has a great time doing it.
It feels important to say that Chad Powers is not going to be a show for everyone. Its premise is functionally ludicrous. Its humor is epitomized by the sort of politically incorrect jock jokes that powered an endless array of mid-aughts college comedies. Its characters can sometimes feel cartoonish. And it is absolutely not what anyone might call prestige or high-brow entertainment. And yet, the show is somehow strangely charming, a largely unbelievable comedy about an obnoxious jackass who may or may not be fumbling his way towards becoming a decent person that’s seasoned with just enough edge to avoid becoming overly cloying or saccharine. Nothing about this show should work. And…yet. In all its dumb, ridiculous glory, it (mostly) does.
It helps that, as a unit, its cast is gamely committed to the bit. Powell’s abundant natural charm covers a multitude of sins and, as OG Scream Queens fans already know, his comedic timing is wonderfully on point. (I’m almost embarrassed to admit how many times I laughed myself silly over Chad regaling his coaches with some made-up story about his supposedly backwoods upbringing.) More importantly, he makes the sporadic flashes of warmth and humanity that flourish in Russ over the course of the season’s six episodes (all of which were available for review) feel believable. Can pretending to be a good person help make you a good person? Or, at least, a better one? That’s a key question at the heart of the show, and it may surprise many viewers to learn that Chad Powers isn’t afraid to make the answer to that question a morally thorny and emotionally complicated one. — Lacy Baugher Milas [Full Review]
4. Slow Horses
Network: Apple TV+
Last Week: 4
This Week: Sinister forces appear to be executing a “destabilization strategy,” and Slough House is on edge.
Everyone in Slough House is stuck. It’s professional purgatory for the service’s biggest screw-ups, all of whom are trapped in various messes of their own making. But even though their inability to move forward serves a purpose, stagnation also eventually leads to decay. Season 4 was a high point for Slow Horses. It was the show’s most emotionally affecting outing yet as River and his grandfather (Jonathan Pryce) found themselves in the crosshairs of an assassin-siring monster who turned out to be River’s long-lost father (Hugo Weaving). Not every season can (or should) be as personal, but it’s a major narrative development, and it didn’t just affect River and his grandfather; it also indirectly resulted in Marcus’ (Kadiff Kirwan) death. So it’s the type of season that demands action and movement in the aftermath, more so even than previous installments that saw Slough House agents die. And in that regard, it’s initially difficult to be dropped into a new story that mostly hinges on the question “No self-respecting woman would willingly date Roddy, right?” and not wonder if the show is as stuck as its titular slow horses.The good news is, the series doesn’t totally ignore the bomb dropped on River last season, nor does it gloss over the aftermath of Marcus’ murder. In fact, Slough House is under construction when the show returns, both a subtle reminder of what happened and an apt representation of the current states of those most affected by the prior season’s events. Understandably, Shirley (Aimee-Ffion Edwards) isn’t coping well with Marcus’ death, but she throws herself into protecting Roddy since she couldn’t do the same for her friend. Meanwhile, River has compartmentalized his trauma and chosen to prioritize work instead of processing that the health of his grandfather, the man who raised him, has declined significantly in recent months, or that his actual father just tried to kill him. All of this puts a strain on his already complicated relationship with Jackson Lamb (Gary Oldman), yet another father figure of sorts. It all makes sense in terms of the characters, and yet there are instances when one wishes they could spend just a little bit more time with them in the in-between moments. — Kaitlin Thomas [Full Review]
3. Only Murders In the Building
Network: Hulu
Last Week: 3
This Week: Is the real death of this season going to turn out to be the Arconia?
Only Murders in the Building is a show about tenets as much as it is about tenants. Yes, the Emmy-nominated Hulu comedy follows an eccentric group of characters who live in an apartment complex called the Arconia, a building that itself is a monument to old New York. But the show’s tenet is that it is about the importance of community and a chosen family. Premiering in summer 2021 when the divide between masks-on and masks-not was rapidly growing, it’s a story of three neighbors who unite to solve not just any murder, but the murder of someone with specific ties to their lives because they are people who died in their building.
In Murders’ fifth season, it’s pretty shocking that the Arconia has any tenants left, given its uptick in homicides in recent years. But it’s nice to know that the tenets of the series remain. One of the victims this season is Teddy Coluca’s Lester, the building’s doorman who—even if they didn’t always acknowledge him—was a constant presence in the lives of the show’s three leads: Selena Gomez’s suspicious Mabel, Steve Martin’s anxious Charles, and Martin Short’s exuberant Oliver.
Lester, in turn, is an embodiment of this season of Murders and maybe also for society. The season’s best episode of the nine released to the press is, by far, its second. Written by Ben Smith and Ella Robinson Brooks and directed by series showrunner John Hoffman, it’s mostly told in flashbacks and shares the life of the humble old doorman when he thought this gig was going to be a waylay before he made it big as an actor. Smash and The OA actor Emory Cohen gives us a Lester with his own career trajectory and love life outside of just opening doors for rich people and maybe the occasional pig. Everyone deserves a chance to tell their backstories, even if most people won’t notice them. — Whitney Friedlander [Full Review]
2. Outlander: Blood of My Blood
Network: Starz
Last Week: 2
This Week: Ellen and Brian finally make a break for it, as Henry and Julia plot to time travel home.
Prequels (and sequels, come to that) are tricky things. Stories rarely compare all that favorably to the original work, and there’s often a whiff of desperation to the whole thing, as we watch a previously beloved franchise try to find a reason to keep existing past the end of its flagship property. Every so often, though, one of these sorts of series manages to surprise you: Not only justifying its own existence, but reminding you of everything you loved about the original in the first place. And while Outlander: Blood of My Blood may technically be a prequel that explores the familial origins of several characters from the megapopular Starz historical romance, the series more than stands on its own tartan-clad feet, striking a near-perfect balance between the old and the new.
For Outlander fans, the star-crossed romance of Jamie Fraser’s (Sam Heughan) parents was already the stuff of legend, a story that Sassenach Claire Beauchamp (Caitriona Balfe) heard about ad nauseam when she first time-traveled to early 18th-century Scotland and found herself caught up in the interfamily drama of the MacKenzies of Castle Leoch. Viewers knew much less about Claire’s parents, save the fact that they died in a car crash when she was quite young. Blood of My Blood aims not only to tell the story of these two love affairs but also to tie them together in a thrilling new way, rewriting the fates of Claire’s parents to firmly intertwine their lives with the story of Jamie’s in a way no one likely expected.
To be fair, you don’t have to have seen a minute of Outlander to enjoy Blood of My Blood, which is a fully and compellingly immersive story in its own right.. Yes, the series is packed full of Easter eggs and narrative callbacks that will delight longtime fans of the long-running original. (Heck, the show’s entire premise is essentially that the romance between Outlander’s Claire Beauchamp and Jamie Fraser was so fated it impacted multiple generations.) And, those who are familiar with the original series will surely find themselves gasping at the skill of this franchise’s casting department, who have managed to find a quartet of leads who are startingly similar in both appearance and mannerisms to the actors who portrayed their onscreen relations. But if you have never heard of Craigh Na Dun, there’s still plenty to enjoy in this story of forbidden love, Scottish political intrigue, and women fighting for the chance to choose their own fates. —Lacy Baugher Milas [Full Review]
1. Peacemaker
Network: HBO Max
Last Week: 2
This Week: The Season 2 finale has a lot of musical montages, the truth about the party boat incident, and a Salvation that’s anything but.
It would have been easy for James Gunn to get caught up in the world-building of a new season of live-action storytelling in his fresh DC universe to start spinning more ideas out, but this is still the Peacemaker fans fell in love with back in 2022. It’s just as silly, dark, and bizarre as you remember. Even Peacemaker’s pet eagle, Eagley, gets his own story arc this year—with longtime Gunn collaborator Michael Rooker playing a renowned eagle hunter tasked with taking out Peacemaker’s feathered sidekick.
It’s fair to wonder if Gunn might eventually stretch himself too thin at some point, producing everything on DC’s slate while writing and directing plenty of his own projects (up next, he’s said to be working on a follow-up to Superman that he’s also lined up to direct). But that hasn’t happened yet. If anything, it’s only gotten the creative juices flowing more with the entire DC Comics canon at his disposal to use as he sees fit (as the early trailers for Season 2 revealed, Nathan Fillion’s Green Lantern and Isabela Merced’s Hawk Girl reprise their super-roles introduced in Superman, plopping Peacemaker right in the middle of this new DC order). Peacemaker Season 2 shows Gunn is more than capable of using all that power to still tell weird, wild stories far outside the pantheon of any potential blockbuster Justice League saga to come. —Trent Moore [Full Review]
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