Paste Power Rankings: The 5 Best TV Shows on Right Now (October 7, 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: Saturday Night Live (NBC), House of Guinness (Netflix), The Morning Show (Apple TV+)
5. Wayward
Network: Netflix
Last Week: N/A
This Week: Let’s be real, we’d all join Toni Collette’s cult.
If asked, almost everyone would likely insist there’s no way they could ever be convinced to join a cult. But, consider this—what if that cult is run by Toni Collette? That’s one of the key questions at the heart of Netflix’s twisty thriller Wayward, a show that deploys the actress’s most maternal and menacing qualities to devastating (and often frightening) effect.
Collette plays Evelyn Ward, the director of a boarding school for troubled teens who allegedly uses “groundbreaking therapeutic techniques” to “solve the problem of adolescence”. One part authoritarian leader and one part empathetic therapist, her particular brand of healing tends to skew more malevolent than maternal. You likely won’t be surprised to learn that it’s a role that seems tailor-made for Collette’s immense talents, nor that the character she’s playing is something more than she initially seems. Yet, much like the show itself, the seemingly villainous Evelyn is strangely fascinating, compelling in a way that’s difficult to look away from and hard to pin down.
It’s true, Collette’s role in the world of the show is not subtle. In fact, not much about Wayward is. It’s clear from the jump that almost nothing about the picturesque town at the series’ center is what it appears to be, that something genuinely disturbing is happening on the grounds of the local school, and that the therapy that Tall Pines Academy preaches looks an awful lot like abuse. But while many of the show’s choices are obvious, even predictable ones, it—like many of the popular cult documentaries Netflix already knows we are all obsessed with—is full of the sort of creepy atmosphere, relentless pacing, and weird quirks that make for extremely addictive viewing even when it doesn’t provide as many answers as some of us might like.— Lacy Baugher Milas [Full Review]
4. Chad Powers
Network: Hulu
Last Week: N/A
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]
3. Only Murders In the Building
Network: Hulu
Last Week: 4
This Week: Billionaire board games are awkward but lead to an important clue.
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. Peacemaker
Network: HBO Max
Last Week: N/A
This Week: The penultimate episode of Season 2 sees Chris learn the errors of his ways.
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]
1. Slow Horses
Network: Apple TV+
Last Week: 1
This Week: Does Roddy have a girlfriend or is there an elaborate plot at work?
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]
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