Two months of the TV calendar still remain, but let’s be honest with ourselves: 2026 has already delivered a full year’s worth of television. The kind of year where a real-time hospital drama sets the critical bar in January, a cursed New England island steals the Emmys in September, and Keri Russell spends October talking the world back from the brink of war. If your watchlist has been gasping for air, we get it — and this list is the oxygen.

So we did the difficult, couch-bound work of watching practically everything, and narrowed it down to the 25 best TV shows of 2026 so far, ranked from 25 all the way to our undisputed #1. The cut spans every corner of the dial: broadcast gems (“Scrubs,” “Survivor”), cable standouts (“Lanterns,” “The Real Housewives of Rhode Island”) and streaming heavyweights on HBO Max, Netflix, Apple TV and Hulu. You’ll find pristine final seasons (“Hacks,” “The Comeback”), franchise expansions done right (“A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms,” “Star City”) and reality TV at its most delightfully unhinged (“The Traitors,” “Survivor 50”).

Every entry includes the platform, the premiere date and the critical score that matters, so you can jump straight to your next binge. Scroll on — and when you’re done, argue with us in the comments. We genuinely hope you do.

The 25 Best TV Shows of 2026 So Far: At a Glance

RankShowPlatformSeason/StatusPremiereMetacritic
1The PittHBO MaxSeason 2Jan. 892
2The DiplomatNetflixSeason 4Oct. 1590
3HacksHBO MaxSeason 5 (final)Apr. 989
4The TestamentsHuluSeason 1 (new)2026—
5Widow’s BayApple TVSeason 1 (new)Apr. 2981
6IndustryHBOSeason 4Jan. 1188
7BEEFNetflixSeason 22026—
8The ComebackHBOSeason 3 (final)Mar. 2280
9A Knight of the Seven KingdomsHBOSeason 1 (new)January—
10LanternsHBOSeason 1 (new)2026—
11ParadiseHuluSeason 22026—
12ScrubsABCRevival, Season 2 airing2026—
13ShrinkingApple TVSeason 32026—
14SurvivorCBSSeason 50Spring 2026—
15The TraitorsPeacockSeason 4Early 2026—
16CarriePrime VideoSeason 1 (new)2026—
17Love on the SpectrumNetflixSeason 42026—
18Stuart Fails to Save the UniverseHBO MaxSeason 1 (new)2026—
19East of EdenNetflixLimited seriesOct. 180
20FuriousHuluSeason 1 (new)Jul. 2781
21Star CityApple TVSeason 1 (new)May 2980
22AdultsFXXSeason 22026—
23Chad PowersHuluSeason 22026—
24Maximum Pleasure GuaranteedApple TVSeason 1 (new)2026—
25The Real Housewives of Rhode IslandBravoSeason 1 (new)2026—

25. The Real Housewives of Rhode Island (Bravo)

The newest jewel in Bravo’s crown is also its most accidental triumph. Where veteran Housewives casts have learned to manufacture storylines with the polish of seasoned producers, the women of Rhode Island appear to be genuinely unaware they’re entertaining anyone — and that’s precisely the magic. One cast member casually admits in a confessional that she once ran over a woman; another flatly denies her husband’s wandering eye while the receipts play out on national television. You cannot write this stuff, and mercifully, nobody tried. There’s something almost anthropological about watching a cast operate entirely outside the genre’s established rules, untouched by the self-awareness that has homogenized later franchise entries. For longtime fans, it plays like a time capsule from the sprinter-van era, when drama felt discovered rather than engineered. A few episodes in, these women are already running circles around shows that have been on the air for a decade. Watch it before they learn the game.

Watch if you love: early Real Housewives of New York, unfiltered confessionals, reality TV that doesn’t know it’s reality TV.

24. Maximum Pleasure Guaranteed (Apple TV)

Maximum Pleasure Guaranteed

Tatiana Maslany has spent her career making impossibilities look effortless, and this twisty Apple TV thriller hands her another loose cannon of a role to run wild with. She plays Paula, a divorced mom whose ordinary evening curdles into a full-blown conspiracy after she witnesses a horrifying abduction during what should have been an anonymous online encounter. Most people would call the police; Paula starts digging — and the deeper she goes, the more the bodies accumulate, until the danger is parked permanently on her doorstep, with her daughter squarely in the blast radius. What could have been a standard paranoid potboiler becomes something special because of Maslany, who cycles through panic, ferocity, gallows humor and maternal terror sometimes within a single scene. The action sequences are shot with a frenetic, almost slapstick urgency that keeps you clenched, and the plot’s escalating absurdity is a feature, not a bug. It’s the year’s most underrated thriller — and a strong case for giving underrated things your evenings.

Watch if you love: Orphan Black, escalating capers, moms pushed past the breaking point.

23. Chad Powers (Hulu)

Yes, the premise remains gloriously ridiculous: Glen Powell plays a disgraced college football quarterback who reinvents himself under heavy prosthetics as the impossibly named Chad Powers, snapping up a roster spot with the South Georgia Catfish. And yes, two seasons in, the secret-identity gag should be running on fumes. It isn’t — because the show treats its own absurdity as a load-bearing wall rather than a punchline. Powell is having the time of his life playing both Russ Holliday, the self-destructive fallen star, and Chad, the Weird Al-goes-to-SEC-country persona he hides behind, and the show mines genuine, surprisingly tender self-discovery from the disguise. The supporting bench — Steve Zahn, Frankie A. Rodriguez, Perry Mattfeld — keeps the small-town football satire warm and specific, and the stakes around Chad’s exposed identity ratchet up believably each season. It’s the rare sports comedy where the game almost doesn’t matter. Go Fish, indeed.

Watch if you love: Ted Lasso-adjacent sports charm, Powell in full movie-star mode, prosthetic comedy done with commitment.

22. Adults (FXX)

The five twenty-somethings crammed into this FXX sitcom’s shared New York house have quietly become the funniest ensemble on television, and Season 2 is the year’s most confident comedy showcase. The roommate formula is ancient — Friends built an empire on it — but Adults refreshes the walls with Gen Z-specific chaos: an acid trip that goes exactly as wrong as you’d fear, a career pivot into wannabe K-pop stardom, and the long-simmering flirtation between Anton and Paul Baker finally catching fire, with consequences. What elevates the show is how generously it distributes the spotlight; every roommate gets an episode (or three) that weaponizes their specific neuroses, and the ensemble’s chemistry has the loose, honed-over-years feel of a troupe that genuinely enjoys torturing each other. The finale then throws a grenade into the group’s dynamics that has us counting the days until Season 3 — which FXX would be criminally foolish not to order. This is hangout comedy at its stickiest.

Watch if you love: Happy Endings, roommates who should absolutely live apart, punchline density per minute.

21. Star City (Apple TV)

The For All Mankind universe expands by flipping the Space Race on its head: in this spin-off’s alt-history, the Soviets won, and Apple TV hands the keys to the cosmonauts. You need zero knowledge of the mothership series to dive in — the story stands alone, splitting its attention between a KGB mole hunt hunting for whoever is quietly feeding secrets to the Americans, and the Soviet space program’s brilliant, conspiracy-surfing Chief Designer (a superb Rhys Ifans) as he gambles everything on a covert mission to Venus. The result is a hybrid nobody else is making: equal parts space spectacle and paranoid Cold War spy thriller, moving at a clip that belies its cerebral premise. Empire ranked it among the year’s best, and Metacritic’s 80 confirms the critics agree. It’s bleak where For All Mankind is hopeful, but tension this well-engineered is its own reward. Space has rarely felt this claustrophobic — or this gripping.

Watch if you love: The Americans, hard sci-fi with a spy-fiction chaser, shows where the real enemy is bureaucracy.

20. Furious (Hulu)

Few shows this year hit harder, and few open with a content warning they’ve genuinely earned. From New Girl veteran Elizabeth Meriwether comes this Hulu drama about Alice Black (Emmy Rossum), an FBI agent hunting a female serial killer (a chilling Lola Petticrew) whose victims share one thing in common: they’re men who abused women and children. The killer’s origin — trafficking, survival, retribution — keeps colliding with Alice’s own buried history, and the show refuses to pretend those two roads don’t lead to the same place. Rossum delivers the best work of her career, playing a woman whose competence at the job is inseparable from the damage the job keeps reopening; Scoot McNairy adds unexpected tenderness as a grizzled NYPD detective working the same dark territory. It’s heavy, haunting and often brutal — but the character work underneath the case-of-the-week machinery is so precise that the weight feels purposeful rather than gratuitous. Metacritic’s 81 says the critics felt it too.

Watch if you love: Mare of Easttown-grade detective drama, thrillers with a moral compass, career-best Emmy Rossum.

[IMAGE: Emmy Rossum as Alice Black — suggested alt text: “Emmy Rossum in Furious, one of the best new Hulu shows of 2026”]

19. East of Eden (Netflix)

Netflix’s seven-episode take on John Steinbeck’s sprawling novel makes one audacious structural bet: it recenters the entire story on Cathy Ames, the novel’s most infamous villain, and lets Florence Pugh — outstanding as ever — fill in the wounds and choices the book left in shadow. Purists may bristle; everyone else should simply marvel. The expanded backstory gives Cathy’s antagonism a devastating internal logic, and Pugh plays it as tragedy rather than monster-mash, while Christopher Abbott’s Adam Trask, Hoon Lee’s luminous Lee and Ciarán Hinds’ Samuel Hamilton carry the Trask family saga with all its inherited grief intact. The adaptation’s thesis lands quietly: pain is a family heirloom, and the only question is whether anyone’s strong enough to stop passing it down. Cinematically, it’s one of the year’s most beautiful productions, all golden Salinas Valley light and period richness. Released Oct. 1, it’s the prestige limited series October deserved — and a Metacritic 80 confirms it sticks the landing.

Watch if you love: literary adaptations with teeth, Florence Pugh at full power, generational sagas.

18. Stuart Fails to Save the Universe (HBO Max)

Of all the ways the Big Bang Theory empire could extend itself, a multiverse-hopping sci-fi comedy built on four supporting characters seemed like the least likely to work — which is exactly why it does. Free from the obligation of recreating the flagship’s apartment-set dynamics, the show turns comic-book store owner Stuart (Kevin Sussman), his partner Denise (Lauren Lapkus), Bert (Brian Posehn) and Kripke (John Ross Bowie) into an unlikely rescue squad tumbling through alternate realities, and gives each actor the best material of their careers. Crucially, the multiverse isn’t a cameo conveyor belt; it’s a storytelling engine, using parallel lives to reveal sides of these characters the original series never had room for. Sussman makes a wonderful unconventional lead — his nervous energy reads as heroism at exactly the right moments — and the show’s ambition is matched by genuine warmth. Funny, weird and wildly inventive, it’s the franchise’s boldest swing and the spin-off nobody saw coming. Leonard, Sheldon and Howard would have binge-watched it in one sitting.

Watch if you love: Big Bang Theory deep cuts, multiverse comedies with heart, underdogs promoted to leading men.

17. Love on the Spectrum (Netflix)

Television’s gentlest dating show returned for a fourth season and somehow keeps raising the emotional stakes without ever raising its voice. Following a group of autistic young adults as they navigate romance, the new batch of participants instantly earns its place in the show’s hall of fame: Logan, whose search for a girlfriend with “curvy, straight hair” leads to a confidence arc courtesy of one magnificent velvet suit; Dylan, whose deadpan catchphrase deployment and sweet bond with his mom make every awkward date feel like a victory; and Emma, whose verdict that one unlucky suitor looked “too much like her dad” remains the season’s most relatable moment. The season also delivers series firsts — an engagement between Madison and her cowboy sweetheart Tyler that will fog up any screen, and the show’s first major breakup, handled with a maturity most reality TV can’t spell. It’s hopeful without being saccharine, honest without being exploitative, and it will restore your faith in people in six episodes flat.

Watch if you love: reality TV that leaves you better than it found you, genuine firsts, love stories earned the hard way.

16. Carrie (Prime Video)

Leave it to Mike Flanagan to find the humanity in Stephen King’s most misread tragic figure. This Prime Video adaptation of Carrie — already renewed for a second season — transplants the prom-night horror classic into 2026, where the bullying that breaks Carrie White happens in group chats as much as locker rooms, and the horror of going viral becomes a modern crucible for King’s story of religious terror and teenage cruelty. Summer H. Howell is a revelation as Carrie, all watchful sweetness and contained devastation, grounding the series as its moral center even as the chaos escalates; Samantha Sloyan makes Margaret White genuinely frightening in her twisted, loving way, and Alison Thornton’s Chris is a refreshingly dimensional mean girl with visible wounds of her own. Flanagan’s fingerprints are everywhere: three-dimensional antagonists, emotional stakes that outrank the scares, and a surprising tenderness that sneaks up on you between the carnage. The prom still burns. But now everything leading up to it hurts more.

Watch if you love: King adaptations done reverently, Flanagan’s signature emotional gut-punches, horror with a thesis.

15. The Traitors (Peacock)

Season 4 of Alan Cumming’s glorious paranoia engine was its most twist-saturated yet, and Peacock’s flagship competition remains the gold standard of celebrity reality gamesmanship. Where to begin? A first-ever Secret Traitor whose identity was concealed from the viewing audience at home (donna-messianic football mom Donna Kelce, of all people). Lisa Rinna’s spectacular self-immolation at the Black Banquet, a masterclass in how to sink your own game. Johnny Weir and Tara Lipinski piecing together the conspiracy minutes too late, in what may be reality TV’s most stylish failure. And then the finale: Rob Rausch, gazing at Faithful ally Maura Higgins, calmly revealing that yes, he had been a Traitor all along — a confession scene scripted TV should study for how to detonate an audience’s jaw. Cumming’s wardrobe alone deserves its own category at the Emmys, but the show’s real innovation is structural: every season reinvents the deception mechanics just as viewers think they’ve solved the format. Four seasons in, nobody has. Long live the castle.

Watch if you love: social deduction games, celebrity chaos, finales that recontextualize everything.

[IMAGE: Alan Cumming hosting in one of Season 4’s outfits — suggested alt text: “Alan Cumming hosts The Traitors season 4, one of the best reality shows of 2026”]

14. Survivor (CBS)

Fifty seasons. Twenty-six years after Richard Hatch outlawed clothing on Borneo, CBS’s immortal competition series hit its half-century mark with “Survivor 50: In the Hands of the Fans” — and the celebration was anything but a victory lap. The biggest returning-player cast in series history delivered wall-to-wall iconic moments, while the season’s gimmick (fan-voted twists influencing everything from idols to game rules) created a genuinely unpredictable season that honored old-school heart and new-era cutthroat gameplay in equal measure. The twists came relentlessly, the players adapted (or perished, spectacularly), and Wednesday nights felt like events again. What deserves equal celebration is the show’s stamina: in an industry obsessed with the next shiny format, Survivor keeps reinventing itself from within, season after season, without losing the fundamental magic of strangers, an island, and a million dollars. Nostalgia season? Sure. But it also forged fresh paths — which is why the milestone sits comfortably in our top 15 rather than arriving on legacy alone.

Watch if you love: strategic game-playing, milestone seasons done right, torches snuffed with maximum drama.

13. Shrinking (Apple TV)

Bill Lawrence’s dramedy empire has a formula: characters so lovable you’d follow them into a spin-off about their grocery runs. Shrinking‘s third season put that loyalty to the test with a season-long meditation on goodbye — and stuck every landing. Jimmy and his daughter Alice confront the hollowing-out of her leaving for college; Paul finally runs out of reasons to postpone retirement; and Gaby absorbs a loss so shattering it reorganizes the show’s entire emotional architecture. In lesser hands, that’s a bummer of a season. Here, it’s a warm bath: the cast (Jason Segel, Harrison Ford cracking wise at maximum curmudgeon efficiency, Jessica Williams) makes grief funny and funny things poignant, often in the same scene. The season’s secret weapon is special guest star Michael J. Fox, whose appearance lands with the weight only a legend of Lawrence’s Family Ties/documentary-adjacent universe can deliver. Few shows balance heavy themes and light touch this gracefully. We’ll need actual therapy when it ends — presumably the point.

Watch if you love: Ted Lasso warmth, therapy-with-consequences, Harrison Ford being aggressively lovable.

12. Scrubs (ABC)

The revival that shouldn’t have worked and absolutely did. Sixteen years after ABC wheezed the final credits out of Scrubs (and nine after the Season 9 misfire most fans agreed to forget), J.D., Turk, Elliot, Carla and Dr. Cox returned to Sacred Heart with something most revivals lack: a genuine reason to exist. Rather than freezing its characters in 2010 amber, the show interrogated what time does to people — aging bodies, professional burnout, evolving workplace culture, friendships stretched across distance — while keeping the fantasy-sequences-and-fart-jokes engine fully operational. The revival’s smartest move is letting growth stick: J.D. has actually matured, and the comedy matures around him. Then Season 2 happened, and somehow surpassed the comeback season entirely — sharper character work, richer emotional stakes, and a renewed confidence in the delicate alchemy of stupid jokes and real tears that made the original appointment television. It’s the best broadcast comedy of 2026, full stop. The procedure was a complete success.

Watch if you love: revivals with a pulse, sitcoms that can destroy you by the credits, Sacred Heart nostalgia done right.

11. Paradise (Hulu)

After a Season 1 twist so enormous it functioned as its own marketing campaign, Dan Fogelman’s Hulu thriller faced the classic second-season dilemma: now what? The answer, elegantly, was everything — expanding beyond the bunker while Sterling K. Brown’s Secret Service agent Xavier Collins anchors a story that keeps rewarding close attention. New arrivals complicate the math: Shailene Woodley’s pregnant tour guide Annie and her mysterious suitor Link (Thomas Doherty) open up the world outside, while Julianne Nicholson’s Sinatra keeps bending universal constants with the serenity of a woman who owns the rulebook. Season 2 pulls off the rare double: it answers a whole drawer of burning questions while seeding a fresh crop, building to a third season that can’t come soon enough. Brown remains one of TV’s most watchable leading men, and the show’s commitment to character-first mystery — the twist is never the point, the people are — keeps it in prestige territory even as it operates at pure potboiler velocity.

Watch if you love: twisty mysteries that respect your attention, Sterling K. Brown, bunker politics.

10. Lanterns (HBO)

HBO’s grounded take on DC’s emerald guardians picks up the baton dropped by 2019’s Watchmen: superheroes transplanted into real, flawed, middle-American soil — and the transplant takes beautifully. Kyle Chandler’s Hal Jordan is a revelation of anti-glamour: scruffy, smart-alecky, deeply unserious, with an aching loneliness leaking through the cracks every time the one-liners stop. His recruit, Aaron Pierre’s John Stewart, is the inverse — a disciplined rule-follower whose faith in his legendary new mentor erodes, episode by episode, into something far more interesting than fandom. Their buddy-cop friction powers a season-long mystery rooted in small-town secrets rather than cosmic stakes, and the supporting cast (Kelly Macdonald, Poorna Jagannathan, Garret Dillahunt) is uniformly superb. In a superhero landscape suffering franchise fatigue, Lanterns proves the genre’s future is smaller, sadder and funnier — more True Detective than Justice League, with Willpower-powered cop drama and genuinely hilarious banter. Chandler’s deadpan delivery alone justifies the green light. The brightest show on HBO’s slate burns steady.

Watch if you love: Watchmen‘s grounded approach, buddy-cop chemistry, superhero TV for people tired of superhero TV.

9. A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms (HBO)

A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms

The Game of Thrones universe has always specialized in maximalism — dynasties, dragons, escalating body counts. HBO’s Dunk-and-Egg prequel goes the other way, and the shrinkage is the genius. Adapted from George R.R. Martin’s novellas and set roughly a century before the flagship, it follows Ser Duncan the Tall (Peter Claffey), a poor, earnest hedge knight with outsized dreams, and his pint-sized squire Egg (a scene-stealing Dexter Sol Ansell) as they bumble toward a jousting tournament that keeps threatening to kill them. The stakes are small, local and deeply human, which makes every bruise land harder than a dragon did. Claffey’s sweet-faced decency against a world of schemers is a joy to watch, the humor is genuinely funny — Westeros has never crackled like this — and the cinematography finds beauty in mud and meadows rather than thrones. It’s the Thrones-verse’s comedic soul finally given a body, and its audience score (an 8.6 on IMDb) says fans are charmed. Sometimes less realm really is more.

Watch if you love: Westeros without the body count, buddy adventures, knights who read as golden retrievers.

8. The Comeback (HBO)

Lisa Kudrow’s pioneering cringe comedy returned after more than a decade to deliver its third — and, blessedly, final — season, sending Valerie Cherish into the great streaming unknown with her dignity at maximum risk and our devotion at maximum strength. The satirical target this time: artificial intelligence, naturally. Val stars in and executive-produces the industry’s first all-AI-written series, a production so confidently terrible it doubles as the sharpest Hollywood indictment of the year, and watching Kudrow’s heroine navigate the tech (while hiding its involvement from her cast) produces the most exquisitely painful pickles of the show’s run. The season also pays tender tribute to the late Robert Michael Morris, Val’s beloved Mickey, and stacks its guest bench with the likes of John Early, Abbi Jacobson, Andrew Scott — plus a wonderful James Burrows turn as himself. Metacritic’s 80 marks the character’s best-reviewed season yet. Saying goodbye hurts, but Val went out exactly the way she lived: adapting, smiling, and refusing to be written off. We’ll always have “I see it, I like it, I want it.”

Watch if you love: cringe comedy of the highest order, Hollywood satire, legends closing their own loops.

7. BEEF (Netflix)

How do you follow an Emmy-sweeping first season that everyone assumed was a one-off? Lee Sung Jin’s answer: dismantle the premise and rebuild it as an anthology of privilege. BEEF Season 2 swaps Danny and Amy for two couples in freefall — a wealthy country-club power pair (Oscar Isaac and Carey Mulligan, magnificent) and the engaged young employees (Cailee Spaeny and Charles Melton) whose lives explosively intersect with theirs after one fateful incident. The season dissects wealth’s quiet corruptions with the same psychological scalpel Season 1 aimed at road rage, finding dark hilarity in its most miserable corners (one episode’s healthcare nightmare is a comic-horror masterpiece). Late episodes relocate to Seoul and widen the canvas without losing the intimacy, and the performances — all four leads, but especially Mulligan, playing bitterness that money visibly cannot fix — are awards-grade across the board. Season 1 was no fluke; Season 2 announces an anthology with legs, teeth and a merciless eye for the American dream’s fine print.

Watch if you love: anthologies that level up, ensemble acting feasts, class satire with real fangs.

6. Industry (HBO)

HBO’s finance drama keeps compounding returns like a well-managed fund, and Season 4 is its most ambitious denomination yet. The great Pierpoint trading floor is now a memory; in its place, the show scatters its wounded principals — Harper (Myha’la), Yasmin (Marisa Abela) and Eric (Ken Leung) — into new arenas where former colleagues now compete directly, sometimes as adversaries, always as liabilities. The season’s aperture widens to global scale, tracing finance’s greasy fingers into politics and the underworld, with hot-button subject matter (trafficking, fascist currents, the moral rot of the ultra-rich) handled with more fire than any prestige sibling dares. New blood Max Minghella and Kiernan Shipka spike the ensemble’s adrenaline, and Kit Harington’s Henry Muck unraveling into gilded irrelevance is quietly devastating. Yes, the sex and substances remain fully stocked. But Season 4’s real thrill is watching a show once dismissed as salacious grow into television’s most vital state-of-the-world drama. Metacritic’s 88 is its highest yet. Strong buy. Still.

Watch if you love: Succession withdrawals, capitalism dissected at speed, characters you’d flee from in real life.

5. Widow’s Bay (Apple TV)

Horror-comedy is the graveyard where most genre experiments go to die — too campy to scare, too spooky to land jokes — which makes Apple TV’s breakout even more of a miracle. Creator Katie Dippold (of Parks and Rec and Ghostbusters pedigree) builds a New England island town with a centuries-old curse and a marketing problem: Mayor Tom Loftis (Matthew Rhys, sweaty and magnificent) is determined to rebrand Widow’s Bay as the next Martha’s Vineyard, never mind the haunted inns, ancient sea hags and occult self-help books sabotaging the tourism board. The show’s balance is preternatural — it is honestly funny and honestly frightening, sometimes in the same scene — and the ensemble is a murderers’ row: Stephen Root (who took home the Emmy for the role), Hamish Linklater, Betty Gilpin, Dale Dickey and breakout Kate O’Flynn as the mayor’s gloriously odd assistant. Critics scored it an 81 on Metacritic; the Television Academy went further, handing the series a breakthrough-Emmy haul. The best new show of spring 2026 — and the reason you’ll side-eye every coastal ferry forever.

Watch if you love: Parks and Rec small-town logic, jump scares with punchlines, shows that feel like true originals.

4. The Testaments (Hulu)

The Testaments

Margaret Atwood’s sequel finally arrives on screen — and Hulu’s Handmaid’s Tale follow-up pulls off the hardest trick in dystopian television: it makes Gilead feel new again. The trick is perspective. Where the mothership processed the regime through an adult’s trauma, The Testaments views it through the eyes of girls raised inside its walls — Chase Infiniti and Lucy Halliday lead a young cohort of performers so confident they trade scenes with Ann Dowd’s Aunt Lydia (older, wiser, no less formidable) without blinking. The result is a show with unsettling energy: brutal strictures intact, but the story hums with the ferocity of a next generation asking why any of this exists. The finale of The Handmaid’s Tale hinted Gilead’s rot was terminal; this series corrects the record — progress here is one step forward, two beatings back — and somehow that honesty is what makes it energizing rather than bleak. Hulu believed in it enough to order Season 2 before the first finished airing, and after the premiere episodes, that faith looks shrewd. The resistance, it turns out, is young and watchable.

Watch if you love: The Handmaid’s Tale‘s world with fresh eyes, Ann Dowd’s Aunt Lydia at maximum complexity, next-generation dystopia.

3. Hacks (HBO Max)

The sharpest comedy on television took its final bow this year, and the farewell run earned every ounce of its Metacritic 89. Across five seasons, Jean Smart’s Deborah Vance and Hannah Einbinder’s Ava Daniels built television’s most complicated relationship — mentor/rival/family/something-else-entirely — and the final season gave it the ending it deserved: Deborah chasing her last great dream, headlining Madison Square Garden, while the show took a heavier, lovelier look at what love and loyalty actually cost between two women this proud. Creators Paul W. Downs, Lucia Aniello and Jen Statsky stuck the landing in a way series finales almost never do — surprising, inevitable, and emotionally total — and the supporting roster (Downs’ Jimmy, Megan Stalter’s unhinged Kayla) got their own perfect sendoffs. All five seasons of Hacks cleared the critical bar; the final three cleared it by a mile. Deb got knocked down, stood back up, and made it funny every single time. Consider us Little Debbies forever. The garden is closed, but the comedy blooms on.

Watch if you love: perfect final seasons, intergenerational female friendship, comedy about the grind of comedy.

2. The Diplomat (Netflix)

Keri Russell’s political thriller keeps getting better the higher the stakes climb, and Season 4 — Netflix’s best-reviewed season of the year at Metacritic 90, with a 96% on Rotten Tomatoes — is the series’ finest hour yet. Ambassador Kate Wyler faces the show’s most punishing season of twists: an assassination attempt on Allison Janney’s President Grace Penn, the devastating death of her British counterpart Austin Dennison, and a President recklessly accelerating toward a military showdown with Russia while Kate talks the planet back from the ledge with nothing but phraseology and nerve. Jodie Whittaker’s arrival as the new UK prime minister refreshes the dynamic, and the dialogue has never crackled harder — every negotiation is both a policy fight and a marriage fight, sometimes simultaneously. It all builds to a cliffhanger so audacious that Season 5 feels like a human right. For our money, this is the smartest Sunday-night-caliber drama on Netflix, and it only missed the top spot because one show was even more flawless. See below. Then lobby Netflix with us.

Watch if you love: The Americans energy, negotiation scenes as fight scenes, cliffhangers with actual consequences.

1. The Pitt (HBO Max)

There was never really a contest. The Pitt Season 2 is the best-reviewed major show of 2026 (Metacritic 92), the #1 series of the year on Empire’s list, and the rare phenomenon that satisfies critics, audiences and the Television Academy in the same breath. The real-time ER drama returned in January and did the impossible: it made a masterpiece season about something even harder than saving lives — the cost of trying. Noah Wyle delivers career-defining work as Dr. Robby, picking up the psychological wreckage of Season 1’s rooftop crisis and mining his recovery with an honesty network TV hasn’t attempted in decades; Katherine LaNasa’s Dana, returning after her assault, turns suppressed trauma into devastating, note-perfect physicality. The Fourth-of-July-weekend shift gives the season its own infernal rhythm, as everyday heroes absorb the holiday’s casualties while quietly falling apart. What Season 1 built as TV’s most immersive medical experience, Season 2 perfected as human character study — gritty, humane, and utterly without melodrama’s easy outs. The Pitt doesn’t just top our list. It defines what 2026’s television was about.

Watch if you love: ER raised on prestige standards, Noah Wyle’s lifetime-achievement-in-waiting, dramas that respect both medicine and grief.

How We Ranked These Shows?

Ranking 25 excellent shows is a contact sport, so here’s the methodology, for transparency’s sake. Every entry aired at least one episode between January and late October 2026 (final seasons are judged on their complete runs). We weighted four factors: critical consensus (Metacritic and Rotten Tomatoes aggregation, plus year-end positioning from outlets like Empire, Rolling Stone and The Hollywood Reporter), cultural impact (Emmy recognition, franchise significance, social footprint), execution quality (writing, performances, direction, and that unquantifiable “wait for it to drop” pull), and 2026 specificity (what the season says about this moment). A returning season needed to outperform its predecessors to rank high; a new show needed to feel like it couldn’t have aired any other year. Reality and unscripted competed on the same field as prestige drama — if it dominated your group chat, it was eligible. Disagree with the order? That’s what the comments are for.

Honorable Mentions: Just Missed the Cut

Twenty-five slots, brutally finite. These excellent 2026 shows fell just short — and several would top a less competitive year:

  • The Lowdown Season 2 (FX/Hulu) — Sterlin Harjo’s drama at a Metacritic 92, “shot out of a cannon.”
  • The Bear Season 5 (FX/Hulu) — the final season recaptures the kitchen’s adrenaline.
  • X-Men ’97 Season 2 (Disney+) — animated Marvel at a career-best Metacritic 90.
  • The Vampire Lestat (AMC) — Anne Rice’s icon fronting a rock opera; the franchise’s best season.
  • Slow Horses Season 6 (Apple TV) — the spy jig keeps humming at an 85.
  • Tip Toe (Starz/Channel 4) — Russell T. Davies’ state-of-the-nation drama, with Alan Cumming.
  • Margo’s Got Money Troubles (Apple TV) — Elle Fanning, Michelle Pfeiffer and an alien-themed OnlyFans account.
  • Wonder Man (Disney+) — Yahya Abdul-Mateen II and Ben Kingsley in a poignant Hollywood two-hander.
  • Bait (Prime Video) — Riz Ahmed auditioning for Bond, with Patrick Stewart as his inner monologue.
  • How to Get to Heaven From Belfast (Netflix) — Derry Girls creator Lisa McGee’s funniest, darkest mystery.

FAQs

What is the best TV show of 2026 so far?

The Pitt Season 2 (HBO Max) is 2026’s best show, with the year’s highest Metacritic score among major series (92), the #1 slot on Empire’s year-so-far list, and career-best work from Noah Wyle. The Diplomat Season 4 and Hacks Season 5 round out the podium.

What are the best new TV shows of 2026?

The strongest 2026 debuts include Widow’s Bay (Apple TV, Emmy-winning horror-comedy), A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms (HBO), Lanterns (HBO), The Testaments (Hulu), East of Eden (Netflix), Furious (Hulu), Carrie (Prime Video) and Star City (Apple TV).

What is the best comedy of 2026?

Hacks ended its five-season run with its sharpest, most emotional year (Metacritic 89), while Adults Season 2 emerged as the funniest young ensemble on TV and Stuart Fails to Save the Universe became 2026’s boldest new sitcom swing.

What is the best reality show of 2026?

The Traitors Season 4 (Peacock) delivered reality TV’s most jaw-dropping finale, Survivor 50 celebrated the format’s biggest milestone with its largest returning cast ever, and The Real Housewives of Rhode Island gave Bravo its most accidentally authentic franchise in years.

Which 2026 shows are still airing or arriving in November and December?

Scrubs Season 2 and The Real Housewives of Rhode Island are airing now, The Diplomat S4 and East of Eden just landed in October, and more fall arrivals are still ahead — bookmark this page; we’ll keep the ranking updated as the year closes out.

Where can I watch the best shows of 2026?

Apple TV and Netflix lead with four entries apiece, HBO/HBO Max follows with seven combined, Hulu carries four, and broadcast earns its share via Scrubs (ABC), Survivor (CBS) and The Traitors (Peacock, streaming). The full platform list is in the table above.

The Verdict: 2026 Is TV’s Bounce-Back Year

If 2025 belonged to the farewell tours, 2026 belongs to the reinventions — franchises that found new angles (A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms, Star City, Stuart Fails to Save the Universe), veterans that hit new peaks (The Diplomat, Industry, The Pitt), and originals nobody saw coming (Widow’s Bay, Maximum Pleasure Guaranteed). The common thread is ambition: even the silliest entries here swing big, and most connect. Two months of premieres remain, and the November-December slate could still shuffle this list — so consider this a living document.