The 11 worst TV shows of 2025

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It’s been a marvellous year to be a couch potato. The Celebrity Traitors, The Studio, Adolescence, Severance, The White Lotus, Last One Laughing, Leonard and Hungry Paul, the final series of Big Boys – 2025’s TV at its best has been thrilling, agenda-setting, devastating and blissfully, joyously silly.  

Unfortunately for me, whose job it is to sit through a programme, good or bad, there have also been considerable abuses of the form. Several shows have given new meaning to the word “challenging”, and thrown my patience, funny bone, morals and will to live into question. With absolutely no joy whatsoever, I present to you the worst television of the year.

All’s Fair

Disney+

For this legal atrocity, Ryan Murphy inexplicably rounded up Glenn Close, Naomi Watts, Teyana Taylor and most importantly Kim Kardashian and asked, “What if women lawyers?” The answer was: “No.” And if you don’t think any of that makes sense, I assure you it makes more sense than the drama, the purpose of which I cannot identify.

It was obviously never intended to be actually entertaining, or it might have a script or some plots or some tension or some acting. But it also seems an incredibly expensive exercise in rage-baiting. Is it just that Kardashian has exhausted every other vehicle to notoriety, and being the face of something so proudly awful and destined only for trolling was the only recourse she had left?

I am beyond caring, because while there has always been bad TV and there has always been boring TV and there has always been lazy TV, this – whose opening episode features the line, “from cocktails to cock rings all in one 24 hour period… God I love my job”, and yet isn’t even funny – appears to exist as a talking point and nothing more. And talk everyone did. Yet another artistic medium is dead. Series two has of course been commissioned.

Hostage

Netflix

This absurd drama started with the abduction of the Prime Minister’s husband in French Guiana and in just five episodes managed to cycle through right-wing nationalism, an Anglo-French diplomatic crisis, spies, corruption, NHS shortages, defence spending cuts, electoral blackmail, more kidnap, an incest-adjacent affair, and the explosion of 10 Downing Street. And if you can believe it, I haven’t even given away the preposterous finale.

I’m trying to remember why it is I watched and rather enjoyed the whole thing, given my very low threshold for bad drama, and I think it must be purely down to Suranne Jones, who is excellent in everything even when the material is at best naff and at worst actually an act of treason.

Because as with so many Netflix shows, engineered to appeal to the absolute maximum number of people around the world, this was lowest common denominator stuff and its depiction of Britain and its politics was offensive – though presumably more offensive to French viewers was the constant mispronunciation of Julie Delpy’s President “Toussaint”.

I’m sure Netflix would like to congratulate itself on a drama with two Strong Powerful Women at the centre but let’s be honest, the reason this became a massive hit over the summer is because there was absolutely nothing else on. Great twists though.

Nobody Wants This

Netflix

I fancied the Hot Rabbi so much during this romcom’s first season he nearly had me considering conversion. Alas, its much-anticipated second run delivered absolutely no plot development, was excised of all its sexual tension and deformed its previously charming main characters into unlikeable, insufferable overgrown children.

Is Kristen Bell’s Joanne going to convert to Judaism – or is Noah (Adam Brody) going to love her anyway, even if it means he’ll never be top dog down the synagogue? I still don’t know and I’m not sure I care anymore – they’ve squandered the best chemistry a TV couple has had since the mid-Noughties and ruined my millennial fantasy.

The Genius Game

ITV

The Traitors has a lot to answer for, because now every single channel thinks they need to make a game show whose central conceit lies in deceit and betrayal. ITV clearly pumped money into its “strategic” “tactical” “pressure cooker” “battle of wits” because it had David Tennant at the helm – something I imagine he would like to forget, as it was a complete flop and was axed after one series.

The Genius Game brought together a load of “very intelligent” contestants with clever-sounding jobs and Mensa memberships (kill me now) to solve puzzles, and form allegiances, or something, except the audience were unable to play along with it, making it no fun at all.

It also felt like a relic from decades past, see also: Cheat: Unfinished Business (Netflix, hosted by Amanda Holden) and BBC One’s Stranded on Honeymoon Island (with Davina McCall).

Monster: The Ed Gein Story

Netflix

I could have gone my whole life without seeing Charlie Hunnam standing on a wooden stool, masturbating furiously while dressed in an elderly woman’s underwear with a tight leather choker around his neck, but unfortunately the universe had other plans.

True crime, or whatever this is, went past the point of no return a long time ago, but I really think it’s high time we agreed that no more of history’s serial killers need a miniseries and that Ryan Murphy’s contract with Netflix is revoked.

This was just about as crass as it can get and more, and didn’t attempt to offer even cursory insight into the mind of the deeply disturbed person at its centre. The problem is, they’ll keep making it because there are sickos out there who want to watch people have sex with corpses. If you are one of them, seek help.

Victoria Beckham

Netflix

Unlike her husband’s docuseries a few years before, this was a wasted opportunity for 90s nostalgia, proper reflection on fame and the Beckham family or the camp comedy of which Vicky B is a master.

It instead felt like being told for three hours how hard she works and how much she cares and how hard it was to be taken seriously in fashion. Do I believe all of it? Yes. Do I want to watch a documentary about it? No.

1000 Men and Me: The Bonnie Blue Story

Channel 4

The scene in this documentary, in which a 25-year-old naked woman lies on her back doing a starfish on a floor littered with hundreds of used condoms because she’s been getting gang banged all day, was when I decided feminism had failed.

This was supposed to take us inside the mind of “Bonnie Blue”, who claims she loves the “physical challenge” of the (horrifying) infamous sex stunts she performs in the name of “empowerment”. I’m sorry, though, but I’m not having it and the doc was both grim and irresponsible.

The film-maker did not sufficiently interrogate her, we were expected to tolerate the idea that her “career” – and her promotion of it to other young women – is fine because it’s her choice and she’s making lots of money, and by the time her mother declared she was proud of her and wouldn’t want her doing anything else, I was ready to jump out of the window.

“I’m just not emotional,” Bonnie Blue – real name Tia Billinger – repeats, assuring viewers she genuinely enjoys when men “make me your slut”, that she has not experienced abuse or trauma and does not require therapy. Good for her, but I needed it after watching this violently bleak film.

The Paper

NOW

Oh, my hopes were high for this mockumentary, from the team behind one of my favourite comedies, The US Office, and set in the same universe but this time at a local newspaper.

Alas I didn’t laugh once – recycled gags, an over-reliance on in-jokes from The Office that didn’t land, no subtlety and the feeling that everyone is just going through the motions. If you want a decent mockumentary that does manage The Office’s combination of heart and laugh-out-loud absurdity, watch Abbott Elementary instead.

Katie Price: Making Babies

Channel 4

It’s really time we stopped encouraging Katie Price. I’ve always rather liked her and I believe her heart’s in the right place, but it takes only a passing consciousness of the tabloid press to know that we shouldn’t be sticking cameras in front of her face every time she comes back from Turkey with a set of new teeth or starts warring with her ex-husbands, and should perhaps instead nudge her towards a darkened room with a pair of noise-cancelling headphones and some transcendental meditation tapes.

Anyway, far be it for safeguarding to get in the way of a Channel 4 documentary (see also Vicky Pattinson: My Deepfake Sex Tape – another of 2025’s lows) and so to this two-part series following Price as she attempted, against the advice of physicians, to conceive a sixth child via IVF with her estranged partner Carl Woods.

It purported to show us an emotional journey but it was so irresponsible and in such poor taste that it is hard to imagine anyone struggling with their own fertility (and its expense) will have found anything to relate to. Leave Price alone – and, for that matter, her existing children, two of whom, Junior and Princess Andre, are clearly suffering with the trauma of life in reality TV’s glare, as documented on another ill-advised commission this year, ITV Be’s The Princess Diaries.

The Assassin

Prime Video

Keeley Hawes is quite obviously better than this ludicrous addition to the bloated “women can be badass too” genre of action-crap. She plays a retired contract killer whose second act is as the resident British crank on an idyllic Greek island.

When her estranged son comes to visit, and the two of them get caught up in a sniper shoot-out that is more bloody and more ridiculous than Game of Thrones’s Red Wedding, it becomes clear that there’s no such thing as retirement and you can only hide from the Bulgarian mafia for so long… The whole thing is both ludicrous and contrived, which is fine if a drama is sufficiently entertaining. Unfortunately, this was not.

With Love, Meghan

Netflix

Back in March, I was dismayed at Meghan Markle’s indefensibly terrible and embarrassingly outdated daydream of edible flowers, “surprise and delight” moments and ladybird crostini. I said she was living in the past, a millennial parody, promoting a perfect “aspirational” lifestyle vision far, far removed from our era of authenticity.

I’m afraid that by the time she made a broccoli wreath in her Holiday Special I must have been lobotomised because I now feel not only that we should live and let live but also that I want more. I want to watch her make soap. I want to see what D-list celebrity Netflix have invited over to her rented Montecito house to be her friend for the afternoon.

I want to watch her empty plastic bags of peanut butter-filled pretzels into other, newer plastic bags. I no longer care that she is detached from reality because I must concede that hers is a better reality than mine.