Television’s holiday dreck machine doesn’t even wait till Halloween is over anymore; now the whole of Q4 is fair game for snowy, small-town romance porn. Happily, in November 2025, a handful of promising premieres managed to sneak in before Thanksgiving closed the door on substantive TV for the year. Below, you’ll find a thriller starring Claire Danes and Matthew Rhys; a wry take on American history featuring Michael Shannon and Matthew Macfadyen; a steamy, French, female-gaze Dangerous Liaisons; the small-screen debut of Hong Kong auteur Wong Kar Wai; and a big sci-fi swing that reunites Better Call Saul’s Vince Gilligan and Rhea Seehorn.
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The Beast in Me (Netflix)
Claire Danes gets a lot of attention for her “cry face.” It is, indeed, a sight to behold. Engulfed by waves of sorrow, her chin vibrates, her eyes scrunch into slits, the corners of her mouth turn down as though tugged by invisible weights. But the crying is just an extreme expression of Danes’ greatest asset as an actor: her unique ability to convey abjection. This is the quality that has shaped her performances in roles as different as My So-Called Life’s angsty teen Angela Chase and the doomed female lead in Romeo + Juliet, the CIA agent wrestling with bipolar disorder throughout eight seasons of Homeland and the exhausted Manhattan supermom in Fleishman Is in Trouble. Even when they are surrounded by misfit buddies or concerned colleagues, her characters tend to feel wholly, miserably—but also, somehow, relatably—alone.
Loneliness happens to be the defining attribute of Danes’ latest antihero, Aggie Wiggs, the Pulitzer-winning journalist at the center of the Netflix cat-and-mouse thriller The Beast in Me. Still wracked with grief years after her young son’s death in a car crash, divorced from the wife with whom she was raising him, and paralyzed by writer’s block following those dual traumas, Aggie can’t let go of pain for which she blames everyone but herself. With apologies to Rachel Fleishman, she is the best character Danes (also an executive producer) has given us since Homeland’s Carrie Mathison. And the ideally cast, impeccably paced, diabolically addictive 8-episode murder mystery that she anchors is one of the year’s most suspenseful rides. [Read the full review.]
Blossoms Shanghai (Criterion Channel)
Although it takes place in the early 1990s, the Chinese drama Blossoms Shanghai unfolds in a polished, sparkling Art Deco world (minus the occasional glimpse of a brick-sized cellphone). There are two good reasons for that choice: For one thing, the nostalgic aesthetic draws a parallel between America’s prosperous, hard-partying Jazz Age and the period of rapid economic growth sometimes known as China’s Roaring ’90s. Secondly, Blossoms was created and directed by Wong Kar Wai, the Hong Kong filmmaker whose dreamy, romantic features infuse Old Hollywood glamour into East Asian environs. Given that Wong is one of the world’s greatest living directors and this is his first-ever TV series—which won awards and broke viewership records when it aired in China—its low-key stateside debut merits more fanfare.
Rolling out with three episodes per week (the first batch arrived on Nov. 24) on the essential cinephile streaming service Criterion Channel, the 30-part epic follows an ascendant trader in the early years of the Shanghai Stock Exchange, as international capitalism minted self-made millionaires in a nominally communist country. Chinese movie star Hu Ge gives a debonair lead performance as Ah Bao, a mysterious power player who owes his rapid rise to the tutelage of an elderly ex-con, Uncle Ye (You Benchang). The saga begins with the dramatic attempted murder of Bao, but the attack is less the setup for a whodunit than a way to plunge into the heart of Shanghai’s intertwined, neon-lit worlds: finance, crime, food, nightlife. The storytelling in Blossoms might feel a bit familiar to Western audiences—it’s The Great Gatsby meets the ’80s Wall Street canon, with the after-hours loucheness of Babylon Berlin. But you don’t come to Wong primarily for plot; style is his substance, and it’s just as intoxicating here as in his films.
Death by Lightning (Netflix)
When most Americans hear the name Garfield, we think not of our 20th president but of an orange cartoon cat who loves lasagna. That is kind of the point of Death by Lightning, a four-part tragicomedy that traces the election and assassination of James A. Garfield, who served for about six months in 1881—two of which he spent dying of sepsis. Casting Michael Shannon wonderfully against type as the upright and progressive, if a bit naive, POTUS, the series entwines Garfield’s perspective with that of his assassin, Charles Guiteau, a delusional grifter played by Matthew Macfadyen, Succession’s own Tom Wambsgans. Other spectacular pairings of actor and historical figure include Nick Offerman as a sad-clown Chester A. Arthur, Shea Whigham as New York power broker Roscoe Conkling, Bradley Whitford giving 19th century West Wing as James Blaine, and the versatile Betty Gilpin as Garfield’s wife, Lucretia.
But the cast isn’t all the show has going for it. Creator Mike Makowsky shapes the source material, Candice Millard’s nonfiction book Destiny of the Republic, into a collection of quintessentially American archetypes. There’s Garfield, the would-be great man so principled that, like Plato’s philosopher kings, he doesn’t even want the nomination his fellow Republicans vote to bestow upon him. There’s the wild-eyed conman Guiteau, an instantly recognizable ancestor of the 21st century’s sweaty wannabe tech evangelist, half earnest in his zealotry and half desperate to make his fortune. There’s greedy, ruthless, hypocritical Conkling, enriching himself by any means necessary. Finally there’s Arthur, an upwards-failing buffoon caught—like so many of his countrymen, then and now—between Conkling’s spoils system and Garfield’s idealism. Our current political chaos may be unprecedented, but the characters who populate present-day Washington? We’ve seen their like before, whether or not we remember them.
Pluribus (Apple TV)
Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul creator Vince Gilligan’s Pluribus, which arrives three years after the final episode of Saul, opens by having a bit of fun with the clichés of prestige apocalypse dramas, from The Walking Dead to The Last of Us to 3 Body Problem. The premiere hints at many types of extinction events before pivoting to a cataclysm so surprising, it’s useless to guess. All you really need to know is that, within the first half-hour, the world we know is transformed beyond recognition. I wouldn’t want to reveal more even if I hadn’t been asked not to, because the show works best when you’re just as clueless as poor Carol. [Read the full feature on Gilligan and Pluribus.]
The Seduction (HBO Max)
There are no heroes in Les Liaisons dangereuses, Pierre Choderlos de Laclos’s epistolary novel of cold-blooded decadence in the same French court that would be violently overthrown a few years after its publication in 1782. Chief among its villains is Marquise Isabelle de Merteuil, a master manipulator who takes advantage of her former lover Vicomte Sébastien de Valmont’s resurgent desire for her with a wager that ultimately dooms them both. As a teenage Fiona Apple dryly noted: “It’s a sad, sad world when a girl will break a boy just because she can.”
The Seduction, HBO Max’s first French-language series and approximately the millionth onscreen iteration of Laclos’s masterwork, imagines just what that world might entail. If you’ve read the book or watched the canonical film adaptation starring Glenn Close and John Malkovich—or even the 1990s teen drama update, Cruel Intentions—you probably won’t be surprised by the endgame of this lush, deliciously acted, baroquely libidinous yet sneakily substantive miniseries. Created by Jean-Baptiste Delafon and directed by Jessica Palud, the six-episode drama not only makes Merteuil its protagonist, but also supplies backstory that recasts her as less a monster than a wounded woman fighting for the same freedom men enjoy. [Read the full review.]