The 10 Best TV Performances Of 2025 (So Far)

Gone are the days when television was considered a lesser medium for actors; long gone, in fact. In the many years since shows like "The Sopranos" and "Sex and the City" made waves on the premium network HBO and reminded everybody that the small screen is just as worthy, plenty of incredible performers have started working with premium networks — HBO is still basically the king of those — as well as major streamers with money like Netflix, Apple TV+, and a handful of others.

So with that said, which actors gave the very best performances in 2025? In order to qualify, the show needed to air at least a good chunk of their episodes in 2025, even if the current season began airing in 2024 (a rule that really only applies to the sole network TV show on this list, so put a pin in that). With that said, we didn't have room for everybody, sadly, so we do have some honorable mentions. Because we didn't want too many people from the same handful of shows, recently minted Emmy winners and nominees alike like Kathryn Hahn ("The Studio"), Britt Lower and Trammel Tillman ("Severance"), Aimee Lou Wood and Walton Goggins ("The White Lotus"), and Katherine LaNasa and Shawn Hatosy ("The Pitt") all had to be left off of the list. This is, in no way, a fully complete list of great TV performances in 2025, but just the best of the best... so without further ado, here are the best performances on the small screen by great performers in 2025, listed alphabetically by show.

Quinta Brunson and Sheryl Lee Ralph are the two "Abbott Elementary" cast members who have taken home most of the prominent awards hardware for the series — which isn't all that surprising when you consider that Brunson created the series and Ralph is a television veteran — but we all need to take a moment to appreciate Janelle James' razor-sharp performance as the titular school's principal, Ava Coleman. Ava is, at first glance, a woman could give a flying fart about the minutae of her job, but thanks to Brunson's smart writing and James' incredible versatility and grasp of this slippery character that would be cartoonish in the hands of a lesser performer, we see Ava's icy exterior break down throughout the first four seasons of "Abbott." In season 4, though, Ava really gets to shine.

In an episode roughly halfway through the season that aired in February 2025, "District Budget Meeting," Ava does something spectacularly unselfish for a pretty bad reason; namely, she insists that other Philadelphia public schools get higher budgets at Abbott's expense, because she's been blackmailing a golf course near the school for money for supplies. When Ava is caught, she refuses to let any other teachers take the fall with her and is fired — and even though Ava is ultimately reinstated as principal, it's a truly great character arc to watch her survive without Abbott (and, unsurprisingly, launch a solid career as a public speaker). Everyone on "Abbott" is great, but without James, it might not all work quite as well.

The British crime miniseries "Adolescence," which spans four episodes and was created by Jack Thorne and Stephen Graham with direction by Philip Barantini, is a gripping, searing look at the toxic masculinity crisis — and while it's become notable for its absolutely stunning one-take episodes, the performances are certainly nothing to sneeze at. Respect must be paid to Graham, who pulls double duty and plays Eddie Miller, a man whose son does something unbelievable and unthinkable to a classmate ... but "Adolescence" suceeds thanks to its young star Owen Cooper as Eddie's son Jamie. (Christine Tremarco as Jamie's mom Manda and Amélie Pease as his sister Lisa are excellent as well.) 

"Adolescence" isn't a "whodunit" or even a "howcatchem," the latter being a type of murder mystery that shows you an ending and basically works backwards. Instead, "Adolescence" gives you the answers immediately and forces the viewer to grapple with the fact that Jamie, a young boy radicalized by dark corners of the Internet, stabbed a young female classmate to death and was caught doing so on camera. As Jamie is interrogated and held by the police, who try and figure out why he would do something so horrific, Cooper manages to play Jamie as both a frightened child and an afflicted and even cruel boy; in the series' third (and best) hour, Jamie faces off against forensic psychologist Briony Ariston (Erin Doherty) as she attempts to uncover his motive. Throughout that episode, Cooper lets Jamie frantically try different tactics and manuevers against Briony until he simply explodes ... and it's no wonder that, alongside his on-screen dad Graham, Cooper picked up an Emmy for this troubling and astounding turn.

The second that Hannah Einbinder's Ava Daniels starts screaming about branzino, Einbinder ensured that she'd win her first Emmy for her role on HBO Max's unbelievably great comedy "Hacks" — and it made her a shoo-in for this list too. Let's back up. Throughout all of "Hacks," Einbinder has delivered solidly good-to-great performances, getting better with each season ... and in the show's fourth season that aired in 2025, her character Ava has finally "made it," sort of. After blackmailing her creative partner and, for lack of a better term, soulmate, famous comedian Deborah Vance (fellow Emmy winner Jean Smart), into letting Ava take the head writer role on Deborah's big late night series, Ava finally has a huge job as a comedy writer. The problem is that a furious Deborah keeps setting her up to fail, and as far as the network is concerned, the show has to succeed immediately, so Deborah and Ava forge an uneasy truce.

Einbinder is great in the entire fourth season of "Hacks," but her performance in the episode "Mrs. Table" is unforgettable. After finding out that all of her writers are expensing $72 branzino "for the table" when they order lunch to the office, Ava melts down spectacularly, screaming that she can't believe she's subsidizing lobster rolls and branzino for a "table" and lamenting the stresses of her job before shrieking, "Branzino doesn't travel well. You should never order it to go!" The very moment that Ava throws the entire fish against a window and runs out of the room, still screaming, remains one of the funniest and best-performed moments on TV in 2025.

If you loved the "Pitch Perfect" movies but wished that Brittany Snow's character had just been openly queer throughout all of them, you'll love "The Hunting Wives" — and ultimately, with all due respect to a truly excellent snow, you'll stay for Malin Akerman's central character Margo Banks. Born as Mandy Burkett, Margo managed to marry way, way up thanks to a union with oil tycoon turned candidate for Texas governor Jed Banks (Dermot Mulroney). Thanks to her newfound power and influence in the wealthy Texas enclave of Maple Brook, Margo — who enjoys an open arrangement with Jed as they both seek out the company of other women — basically runs everything, even serving as the defacto queen bee of the titular "hunting wives" that love drinking, shooting, and backstabbing.

Sophie, a Harvard-educated "East Coast liberal" who only moved to Maple Brook so her husband Graham (Evan Jonigkeit) can work alongside Jed, is deeply apprehensive about her new friend Margo at first, but Akerman's performance is so overtly sensual and subtly enticing that it's quite easy to see how Sophie ends up drawn into Margo's glamorous and dangerous world. Whether she's "romancing" a high school boy or threatening her brother in his double-wide trailer, it's sort of impossible to look away from Akerman as Margo, proving that this formidable actress has been underrated for decades.

Even though Looper gave the second season of Craig Mazin and Neil Druckmann's video game adaptation "The Last of Us" a thoroughly positive review, there was plenty of outcry over the sophomore season centered around a post-apocalyptic world overrun by infected cordyceps zombies ... and though some of that unfortunately focused on Kaitlyn Dever's debut as the game's infamous character Abby Anderson, the girl deserves her flowers. After we watch Joel Miller (Pedro Pascal) slaughter a room full of doctors and nurses trying to find a cure to the cordyceps virus so that he can save his surrogate daughter Ellie (Bella Ramsey) in the Season 1 finale of "The Last of Us," audiences are forced to deal with the fact that Joel just killed a bunch of innocent and righteous people with families. The doctor who intended to kill Ellie and operate on her brain — thanks to her apparent immunity from the virus — had a daughter, her name just so happens to be Abby, and she just so happens to run afoul of Joel early in Season 2.

Seizing an opportunity to get revenge even after Joel saves her from a horde of infected zombies, Abby rallies her friends and they help her subdue and overtake Joel. Ellie arrives at the tail end of things, but the result is clear: Abby beats Joel to death with a golf club, hitting him so hard that the club snaps — allowing her to drive the jagged handle into his neck to finish him off. Dever's raw, understandable, and horrifying rage as Abby is palpable, making it all the more remarkable that she performed this pivotal scene shortly after losing her own mother. Whenever Season 3 of "The Last of Us" premieres, we'll probably get a full season devoted to Abby ... and it'll be worth it.

Years after playing the privileged med student turned hardened trauma attending Dr. John Carter on "ER," Noah Wyle returned triumphantly to the small screen with "The Pitt," a series he helped create alongside showrunner R. Scott Gemmill and director John Wells (both of whom also worked on "ER" back in the day). If you're unfamiliar with "The Pitt," this sounds like Wyle is simply reheating, as the kids say, his own nachos — but on the contrary, Wyle's performance as Dr. Michael "Robby" Robinavitch on "The Pitt" is simply a new height for this storied actor. On the anniversary of his mentor's death (which happened during the thick of the COVID-19 pandemic), Robby is on edge as he shows up for his 12 hour shift — each episode of "The Pitt" takes place in "real time," with every hour representing a hour of this chaotic and difficult shift in a crowded Pittsburgh emergency department — and he's right to be worried.

Robby, along with his colleagues, ends up staying for 15 full hours after a devastating mass shooting occurs at a gathering called PittFest ... and though Wyle is extraordinary throughout the entire debut season of "The Pitt," his finest hour without a doubt is "7:00 P.M.," where he breaks down fully after losing a loved one's loved one who suffered a fatal gunshot wound. Wyle, incredibly, finds tiny moments to be funny and wry throughout "The Pitt" — there's an incredible beat where a harried medical student hands Robby a bunch of her stuff before performing a procedure, much to his amusement — showcasting this venerated actor's astounding versatility. The fact that Wyle has been transparent about the goal behind "The Pitt," which is to bring awareness and support to the real-life medical community in difficult times, is simply icing on the cake.

Adam Scott may have lost the Emmy for outstanding actor in a drama series to Noah Wyle, but nobody else on a 2025 television show managed to perfectly perform an argument with himself via a camcorder — so Scott can hang his hat on that, at the very least. Scott has been a TV favorite for years thanks to shows like "Party Down," "Parks and Recreation," and "Big Little Lies," and on "Severance," he finally got a starring role in a drama; after the show, created by Dan Erickson and aided by director and producer Ben Stiller, premiered in 2022, fans had to wait an interminable three years for Season 2.

The wait was well worth it, and that's thanks in very large part to Scott's bravura performance as two distinct but similar characters: his "innie" Mark S., who works in macrodata refinement at the mysterious and sinister Lumon Industries and is growing deeply suspicious of their endgame, and his "outie" Mark Scout, who's attempting to merge with his innie to find his missing wife Gemma Scout (the outstanding Dichen Lachman, who gets a whole episode, "Chikhai Bardo," centered around her story in Season 2). Scott is genuinely incredible throughout all of Season 2 of "Severance," but that argument between Mark S. and Mark Scout through a camcorder is a truly stunning accomplishment, even for an actor of his caliber. Scott clearly has decades of phenomenal performances ahead of him, but there's no question that, even without that Emmy, his dual performance on "Severance" will help define his excellent and varied career.

Seth Rogen's incisive yet loving Hollywood parody "The Studio" hit Apple TV+ early in 2025 and made a splash right away — and with the utmost due respect to the truly excellent ensemble cast that includes Rogen himself (as brand new studio head and passionate cinephile Matt Remick), Kathryn Hahn (as the fictional studio's bombastic marketing executive Maya Mason), Chase Sui Wonders (as aspiring executive producer Quinn Hackett), and Catherine O'Hara (as ousted studio executive Patty Leigh), we have to single out Ike Barinholtz here. For years, Barinholtz and his considerable comedic talents have been relegated to sidekick roles in things like "The Mindy Project" and "Neighbors," and even though his character, Matt's best friend and fellow studio executive Sal Saperstein, is definitely a supporting role, he really gets to shine throughout this show's debut season.

Desperate to prove himself and clearly a little jealous of his closest friend for being named the head of the studio, Barinholtz's Sal is bombastic and hilarious, but because Barinholtz is such an unbelievable pro, the performance is so precise that he manages to stand out from the rest of the supremely talented cast. The episode that recreates the Golden Globes is a huge highlight for Sal after, due to a silly misunderstanding, every single winner starts jokingly thanking Sal Saperstein — even Adam Scott, playing himself in a fun cameo — making Matt go absolutely insane. Barinholtz is one of the funniest guys in Hollywood, and thanks to "The Studio," people are finally figuring that out.

Usually, when actors play themselves, it's nothing more than a fun little lark — but Zoë Kravitz as herself on "The Studio" is truly a sight to behold for so many reasons. The former "High Fidelity" star plays herself throughout the back half of the show's first season, originally appearing in that aforementioned Golden Globes episode as a director and star of the fictional hit "Open," produced by Catherine O'Hara's Patty Leigh. The dynamic between Kravitz and Seth Rogen's fictional studio head Matt Remick is established immediately when he develops an unhealthy fixation on her thanking him if she wins, but the true joy of Kravitz's self-parody comes in the season's penultimate episode, "CinemaCon," where Kravitz, attending a party hosted by Matt and his crew, ingests an astounding amount of hallucinogenic mushrooms without knowing.

It takes a lot to lampoon your own image, and Kravitz, one of the coolest girls in Hollywood, is more than happy to make fun of herself ... and anyone who watched "The Studio" is eternally grateful. As the "fictional" Zoë, Kravitz goes absolutely bonkers during her extended trip — a notable moment is when she perches on a hotel nightstand and insists she can't possibly get down to ground level because she's far too tall — and we won't spoil the conclusion of her in-universe CinemaCon appearance, but it is beautifully insane. There were a lot of great comedic performances in 2025; Kravitz's, as herself, was one of the very best.

Every time that showrunner Mike White wants to film a new season of his anthology series "The White Lotus," he assembles an Avengers-level all-star cast and ships them to a gorgeous and luxurious far-flung locale; in season 3 of the series, he brings his audience and his characters to the fictional White Lotus resort in Thailand. That includes Laurie Duffy (Carrie Coon), a recently divorced lawyer on a girls trip with her wealthy actress friend Jaclyn Lemon (Michelle Monaghan) and their third bestie Kate Bohr (Leslie Bibb). From the second the three women show up to the resort, there's obvious underlying animosity amongst the threesome, and the way they all speak to each other through veiled barbs is genuinely fascinating (and all too real for anybody who's ever been part of a complicated friend dynamic).

Monaghan, Bibb, and Coon are all phenomenal — there's a face that Bibb makes when the other two women inquire about her recent voting record that immediately entered the reaction GIF hall of fame — but Coon is simultaneously one of Hollywood's most beloved and underrated performers, and she deserves her flowers for playing Laurie, a woman looking to cut loose in Thailand who ends up delivering one of White's most profound and devastating monologues. Coon has been a pinch hitter since her supporting role in "Gone Girl" back in 2011, and she's genuinely phenomenal on "The White Lotus" as Laurie, who desperately needs some excitement ... and finds it in all the wrong places.