Welcome to the Sunday special. I'm Gilbert Cruz. We're spending this last several episodes of the year looking back on some of the big cultural moments of 2025. And today we are talking about TV. Here with me to consider some of the best shows of the year, as well as some of the most

popular ones, are two of my colleagues who watch a ton of TV.

Jim Panoazik is our chief television critic here at the Times.

Pleasure to have you back with us, Jim.

Yeah, it's a pleasure to be back so far.

And Alexis Siloski is one of our culture reporters.

Happy to have you also back here with us again, Alexis.

I could not be more delighted.

I can tell.

Okay, so let's start out with a little, little fill in the blank exercise, which I'm asking everyone to do.

For TV, 2025 was a blank year. Fill in the blank.

It was a year of mild improvement, I think. Beautiful. For my standpoint. Okay.

When I put together my, you know, end of the year best lists, most years it is a wrestling match trying to eliminate the last few things

to get the list down to 10 or some approximation of that. I would say last year, not to crap on

2024 too much, but was one of the few years where, you know, I just, I basically had 10 and I was good.

And one of them was the Olympics.

You know, this year, I think we were, I'm not going to say that it was just a blow the doors off year for television.

But it was a much more normal distribution of going down to the wire and cutting things off the list.

So that's a positive note for me.

I think it is.

I think it is.

Alexis, you do not put together, or you don't publish at least, a best of the year list.

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