Tess and Claudia quit! Celia farts! It’s 2025’s most jaw-dropping TV moments

26 décembre 2025 à 12:00

From shock Strictly news to shock flatulence, plus a roundup of the most hilarious news fails, here are the year’s wildest bits of television

One of the most critically acclaimed and most watched shows of the year was Jack Thorne and Stephen Graham’s staggering Adolescence. At the heart of the plot: why did an innocent-looking kid called Jamie (Owen Cooper) commit such a brutal murder? The third episode lifted the lid. As Jamie is interviewed by psychologist Briony (Erin Doherty), we see him slowly reveal that he’s not an innocent kid, but warped by misogyny and a twisted sense of entitlement. The episode was captivating in its acting, but it stayed with you: from Jamie’s sudden switch from vulnerability to manipulation, to the moment the camera zooms in on Briony’s face as she registers who Jamie really is. Horrifying.

Unpublished ‘Tupperware erotica’ novel prompts fierce contest for TV rights

The Guardian

Par :Michael Savage Media editor

26 décembre 2025 à 09:36

Interest in Wet Ink by Abigail Avis is part of a trend for works by female authors among streamers and production companies

A much-hyped novel about a housewife who uses Tupperware parties to secretly smuggle erotic stories to her friends and neighbours is causing a stir in the television world, igniting a fierce bidding contest over the right to adapt it for the small screen.

Wet Ink, a novel by the 33-year-old London-based author Abigail Avis, is not scheduled to be published until the spring 2027, but industry insiders said a fierce auction between six major production companies had already taken place for the TV rights.

‘Bob Odenkirk called to check on me after he saw it’: Rhea Seehorn on the intensity of making hit show Pluribus

The Guardian

Par :Stuart Heritage

26 décembre 2025 à 07:00

The star has hit the big time as a total grump in her new Apple TV drama – no mean feat, given how delightful she is. She talks Lego therapy, freaking out her Better Call Saul co-star and her frustration with the Guardian crossword

Rhea Seehorn has had a hell of a year. For years she had garnered a reputation as a great underappreciated talent, but that has all changed now thanks to Pluribus. A series about one of the only people on Earth not to have their minds taken over by an alien virus, Pluribus is not only critically adored, but recently became Apple TV’s most-watched show. And Seehorn is front and centre through it all. However, today she has bigger things on her mind.

“You gotta tell me how to crack the code,” she pleads before we’ve even said hello. “I’m an avid crossword puzzler, but I cannot beat the Guardian crossword. I cannot crack it, and I need to figure out what the problem is.”

The Lowdown review – Ethan Hawke’s new drama is hilariously poignant

The Guardian

Par :Phil Harrison

26 décembre 2025 à 06:00

The actor plays a ‘truthstorian’ trying to uncover how a powerful man’s death came about. Brace yourself for a hugely funny, all-American wild goose chase!

Lee Raybon (Ethan Hawke) is a “truthstorian”. How to explain that proudly self-applied title? A historian, but also an investigative journalist with an inherent distrust of mainstream narratives? A maker of trouble for trouble’s sake? Or one of those fantasists whose home contains a huge mood board (current mood? Paranoid!) covered with photos of suspects and newspaper clippings and various strands of a conspiracy connected by pieces of string? Raybon actually has one of those. “I’m a very visual thinker,” he says. His scathing former business partner Wendell (Peter Dinklage) sees it differently: “It’s like you read one Oklahoma history book and then made a junior high collage out of it.”

This exchange is typical of the alacrity with which The Lowdown cheerfully undercuts itself. Sterlin Harjo’s Tulsa noir is brilliantly elusive in tone. It allows Raybon, its nominal hero, precious little dignity. Raybon is, in many ways, a ridiculous man. His marriage is in ruins. He puts his sweet, resourceful daughter Francis in danger by mixing business and parenting. He’s one of the least physically imposing renegades you’ll ever meet (“How does an adult with a gun get put in the trunk of a car?” wonders his associate Cyrus at one point). He isn’t Woodward or Bernstein, he’s Jeffrey “The Dude” Lebowski with a sympathetic editor and a political agenda.

Stranger Things season five vol 2 review – the fact that this isn’t unbearable is a miracle

The Guardian

Par :Stuart Heritage

26 décembre 2025 à 02:00

Yes, the kids are now 90% Adam’s apple. Yes, Winona Ryder has been unforgivably sidelined. And yes, some characters are trapped in a room filling with yoghurt. But despite our misgivings, this show still absolutely slaps

Listen, this isn’t the place for newcomers. Stranger Things has been around for almost a decade, and it has spent almost all this time building a mythology that has grown so unwieldy that trying to explain it would cost me my wordcount and my will to live.

However, in fairness, this new penultimate batch of episodes gives it a good try. The content of these new episodes can neatly be split into three categories. There’s action, which is high-octane and fun, and probably why you’re watching. Then there’s dialogue, which is less successful because it causes characters to stop moving and emote at each other, even though they should probably be concentrating on the imminent end of the world.

Kimmel Tells U.K. Viewers ‘Tyranny Is Booming’ in America

NYT

Par :Lizzie Dearden

25 décembre 2025 à 18:51

Chosen by a British TV station to give an “alternative” to the king’s speech, Jimmy Kimmel said it had been a great year for the U.S. “from a fascism perspective.”

A photograph released by Channel 4 for Jimmy’s Kimmel’s “Alternative Christmas Message.”

King Charles calls for reconciliation and unity in Christmas message

The Guardian

Par :Kevin Rawlinson

25 décembre 2025 à 16:10

Monarch urges people to draw strength from community diversity after a year marked by division and violence

King Charles has called for reconciliation after a year of deepening division, saying in his Christmas address that people must find strength in the diversity of their communities to ensure right defeats wrong.

The monarch cited the spirit of the second world war generation, which he said came together to take on the challenge that faced them; displaying qualities he said have shaped both the UK and the Commonwealth.

The SpongeBob Movie: Search for SquarePants review – swashbuckling, snicker-inducing silliness

The Guardian

Par :Mike McCahill

25 décembre 2025 à 08:00

With a turn by Mark Hamill and a saltily suggestive catchphrase for Patrick, the fourth SpongeBob film shows that anything can still happen in Bikini Bottom

Could the students who snickered their way through those first SpongeBob adventures have foreseen the franchise persisting 25 years on, even after metabolising the most lysergic pharmaceuticals? Such longevity is partly down to extra-commercial considerations, in that the series has a capacity for tickling adults’ funny bones – possibly even those now fully grown students – as well as the very young. Though it can’t claim anything quite as unexpected as the David Hasselhoff cameo in 2004’s The SpongeBob SquarePants Movie – not so much a high bar as an unforgettably wonky one – feature four thinks nothing of making Clancy Brown talk like a pirate while handing royalty cheques to Barbra Streisand and Yello. Anything can still happen in Bikini Bottom.

Preceded by a festive short for Paramount’s other weathered babysitters, the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, the new SpongeBob film soon settles into a familiarly goofy groove, its script a PG-rated treatise on the pros and cons of growth. This SpongeBob (once more voiced by Tom Kenny) is now 36 clams high, a source of particular excitement as this will allow him to ride the rollercoaster of his dreams. (One early, trippy laugh: our overexcitable hero’s imagined loop-the-loops.) As in the best contemporary American animation, though, the corkscrew plotting is the real rollercoaster. SB’s quest to obtain the fabled swashbuckler certificate that will prove him a “big guy” brings him into conflict with the Flying Dutchman, voiced by the suddenly ubiquitous Mark Hamill.

‘Wouldn’t it be lovely if I could shut up?’ Meet Lola Petticrew, TV’s most fearless actor

The Guardian

Par :Róisín Lanigan

25 décembre 2025 à 07:00

The award-winning star of Say Nothing and Trespasses refuses to play the fame game when they can fight government inaction. They open up on making amazing TV … and why morals matter more than nice handbags

Few people are less daunted about the prospect of turning 30 than Lola Petticrew. “I used to be so afraid of getting old, and now I just think it’s the best thing ever,” they say. “I feel like I’m just coming into myself. And it feels fucking amazing. I think it’s such a fantastic thing to age – all the shit starts falling away and what you care about becomes more concentrated. I know what I want my life to be now, and I’m pretty stern on it. I don’t have to care about anything else.”

They’re telling me this over Zoom from New York, where Petticrew is shooting Furious, the new show by Elizabeth Meriwether (New Girl, Dying for Sex). Petticrew plays a character who was sex-trafficked as a child and is now out for revenge, tailed by an FBI agent played by Emmy Rossum.

‘I think I was relatively astute in The Traitors!’ Nick Mohammed on magic, TV mayhem and why he turned on Joe Marler

The Guardian

Par :Zoe Williams

24 décembre 2025 à 07:00

He stole our hearts in The Celebrity Traitors – then it all went wrong. The actor and comedian opens up

When I catch up with Nick Mohammed, he is on the set of War, a new HBO series. Full of legal eagles, tech-bro hot shots and ugly divorces, it’s a punchy, slick enterprise, nothing at all like The Celebrity Traitors – except for the high drama, unbearable tension and the fact that Mohammed is reunited with Celia Imrie. Traitors was filmed in April and May and this started in September, so they both knew exactly what had happened in the castle, but were still in their chamber of deadly secrecy. Mainly, Mohammed was happy just to kick about with Imrie again. “She’s wonderful,” he says. “Everything you think she might be, she absolutely is – she’s just brilliant.”

Which brings us to the root of the problem, the answer to the question: “What the hell happened, Nick?” Spoiler alert: we intend to talk about exactly what went down in the most infuriating Traitors final since, well, the last non-celebrity Traitors. If Joe Marler had had his way, he and Nick would have sauntered to victory, Alan Carr’s magisterial fibbing finally unmasked. Instead, Nick’s niggling doubts brought down the ship.

Bold docuseries or dull branding exercise? What The End of an Era really told us about Taylor Swift

The Guardian

Par :Simran Hans

23 décembre 2025 à 18:04

Swift’s six-parter charting her Eras tour began with some riveting revelations – but the drama ebbed away, leaving another piece of mere product for fans

In the behind-the-scenes documentary series Taylor Swift: The End of an Era, the singer Florence Welch ascends to the stage to perform their duet Florida!!! to a crowd of 90,000 people. Welch later reflects on their duet at Wembley Stadium with a mix of awe and bemusement. “Taylor is my friend,” she says. “I know her as this very cosy person, and I came out of that lift and I was like, ‘Oh my God, it’s fucking Taylor Swift.’”

If Swift is a cosy person, The End of an Era – now complete, with its concluding episodes dropping today – is certainly a cosy watch; the sort of lighthearted, low-demand viewing that feels especially welcome in the lazy days leading up to Christmas and stretching towards the new year. Viewers will be familiar with the story. The Eras Tour was great, it tells us. It broke records, burst hearts and boosted the economy. We know she pulled it off. This is only a problem insofar as it means there is almost zero jeopardy in the series, which feels repetitive and thinly stretched over its six hour-long episodes.

‘I wouldn’t answer Stephen Graham’s calls’: Erin Doherty on dreams, danger and ghosting Adolescence’s creator

The Guardian

Par :Emine Saner

23 décembre 2025 à 15:00

She won an Emmy for her electric performance in the Netflix smash hit, but the casting process wasn’t exactly hiccup-free. The actor opens up about a year of success, struggle – and how she nearly became a footballer

For a while, Erin Doherty ignored Stephen Graham’s calls. Not deliberately, she stresses with a laugh. “I’m just really bad at my phone. I’m such a technophobe, and he knew that,” she says. They had made the Disney+ show A Thousand Blows together, in which Doherty plays an East End crime boss in Victorian London, and Graham had talked about an idea he wanted to dramatise, about a teenage boy who is catastrophically radicalised by online misogyny. A couple of months after they’d wrapped A Thousand Blows, Graham and his wife and producing partner, Hannah Walters, kept trying to get in touch. “I was getting voice notes from him and Hannah being like, ‘Erin, pick up your phone!’” Doherty’s girlfriend told her to ring him back and Graham offered her the role in Adolescence. She said yes on the spot, without reading the script.

Since it was screened on Netflix in March, Adolescence has had nearly 150m views. It sparked a huge cultural conversation; it was shown in secondary schools and its creators were invited to Downing Street. Did they have any idea it would become such a phenomenon? “No, and I’m not sure you’re supposed to,” says Doherty when we speak. She is chatty and down-to-earth, even in the year her career went stellar. As well as starring in A Thousand Blows, her role in Adolescence – as Briony Ariston, a psychologist – won her an Emmy for best supporting actress. “But you do know when you’re a part of something that’s good and deserves to be seen, and we knew that about it. I think because it came from such a genuine place, a place of real purity and rawness, it [fed into] the making of it. From day one, it had that electricity.”

The 50 best TV shows of 2025: No 1 – Adolescence

The Guardian

Par :Stuart Heritage

23 décembre 2025 à 11:00

An exceptional cast, astonishing directing and the talent discovery of the decade – not to mention a plot so of-the-moment it was discussed in parliament. This may actually have been perfect TV

• The 50 best TV shows of 2025
• More on the best culture of 2025

How could it be anything else? Adolescence is the Guardian’s best television series of 2025. And you’d have to assume that we’re not the only ones who think so. In any available metric – story, theme, casting, performances, execution, impact – Adolescence has stood head and shoulders over everything else.

So ubiquitous was Adolescence upon release that it would be easy to assume that everyone in the world has watched it. But just in case, a recap. Adolescence is the story of a terrible crime, and how its shock waves ripple out across a community. In episode one, 13-year-old Jamie Miller is arrested on suspicion of murdering a female classmate. In episode two, we follow a pair of police officers through a school, and learn that Jamie was radicalised online. The third is a two-hander between Jamie and his psychologist, in which Jamie’s anger rushes to the surface. The fourth returns to Jamie’s parents, as they question what more they could have done to stop this from happening.

The 50 best TV shows of 2025

The Guardian

Par :Guardian Staff

23 décembre 2025 à 11:00

This year saw everyone from Alan Carr to demon sheep run riot on our screens – but there could only be one winner. Here’s our full countdown of the very best television of 2025
• More on the best culture of 2025

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