Top 3 TV shows of 2025 ranked by USA TODAY critic Kelly Lawler
Kelly Lawler reveals the best TV shows of 2025 including “The Pitt” and “Adolescence.”
It’s time to bid farewell to a year marked by late-night controversies, movie theater chaos and celebrities literally leaving planet Earth.
2025 was filled with the kind of pop culture stories that travel far outside entertainment news circles, whether it was an internet-breaking celebrity engagement or a jeans ad that may well have come up during Thanksgiving dinner.
It was also a year that brought even more instability to an entertainment industry that can hardly stand any more of it amid its ongoing recovery from the COVID-19 pandemic.
With a new year in sight, these were the pop culture moments that, for better or worse, came to define 2025.
Kendrick Lamar delivers an electric Super Bowl halftime show performance
If you’ve revisited Kendrick Lamar’s Super Bowl halftime show upward of 30 times on YouTube throughout 2025, you’re not alone.
Lamar’s epic war with Drake made our roundup of defining pop culture moments for 2024, and the rapper is back on the list thanks to his electric Super Bowl performance in February, which felt like a fitting finale to last year’s drama.
With surprise appearances by Samuel L. Jackson and Serena Williams, the visually stunning set led up to Lamar performing “Not Like Us” and gleefully insinuating his mortal enemy is a pedophile in front of more than 100 million viewers, a level of petty most of us could only dream of.
Late-night in crisis: Kimmel suspended, Colbert canceled
With late-night shows being canceled here and suspended there, this was one of the most consequential years in the struggling genre’s history.
In July, CBS’ cancellation of “The Late Show” was a bit like when Pope Benedict XVI resigned in 2013: It was a piece of news that made us ask, “Wait, that’s something that can happen?”
“The Late Show” had become a television institution that one simply assumed would outlast us all, and its impending end still has Democrats questioning whether the move was politically motivated. (CBS’ parent company, Paramount, has maintained that it was purely a financial decision.)
But what no one could have guessed was that this wouldn’t even be the biggest late-night story of the year. Just two months later, ABC in September made international news with its temporary suspension of Jimmy Kimmel over comments about Charlie Kirk’s killing, a move that followed public pressure from the head of the FCC, Brendan Carr.
Kimmel’s return to the air following widespread outcry, including from people like Ted Cruz who disagree with the comic politically, was a win for free-speech advocates. But that doesn’t change the fact that serious questions about the viability of late-night television remain.
Sean ‘Diddy’ Combs is convicted, sentenced to prison
Sean “Diddy” Combs‘ empire came crumbling down in 2024, leading up to his arrest that September, but 2025 provided the rapper’s legal saga with its conclusion.
From May to July, over 30 witnesses testified in a federal criminal trial as prosecutors laid out their case that one of the most influential hip-hop artists in history operated a criminal enterprise for years and engaged in sex trafficking. Combs denied the allegations.
Ultimately, he received a mixed verdict: Combs was convicted on the lesser charges of transportation to engage in prostitution, but acquitted on the more serious charges, racketeering and sex trafficking. He was sentenced to about four years in prison and is scheduled to be a free man before his 59th birthday in 2028.
Katy Perry jets off to space with Gayle King
Katy Perry’s 2025 sounds more like something out of a year-in-review Mad Libs: She started it as an astronaut and ended it in a relationship with a former world leader.
In April, Perry joined Gayle King and an all-female crew on Blue Origin’s latest star trek, sparking social media backlash as critics accused her of being out of touch and questioned whether a brief, 10-minute jaunt to Earth’s outer orbit even counts as “going to space.”
Maybe that’s why Perry’s recent romance with former Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau hasn’t made as much of a splash as it could have: When it comes to bizarro news items, for Perry, there was nowhere to go but back down to Earth.
Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce get engaged
Rarely have 10 words so thoroughly blown up every group chat in America than these: “Your English teacher and your gym teacher are getting married.”
That was the now famous caption to Taylor Swift’s iconic Instagram post on Aug. 26 announcing her engagement to Travis Kelce, causing entertainment reporters everywhere to sprint back from their lunch break and sparking an avalanche of “Love Story” puns.
Still in store for 2026: A ceremony that looks set to be the closest thing America can have to a royal wedding.
A new Superman takes flight
Here’s a statement movie fans wouldn’t have believed a decade ago: the highest-grossing superhero film of the year was released by DC.
The comic book brand spent years trying, and spectacularly failing, to catch up with Marvel in terms of box office grosses and overall cultural impact. So in 2022, Warner Bros. made a big bet that James Gunn was the man who could right the ship and revive the brand. It paid off this year with “Superman,” which successfully introduced not only a new rendition of the title hero, but a whole new shared universe.
While the movie wasn’t a monster hit, it outperformed all three of Marvel’s 2025 releases. This marks the first time in 17 years, since 2008’s “The Dark Knight,” that the top-grossing superhero movie of the year belongs to DC (not counting 2020, when theaters shut down and Marvel didn’t put out any movies). Among critics and audiences alike, “Superman” also received an enthusiastic enough reception to give DC a much-needed boost in enthusiasm.
After several of Marvel’s recent movies have underwhelmed at the box office, if DC can keep up the momentum, there may be a new top dog in town when it comes to superhero films. And we’re not just talking about Krypto.
‘KPop Demon Hunters’ becomes a cultural phenomenon
Any parent whose Spotify Wrapped was topped by “Golden” could tell you one of the buzziest movies of the year was “KPop Demon Hunters.”
Few were anticipating the animated musical would become the cultural phenomenon that it did. But the movie was such a smash that when it got a theatrical release in August, by which point it had already been streaming at home for two months, so many people turned out that it became the first Netflix film to top the box office.
Just when “Wicked: For Good” thought it had next year’s original song Oscar locked, the Huntr/X girls are going up, up, up.
Gen Z turns ‘A Minecraft Movie’ into a modern ‘Rocky Horror’
Movie theater employees won’t soon forget the weekend of April 4, when legions of kids and teens turned their workplaces into popcorn-filled warzones.
As “A Minecraft Movie” hit theaters, young fans of the video game treated it less like a film and more like an interactive social event by screaming and tossing popcorn in the air during the “chicken jockey” scene, which became a meme before the movie was even out.
This likely helped propel “Minecraft” to nearly $1 billion at the global box office, making it one of the year’s highest-grossing films and surely the start of a major new franchise.
Sure, the chicken jockey shenanigans were arguably disrespectful to the theater employees who had to sweep up all that tossed popcorn, not to mention anyone who generally prefers to watch a movie without the presence of a live chicken in theater (Yes, that really happened).
But at a time when Hollywood is desperate to keep young people engaged in movies by any means necessary, beggars can’t be choosers.
‘South Park’ goes nuclear on President Trump
Last September, “South Park” creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone told Vanity Fair they planned to avoid covering President Donald Trump when the show returned. “I don’t know what more we could possibly say about Trump,” Parker said.
It’s safe to say they had a change of heart.
In July, the show’s Season 27 premiere dropped a nuclear bomb with a brutal and shockingly vulgar Trump parody, which depicted him as a thin-skinned bully with a small penis who is literally in bed with Satan. It seemed largely like Parker and Stone’s effort to prove their independence amid a merger between Comedy Central’s parent company, Paramount, and Skydance, which required Trump administration approval.
But even months after the merger went through, Parker and Stone haven’t let up: Every single episode since then has been heavily focused on Trump and members of his administration, who have now gotten more screen time than many of the show’s longtime supporting characters.
For a series that has been accused of perpetuating political disengagement by suggesting both sides of an issue are equally bad, it has been quite a turn to behold.
Morgan Wallen says ‘get me to God’s country’ after abrupt ‘SNL’ exit
Morgan Wallen provided the most versatile meme of the year when he posted a photo of his plane on Instagram and wrote the caption, “Get me to God’s country.”
The comment came shortly after Wallen was the musical guest on “Saturday Night Live” in late March and broke from tradition by abruptly walking off the stage, in full view of the camera, during goodnights. Typically, the musical guest sticks around for another minute as the credits roll and the cast members hug each other, but Wallen headed for the exit as soon as humanly possible.
“SNL” fans were angry with Wallen for the disrespectful gesture, while the country singer’s fans who can’t stand the show were thrilled. But everyone could agree that “get me to God’s country” was the perfect string of words to post on Instagram right before heading to an IMAX screening of “One Battle After Another.”
When the word eugenics appears in news articles about your jeans ad, something has generally gone awry.
Sydney Sweeney’s American Eagle jeans commercial became an unlikely cultural flashpoint over the summer, with critics arguing it was tone deaf for the ad to present an attractive, white woman with blonde hair and blue eyes as the face of good genes (or “good jeans,” as the pun-filled campaign actually said).
At the time, the “Euphoria” star’s PR strategy was to remain silent and focused on promoting her Oscar hopeful, “Christy.” But in the end, the boxing drama gained little traction in awards season and was a box office disaster. By December, Sweeney came out with a statement condemning hate and walking back her silence, and her Golden Globes snub days later was the cap to the year.