Blog: Telly What I Have Watched
Last week I discussed books what I read in 2025, so today I thought I might as well do the OTHER big list of Cultural Phenomena What I Have Enjoyed and look at TELLY.
I have a LIST of what telly series I watch because here in the space future of 2026 there is so MUCH of it that it's hard to keep track, so in recent times i have done myself LISTS of what's available and then noted what I thought of them. This is particularly handy in these times of multiple media vendors because it means I can look at the shows I PLAN to watch and say "right, those are ALL on e.g. Paramount Plus so I will get that and watch THE LOT in the space of a month". This is immensely satisfying and also probably a strike at the very heart of capitalism, so you can thank me for it come the revolution.
Anyway, using this list we can divvy up my 2025 viewing into specific categories, starting with Stuff Everybody Was Watching. As I have said many times before, I LOVE the fact that these days I can usually watch whatever it is that Everybody Is Watching if I want to by simply getting a monthly subscription to a channel, as opposed to the distant past when you needed a satellite or, earlier still, when you needed NOT to live in the Anglia Television region. I watched all sorts of things like this, including "Anthology" (LOVELY), "Black Doves" (FUN) , "Mitchell & Webb" (also FUN) and "Only Murders In The Building" (increasingly silly but FUN too). The BEST of these shows that everybody was going on about though were "Andor", which was just flipping BRILLIANT and recently "Stranger Things", ESPECIALLY the Very Long Ending which was GRATE and everyone who says not can frankly keep it to themselves.
Next we have Sci-Fi Franchise TV Shows which can be divided up into DOCTOR WHO and STAR TREK. My Doctor Who list includes "The Rig", which wasn't particularly good but I kept watching because it felt like Peter Capaldi's Doctor was going to turn up soon, and "The Devil's Hour" which DID have him in it and was also SCARY. Actual Doctor Who was largely All Right I thought, although both the new series and also "The War Between the Land And The Sea" felt like they would have benefited from having endings that made ANY kind of sense.
Star Trek shows were overall BETTER I think - "Strange New Worlds" is just bloody lovely, and "Lower Decks" is the MOST STAR TREK EVER. "Section 31" was a load of old rubbish and so I only watched the first ten minutes of it, which I believe was for the best. Similarly I watched "Alien: Earth" which would have added a whole other Sci-Fi Franchise, except that I got through two episodes and realisd I was BORED so stopped.
Closely related to this categorty is SUPERHERO shows. COR, it is still amazing to me that such shows EVEN EXIST, and especially that most of them are DEAD GOOD. I must admit that I skipped to the end of "Ironheart" to see what happened because it was a bit boring, but this was more than made up for by "Marvel Zombies", which was FANTASTIC but seems to have passed most people by, "Daredevil" (FAB), "Peacemaker" (EMOTIONAL) and "Gen V", which was also ace, especially because I guessed the big twist about two episodes early. WELL DONE ME!
Other than that my viewing featured a couple of SUBTITLED SCI-FI shows because I am dead sophisticated. "The Eternaut" is basically "What if some Old Boys were in the apocalypse?" and was dead good and "THe Dark" is basically... er... actually, there is nothing basic about it and I needed an ACTUAL SHEET of all the characters to understand what was going on, but was still worth it.
There were plenty of other shows and films watched OBVS but I think that is more than enough to be going on with. It was a GRATE year of telly all round though, and I look forward to more SQUARE EYED activity to come. Telly is BRILLO!
posted 10/1/2026 by MJ Hibbett