Tag best Drama shows

Doctor Who (2023)

The Disney era handed Russell T Davies the biggest budget in the show's history and Ncuti Gatwa the keys to the TARDIS, and the result is the most confident Doctor Who has looked in a decade. After three 60th anniversary specials gave David Tennant a victory lap, The Church on Ruby Road properly introduced Gatwa's Fifteenth Doctor on Christmas 2023: a flashier, flirtier, more emotionally open Doctor with Millie Gibson's found family orphan Ruby Sunday alongside. The production upgrade is immediate, with cinematography and score that finally match the ambition the scripts always had.

Angel

The Buffy spin off moved the vampire with a soul to Los Angeles and quietly became a different, better show than most people remember. Where Buffy was about surviving growing up, Angel is about a grown man trying to atone for a century of atrocities and learning that redemption is not a finish line but a job. Angel Investigations, a detective agency that helps the helpless, gives the series a noir spine Buffy never had, and the early case of the week years use the city's neon rot far better than most LA dramas.

Buffy the Vampire Slayer

Joss Whedon's high school horror riff did something television had not managed before: it took the dumbest possible premise, a cheerleader kills vampires, and used it as scaffolding for the most literate genre drama of its era. Buffy Summers moves to Sunnydale, a town built on a Hellmouth, and over seven seasons the show treats every monster as a metaphor for something real: first love that literally leaves a scar, the person you sleep with turning into a monster after, a mother's death that no slayer strength can fix. The gimmick was monsters, the subject was growing up.

Brilliant Minds

Zachary Quinto plays Dr. Oliver Wolf, a brilliant, openly gay neurologist loosely inspired by Oliver Sacks, who loses his hospital job for unconventional methods and starts a practice with a team of young residents at Bronx General, treating the strangest cases in medicine. The premise is House by way of The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, and the show commits fully to the case format: face blindness, alien hand syndrome, a woman who cannot recognize her own daughter, each treated as a puzzle with a human attached.

Doctor Odyssey

Ryan Murphy put Joshua Jackson on a cruise ship as Dr. Max Bankman, the new on board physician for the luxury liner The Odyssey, with Phillipa Soo and Sean Teale as his medical team, and the result is the most gloriously unhinged network drama of the season. Every week brings a themed cruise, singles week, plastic surgery week, a Halloween voyage, and every week the ship's compliment of medical catastrophes escalates from implausible to frankly supernatural. There is a throuple. There are multiple mass casualty events. The season ends on a twist about the nature of reality itself that made national news.

Sterling Point

Megan Park, who directed one of the best recent teen films in My Old Ass, created this eight episode coming of age drama for Prime Video, with Josh Schwartz and Stephanie Savage of Gossip Girl pedigree producing and Margot Robbie's LuckyChap aboard. Ella Rubin leads as Annie Jacobson, a 17 year old New Yorker who inherits a remote Canadian island from the estranged grandfather she was never allowed to meet, and travels north with her twin brother, played by Keen Ruffalo, and their adoptive father, played by Jay Duplass, to untangle why her mother cut the family off.

Furious

Elizabeth Meriwether, the creator of New Girl and the devastating Dying for Sex, takes an odd swerve into serial killer territory with this eight episode series loosely inspired by the 1987 thriller Black Widow. Emmy Rossum plays Alice Black, an FBI agent hunting a calculating female serial killer, played with icy charisma by Lola Petticrew, and the show's central gambit is structural: it tells the story from both sides, giving the killer's backstory and reasoning nearly equal weight, until the pursuit starts to look like a twisted courtship.

Best Medicine

FOX's American remake of Doc Martin transplants the grumpy surgeon to the fishing village of Port Wenn, and the results are exactly as mixed as every transatlantic comedy transplant before it. Josh Charles plays Dr. Martin Best, a brilliant Boston surgeon who flees to the small coastal town where he spent childhood summers, only to discover he has developed a phobia of blood, which is a problem for a country doctor. The premise survives the move; the tone is the question.

American Hostage

Jon Hamm finally gets the role his Mad Men gravitas has been circling: Fred Heckman, a beloved Indianapolis radio reporter who ends up on the wrong end of his own microphone when an armed man, Tony Kiritsis, takes him hostage live on air in 1977. Based on the scripted podcast and the real case, the eight episode MGM+ series turns a three day standoff into a period piece about media saturation, police incompetence, and a kidnapper who understood television better than the people covering him.

East of Eden

The Early Word: Netflix is betting big on Steinbeck. Zoe Kazan, whose grandfather Elia Kazan directed the 1955 film, adapts the full novel as a seven episode limited series, and the big selling point is structural: the 1955 movie only covered the book's second half, so the Trask family's founding generations, the Civil War arc, and the full Cathy story have never been filmed. Florence Pugh plays Cathy Ames, literature's most chilling sociopath, with Christopher Abbott as Adam, Mike Faist as Charles, and Hoon Lee as the family's cook and moral center Lee, a role whitewashed out of every previous adaptation.