Top 3 TV shows of 2025, ranked by USA TODAY critic Kelly Lawler
Kelly Lawler reveals the best TV shows of 2025, including ‘The Pit’ and ‘Adolescence.’
It’s time to say goodbye to a year filled with late-night arguments, movie theater chaos, and celebrities who literally left the planet.
The year 2025 has been filled with pop culture stories flying far outside the entertainment news world, whether it’s a celebrity engagement breaking the internet or a jeans ad that probably popped up during Thanksgiving dinner.
It was also a year that brought further instability to an entertainment industry that can no longer endure as it continues to recover from the coronavirus pandemic.
With the new year just around the corner, these were the pop culture moments that defined 2025, for better or worse.
Kendrick Lamar gives an emotional performance during the Super Bowl halftime show
If you rewatched Kendrick Lamar’s Super Bowl Halftime Show on YouTube over 30 times throughout 2025, you’re not alone.
Lamar and Drake’s epic war made a roundup of the pop culture-defining moments of 2024, but the rapper is back on the list thanks to his emotional performance at February’s Super Bowl. It felt like a fitting finale to last year’s drama.
A visually stunning set that included surprise appearances by Samuel L. Jackson and Serena Williams, in which Lamar performed “Not Like Us” and gleefully implied that his mortal enemy was a pedophile in front of more than 100 million viewers, was a level of lameness most of us can only dream of.
Midnight Crisis: Kimmel suspended, Colbert suspended
The cancellations and suspension of late-night programming here have made this year one of the most significant in the struggling genre’s history.
When CBS canceled “The Late Show” in July, it was a little like when Pope Benedict XVI resigned in 2013. The news made me think, “Wait, can something like that happen?”
“The Late Show” became a TV show that was simply expected to outlast all of us, but given its impending demise, Democrats still question whether the move was politically motivated. (CBS parent company Paramount claims this was a purely financial decision.)
But no one could have predicted that it wouldn’t even become the biggest late-night news story of the year. Just two months later, in September, ABC made international news by suspending Jimmy Kimmel for his comments about Charlie Kirk’s murder, a move that followed public pressure from FCC Commissioner Brendan Carr.
Kimmel’s return to the airwaves after widespread outcry, including from people like Ted Cruz who politically disagree with the cartoon, was a victory for free speech advocates. But the fact remains that serious questions remain about the viability of late-night television.
Sean ‘Diddy’ Combs convicted and sentenced to prison
Sean “Diddy” Combs’ empire collapsed in 2024, and although he was arrested in September of the same year, 2025 brought an end to the rapper’s legal saga.
More than 30 witnesses testified in a federal criminal trial between May and July as prosecutors advanced their case that one of the most influential hip-hop artists in history ran a criminal enterprise and engaged in sex trafficking for years. Combs denied the charges.
In the end, he received a mixed verdict. Combs was convicted of a lesser charge of transportation to engage in prostitution, but was acquitted of the more serious charges of extortion and sex trafficking. He was sentenced to approximately four years in prison and is scheduled to be released by his 59th birthday in 2028.
Katy Perry flies into space with Gayle King
Katy Perry’s 2025 sounds more like a Mad Libs look back at the year: She started it as an astronaut and ended it with a relationship with a former world leader.
In April, Perry joined Gayle King and an all-female crew in Blue Origin’s latest Star Trek, sparking a backlash on social media, with critics accusing her of being out of line and questioning whether a short 10-minute jaunt into Earth’s orbit counted as “going into space.”
Perhaps that’s why Perry’s recent romance with former Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau hasn’t made as much headlines. When it came to strange news, there was nowhere for Perry to go but back to Earth.
Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce engaged
Few ten words blow up every group chat in America as thoroughly as the words, “My English teacher and my gym teacher are getting married.”
That’s the now-famous caption for Taylor Swift’s iconic Instagram post announcing her engagement to Travis Kelsey on Aug. 26, prompting an avalanche of “Love Story” puns as entertainment reporters everywhere rushed back from their lunch breaks.
Also planned for 2026: A ceremony likely to be America’s closest thing to a royal wedding.
A new Superman takes flight
This is a statement that movie fans would have never believed a decade ago: The highest-grossing superhero movie of the year was released by DC.
The comic book brand tried for years to catch up to Marvel in terms of box office revenue and overall cultural impact, but failed spectacularly. So in 2022, Warner Bros. made a big bet that James Gunn was the man who could right the ship and revive the brand. This year, it paid off, with the arrival of “Superman,” which manages to introduce not only a new representation of the titular hero, but also an entirely new shared world.
The movie wasn’t a huge hit, but it surpassed all three Marvel movies released in 2025. This is the first time in 17 years that the top-grossing superhero movie of the year has belonged to DC, since 2008’s The Dark Knight (excluding 2020, when theaters were closed and Marvel didn’t release a movie). Among critics and audiences alike, Superman received a rapturous reception and gave DC a much-needed boost.
Some of Marvel’s recent films have underperformed at the box office, but if DC can keep up the momentum, there could be a new leader when it comes to superhero movies. And we’re not just talking about crypto.
“KPop Demon Hunters” becomes a cultural phenomenon
If you’re a parent whose “Golden” topped Spotify rap, you can probably tell me that “KPop Demon Hunter” is one of the most talked about movies of the year.
Few expected this animated musical to become such a cultural phenomenon. However, the film was such a huge hit that when it was released in theaters in August, many saw it become the first Netflix film to top the box office, as it had already been streaming at home for two months at that point.
Just when you thought “Wicked: For Good” had next year’s original Oscar locked in, the Huntr/X Girls are rising, rising, rising.
Gen Z turns ‘Minecraft Movie’ into modern-day ‘Rocky Horror’
Movie theater workers won’t soon forget the weekend of April 4, when hordes of children and teens turned their workplaces into popcorn-filled battlefields.
When “The Minecraft Movie” hit theaters, young fans of the video game treated it less like a movie and more like an interactive social event, including screaming during the “Chicken Jockey” scene and throwing popcorn in the air. This scene became a meme before the movie was released.
This brings Minecraft’s worldwide box office to nearly $1 billion, making it one of the highest-grossing films of the year and certainly the start of a massive new franchise.
Indeed, the Chicken Jockey prank was definitely disrespectful to the theater employees who had to sweep up all the thrown popcorn, not to mention the general public who prefer to watch movies without live chickens in their theaters (yes, that actually happened).
But at a time when Hollywood is hell-bent on keeping young people in the movies by any means necessary, beggars can’t choose their movies.
‘South Park’ launches nuclear attack on President Trump
Last September, South Park creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone told Vanity Fair that they would avoid covering President Donald Trump when the show returns. “I don’t know what more I can 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 the bomb with a brutal and shockingly vulgar Trump parody, depicting Trump as a skinny bully with a small penis who is literally in bed with Satan. This largely appeared to be an effort by Parker and Stone to prove their independence as the merger between Comedy Central’s parent company Paramount and Skydance requires approval from the Trump administration.
But even months after the merger was finalized, Parker and Stone remained on their toes. Since then, every episode has focused on Trump and members of his administration, who now receive more screen time than many of the show’s longtime supporting characters.
This is a very notable development for a series that has been accused of perpetuating political disengagement by suggesting that both sides of an issue are equally bad.
Morgan Wallen says, “Take me to God’s kingdom” after sudden exit from ‘SNL’
Morgan Wallen provided one of the most versatile memes of the year when she posted a photo of her airplane on Instagram and wrote the caption, “Take me to God’s kingdom.”
The comments came shortly after Wallen appeared as a musical guest on “Saturday Night Live” in late March, breaking tradition by abruptly leaving the stage in full view of the cameras during the show’s bedtime period. Normally musical guests would stay there for an extra minute until the credits rolled and the cast members hugged each other, but Warren headed for the exit as quickly as humanly possible.
“SNL” fans were outraged by Wallen’s disrespectful behavior, while fans of the country singer who can’t stand the show were overjoyed. But we can all agree that “Take me to God’s kingdom” are the perfect words to post on Instagram right before heading to an IMAX screening of “One Battle After Another.”
When the word eugenics appears in a news article about a jeans ad, it usually means something is wrong.
Sidney Sweeney’s American Eagle Jeans commercial became an unlikely cultural flashpoint this summer, with critics claiming it was tone-deaf to portray an attractive white woman with blonde hair and blue eyes as the face of good genes (or, as the pun-filled campaign actually put it, “good jeans”).
At the time, the “Euphoria” star’s PR strategy was to remain silent and focus on promoting Oscar nominee “Christie.” But in the end, the boxing drama garnered little attention during awards season and was a box office disaster. By December, Sweeney issued a statement condemning the hate and restoring her silence, and days later her snub at the Golden Globes capped off the year.
