I don’t watch a lot of television or movies, which is probably not the smartest thing to admit as a person whose job is literally to watch television and movies. But there’s work viewing, which is essentially consumption as a sport — deadlines, analysis, strategy — and then there’s pleasure viewing — relaxation, leisure, curiosity — and I do a lot of the former but almost none of the latter.
This is a truth that other parents try to warn you about before you have children but you don’t believe them because it sounds too sad: When you have young kids, you do not even want to get caught up on prestige dramas after their bedtime; you want to load the dishwasher and then eat the secret cookies that you told your kids did not exist.
So what was the best thing to watch in 2025? I have no idea. What was going on in your life in 2025? Where was your headspace? How was your cookie supply?
“Severance” was sublime, but in a time of hiring freezes and federal workforce reductions, maybe you didn’t want to escape to a fictionalized world of the ultimate work stress. “Dying for Sex” looked great, if you had several spare hours to spend sobbing uncontrollably.
Doctors will tell you that the best exercise routine is the routine you’ll actually stick to. There’s got to be a television corollary to that: If a show is brilliant but you can’t get through it, is it really brilliant for you?
Good television, like any good art form, should challenge you, stretch your imagination and your empathy, and teach you something new about yourself or the world around you. But sometimes it should also meet you where you are. And sometimes where you are is on the couch, with a load of unfolded towels.
And so, my personal best television show of 2025? The fourth season of “Clarkson’s Farm.”
If you haven’t heard of it — I’m the only person I know who watches this show in real life — it is an Amazon Prime docuseries about British TV host and journalist Jeremy Clarkson and his attempts to domesticate his 1,000 acres of farmland. He works with an acerbic farm manager named Kaleb, a wise crop consultant named Charlie and a homespun stonemason named Gerald. Lisa, Clarkson’s romantic partner, runs the produce shop and pops in every now and then to call Clarkson an “eejit” in her delightful Irish accent.
Every season involves a special project — in Season 4, it’s opening a pub that will sell only British-grown food — but every season is also just about the rhythms of farm life. The timing of the harvest, the birth rate of hogs, the way that livelihoods are made or broken based on weather patterns beyond farmers’ control.
The show is about the backbreaking work that goes into growing our food, and the comeuppance of a man who used to take the labor for granted: Clarkson had outsourced the running of his farm for more than a decade before he decided it couldn’t be that hard to do himself.
But more important, in my house it was also the reliable answer to the perpetual question, what do you want to watch?
The show has minimal swearing, no sex or violence outside of the animal-husbandry kind, and if you miss an episode (or 10 minutes of an episode), you can follow the plot without even hitting pause.
Am I recommending that you watch “Clarkson’s Farm”? No, you might hate it. There’s an entire episode about the moisture content of rapeseed!
Mostly what I’m recommending is that you take recommendations from people like me with a grain of salt. Because there’s what you might watch if you had endless time, patience and mental capacity — if watching things were your job. And then there’s what you actually watch when the day is ending, and you’re the only one who has to live in your brain.
It’s OK to find your “Clarkson’s Farm.”