Six Shows We're Ready To Have Mess Our Minds Up In 2025

There isn’t an award for this (although there should be), but the best TV shows of the year are typically the ones that leave our minds disoriented and shocked, but always entertained. Whether it was the shifting alliances and weaponized duplicity of Shōgun, Gambit’s shocking death in X-Men ‘97, or Baby Reindeer’s penchant for delving to unseen depths of abuse and psychosis, 2024's best shows were mindfucks. And it’s looking like 2025 will be no different.

To prepare you and your precious brain for the onslaught of twists, cliffhangers, and alien explosions, we have a quick guide to six shows we can’t wait to have fuck up our minds in the best ways possible.  

Release date: February 6

Invincible has pulverized our senses with superhero collective slaughtering, humans imprisoned in murderous cyborg bodies, and an orgy full of clones, and they aren’t pulling their punches in the third season. After Mark Grayson (Steven Yeun), aka Invincible, crosses a moral boundary by killing Angstrom Levy (Sterling K. Brown) in a multiversal melee for the ages, we may finally be in for his full power to be put on display in Invincible’s typical bloody manner. By the looks of the trailer, which shows Invincible mangling a humanoid cyborg and his angrily retaliating against his “boss” Cecil Stedman (Walton Goggins), we’re likely in for feats of superhuman brutality only achievable in animation crafted by some severely disturbed writers.

Release date: January 17

Boredom has never been more suspenseful than it is in the blindingly white halls of Lumon on Apple TV+’s standout series Severance. We all spent an entire season trying to reprogram our brains to understand a world where humans can sever their consciousness between work and personal life. Then, we spent the next two years trying to figure out why a company that severs people’s minds is herding goats, what happens to severed workers when they’re “fired,” and what the hell these people are actually doing for work. We previewed the second season, and there will be no shortage of tantalizing oddities (and goats) as the the severed workers plot a revolt against Lumon after being awakened in the real world at the end of Season 1. Just as we get answers to questions about the aftermath of the Innies’ awakenings and the complicated four-way relationship between Innie and Outie Mark (Adam Scott) with Innie Helly (Britt Lower) and Outie Ms. Casey (Dichen Lachman), we get bombarded with more questions about the perils of reintegration and why there is a child working on the severed floor.

Release date: April 2025

Watching deadly mutated humans hunt survivors down using the quietest of sounds is terrifying enough before you remember that The Last Of Us is based on a video game series and that the acclaimed HBO show hasn’t touched the saddest parts of yet. At the end of the first season, Joel (Pedro Pascal) saves Ellie (Bella Ramsey) from the Fireflies, a resistance group who was going to kill her in the hopes of devising a cure for the plague that has ravaged humanity. He later lies to her about what happened, saying that it simply didn’t work and sparing her the tiny detail that he killed them all. If the second season follows The Last of Us II’s story (and, in broad strokes at least, it likely will), well, let’s just say that we’re in for even more harrowing and devastating events. The trailer for season two hints at the infected evolving into weather-resistant monstrosities looking to invade Joel and Ellie’s safe haven of Jackson, and posing an existential threat that will surely break our hearts and minds.

Release date: N/A

First off, rest in peace to Chance Perdomo, the late actor who played Andre Anderson in Gen V, and who passed away from a motorcycle accident four months after the first season ended. While we won’t get to see the full, violent extent of his metal manipulation, the show has plenty of mind-bending absurdism to go around. The show that had a superhuman explode someone’s penis by redirecting all of the blood in his body to his groin has a lot more of The Boys universe to show, with no element more intriguing than the virus developed in Gen V with the demonstrable power to mutilate and kill superpowered folks, or “supes.” The last season ended with a school-wide massacre at Godolkin University between supes and normal humans, and the aftermath will likely expose us to the full scope of supe miscreants from that school.

Release date: March 4

Charlie Cox, who plays Matt Murdock (aka Daredevil) in the Daredevil franchise, has said the Disney+ series Daredevil: Born Again will be darker than much of the original Netflix series. Remember, the Netflix series had Daredevil famously beating up droves of bad guys in a dark corridor in what is still one of the most iconic moments in any Marvel TV series or film. To get darker than that would really require them to up the ante, and Wilson Fisk (Vincent D’Onofrio) asking Murdock if all that’s left of him “the devil of Hell’s Kitchen” in the trailer makes me believe that the show will be delving deep into the character’s dark side. Plus, we still need to know what happened to him after Thanos snapped away half of the planet, which will surely have us trying to rearrange the MCU timeline in our heads.

Release date: N/A

In Rian Johnson’s remarkable mystery-of-the-week Peacock show, Charlie Cale (Natasha Lyonne) is a former casino worker on the run from her criminal ex-bosses after she uncovers murder and corruption at the casino. One caveat: She has an uncanny ability to detect when someone is lying, a skill that has her solving crimes while on her escape route. What really messes with viewers’ minds is not only trying to figure out how certain crimes were committed, but how seemingly disparate characters and plot points will be meshed together in her big reveal near the end of each episode. She once solved an elderly man’s murder in a retirement facility by detecting the bullshit in two unassuming old ladies who had been plotting this murder because the elderly man got them both arrested during their younger, militant days as anti-government revolutionaries who plotted bombings and assassinations. We may not know exactly when the second season comes, but we sure as hell know that it’ll be full of mysteries the smartest viewer can’t crack. (That won’t stop us from trying, though.)