Top Best TV-Shows on Netflix

There are a lot of good TV shows on Netflix The bread-and-butter of the Netflix service, however, is its original programming. If you’re trying to figure out exactly which original show to watch next, here’s a great place to start with a look at the 23 best Netflix original series right now
Netflix is currently the hottest streaming service on the planet. Not only is it creating fantastic original shows - Dear White people, Orange is the New Black - it is teaming up with the likes of Marvel to adapt famous superheroes for the small screen. And it’s just bought its own graphic novel IP so expect more original comic-book content soon.

Netflix has a treasure trove of terrific movies that you can stream right now, but if you’re looking for more than just a two-hour commitment, it’s also got a boatload of great TV shows you can delve into to keep yourself occupied for days — or even weeks — on end. If you just finished a good series and need a new one to fill the void, Netflix is the place to go, given the service’s phenomenal mix of classic, current, and original programming. Below, we’ve rounded up the best shows on Netflix right now, so you can binge without having to hunt for the right title.

#1) Dear White People:

One of the best and most underappreciated series on Netflix, Dear White People is a television adaptation that manages to improve exponentially on the movie upon which it is based. From creator Justin Simien, Dear White People is a smart, insightful, thoughtful and at times sharply funny examination of racial politics on a college campus, where it’s more than just black people pitted against white people; it’s woke people vs. those who aren’t woke; black people fighting the system versus black people trying to work within the system; and light-skinned black people versus darker skinned black people. It’s an eye-opening, smartly crafted television show that’s as entertaining as it is important, and it features an outstanding cast, led by Logan Browning.

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#2) The Get Down:

Baz Luhrmann’s (The Great Gatsby, Moulin Rouge) lavish, ambitious and expensive series explores the burgeoning hip-hop scene in the South Bronx in the 1970s. Messy and over the top, Lurhmann threatens to derail The Get Down with a campy bombastic style that overshadows substance. The movie-length pilot episode is too long and unfocussed, but once the series gets going, it improves dramatically. After all the major characters are introduced and the storylines begin to congeal, The Get Down transforms into an eclectic, infectious and delightful 1970’s cultural remix. The storylines don’t always hold, but every episode delivers at least one show-stopping musical number that will stop viewers in their tracks.

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#3) Travelers:

Travelers is a sci-fi series co-produced by Netflix and a Canadian television network Showcase starring Eric McCormick (Will & Grace). It’s a light sci-fi drama about people from hundreds of years in the future whose consciences are sent back to the present day to take the place of others who are already about to die. They’re sent back, a la Terminator, to prevent a bleak future from taking place. In the present day, this group of people are tasked with missions to prevent the future dystopia from happening, but they also have to acclimate into the lives of their host bodies. It is a quintessential Netflix show: Easy-to-binge, madly addictive, fun as hell, and immediately engrossing. While it certainly borrows heavily from other sci-fi shows and movies, it does an excellent job of shaking it up and bringing fresh life to the genre.

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#4) Hemlock-Grove:

Executive produced by Eli Roth, Hemlock Grove was one of Netflix’s first original series. It was also one of the first to end its run. Buoyed by interest in a horror series and Netflix’s new bingewatching model, the first season of Hemlock Grove was popular worldwide, but poor reviews and the slow pacing led to dwindling interest. Hemlock Grove follows the investigation of two brutally murdered teenage girls into the secrets of a town in Pennsylvania (chief among them, the town’s werewolf population). There’s plenty of gore in the series to keep horror hounds satiated, and there is the occasional spark of life. Unfortunately, the interesting moments are few and far between, and what’s left in between is an inscrutable mystery, disjointed storylines, and far too many loose ends. It’s a ridiculous mess, but not ridiculous enough to be consistently entertaining.

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#5) Friends from College:

Friends from College — from husband and wife team, Nicholas Stoller (Forgetting Sarah Marshall, Neighbors) and Francesco Delbanca — is a tonal nightmare. It meshes sitcom television tropes with dark relationship drama with very mixed results. The cast is incredible — Keegan Michael Key, Cobie Smulders, Nat Faxon, Billy Eichner, Annie Parissie, Jae Suh Park, and Fred Savage (with extended cameos from Kate McKinnon and Seth Rogen)– which makes Friends from College very watchable, but the characters are deeply unlikable. It centers on a married couple (Key and Smulders) who move back to New York and end up reuniting with their college friends, one of whom Key’s character has been having a 20-year affair (which they continue even as the wife is trying to have a baby). The catch is that when these 40 year olds get together, they find themselves acting just as they did in college: They drink too much, they’re obnoxious, and old romantic attractions are reignited. There are plenty of laughs, and much of it might feel relatable to the over 30 demographic, but the series doesn’t quite gel. Despite its many problems, I liked it, but viewers’ mileage may vary, depending on their tolerance for privileged adults acting like college kids.

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#6) Ozark: 

Ozark, from part of the team behind Ben Affleck’s The Accountant, is the latest example of what I call stress-watching television. A combination of Breaking Bad and Bloodline, Ozark sees a money launderer (Jason Bateman) and his wife (Laura Linney) move from Chicago to backwoods Missouri in an effort to clean $8 million in three months, lest their entire family be killed by a Mexican drug cartel. It’s not a fun show, and it’s barely entertaining, but like Bloodline, it’s the kind of series where the viewer is anxious to binge through it just to see if the antagonists will survive and how. It’s a seedy, well-written, well-acted series, and Bateman is terrific, but the entire point of Ozark is to put the viewer through the wringer: It’s tense, and stressful, and we don’t watch for resolution; we watch for relief.

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#7) Orange is the New Black: 

jenji Kohan’s knack for social commentary mixed with humor is perfect for a prison story. Orange Is the New Black is as funny as Weeds in its early years, but Kohan has found a way to infuse poignancy to the overall vibe of her stories. The diverse, engaging ensemble cast is chock-full of fan favorites, and while Orange is the New Black traffics in stereotypes, it also challenges and complicates them. The acting is superb, the writing is brilliant, and the storylines are addictive. More importantly, it forces us to root for people who make poor decisions and appreciate the fact that we all make poor decisions because we’re human. The series will make viewers laugh and think, and every once in a while, it will break viewers’ hearts. It is a smart show, but most of all, it is good, in every sense of the word.

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#8) Sense8:

The Wachowksis’ Sense8 is about a group of people around the world who are suddenly linked mentally. Like Cloud Atlas, the disparate stories about love and relationships weave in and out of each other. For all its sci-fi flourishes, however, Sense8 is about big, sloppy profound love, and as unwieldy as the series can often be, there’s at least one moment in every episode so powerful that viewers can’t help but to feel moved by the affection the characters feel for one another. It is sometimes cheesy, and occasionally illogical, but it is also one of the most diverse, multi-cultural, romantic, life-affirming sci-fi series ever. It may require some patience from viewers, but for idealists and romantics, it’s a truly special series.

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#9) Wet Hot American Summer: First Day Of Camp:

Viewers who didn’t like the original Wet Hot American Summer movie or haven’t seen it shouldn’t bother with the Netflix series without at least watching the film first. The series operates like an inside joke within an inside joke referencing a bunch of ’80s teen movies (Zapped, Summer School, School Spirit, Meatballs, etc.) that only a particular demographic will understand. It’s a parody series that uses a very small window as a reference point, but for those who get the joke, it’s impossible not to appreciate the attention to detail that David Wain and Michael Showalter put into the show. The Netflix series sees 45-year-old actors playing teenagers in a prequel to a movie in which the same actors at 30 were playing teenagers at a sleepaway summer camp. It also provides an origin story to many of the characters in the original film. There’s a lot of meta humor, scores of callbacks, and it is littered with Easter Eggs. WHAS is a special kind of brilliant, but as a stand-alone series it doesn’t function particularly well.

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#10) Bloodline:

While the second season doesn’t quite live up to the near-perfect first, that freshman outing offers slow-burning greatness, doling out revelations about the Rayburn family incrementally. The series follows the Rayburn siblings, John (Kyle Chandler), Meg (Linda Cardellini), Kevin (Norbert Leo Butz) and Danny, portrayed by the Emmy-nominated Ben Mendelsohn, who gives one of this decade’s best television performances It’s Danny who’s the powder keg, the black-sheep brother who returns home to hotel business and upends the entire family, outing their secrets and putting them all in danger. Bloodline is a stressful series. It seems designed not to entertain, but to give viewers a panic attack. It’s a series that demands to be binged, not because the viewer wants to find out what’s next so much as not pushing through means living with these characters’ anxiety that much longer.

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#11) The Crown:

At once intimate and sweeping, The Crown presents an inside view of the ascension of Queen Elizabeth II, played by Claire Foy, and the first few years of her reign. John Lithgow is featured as the indomitable Winston Churchill, struggling with the ignominy of age at the end of his career. Churchill’s support and mentorship of Elizabeth, despite his limitations, creates an important emotional center around which various historical events turn. Elizabeth’s relationship with her husband, Prince Phillip (Matt Smith) is also wonderfully explored; his role as consort is one that he by turns delights in and rebels against. The production spared no expense in painstakingly recreating the physical environments and rigid protocols that constrained and defined the royal family. The challenges posed by modernity and the postcolonial period are filtered through the Palace’s political structure, in which despite her role, Elizabeth’s personal needs and wishes are continually subsumed to protocol and appearance. This series will appeal to anyone who enjoys costume drama, but it is also a fascinating exploration of the post-WWII period and the development of a monarch who managed to maintain and even expand the popularity and stability of the British Monarchy against significant odds.

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#12) 13 Reasons Why:

13 Reasons Why has a intriguing hook: A teenage girl named Hannah takes her own life and leaves behind a suicide note in the form of 13 tapes, each one directed at a particular individual at least partially responsible for decision to kill herself. The tapes are then passed around to the 13 people, who have to deal with the guilt they feel for the role they played in her death, as well as keep their secrets hidden as the contents of the tape threaten to to destroy relationships and cost the school millions in an ongoing lawsuit. The drama has come under fire for its heavy subject material, and the reason it’s stirred so much controversy is because it is an honest and unflinching look at teen suicide. It’s a heavy series, especially for one featuring teen characters, but it is also emotionally raw, incredibly compelling, heartbreaking and admirable for at least what it’s trying to do. 13 Reason Why is a haunting and very personal series, and whether it succeeds — or backfires — in its aims will depend largely on the viewer.

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#13) Master of None:

Aziz Ansari’s Master of None is a post-racial dating and relationship sitcom about millennials. Like the better dating sitcoms of the past, the series still manages to capture the anxieties of dating, of new relationships, and of settling down, only it successfully brings in texting and social media into the mix naturally and without calling attention to itself. It also explores intimacy without resorting to gender stereotypes or relationship clichés. It’s new, and unique, and most of all, it is kind. It’s a good series about genuinely good people, and the chemistry between Ansari’s character and his love interest (Noel Wells) is electric. It’s not laugh-out-loud funny, but Master of None is funny in its observations, clever in its writing and honest in the depiction of its characters. It’s a truly great sitcom, and something of a roadmap to dating for a new generation.

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#14) Stranger Things:

A throwback and love letter to the early 1980s movies of Steven Spielberg and John Carpenter, the Duffer Brothers Stranger Things feels both familiar and new. It’s about a boy named Will (think E.T.‘s Elliot) who is captured by a The Thing-like creature and trapped in a Poltergeist-like world. His mother (Winona Ryder) recruits the local sheriff to investigate Will’s disappearance. Meanwhile, Will’s dorky, Goonies-like best friends take to their bikes to do some sleuthing of their own and eventually befriend an alien-like girl with telepathic powers (the E.T. of the series). The investigation into Will’s disappearance and the arrival of the telepathic girl all seem to lead back to a power plant operated by a character played by Matthew Modine. It’s great PG horror/sci-fi, like the blockbusters of the early ' 80s, but for those who didn’t grow up in the era or aren’t intimately familiar with Amblin Entertainment’s catalogue, the series may not hold as much appeal.

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#15) BoJack Horseman:

One of Netflix’s best series is also its most underrated. Set in a world where anthropomorphic animals and humans live side-by-side, Bojack Horseman is about a horse named Bojack (Arnett), the washed-up star of the 1990s sitcom Horsin’ Around. After a decade boozing on his couch and sleeping around, Bojack tries to resurrect his celebrity relevance with decidedly mixed results. His agent and on-again, off-again girlfriend is a Persian cat (Amy Sedaris); his rival (Paul F. Tompkins) is a golden labrador; he’s in love with a human woman who works as a ghostwriter (Alison Brie); and he has a layabout roommate (Aaron Paul) with whom Bojack has a co-dependent relationship. On the face of it, it’s a zany satire of Hollywood and celebrity culture. What’s unexpected, however, is that Bojack Horseman may be television’s most honest and thorough examination of depression. The writing is sharp, the jokes are layered, and the situations are hilarious, but there’s a melancholy undercurrent to the series. Despite being a horse, Bojack is also one of the most human characters on television. It takes two or three episodes to hook viewers into its world, but once it does, it’s an impossible series to stop watching.

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#16) Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt:

Relentlessly positive, infinitely quotable, and insanely likable, Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt applies the quick-witted, reference-heavy comedy of 30 Rock to the life of Kimmy Schmidt (Ellie Kemper), a woman who moves to New York after being rescued from a doomsday cult. Kimmy, a 30-year-old woman with the pop-cultural IQ of a ’90s teenager, must navigate the cynical big city while dealing with her own form of PTSD. She’s helped along by her conspiracy-theory minded landlord (Carol Kane) and her irresponsible, flighty gay roommate (Titus Burgess). Its fast pace and wide-eyed wonder of its lead makes it the most bingeable series on Netflix. It’s almost impossible not to finish each season in one or two sittings, because it’s a near-perfect sitcom about the power of human optimism that’s as life affirming as it is funny.

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#17) Breaking Bad:

Breaking Bad is must-watch TV and one of the reasons Netflix has risen to the popularity it has. Before Breaking Bad, Netflix was seen as a fairly decent streaming service. After it got the rights to show the final season of Breaking Bad in the UK, Netflix propelled itself to superstardom. Not bad for a show that’s ostensibly about a high-school teacher with cancer who goes on to sell meth to pay for his hospital bills. It goes without saying, if you haven’t yet spent time with Walter White and Jesse - do so now! But, be warned, the show is as addictive as the stuff Walter is peddling.

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#18) The Defenders:

There's a reason Iron Fist isn't on our Best Shows on Netflix list: it's terrible. Which is such a shame as the rest of Netflix's Marvel series have been hard-hitting, explosive delights. Thankfully The Defenders sees the Marvel TV universe fighting fit once more, with the mini series proving that all of the characters are better together - yes, even glowy fist man. Given its limited episode run - it's a lean eight episodes - it's a little strange that it takes a good three episodes to get going but once it does, and mostly because of Sigourney Weaver, it's great.

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#19) Freaks and Geeks:

Unfairly cancelled after just one season, Freaks and Geeks was the starting point for many AAA comedy actors, directors and writers careers of today. Set around two factions of kids trying to get by in a typical US school: the freaks and, well, the geeks. James Franco, Seth Rogan and Jason Segel are fantastic as part of the geek ensemble - Franco playing the heart throb, Rogan the monosyllabic beer fiend and Segel, the loveable stoner. While the geeks include Silicon Valley's Martin Starr and a superb John Francis Daley. But it's Lind Cardellini who's standout, playing Lindsay Weir, the math kid who decides to rebel. Created by Paul Feig, who recently tried his hand at rebooting GhostBusters, and written by Judd Apatow, the show is great antidote to the whimsical teenage world of Dawson Creek and the like.

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#20) Him & Her:

Him & Her is one of the best British sitcoms in years. Based around the lives of a bored, lazy but happy 20-something couple, the show's plot is slight but it manages to get laughs out of the most mundane happenings. Sarah Solemani is fantastic as Becky whose love for Steve (Russell Tovey) never falters, despite her parents disliking him. And Kerry Howard as Laura, Becky's sister, is the most hateful character since, well, ever. All four series are now on Netflix.

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#21) It's Always Sunny In Philadelphia:

Initially made on a shoe-string budget, It's Always Sunny In Philadelphia first season had a cult following, but low viewing figures meant it was destined to be a one-series wonder. Thankfully, everything changed when Season 2 was eventually green-lit, thanks to some big-time star power. Danny De Vito joined for a 10-episode run that was extended because he loved it so much. He's still in the show that's now in its 11th season, bringing with him huge viewing figures. The antics of Dennis (Glenn Howerton), Mac (Rob McElhenney, the show's creator), Charlie (Charlie Kelly) and Sweet Dee (Kaitlin Olson) won't be for everyone - at its darkest the show's 'comedy' themes range from nazism to drug abuse - but stick with it and this deliciously depraved classic will reward you. A new, 12th season, has finally landed on Netflix, after airing in the US earlier this year. The show has also been renewed for two more seasons, which will make it the longest running live-action comedy series on TV ever. 

Impressive stuff.

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#22) The Keepers:

Netflix struck true crime gold with How To Make a Murderer and its done the same again with The Keepers. This time the case in question is the murder of a nun in 1969 in Baltimore. The case remains unsolved and this documentary series goes back to the scene of the crime, speaking to witnesses and people who worked on the case. This is a meticulously researched series, and one that has been in the works longer than Making a Murderer. It shows, too. Each episode ends on a new piece of evidence and by the end you'll be horrified with just how this case remained unsolved for so long. Gripping stuff.

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#23) The Mist:

Swapping aliens for insects, The Mist has made a decent transition to television. It echoes the foreboding that the fantastic movie adaptation had but expands the idea of a town being terrorised by a mysterious force from a group of people trapped in a store to many groups of people being trapped. Although it gets a bit sill in places, there's a decent amount of scares here to keep you watching.

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It's fair to say there’s never been a better time to bag yourself a Netflix subscription and binge watch, so get stuck into our gallery and let us know if your favourite show isn't on the list.