This compilation covers both debut series and returning shows from 2025, including those that thankfully concluded their runs and others that continue to produce lackluster content. Some once lauded shows have sadly lost their spark over time. Here, we present the ten most lackluster television shows of 2025, organized alphabetically rather than by degree of disappointment, allowing each to stand out in its unique way.

Among these, “All’s Fair” stands out not just as a low point for 2025 but potentially as one of television’s all-time misfires. Created by Ryan Murphy, whose name appears again on this list, the show stars Kim Kardashian, a reality TV personality turned aspiring actress, in a legal drama devoid of authenticity. Despite a stellar supporting cast including Glenn Close, Naomi Watts, Niecy Nash-Betts, Sarah Paulson, and Teyana Taylor, Kardashian’s performance drags the narrative into mediocrity. Her portrayal of a lawyer, despite her real-life struggles with the bar exam, makes “All’s Fair” a frustrating watch. Surprisingly, the show garnered enough attention—albeit negative—to secure a second season.

“All’s Fair” isn’t just one of the worst shows of 2025. It’s probably the worst show that premiered that year, and it actually might be one of the worst television shows ever made. Ryan Murphy, who makes another appearance on this list a little bit later on, has forged a real-life friendship with reality TV star, dubious business mogul, and aspiring lawyer Kim Kardashian — who appeared in “Delicate,” one of his installments of “American Horror Story” — and unfortunately for the rest of the world, Murphy decided that Kardashian is also an actress. That must be why he specifically cast her in “All’s Fair,” a wet fart of a legal drama where Kardashian gets to play a lawyer on TV (despite failing the bar exam in real life) alongside ridiculously talented actors like Glenn Close, Naomi Watts, Niecy Nash-Betts, Sarah Paulson, and Teyana Taylor.

Not even that cast list can save “All’s Fair,” which is nothing more than an infuriating hate-watch with absolutely zero basis in reality (one can easily imagine that a real lawyer watching this show might be able to sue production after suffering a stress-induced coronary). Kardashian is wooden as can be, and despite efforts from her co-stars to support her in scenes, she drags the proceedings down so miserably that the show is barely even fun to despise. Despite all of this, or perhaps because of the overwhelming negative publicity, the show was renewed for a second season.

“Sex and the City” was a massive, groundbreaking series for HBO back when it first premiered in 1998, so it’s not surprising that, after it ended in 2004, it spawned two movies and a reboot series. What is surprising is that the reboot series, titled “And Just Like That…” after the specific way its leading lady Carrie Bradshaw (Sarah Jessica Parker) muses when she’s writing, turned out to be so lifeless, dull, and maddening. A big factor in this, to be honest, is the absence of Samantha Jones, the sex-positive PR maven played throughout the original series and the two films by Kim Cattrall; due to a rumored feud with Parker and a whole host of other alleged factors, Cattrall declined to return as Samantha for “And Just Like That…” aside from a presumably pricey cameo in the Season 2 finale that did not require her to set foot on the show’s set.

Still, even without Samantha, showrunner Michael Patrick King could have tried to keep some of the spark and life found within “Sex and the City” — and yet, he came up entirely short. Alongside Carrie, original characters like Miranda Hobbes (Cynthia Nixon) and Charlotte York-Goldenblatt (Kristin Davis) feel like horrifying caricatures of their former selves, and newcomers like Sarita Choudhury’s Seema Patel never get any time to shine. Thankfully, Season 3 was the end of the series, but it might have been the worst outing of all between the aggravating return of Carrie’s former fiancé Aidan Shaw (John Corbett) and the show’s actual ending, which involved a clogged toilet. Actually, the clogged toilet thing is pretty fitting in retrospect.

At this rate, it feels like Darren Star’s dubious heroine Emily Cooper (Lily Collins) will continue culturally terrorizing all of the great cities of Europe by refusing to learn their language or take public transportation — because “Emily in Paris” is in its fifth season and shows absolutely zero signs of slowing down. Weirdly, though, after the Season 4 finale of the show transported Emily to Italy for a new business venture — namely, running an entire advertising agency called Agence Grateau, a role for which she is entirely underqualified and frankly inept — Paris faded into the background for most of Season 5 of “Emily in Paris,” which sees Emily exploring Rome, Venice, and other ancient cities that deserve far more respect than Emily is ever prepared to offer. As Emily cavorts around Rome with her new paramour Marcello (Eugenio Franceschini), her buddies in Paris, like the “hot chef” Gabriel (Lucas Bravo) and her loud American friend Mindy Chen (the utterly wasted Ashley Park), carry on without her. Meanwhile, Emily’s perfect boss Sylvie Grateau (Philippine Leroy-Beaulieu) remains perfect, and should honestly be the focus of the show.

“Emily in Paris” is not really a “television” “show” insofar as nothing ever happens, there are no narrative stakes, and the characters are both insufferable and boring. This does not change in Season 5, which provides yet another dull, vaguely infuriating outing for Emily and her buddies. Perhaps one day the European Union will unite against Emily Cooper and bar her from the continent. (By the way, she does return to Paris in the Season 5 finale, so the title makes sense again.)

For a handful of years now, Ryan Murphy (yes, him again) has been centering his anthology series “Monster” around infamous serial killers and murderers, some of whom terrorized portions of the United States and some of whom committed horrific crimes against specific and targeted people. (We say that second thing because the second season of “Monster” was subtitled “The Lyle and Erik Menendez Story” and focused on the real-life brothers who were ultimately convicted of killing their parents in 1989.) After victims of Jeffrey Dahmer made their feelings clear about Murphy’s inaugural season “Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story” and its weirdly sympathetic treatment of the killer, Murphy went ahead and ignored that outcry and made 2025’s “Monster: The Ed Gein Story.”

The real Ed Gein, who was the inspiration for Buffalo Bill in Jonathan Demme’s (actually good) film “The Silence of the Lambs,” operated in the 1950s, so there wasn’t much notable pushback from the real-life killer’s victims. The problem with “Monster: The Ed Gein Story” is, frankly, that it’s just not any good. Murphy has a tendency to overstuff seasons of anthology shows — even one of his best “American Horror Story” seasons, “Asylum,” has a weird alien subplot that ultimately distracts from the actual narrative — and that tendency is fully on display in this installment. We’ll just quote Roxana Hadidi in her review for Vulture: “Like Gein, ‘Monster’ doesn’t know when to stop.”

Netflix’s first original medical drama, sadly, turned out to be DOA — dead on arrival. Even though you can find long-running medical shows like “Grey’s Anatomy” on the massive streaming platform, Netflix decided to forge ahead with their own take on this crowded genre, and instead of creating something transcendently good like, say, “The Pitt,” they came up with “Pulse.” The “twist” in “Pulse” — though it’s not so much a twist as just something that’s ostensibly meant to set this series apart from ones that look and feel completely identical — is that its heroine, Dr. Danielle “Danny” Simms (Willa Fitzgerald), is struggling through her third year of residency while also dealing with a sexual harassment complaint she filed against one of her fellow doctors … her ex-boyfriend Dr. Xander Phillips, her emergency medicine chief resident at the fictional Maguire Hospital played by Colin Woodell.

The problem with “Pulse,” though, is that it doesn’t have one. Despite valiant efforts from Fitzgerald, Woodell, and other stars like Justina Machado, Jessy Yates, Néstor Carbonell, and Jack Bannon, just to name a few, the series feels absolutely lifeless — and worse, it feels unnecessary, especially with so many other better medical dramas available (and available on Netflix, point in fact!). The show was canceled after one season, and even though Netflix tends to be a little too quick to axe underperforming shows even if they’re good, that feels like the right call.

After “Fire Country” became a massive success for CBS, a spin-off was inevitable — but did it have to be as awful as “Sheriff Country?” In the series, Morena Baccarin, known for “Firefly” and the “Deadpool” movies, plays Mickey Fox, who works as the sheriff of northern California’s Edgewater County alongside colleagues like deputies Cassidy Campbell (Michele Weaver) and Nathan Boone (Matt Lauria). At the same time, Mickey is also trying to co-parent her newly sober daughter Skye Fraley (Amanda Arcuri) with her ex-husband Travis Fraley (Christopher Gorham) and keep her father Wes (W. Earl Brown) in check as he ages.

Shows can be predictable and still be fun, but unfortunately for “Sheriff Country,” it feels more like a fictional series that might be the butt of a joke from Alec Baldwin’s fictional NBC executive Jack Donaghy on “30 Rock” than a real or serious effort. The series will continue on CBS after 2025 because it was successful with audiences, but we don’t recommend it; it’s a dull and often uninspiring slog. The only net positive about “Sheriff Country” is that it ensures a steady paycheck for Baccarin.

Something that TV executives should probably start taking to hear is the fact that lightning does not strike twice — no matter how much proverbial money you throw at that lightning. This might have saved some time when it comes to “Suits LA,” the 2025 “Suits” spin-off that flopped where its predecessor flourished. To be incredibly clear, the original “Suits” was never exactly a phenomenal show at its very foundation, but a fun, fluffy legal drama bolstered by a truly phenomenal cast with great chemistry (Meghan Markle and Gina Torres were two of the show’s original cast members, for crying out loud). When the show hit Netflix and Peacock in 2023, it saw a massive resurgence in popularity, and the powers that be at NBC decided the solution was to reboot the show with “Suits LA,” moving the action from New York to Los Angeles and adding Stephen Amell as former Manhattan prosecutor Ted Black.

So what was the issue with “Suits LA?” It just … wasn’t good. Again, recapturing the energy of the original just wasn’t as simple as putting a bunch of gorgeous people on-screen in three-piece suits, and an attempt to make it a “gritty” reboot failed too (a show like “Suits” doesn’t have much of a dark edge, which is actually why people like binge-watching it). “Suits LA” was canceled after just one season, so hopefully this bespoke experiment doesn’t resurface again any time soon.

Aside from Jesse Plemons and Michael B. Jordan, the “Friday Night Lights” curse seems to be alive and well — at least as far as Taylor Kitsch is concerned. We say this because Kitsch’s big 2025 project “The Terminal List: Dark Wolf,” which premiered on Amazon Prime, was met with dour reviews upon its release … and ended up becoming one of the year’s worst small-screen efforts. A prequel to Chris Pratt’s Amazon series “The Terminal List,” “Dark Wolf” is a prequel that centers around Kitsch’s Ben Edwards and his journey from working as a Navy SEAL to his time in the CIA — basically, the origin story of everything we saw Ben and Lieutenant James Reece (Pratt, reprising his role) deal with in “The Terminal List.”

To be honest, we didn’t need “Dark Wolf,” and that shows. More than anything else, this prequel series seems like an uninspired attempt to cash in on how successful “The Terminal List” was, as well as Pratt’s massive star-power, but nothing quite gels; even though it surpasses the quality of “The Terminal List,” that’s unfortunately a really low bar to clear. (As with “Sheriff Country,” successful and good aren’t always mutually exclusive on this list.) Hopefully, Kitsch finda  better project soon … that’s ideally not in the “Terminal List” cinematic universe.

We’re as bummed as you are to see “Yellowjackets” on this list, especially because its first season was so uniformly excellent. Even Season 2 provided some excellent surprises, including some great new casting (shout out to Lauren Ambrose, Elijah Wood, and Simone Kessell, who really brightened up the proceedings), but unfortunately, returns have diminished on “Yellowjackets,” the dual-timeline series about cannibalistic teens and their adult selves dealing with the aftermath years later, as the show has progressed. Season 3 of “Yellowjackets” — which, as it turns out, is the show’s penultimate season — really let the cracks show, perhaps indicating that the show is a bit directionless … or worse, that the direction in which it’s headed isn’t particularly great.

In the teenage timeline, we catch up with plane crash survivors Shauna Shipman (Sophie Nélisse), Taissa Turner (Jasmin Savoy Brown), Misty Quigley (Sammi Hanratty), Charlotte  “Lottie” Matthews (Courtney Eaton), Vanessa “Van” Palmer (Liv Hewson), and their cohorts as they remain stranded in the wilderness and start considering increasingly desperate ways to survive, like eating human flesh. In the adult timeline, Shauna, Taissa, Misty, Van, and Lottie — now played by Melanie Lynskey, Tawny Cypress, Christina Ricci, Ambrose, and Kessell, respectively — struggle to figure out if somebody knows all their secrets about the woods year prior. So what’s the problem? Sadly, Shauna is the problem. Despite bravura performances from Nélisse and Lynskey alike, “Yellowjackets” Season 3 sees Shauna fully break bad in both timelines, and not only is it rushed and abrupt, it feels like it comes out of absolutely nowhere. Shauna’s bizarre character assassination basically ruined this show’s third season, so we’ll have to wait and see how the entire story concludes in the fourth and final season.

The best thing you can say about Netflix’s miniseries “Zero Day” is precisely that: it’s a miniseries, so we don’t have to watch any more of it. Honestly, who knew that you could cast Robert De Niro in your political drama and still end up with such a lifeless, lackluster result?! De Niro plays former United States president George Mullen on the series, who’s enjoying a quiet life after serving his country only to end up helping his successor, President Evelyn Mitchell (Angela Bassett). As President Mitchell forms a task force known as the “Zero Day Commission” meant to deal with a huge cyberterrorism attack, she enlists George, who dutifully does his duty to help protect the United States … even as his daughter Alexandra (Lizzy Caplan) secretly works against her father’s efforts.

The cast of “Zero Day” is, frankly, insane. Besides De Niro, Caplan, and Bassett, the show features Jesse Plemons, Joan Allen, Connie Britton, Dan Stevens, Bill Camp, Matthew Modine, and Clark Gregg, just to name a few … but none of these unbelievably talented performers could possibly make “Zero Day” work. A turgid, uninspired, and overwhelmingly boring series that wastes a ton of talent on a bafflingly incomprehensible story, “Zero Day” should never have seen the break of day in the first place.