Streaming platforms largely played it safe in 2025. Amidst talk of budget cuts and skittishness over new launches, streaming services opted to continue existing shows rather than take a chance with new titles. Despite the challenges, the year saw a decent number of original series across genres.
Black White & Gray The best streaming series of 2025 by leaps and bounds. Pushkar Mahabal’s genre-defying Hindi show brilliantly weaves together a supposed documentary about a serial killer with an account of the killers’ victims.
The Scroll review observed: “The series takes viewers through a warren of half-truths and self-serving lies, reminding us that murkiness underpins assumptions about innocence and complicity.”
Available on Sony LIV.
Perfect Family This compelling series follows a family that is dysfunctional in the most functional way. The Karkaria clan is forced to seek group therapy after the 11-year-old granddaughter has an episode at school. The sessions reveal each character’s unhealed wounds and crushed desires.
“Powered by an excellent cast as well as insightful writing and direction, Perfect Family doles out valuable home truths about the most basic social unit,” said the Scroll review.
Available on YouTube.
Saare Jahaan Se Accha Aditya Dhar’s box office scorcher Dhurandhar went over ground previously covered by espionage thrillers and the show Saare Jahaan Se Accha. The series follows Indian and Pakistani operatives working to outdo each other even as Pakistan builds its nuclear programme.
From the Scroll review: “The personal price paid by players of patriot games – this idea keeps the series on course even after the plotting enters well-trodden, predictable territory.”
Available on Netflix.
The Hunt: The Rajiv Gandhi Assassination Case Nagesh Kukunoor was busy in 2025: he starred in the second season of Pataal Lok and directed Madhuri Dixit as an enigmatic serial killer in Mrs Deshpande.
Kukunoor hit his stride with a series about the investigation into former prime minister Rajiv Gandhi’s assassination by LTTE suicide bombers in 1991. From the Scroll review: “The show’s prosaic title is the first indication of a balancing act between well-publicised facts and dramatisation, subtext and context, the thin line between justice and retribution.”
Available on Sony LIV.
Khauf Atmospheric visuals and unrelenting dread – Khauf lives up to its title. The nightmarish series is set largely in a women’s hostel, where even the walls hide secrets. “Pankaj Kumar’s lighting and camerawork set the mood, while Alokananda Dasgupta’s music builds suspense and foreboding,” the Scroll review noted.
Kerala Crimes Files 2 With the November release of the film Eko, writer-cinematographer Bahul Ramesh concluded his Animal Trilogy. It began with the movie Kishkinda Kaanadam (2024) and continued with the series Kerala Crime Files 2 in June.
The follow-up to Kerala Crime Files (2023) is more ambitious, busier and meatier, Scroll noted in its review. Bahul Ramesh examines the complexities of human nature through a twist-heavy tale that begins with a misbehaving police dog and leads to a vexing disappearance.
Available on JioHotstar.
Real Kashmir Football Club This feel-good show, based on the formation of Real Kashmir FC, is firmly grounded in the reality of Kashmir’s political situation. According to the Scroll review: “The creators step on the rocky road to success with patience and care. The money and licences needed to set up operations, the early false steps and mishaps, the clash of egos – there is ample drama across the eight-episode series, but delivered at a normal volume rather than a high pitch.”
Available on Sony LIV.
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