Best Of
30 Best TV Shows on Netflix Right Now (2026)
Stranger Things, Dark, Squid Game, Severance, Sacred Games — the 30 best TV shows currently streaming on Netflix, ranked.
30 FILMS·April 2026·By MoviesPack
Netflix has somewhere north of 1,700 TV shows. Finding the actual great ones requires knowing what you're looking for — or a list like this one.
These are the 30 best shows available on Netflix right now (as of early 2026). Some are Netflix originals; some are licensed content. All of them are worth your time.
Section 1
30 Best TV Shows on Netflix Right Now
01
**Stranger Things** (2016–present) ★ 8.7
In Hawkins, Indiana in 1983, a boy named Will Byers goes missing and his friends find a girl with a shaved head hiding in the woods who can move things with her mind. There is a government lab at the edge of town, a dimension called the Upside Down, and a monster that shouldn't exist. The first two seasons work because the horror and the friendships are the same story: kids learning to trust each other to survive things adults can't see. The later seasons are bigger and messier, but the core relationships hold. 👉 Shows like Stranger Things
02
**Dark** (2017–2020) ★ 8.8
In the small German town of Winden, a child goes missing and four local families find their histories tangled across three generations and a cave that connects 1953, 1986, and 2019. The plotting is so intricate that fans built family-tree flowcharts just to follow it — every character has three versions of themselves across three time periods, and none of it contradicts. Three seasons, a complete ending, and one of the best time-travel series ever made.
03
**Squid Game** (2021–present) ★ 8.0
Four hundred and fifty-six people, all desperately in debt, are invited to compete in children's games for a life-changing cash prize. Losers die. The show embeds its social commentary in the design: players in identical tracksuits, guards in identical masks, wealthy spectators watching it as sport — and then it asks who built the system and who benefits. Season 1's "Marble" episode (Episode 6) is where it stops being a survival thriller and becomes something else.
04
**Narcos** (2015–2017) ★ 8.8
Pablo Escobar builds the Medellín cartel from a regional smuggling operation into a narco-terrorist empire that wages war on the Colombian government. Two DEA agents narrate from the outside, watching a man they can't catch. Wagner Moura plays Escobar as someone with genuine popular support — the show earns this by showing it, not asserting it — which makes the violence more complicated rather than simpler.
05
**Ozark** (2017–2022) ★ 8.5
Marty Byrde is a Chicago financial advisor laundering money for a Mexican drug cartel. When his partner is caught skimming, Marty relocates his family to the Missouri Ozarks and starts building a new operation to pay back the debt. His wife Wendy, initially deceived, becomes a full partner. Julia Garner's Ruth Langmore — a local teenager they hire — starts as a threat and ends as the show's moral center.
06
**The Crown** (2016–2023) ★ 8.6
Queen Elizabeth II takes the throne at 25 and the show follows her reign across six decades, with different actresses playing her as she ages. Each season covers a crisis — a political confrontation, a marriage falling apart, a scandal the Palace tried to contain — and the drama comes from the institution she serves requiring her to suppress the woman she is. More critical of the monarchy than its surface suggests.
07
**Black Mirror** (2011–present) ★ 8.8 (Seasons 1–3)
Each episode is a standalone story about technology and the specific way it warps human behavior. "San Junipero": two women meet in a simulated 1980s beach town that turns out to be an afterlife. "White Bear": a woman wakes up with no memory and is hunted by strangers with cameras. "The Entire History of You": a man with perfect recall of his relationship using it to destroy it. The Netflix-era seasons are patchier; the early run is essential. 👉 Shows like Black Mirror
08
**Mindhunter** (2017–2019) ★ 8.6
Two FBI agents in the late 1970s start interviewing convicted serial killers — Ed Kemper, Charles Manson, Dennis Rader — to understand how they think and build the vocabulary of criminal profiling before the field exists. The conversations are the show. Netflix cancelled it after two seasons, which remains inexcusable.
09
**Money Heist / La Casa de Papel** (2017–2021) ★ 8.3
A criminal mastermind known as the Professor assembles a crew of thieves — each named after a city — to take hostages inside the Spanish Royal Mint and print their own money while negotiating with police. The heist is designed to last as long as possible. Cliffhangers are built into the structure and the show knows exactly how to deploy them. Seasons 1–4 are strong; the Korean remake is also excellent.
10
**Sacred Games** (2018–2019) ★ 8.6
Mumbai cop Sartaj Singh receives a phone call from the crime lord Ganesh Gaitonde — missing for years — who says the city has 25 days before catastrophe, then shoots himself. The investigation and Gaitonde's narrated backstory run in parallel: a street kid rising through Mumbai's criminal underworld, told by Nawazuddin Siddiqui with menace, dark comedy, and traces of mythology. The performance ranges from gangster to prophet within a single scene. 👉 Shows like Sacred Games
11
**Delhi Crime** (2019–present) ★ 8.5
Based on the 2012 Delhi gang rape case, the show follows the Delhi Police investigation through the week after the attack — the pressure, the politics, the detective work, and the moment when catching the suspects becomes the only thing that matters. Shefali Shah as DCP Vartika Chaturvedi leads a team that is exhausted, professional, and human. It won the International Emmy for Best Drama and earned it.
12
**The Haunting of Hill House** (2018) ★ 8.6
The Crain family moved into Hill House when their children were young, and the house has followed all five of them into adulthood. The show cuts between the childhood summer and the present day, where the siblings are forced back together by a death and the secrets they've been keeping. A ghost — the bent-neck lady — appears in the background of frames throughout before the reveal explains her. Episode 5 runs 20 unbroken minutes across timelines in a single take. The horror is real; the engine is grief.
13
**Severance** (2022–present) ★ 8.7
Mark Scout works at Lumon Industries, where employees have agreed to have their work and personal memories surgically divided — the "innie" at the office has no knowledge of the outside world; the "outie" at home has no memory of the job. Mark's innie starts asking what they actually do there, why a former colleague was erased, and what Lumon is really building. Season 1's finale cuts between two versions of the same person experiencing completely different crises simultaneously. Available on Netflix in some regions.
14
**Wednesday** (2022–present) ★ 7.6
Wednesday Addams is expelled from her school and sent to Nevermore Academy, a school for supernatural outcasts, where she discovers she has a psychic ability she can't control and that someone is hunting the students. Jenna Ortega plays Wednesday as someone who is not performing coldness — she is genuinely that person and the show is smart enough not to redeem her. One of Netflix's biggest hits and deserves it.
15
**Peaky Blinders** (2013–2022) ★ 8.8
Tommy Shelby returns from WWI to Birmingham and rebuilds his family's criminal operation into a national empire. He is strategically brilliant, traumatized beyond expression, and willing to use anyone including himself. The show uses anachronistic music — Nick Cave, PJ Harvey, The White Stripes over 1920s gangster scenes — to signal from the first episode that it's operating on feeling rather than period accuracy. Murphy plays Tommy's damage as numbness, which makes the violence more shocking when it arrives. 👉 Shows similar to Peaky Blinders
16
**Lupin** (2021–present) ★ 7.5
Assane Diop's father was falsely accused of theft by his wealthy employer and died in prison. Twenty-five years later, Assane — having grown up reading Arsène Lupin novels — begins dismantling the family responsible, using disguise, misdirection, and the fact that rich people don't notice their service staff. Omar Sy is magnetic and the show moves fast. Not profound, but excellent entertainment.
17
**All Quiet on the Western Front** (2022) ★ 7.8
Technically a film — but at 2.5 hours it deserves a mention in any Netflix viewing guide. A young German soldier volunteers enthusiastically for WWI and arrives at the front to find a war of attrition that has nothing to do with the recruitment posters. The German adaptation of Remarque's novel is brutal, beautiful, and ends on a moment of perfect futility.
18
**Cobra Kai** (2018–present) ★ 8.6
Thirty years after the 1984 All Valley Karate Tournament, Johnny Lawrence — the villain from The Karate Kid — reopens the Cobra Kai dojo and starts training the kids who are getting bullied. The show takes Johnny's worldview seriously rather than dismissing it, which means both he and Daniel LaRusso get to be right and wrong. It rewards you if you've seen the original films, but it doesn't require it.
19
**Better Call Saul** ★ 8.9 — *check current Netflix availability*
Jimmy McGill is a small-time lawyer with genuine talent and a brother who has decided he'll never be legitimate. Over six seasons you watch him become Saul Goodman — the criminal lawyer from Breaking Bad — and the transformation is more devastating than Walter White's because you can see every point where Jimmy could have stopped. Available on Netflix in many markets.
20
**Bridgerton** (2020–present) ★ 7.3
The eight Bridgerton siblings navigate the Regency-era London marriage market across the show's anthology seasons — each season follows a different sibling's romance. The world is deliberately anachronistic: diverse casting, modern music in period arrangements, court society as a performance. A soap opera with a costume drama budget and absolutely no pretension about what it is. 👉 Shows like Bridgerton
21
**The Witcher** (Seasons 1–2) (2019–2021) ★ 8.2
Geralt of Rivia is a mutated monster hunter in a world where the boundary between humans and monsters is not as clear as anyone would like. The first two seasons — with Henry Cavill, who trained obsessively for the role — are genuinely good fantasy with morally complex creatures, real action, and a non-linear structure that rewards attention. Season 3 lost Cavill and much of its quality.
22
**Suits** (2011–2019) ★ 8.4
Harvey Specter is a hotshot attorney at a Manhattan law firm who hires Mike Ross — a college dropout who memorized every law textbook but never went to law school — as his associate and keeps the secret. The show lives in the gap between how the law is supposed to work and how it actually does. Gabriel Macht, Patrick J. Adams, and Gina Torres are all excellent. It had a Netflix renaissance when a new generation found it and the binge holds up.
23
**The Umbrella Academy** (2019–2023) ★ 7.9
Seven children — born simultaneously to women who weren't pregnant, purchased and trained as superheroes by an eccentric billionaire — reunite as dysfunctional adults when their estranged father dies and the apocalypse keeps starting. Three seasons of increasingly wild plotting and an ensemble that genuinely works together. Based on Gerard Way's comic and uses its music choices as aggressively as any show on this list.
24
**Suburra: Blood on Rome** (2017–2020) ★ 7.8
A young Roman criminal, a corrupt politician's son, and a member of the Ostia crime family form an unlikely alliance to develop a piece of land in a suburb of Rome. The Vatican, the Camorra, and the political class all have competing claims on the same territory. Dark, beautifully shot, and morally unsparing about every institution it touches — one of Netflix's best non-English originals.
25
**Inventing Anna** (2022) ★ 7.1
Anna Delvey convinced New York's financial and social elite that she was a German heiress with a massive inheritance, then borrowed and defrauded her way through luxury hotels, private jets, and the art world before being arrested. Julia Garner plays her as someone genuinely interesting rather than simply a cautionary tale. The show is more curious about why everyone wanted to believe her than it is about her guilt.
26
**Midnight Mass** (2021) ★ 7.7
A recovering alcoholic returns to the small island community he grew up in — just as a charismatic new priest arrives and the community begins experiencing what the congregation calls miracles. A man and the town sheriff spend multiple episodes in long competing monologues about what they believe happens when you die — one secular, one religious, neither presented as correct. The horror is real, but the show cares more about what the characters believe than what is killing them.
27
**The Queen's Gambit** (2020) ★ 8.6
Beth Harmon grows up in a Kentucky orphanage, learns chess from the janitor, and discovers she can visualize the board on the ceiling when she can't sleep. By her teens she is beating adults in tournaments. By her twenties she is aiming for the Soviet world champion. Seven episodes of superb 1960s period detail and chess sequences that make a board game feel like combat.
28
**Panchayat** (2020–present) ★ 9.0
Abhishek Tripathi, a city-educated civil servant who couldn't get a better posting, is assigned as panchayat secretary to Phulera — a remote UP village with no mobile signal, limited electricity, and the panchayat office doubling as storage. He plans to treat it as temporary. The show is about what happens when he stops treating it that way. Every character in the village gets a real arc, and the toilet construction subplot that runs through the series turns out to be the show's political argument.
29
**Kota Factory** (2019–present) ★ 9.0
Students from across India arrive in Kota — a city that runs on IIT-JEE entrance exam coaching — and grind through two years of preparation in a system that demands total self-surrender from 17-year-olds. Shot in black and white, a deliberate choice that strips the coaching world of aspirational glow. The humor is dry and the emotional center is Jeetu bhaiya, a teacher who actually cares how his students are doing, not just what they score.
30
**Scam 1992** (2020) ★ 9.3
Harshad Mehta, a stockbroker from a modest background, exploits loopholes in India's banking and securities system to become one of the most powerful men in the Bombay stock market — until journalist Sucheta Dalal starts following the money. Pratik Gandhi plays Mehta as someone who genuinely believes he is right, which makes the unraveling more interesting than a simple fraud story. Technically a SonyLIV original rather than Netflix — but essential viewing if you're building an Indian TV watchlist.
Section 2
Netflix: What to Watch by Mood
| Mood | Show | |------|------| | Edge-of-seat thriller | Dark, Ozark, Narcos | | Can't stop watching | Money Heist, Cobra Kai, Suits | | Need to cry | Hill House, Midnight Mass | | Mind-bending | Dark, Black Mirror, Mr. Robot | | Comfort rewatch | Stranger Things, Friends, Parks and Rec | | Indian content | Sacred Games, Panchayat, Delhi Crime |
Section 3
Want More?
- [Best TV Shows of All Time](/blog/best-tv-shows-of-all-time) — the full definitive 50 - [Best Drama TV Shows](/blog/best-drama-tv-shows) — prestige television ranked - [Shows like Dark](/shows/similar/dark) — time travel, mystery, complexity - [Shows like Stranger Things](/shows/similar/stranger-things)
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