Australian TV as a concept is a little blurry around the edges. There are plenty of great locally-made dramas that just happen to have an overseas star in the lead, and a lot of local stars are doing great work in shows made entirely overseas. There are series filmed on Australian locations that are pretending to be overseas, and there are stories set in Australia that are so generic they could be taking place anywhere.
These five series stand out in large part because they couldn’t be anything but Australian. Occasionally it’s nice to turn on a screen and see our own culture there… even if it is doing a burnout.
Best Australian TV series of 2025 – quick links
The People vs Robodebt (SBS)
This year was a good one for documentaries on the small screen (see also: Surviving Malka Leifer) but the three-part SBS series The People vs Robodebt still stood out.
Tracing the course of the Robodebt scandal from start to finish, it took the time to bring the people involved to life – well, aside from the politicians who refused to appear.
The result was both a heartwarming look at the whistleblowers and lawyers who took the system on, and a grim examination of a deplorable chain of events that was largely driven by disgraceful politicians wanting to save a few dollars.
It’s a failure of national resolve that nobody has been jailed over these events, and this documentary makes that very clear. Here’s hoping the dramatised version the ABC has planned for next year shows the same courage.
The Cheap Seats (10)
Two people making jokes about news clips probably shouldn’t be the funniest show on Australian television year after year, but here we are. And it’s not like Australia doesn’t have other funny shows at the moment either. Even against stiff competition, Melanie Bracewell and Tim McDonald are still firmly out in front.
While the writing each week is strong and consistent, it’s when one or the other of the regular The Cheap Seats hosts is on a break that it’s clear just how much of the show’s success is down to the chemistry between the hosts.
Together with their regular cultural correspondent (is it even a joke that she only reports on reality TV?) Mel Tracina, they all seem secure enough to throw pretty much anything out there, safe in the knowledge that someone around the desk will turn it into comedy gold. Every year this is on our screens is a great year for Australian television.
RFDS Season 3 (Seven)
As pretty much the only original weekly drama on Australian commercial television in 2025, RFDS was something of a throwback. These days Australian drama usually appears either on streaming services (where it drops all at once) or on the ABC (where ratings are just one of a number of concerns).
But RFDS not only has to bring viewers in, it has to keep them coming back week after week, which means the series can’t just cruise on an interesting set up and a promise that the mystery will be solved in the final episode.
So RFDS went all out. The performances were strong, the locations were stunning, each episode had a self-contained storyline plus a number of ongoing subplots, the medical side of things was satisfyingly jargon-heavy and the whole thing came together in a package that felt like a good solid slice of entertainment and not some thin gruel you were meant to watch while scrolling on your phone.
Australia made a lot of solid drama in 2025, but the return of RFDS stood out for being a reminder that the weekly format, and the need to bring viewers back each week, is a pretty good way to make great television.
The Back Side of Television & The Last Year of Television (Binge)
It’s more than a little ironic that one of the best Australian television shows of 2025 was about Australian television from decades earlier, but if host Mitch McTaggart is still making series about old television in 2050 then presumably Austin will get the roasting it deserves.
Together with his yearly television recap The Last Year of Television (this year’s version is little more than a fortnight away), The Back Seat of Television manages to take the often dodgy, nostalgic clip-show format and turn it into a thoughtful and often hilarious examination of the underpinnings of Australian television and culture.
It’s the rare local program that’ll leave you feeling smarter for having watched it, even if a large chunk of this year’s effort was devoted to Man O Man.
Son of a Donkey (Netflix)
Australian drama and comedy has a generally accepted tone designed to appeal to the widest possible audience. Within these established parameters, shows can vary in quality to some extent, while still remaining ‘broadcast quality’. Basically, there are some things Australian television just doesn’t do. And you’ll find a lot of those things in Son of a Donkey.
An extension of the Saidden brothers previous Superwog series, Son of a Donkey is not for the faint hearted. But unlike the superficially similar work of Paul ‘Fat Pizza’ Fenech, once you look beneath the gross-out gags, wog humour and performing style that’s… not exactly nuanced, then there’s some surprisingly smart comedy going on here.
The third episode of this series, in which our two heroes find themselves stuck in an insanely boring office job for the first time in their lives, was funnier (and more relevant to most people’s actual lives) than an entire series of a supposedly classier sitcom like the ABC’s Optics.
It may not be the most polished show around, but it turns out dumb jokes can be pretty funny when they’re done well.
