Hideo Kojima Crowns a Surprise Netflix Limited Series as His Favorite Show of 2025
A near-perfect Rotten Tomatoes score says it all: Hideo Kojima was right.
Hideo Kojima, Twitter's reigning film-review king and the guy behind Death Stranding, has crowned his best TV show of 2025. It is not some safe prestige pick. It is Netflix's Adolescence, the breakout that lit up timelines back in March.
How we got here
Kojima made his pick for Vulture's The Culturati 50, a poll where 50 creators across film, TV, and pop culture name their favorites of the year. Adolescence did not just get Kojima's vote. It pulled the most votes overall and landed at the very top of the series section.
"A masterful fusion of meticulously calculated one-shot cinematography and direction that draws out the show's core themes. It vividly exposes the fear and anguish experienced by both children in their formative years and the families who watch over them."
Kojima has been on the Adolescence train since day one. Back on March 23, he posted about the first episode, calling it good and impressive, and pointing out that it plays as a single continuous shot from start to finish. He said the characters, drama, and mystery were handled so well he had to keep going. That first-episode flex is not a gimmick either. The series leans hard into real-time tension and precision staging.
So what is Adolescence?
Created by Jack Thorne (Harry Potter and the Cursed Child) and Stephen Graham (This Is England), the show follows a family dealing with the unthinkable: their 13-year-old son, Jamie, is arrested for murdering a girl at his school. It digs into messy, very current issues like how social media and toxic, misogynistic content can warp kids at an early age. The hook is heavy, but the execution is grounded and unnervingly intimate, thanks to that largely real-time, one-shot style Kojima called out.
The numbers and the hardware
- Rotten Tomatoes score: 97%.
- Viewership: 142.6 million views in its first 91 days on Netflix, per Tudum, making it Netflix's second most-watched English-language series after Wednesday.
- Awards: 13 Emmy nominations and multiple wins, including Best Lead Actor for Stephen Graham and Best Supporting Actor for Owen Cooper, who plays Jamie.
- Vulture's poll wrinkle: more than half of the voters also singled out Owen Cooper for the best performance of the year.
Bottom line: the show blew up, the industry noticed, and Kojima cosigning it is just the cherry on top. If you somehow missed it during the spring frenzy, Adolescence is streaming on Netflix now.