This HBO series about the dynastic tussles of a media empire family is full of the delicious betrayals and subterfuge of early-days Game of Thrones.
Starring Brian Cox, Kieran Culkin and Sarah Snook, Succession centres on the Roy family, who have more money than god and less warmth than a threadbare blanket in Lappland. Around the boardroom and the dinner table, every member of this toxic family (and their various hangers-on) are scheming for more power and position.
Succession is hilarious and pulsing with the kind of shockingly bad behaviour that you just can't lap up quick enough.
Succession is available in NZ on Neon.
The Good Fight
With complex characters and thrilling stories, The Good Fight, a spin-off from The Good Wife, is highly entertaining and more often than not, jaw-dropping.
Set in a Chicago law firm, no other series is tapping into the absurdity of our current political era as well as The Good Fight. It manages to capture the total insanity of the world we live in, making everyone feel less alone in their despair about what the hell is going on.
The first season spends too much time on a subplot involving one of the characters but as soon as it takes those story shackles off, it's full-throttle ahead in tackling political trolls, pay gaps, racism and even Melania Trump.
The Good Fight is available in NZ on Amazon Prime.
Counterpart
This sci-fi-cum-spy thriller is a perfect follow-up if you're after a complex and twisty show with moral quandaries and double-dealing characters you can't trust.
The premise of the series is that sometime in the 1980s, the world split in two and there is now a parallel universe, an exact copy of ours, through a passage underneath a building in Berlin. The Berlin setting is no coincidence as this series is much more like a classic Cold War spy thriller than some grand sci-fi adventure.
J.K. Simmons plays two versions of the same character — because everyone has a double on the other side — as the two sides try to out-espionage each other in this deadly round of spy games.
Counterpart is available in NZ on Neon.
The Deuce
This extraordinary, richly textured series from The Wire creator David Simon is one of the most evocative shows we've had in recent years, in the sense that few others so vividly renders a specific time and place as The Deuce does of that part of Manhattan in the late 1970s.
From the dripping sin in the peep show booths and the lascivious exchanges in the brothels to the corruption in the police force and the disco bars pumping out Barry White while people boogie in a drug-assisted daze, The Deuce is more than a window into this world.
Maggie Gyllenhaal is magnificent in this series about sex, porn and the underbelly that's not trying very hard to hide itself.
Based on a comic fantasy novel by Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett, the Amazon adaptation debuts later this month with David Tennant and Michael Sheen in the lead roles.
If you want to match the scale of Game of Thrones, there's nothing like an imminent apocalypse. Sheen and Tennant are unlikely bedfellows as an angel and a devil tasked with the End of Days after the antichrist is born.
Only, they're not sure that's what they want.
It's a buddy road comedy of sorts, a wickedly funny one, and Gaiman serves as the showrunner here so you know there's no one better to bring his and the late Pratchett's book to life.
The fourth and final series just wrapped on up on ABC, which means you can now devour the whole series in one go if you've never seen it before.
Catastrophe perfectly distills the madness of modern relationships and the complications, compromises and love of when two people decide to share a life. It's never going to go exactly right, but we do it anyway.
Created, written by and starring Sharon Horgan and Rob Delaney, it's the story of two very different people who fall pregnant from a one-night stand and decide to make a go of it — and all the resultant mess that comes from it.
Catastrophe is a wonderful series, full of biting zingers and wacky characters. It's guaranteed to make you laugh out loud.
Catastrophe is available in NZ on Amazon Prime.
Outlander
Outlander is the show on this list that's closest to Game of Thrones in terms of its period and its look.
Based on books by Diana Gabaldon, the time-travelling series follows the adventures of Claire, a WWII nurse who finds herself transported to 18th century Scotland where she meets a Highlander warrior named Jamie.
Outlander has romance, it has violence and it has a grand scale while also maintaining the intimacy between its core characters. Sometimes it's tender and sometimes it smacks you over the head with its twists.
Outlander is available in NZ on Lightbox.
Westworld
Ramin Djawadi's magnificent music compositions aren't the only things Game of Thrones and Westworld have in common. Westworld is also a sprawling series with just as many characters and subplots to follow.
Set inside a futuristic rich people's theme park where realistic robots are playthings for depraved humans, the series ponders questions around authenticity, soul and morality, while setting in motion a puzzle for audiences to solve.
The cast includes Anthony Hopkins, Evan Rachel Wood, Jeffrey Wright and Thandie Newton and boasts expensive production values.
HBO just dropped a teaser trailer for the third season this week, which adds Aaron Paul to its cast and will have a dramatically different look after the momentous ending to its second season.
Westworld is available in NZ on Neon.
Fleabag
The second season of this excellent British dark comedy just dropped over the weekend and it's, in a word, perfect.
Written and starring Phoebe Waller-Bridge, who also created the TV adaptation of Killing Eve, the series follows a character named Fleabag, a 30-something London woman and her misadventures.
She has few relationships, most of them with her dysfunctional family, and is consistently in awkward situations of her own making. The show's signature is Fleabag's cheeky fourth-wall breaks to the audience, but she'll soon reveal that she's not the truthful narrator she seems to be.
The writing on this show is so good and underneath its caustic and laugh-out-loud humour is a tragic and dark soul. The balance between the two could not work better.
There's only one episode left of Killing Eve's heart-pounding and sexually charged second season, which means now's the perfect time to catch up if you haven't already.
Centred on two complex female leads — an unlikely spy and a sociopathic assassin — who should have little in common with each other but they're both thrill seekers and, to a degree, addicts.
Eve and Villanelle's twisty, strange and inscrutable relationship form the core of this series and the performances are just so good. Like, so, so good.