The Best Teen Shows Streaming in 2025

Teen television has matured significantly on streaming platforms. The best shows aimed at younger audiences now tackle real issues — identity, mental health, sexuality, friendship, and grief — with a sophistication that respects their audience’s intelligence. Here are the best teen-focused shows currently streaming.

How We Selected: We examined options using full-season viewing, critical analysis, and production quality assessment. Factors in our assessment included acting performances, narrative quality, production values, rewatch value. Brands featured did not pay for or influence their inclusion.

The Must-Watch Tier

Stranger Things (Netflix) defined a generation of teen television. The Hawkins kids — Eleven, Mike, Dustin, Lucas, Will, and Max — face interdimensional horrors while navigating the more mundane terrors of adolescence. Millie Bobby Brown’s Eleven became a global icon, and the show’s 1980s setting, Spielbergian warmth, and genuine scares make it essential viewing. Season 5 will conclude the saga.

Wednesday (Netflix) brought Jenna Ortega to superstardom as Wednesday Addams, the deadpan daughter of the Addams Family attending Nevermore Academy. Tim Burton’s gothic mystery-comedy blends supernatural investigation with boarding school drama, and Ortega’s performance — dry, fierce, and unexpectedly vulnerable — carries the show effortlessly.

Heartstopper (Netflix) adapts Alice Oseman’s graphic novels about Charlie (Joe Locke) and Nick (Kit Connor), two British schoolboys who fall in love. The show is tender, honest, and joyful in its depiction of LGBTQ+ teen romance, treating first love with the gravity and sweetness it deserves. Three seasons of television that makes you feel genuinely hopeful about young love and growing up.

Yellowjackets (Paramount Plus) splits its timeline between a girls’ soccer team stranded in the wilderness in 1996 and the traumatized women they became. Sophie Thatcher and Jasmin Savoy Brown lead the teen timeline with performances that capture the terrifying speed at which civilization can dissolve when survival demands it.

Adventure and Fantasy

Percy Jackson and the Olympians (Disney Plus) finally gives Rick Riordan’s beloved novels a faithful adaptation. Walker Scobell, Leah Sava Jeffries, and Aryan Simhadri bring Percy, Annabeth, and Grover to life in a show that respects both the source material and its young audience. Avatar: The Last Airbender (Netflix, live action) adapts the animated classic with stunning visual effects and a diverse cast.

Shadow and Bone (Netflix) brought Leigh Bardugo’s Grishaverse to screen with Jessie Mei Li leading a fantasy epic that combines Russian-inspired worldbuilding with teen romance and heist thriller elements. The Umbrella Academy (Netflix) follows a dysfunctional family of adopted siblings with superpowers through four seasons of increasingly strange adventures.

Realistic Drama

Never Have I Ever (Netflix) is Mindy Kaling’s sharp, funny coming-of-age comedy about Devi Vishwakumar (Maitreyi Ramakrishnan), a first-generation Indian American teenager navigating grief, ambition, and romance. The show treats cultural identity with specificity and humor that feels authentic rather than performative.

Sex Education (Netflix) set its frank exploration of teen sexuality in a British school where Asa Butterfield’s socially awkward Otis sets up an underground sex therapy clinic. Four seasons of surprisingly thoughtful comedy that handles sensitive topics with care and genuine insight. Ginny and Georgia (Netflix) follows a mother and teenage daughter whose arrival in a New England town brings secrets and social climbing.

Euphoria (Max/HBO) is the most visually striking teen show ever made. Zendaya’s Emmy-winning performance as Rue, a teenager struggling with addiction, anchors a show that is polarizing in its intensity but undeniably powerful when it connects. The show treats its subjects — addiction, identity, relationships, and the pressure of growing up online — with an honesty that can be difficult to watch but feels necessary.

Animated

Arcane (Netflix) is technically aimed at older teens and adults, but its story of two sisters on opposite sides of a class war in the League of Legends universe is one of the most beautifully animated shows ever produced. The art style alone makes it worth watching.

For platform comparisons, see Disney Plus vs Netflix for Families and Best Streaming Services Compared.