The 5 Most Suspenseful Shows Released Since 2020, Ranked
There's a specific way you sit differently when a show is actually working on you, leaning forward, phone facedown, not even reaching for a snack during a tense scene because you don't want to miss a single second. These five all do that to me at some point, sometimes for a whole episode straight.
None of them rely purely on jump scares or gore to get that reaction either. Most of the tension here comes from not knowing who to trust, or knowing exactly what's coming and still not being able to look away from it. These are by far the most chilling and thrilling suspenseful shows released so far.
5 'The Night Agent' (2023–2025)
A phone in the White House basement hasn't rung in years, and Peter Sutherland (Gabriel Basso), the agent assigned to babysit it, has basically accepted his job as a dead-end nobody who no one takes seriously. Then one night it actually rings, which pulls him into a conspiracy involving a mole buried somewhere inside the White House. Rose Larkin (Luciane Buchanan) ends up on the run alongside him almost immediately, and the show barely slows down from there.
It's based on a novel by Matthew Quirk, trimmed down to keep the momentum constant from episode to episode. Netflix reported it as one of the most-watched shows in the platform's history within its first few weeks. There's nothing groundbreaking about the plot mechanics, betrayals, twists, a countdown clock, but the paranoid momentum works because the pacing never really lets up.
4 'The Fall of the House of Usher' (2023)
Roderick Usher (Bruce Greenwood), head of a massively wealthy pharmaceutical company, watches his children die one by one, each death staged as its own twisted homage to a different Edgar Allan Poe story. Mike Flanagan built the whole show as a retelling that stitches together nearly Poe's entire body of work into one family tragedy. Verna (Carla Gugino) shows up throughout as a strange, shape-shifting figure tied to a deal Roderick made decades earlier.
This was Flanagan's last project for Netflix before he moved his team to Amazon, and it plays like a director cashing in every favor he'd been saving up for years. The pharmaceutical angle gives the gothic horror a sharp, contemporary edge, tying old ghost story tropes directly to real corporate greed. Each death sequence works almost like its own short film, distinct in tone from the one before it.
3 'Severance' (2022– )
Employees at Lumon Industries can undergo a procedure that splits their memory in half, one version exists only at work, the other lives a normal life with zero memory of the job. Mark Scout (Adam Scott) works there to escape grief he doesn't want to carry all day. Ben Stiller directs several episodes, and the office gets shot with a sterile precision.
The mystery of what Lumon actually does moves so carefully that fan theories have filled in gaps the show hasn't addressed yet. Every small detail in the office design matters eventually, nothing here is just background decoration. The show also finds a dark comedy buried inside the dread, corporate jargon and meaningless perks used as tools of control rather than kindness.
Collider Exclusive · 8 Questions · 2 Minutes Which Netflix Character Would Be Your Best Friend? Dustin · Emily · Wednesday · Gi-hun
Some friends drag you out of the house. Some sit with you on the worst night of your life. Netflix has written both, plus the one who tells you the truth you have been avoiding all week. Answer eight quick questions about how you actually do friendship, and find out which of them was always going to end up in your corner.
🧢Dustin(Stranger Things)
🗼Emily(Emily in Paris)
🕷️Wednesday(Wednesday)
🟢Gi-hun(Squid Game)
01
How do you usually end up making a new friend? The origin story says a lot about the friendship that follows it.
02
What is a perfect Saturday with your best friend? Friendship is mostly built out of very ordinary hours.
03
You call them at two in the morning. What happens? This is the real test of a friendship, and everybody knows it.
04
What do you want from them when you are clearly wrong? The best friendships are the ones that survive being corrected.
05
What do your friends actually value about you? The friend you attract says something about the friend you are.
06
You have a falling out. How does it go? How a friendship repairs itself matters more than how it breaks.
07
What do you actually need a best friend for? Everybody is missing something. The right friend fills that gap.
08
Ten years from now, what keeps the two of you close? Eight questions in, this is the one that decides who you get.
The Group Chat Has Spoken Your Best Friend Is…
Four Netflix characters, four completely different ways of showing up for somebody. This is the one who fits how you actually do friendship, and what having them in your life would be like.
Dustin Henderson
You do not do friendship at half volume, and neither does he. What you want is somebody who says yes to the plan before you have finished describing the plan.
- Dustin is the friend the entire show runs on: loyal past the point of sense, enthusiastic about everything, and incapable of leaving anybody behind.
- You have the same instinct. Your friendships are loud, specific and slightly ridiculous, and they last for decades because of it.
- He is also the one person who would take your strangest interest completely seriously, which is far rarer than it sounds.
- You would have a group chat. It would never once be quiet.
Emily Cooper
You are the friend who makes things happen, and so is she. Together you would be mildly exhausting to everyone around you and completely delighted with yourselves.
- Emily treats an ordinary Tuesday as something that could be turned into an occasion, which is either the best or the worst quality in a friend depending on your energy levels.
- You share her refusal to sit still. Neither of you has ever accepted a night in when something was happening somewhere else.
- She is far more loyal than people give her credit for. She defends her friends loudly, publicly, and occasionally before checking the facts.
- She would post the photo without asking. You would forgive her, because it is a very good photo.
Wednesday Addams
You have no patience for pleasant lies, and she has no ability to tell them. What looks like coldness from the outside is the most reliable friendship on this list.
- Wednesday never says a kind thing she does not mean, which makes the rare ones count for an enormous amount.
- You would rather be told the truth than be made comfortable. She is constitutionally incapable of offering you anything else.
- Underneath all of it she is ferociously protective. She simply refuses to make a performance out of caring.
- Do not expect a birthday message. Do expect her to ruin anyone who wrongs you.
Seong Gi-hun
You look after whoever is having the worst day. So does he. It is the least strategic way to move through the world and the best possible quality in a friend.
- Gi-hun is not the strongest player in Squid Game, or the cleverest. He is the one who keeps choosing to protect somebody else, over and over, at genuine cost to himself.
- You have the same instinct. You notice who is struggling and you stay with them, long after anybody would blame you for leaving.
- He is a flawed friend, and that is part of why it lands. He lets people down, then comes back and tries again, which is more than most manage.
- He would give you his last chance and never once mention that he had done it.
2 'The Last of Us' (2023– )
A fungal infection turns most of the population into something closer to a hive-minded monster than a traditional zombie, and Joel (Pedro Pascal) gets hired to escort a teenage girl named Ellie (Bella Ramsey) across a devastated America. Ellie turns out to be immune, which might make her the key to an actual cure. The show keeps most of the game's emotional beats while expanding certain side characters well beyond their original scope.
Episode three, a mostly standalone story about two survivors named Bill (Nick Offerman) and Frank (Murray Bartlett), became one of the most talked-about hours of television that year, and it barely features either lead. The infected stay frightening throughout, but the frightening parts usually comes from other survivors willing to do horrible things just to protect what little they have left.
1 'Squid Game' (2021–2025)
Hundreds of deeply indebted people get recruited to play deadly children's games for a massive cash prize, and Seong Gi-hun (Lee Jung-jae) signs up out of pure desperation. The show is a direct allegory for capitalism and class inequality, and that message stays sharp without overwhelming the tension of watching people die playing tug-of-war. The bright, pastel production design makes every death feel more jarring by contrast.
It became Netflix's most-watched show ever within weeks, turning a niche Korean production into a global phenomenon almost overnight. Each character represents a different kind of desperation, debt, addiction, loyalty, survival instinct, without feeling like a simple morality lesson. Later seasons expanded the story further, but this first outing remains the tightest, most purely tense version of the concept.
Squid Game
7 10
- Release Date
- 2021 - 2025
- Network
- Netflix
- Showrunner
- Hwang Dong-hyuk
- Directors
- Hwang Dong-hyuk
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