My list includes performers from Severance, The White Lotus, The Residence and The Pitt. Who is on yours?
Good TV shows are built on great performances.
So, when I started thinking about all the wonderful television series that have been packed into the beginning of 2025, my mind immediately turned to signature moments delivered by performers at the top of their game.
My Top Six list went up on NPR.org yesterday, and includes the people behind classic scenes on Severance, The Pitt, The Residence and more. Click here to read my in-depth analysis.
Here’s my bit on Severance’s MVP this year, Tramell Tillman as beleaguered office manager Seth Milchick.
“Even before his jaw-dropping performance in this year’s season finale — leading a marching band through a seriously HBCU-inspired musical number inside the offices of Lumon Industries — Tillman made his mark as devoted department manager Seth Milchick. Milchick had a lot going on during the show’s second season inside the cult-like corporate culture of Lumon: anger over constant humiliations, frustration over bizarre racial microaggressions, ambivalence over some of the extreme actions he had to commit. All of it to keep in line Lumon employees, whose work memories were “severed” from their home lives. But Tillman often managed to communicate all this complexity with few words, emotions playing across his face as he constantly seemed to reconsider whether it was all worth it. A proud Black man struggling with the world’s worst middle management job.”
There’s much more in the NPR story. And the graphic below adds in a few honorable mentions I couldn’t fit in the NPR piece.
But I’m also interested in what you’ve been vibing on so far this year. Much as we all love to dump on Hollywood’s Entertainment Industrial Complex, there has been a lot of great work squeezed into the beginning of a year when we all could really use some quality entertainment.
So feel free to let me know in the comments who you would have put on this list and why. Because if there’s one thing that’s nearly as fun as watching a masterful TV performance, it’s debating with other pop culture nerds about which performances were better.