Entertainment
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.
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
- Release Date
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2021 – 2025
- Network
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Netflix
- Showrunner
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Hwang Dong-hyuk
- Directors
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Hwang Dong-hyuk
-
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Wi Ha-jun
Detective Hwang Jun-ho
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