WHICH SHOWS OWNED 2026: NETFLIX MISSED THE VIP LINE

Television in 2026 has delivered a deeply inconvenient truth: the best shows are scattered across so many platforms that maintaining a watchlist now feels like managing a multiversal custody arrangement.

Paul Tassi’s September Forbes ranking combines each show’s Rotten Tomatoes critic score and audience score, adding them together to create a maximum possible score of 200. When shows tie, the series with more reviews gets the higher placement. By that measure, FX/Hulu’s Adults Season 2 and Binge’s Colin From Accounts Season 3 tie at the top with 196 points each, while Apple TV+’s Slow Horses Season 6 follows close behind with 193.

Paul Tassi brought the Rotten Tomatoes arithmetic. I only came with a remote, a snack, and the fiscal trauma of discovering that the best TV of the year apparently lives in twelve different subscription cages.

Before we summon the discourse demons, understand the formula.
This is not simply a ranking of critic percentages. Tassi adds a show’s Rotten Tomatoes critic score to its audience score. A show with 100% from critics and 96% from audiences therefore receives 196 total points. If two series have the same combined score, the one with more reviews takes the higher place.
That distinction matters because Rotten Tomatoes measures two different things:
•The Tomatometer measures the percentage of professional reviews marked positive.
•The audience score measures the percentage of verified or registered viewers who gave a positive rating.
Neither number is a holy tablet dropped from Mount Television. A 100% critic score does not mean every critic thought the show was flawless; it means the collected reviews were classified as positive. Audience scores can also shift depending on participation, review volume, fan intensity, and whether the internet has decided to turn a comedy about friends into an ideological cage match.
Still, combined scores can be useful. They point toward the rare shows that critics and audiences are both enjoying without needing to throw furniture at each other.
According to Tassi, all ten entries are “can’t-miss” television.  That is a confident claim. Let us inspect the menu before the streaming algorithms hide it beneath seven reality shows and an autoplay trailer.

A Killer Story lands in the top ten with a perfect score combination strong enough to place it among 2026’s most warmly received series. Tassi includes it on the list, but the accessible article result does not provide a full synopsis, cast breakdown, network detail, or individual score figures for the show.
That means we will not do the internet thing where somebody sees the title and invents a whole detective saga about a washed-up inspector, a haunted lake, and a missing mayor named Greg.
What we can say is that the show made the ranking through the critic-plus-audience formula. That alone makes it worth putting on the “find out what this is before spoilers find me first” watchlist.
The title carries dangerous energy. A Killer Story could be a crime thriller, a true-crime-inspired drama, a dark satire, or a series about somebody telling the most incriminating anecdote at a party. The source result does not say, so the mystery survives.
That is not incomplete reporting. That is refusing to summon fake characters from the spoiler realm.

The Lowdown also enters Tassi’s top ten through its combined Rotten Tomatoes performance.
Like several titles in the ranking, the accessible version of the source does not provide enough plot, cast, platform, or character information to support a full narrative breakdown. We know it is one of the ten shows that scored highly with both critics and audiences. We do not know enough to tell you that it follows a disgraced journalist investigating a corrupt mayor under a blood moon.
Maybe it does.
Maybe it is about cooking.
Maybe the entire show is one long argument between two cousins over who misplaced a charger.
The responsible move is to leave the mystery intact until a proper official source opens the box.
What its placement proves is that 2026’s critical winners are not limited to giant franchises. A title does not need a cinematic universe, a dragon, or ten billion dollars in trailer promotion to make critics and viewers sit up.
Sometimes the lowdown is simply: it cooked.

Matlock Season 2 makes the list, proving that legal drama remains one of television’s most reliable arenas when the writing knows how to balance cases, characters, humour, tension, and the deeply enjoyable sensation of watching somebody get professionally destroyed by a well-timed question.
The series carries the legacy of the original Matlock name, but a revival cannot rely on nostalgia alone. It has to justify the badge. It has to create cases people want to follow, personalities audiences enjoy spending time with, and an identity that does not merely stand in front of the old show’s shadow hoping nobody notices.
Its placement on a critic-and-audience ranking suggests that Season 2 found that balance. It likely gives procedural television what viewers still want: a satisfying structure, a weekly hook, and a reason to care about the people walking into court.
There are no named characters or cast details provided in the accessible Forbes summary, so there is no need to manufacture a courtroom roster.
But there is one universal truth: if a legal show survives into a second acclaimed season, somebody somewhere is dramatically saying, “Objection,” while the audience pauses dinner.

Widow’s Bay is another high-performing entry in Tassi’s combined-score countdown.
Now, every irresponsible part of my brain wants to say this is obviously about a haunted coastal town, a widow in a black dress, fog, an ancient curse, and one fisherman who knows too much. But the accessible source does not confirm any of that.
Maybe Widow’s Bay is exactly that.
Maybe it is a comedy about a woman running a seafood restaurant.
Maybe the bay is not a bay. Maybe the widow is a boat.
We do not know. And that is fine.
The verified takeaway is that it has enough critic-and-audience love to sit beside major international series in the year’s top ten.  If you enjoy going into a show without the entire plot fed into your mouth through clips, memes, and reaction thumbnails, this may be a smart title to investigate before the algorithm starts shouting spoilers.
The name is already doing half the marketing. Somebody’s dead. The water knows something. There is probably a door nobody should open.
Or perhaps it is about a bakery.
Television is beautiful because it can surprise you.

Brian and Maggie makes Tassi’s top ten, showing that the 2026 TV conversation is not built only from spies, superheroes, murders, monsters, and fictional buildings exploding in the background.
The available source result does not provide detailed plot or character information, so we cannot safely expand the premise beyond the title and ranking placement. But its inclusion points to something useful: human-scale storytelling can still stand shoulder-to-shoulder with larger genre projects.
Not every acclaimed show needs to threaten a city.
Sometimes two people in a room, written well, can produce more tension than a fleet of alien ships. Sometimes a conversation can be the action scene. Sometimes a look across a table can have more impact than a laser beam.
If Brian and Maggie is earning this much praise from critics and audiences, it likely has that kind of emotional precision. Or it has a very good dog. The source will not tell us, and I refuse to lie to you on the internet.

The Comeuppance appears in the top ten, and its title sounds like karma has put on steel-toe boots and arrived at someone’s house to settle a long-running debt.
But a title is not a synopsis. The accessible result does not offer a platform, plot, cast list, character names, or full score breakdown, only its placement in the Forbes list. So let the story stay unspoiled rather than claiming it is definitely about a billionaire being haunted by a very organised ghost.
The word “comeuppance” invites an image of consequence. Somebody did something. The universe noticed. Now the bill has arrived with interest.
Whether the show is a thriller, comedy, drama, or genre creature hiding in a trench coat, its top-ten status says critics and audiences have both found something to enjoy in the reckoning.
And frankly, 2026 could use more stories where bad decisions have consequences. Fictional ones, at least. The real world is still trying to load that update.

Furious is one of the clearest heavy hitters on the list. The Hulu crime series stars Emmy Rossum, and earlier coverage identified it as holding a 100% critic score from dozens of reviews.
That review volume matters. A perfect score based on a tiny handful of reviews is impressive but fragile. A perfect score sustained across dozens of critics means more people have tried to find a weak spot and collectively failed to land one.
Rossum is the named star available in the source material. The specific character she plays is not supplied in the accessible article results, so we will not assign her a detective badge, an alcohol problem, a morally haunted past, and a grudge against the mayor just because crime TV has trained us to expect that starter pack.
What we do know is that Furious has been positioned as a major 2026 critical success, and it performs strongly enough in the combined formula to sit near the upper reaches of Tassi’s ranking.
That tells us something important about the show’s appeal: it is not only pleasing critics. Audiences are responding too. Crime dramas often succeed when they have a strong central performance, a compelling mystery or conflict, and enough tension that viewers say “one more episode” until they suddenly realise it is 3:47 a.m. and their alarm has feelings.
If Furious is doing that at a high level, Hulu has a serious weapon on its hands.

Slow Horses Season 6 sits near the top of the 2026 score board with a 100% critic score and 93% audience score, giving it 193 points in Tassi’s combined ranking.
That is a ridiculous level of consistency for a sixth season.
A lot of television series become tired by this point. They start repeating old plots, mistaking familiarity for momentum, and putting their characters through a slightly different version of the same crisis because somebody has a contract for two more years.
Slow Horses apparently said, “No. We are still working.”
The Apple TV+ spy drama is based on Mick Herron’s Slough House novels and follows disgraced MI5 agents assigned to the bureaucratic dumping ground called Slough House. These are spies who have messed up, been sidelined, or become inconvenient to the people in charge. They are not the polished, champagne-sipping agents from glossy espionage fantasies. They are damaged, sarcastic, messy, and somehow still useful when the real professionals begin making bigger mistakes.

Notable mentions include:

Jackson Lamb, played by Gary Oldman, leads Slough House. He appears sloppy, rude, exhausted, and permanently offended by the existence of everyone around him. But underneath the bad habits and weaponised insults is a deeply capable intelligence officer who sees more than people assume.
Lamb does not inspire loyalty by being warm. He inspires it by being right when it matters, protecting his people in his own viciously indirect way, and understanding the game better than the polished officials who think he is finished.
He is the kind of boss who will insult your haircut, mock your plan, and then quietly make sure you survive the operation.
That is not healthy mentorship.
But it is extremely watchable.

• RIVER CARTWRIGHT: THE AGENT TRYING TO PROVE HE BELONGS

River Cartwright, played by Jack Lowden, is one of the central Slough House agents. He is capable, ambitious, and frustrated by his demotion, still hoping to prove he belongs in the higher circles of MI5.
River’s story is important because he has the instincts of a traditional spy hero, but he is trapped in a world that does not reward clean heroism. He makes mistakes. He gets in over his head. He learns that intelligence work is often less James Bond and more “which powerful person is lying to preserve their career today?”
His drive makes him a useful counterweight to Lamb’s cynicism. River still wants to believe the work means something. Lamb knows the work is a mess but keeps doing it anyway.

• DIANA TAVERNER: THE POLISHED FACE OF COLD POWER

Diana Taverner, played by Kristin Scott Thomas, is a senior MI5 figure operating within the elegant, ruthless politics of British intelligence.
Taverner is the opposite of Lamb in presentation. She is composed, controlled, refined, and dangerous. Where Lamb looks like he has been sleeping under a desk, Taverner looks like she could destroy your career during a pleasant lunch meeting and still make it to the opera on time.
Her presence reminds viewers that the real threat in spy stories is not always a foreign enemy. Sometimes it is the people in the same building, wearing better suits and moving pieces on a board they refuse to explain.
Season 6’s score suggests the series continues to balance that bleak institutional drama with sharp humour, tense plots, and characters worth following.
Six seasons. Still peak. Apple TV+ needs to guard this horse stable with armed professionals.

Colin From Accounts Season 3 ties for first in total points with 100% from critics and 96% from audiences, for 196 points. It takes the number-two placement in the cited coverage’s ordering, with Adults claiming the top spot.
The Australian comedy is built on a delightfully inconvenient premise. Gordon and Ashley are strangers whose lives become tangled after a traffic accident involving a dog named Colin. The injured dog forces them into each other’s orbit, and from there, the story becomes an awkward, funny, imperfect relationship comedy about two adults who are not remotely prepared to become responsible together.
Romance often begins with moonlight, poetry, and a gaze across a crowded room.
This one begins with road trauma and veterinary expenses.
Honestly? More believable.