10 Netflix Animated Series With Zero Weak Episodes

In the decade or so that they’ve been making prestige television to rival HBO and AMC, Netflix has made a name for itself in animation. On the feature side, they’ve given us a modern Christmas classic in Klaus, a Pixar-level fun-for-all-ages masterpiece in The Mitchells vs. the Machines, and Guillermo del Toro’s enrapturing stop-motion adaptation of Pinocchio. They’ve also given networks like Fox and Adult Swim and Cartoon Network a run for their money in the world of animated TV shows.

Netflix turned Terminator into an anime show, and it’s the best the franchise has been in years. They snagged Disenchantment, Matt Groening’s follow-up to The Simpsons and Futurama, a medieval fantasy comedy satirizing Game of Thrones and Lord of the Rings. Netflix has a ton of great animated shows in its library, from David Fincher’s mind-bending anthology Love, Death & Robots to Kevin Smith’s three-part Masters of the Universe revival, but even those two examples had some weak episodes in their run.

It’s rare that a TV show doesn’t have a single bad episode. But, from Arcane to BoJack Horseman, some of Netflix’s animated shows have pulled it off.

Castlevania

Netflix’s Castlevania series bears almost no resemblance to the iconic video game franchise it’s based on. When comic book legend Warren Ellis was offered the chance to turn the games into an animated series, he wasn’t familiar with the franchise. But he took one look at the aesthetic, it reminded him of the Hammer horror movies he grew up loving, and he did completely his own thing from that visual jumping-off point.

But it’s hard to be mad about that. Ellis might not have made a straightforward adaptation of the Castlevania games, but what he did with that basic premise is great in its own right.

Big Mouth

Nick Kroll, John Mulaney, and a bunch of the greatest minds in American comedy came together to turn the universal experiences of puberty into a brutally frank, no-holds-barred, almost entirely uncensored cartoon. Big Mouth uses pitch-black cringe humor to capture the awkwardness of adolescence in all its horror.

But, as vulgar and juvenile as Big Mouth’s sense of humor is, its message is surprisingly mature and positive. It uses hormone monsters and shame demons to have an open discussion about safe sex and consent and menstruation and different sexual orientations. Big Mouth is a better sex education course than the U.S. public school system provides.

Cyberpunk: Edgerunners

When Cyberpunk 2077 first hit the shelves, it was riddled with bugs. But, as the developers slowly but surely fixed those issues, and the game was spun off into a near-flawless animated show on Netflix, the Cyberpunk name was untarnished, and the franchise was forgiven in the eyes of fanboys.

Cyberpunk: Edgerunners tells its own standalone story in the game’s sprawling dystopian setting of Night City, and it’s a worthwhile narrative regardless of its franchise connections. It gets everything right: neon-drenched visuals, compelling characters, intriguing worldbuilding.

F Is For Family

Bill Burr brought his uniquely acerbic wit to the realm of adult-oriented animation with his ‘70s-set sitcom F is for Family. Burr teamed up with Simpsons writer Michael Price to revolutionize that familiar format. F is for Family is a crude cartoon about a dysfunctional family, like The Simpsons or Family Guy or American Dad!, but it doesn’t reset the status quo every week; the characters’ actions have consequences.

F is for Family’s serialized storytelling made it a much deeper, more involving experience. The next-door neighbor’s coke problem was a fun running gag in the early seasons, but the dark side of his addiction reared its head as the series went on.

Devil May Cry

Netflix’s Devil May Cry series has been met with a mixed response from the franchise’s existing fan base (as is often the case), but critics and casual audiences have been very enthusiastic. The show follows a badass demon hunter as he attempts to prevent a demonic invasion of Earth.

This show absolutely nails the urban fantasy aesthetic, a subgenre that’s massively underserved in today’s Hollywood. Devil May Cry has been renewed for a third and final season, so it’s the perfect time to catch up.

BoJack Horseman

The title character in BoJack Horseman might be a talking horse, but he’s more deeply, profoundly human than 99% of the other characters on television. BoJack Horseman is dressed up as a zany, colorful cartoon set in a wacky world full of talking animals, but that’s all just an ingenious conceit to draw you into a harrowing exploration of trauma and addiction and abuse and mental health.

BoJack is every bit the captivating antihero that Tony Soprano and Walter White were, but he’s also a talking horse. BoJack Horseman is a rare example of a show that started great, quickly found its feet, and just got better and better as it built toward the perfect ending.

Scott Pilgrim Takes Off

The producers of Scott Pilgrim miraculously managed to reassemble the all-star cast of Edgar Wright’s cult-classic movie adaptation for an animated continuation on Netflix. To be clear, Wright’s film, Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, was already a perfect on-screen translation of Bryan Lee O’Malley’s brilliant comics, recapturing the source material’s spirit by continually pushing the visual envelope.

But the TV version, Scott Pilgrim Takes Off, might be even better. The animated show goes a step further; it feels like one of O’Malley’s comics brought to life, as if the panels started moving.

Blue Eye Samurai

Blue Eye Samurai tells a very familiar, traditional, archetypal revenge story. Set during Japan’s Edo period, it follows a lone warrior as she hunts down four men, one of whom is her father, and exacts vengeance one by one. Along the way, she discovers the dig-two-graves irony of seeking vengeance, and only perpetuates the cycle of violence that traumatized her in the first place.

We’ve seen that story a million times before, but there’s a reason that formula works — it speaks to something primal in all of us — and Blue Eye Samurai is one of the greatest versions of this story I’ve ever seen. It has gorgeous animation, powerful voice performances, and razor-sharp writing.

Long Story Short

After BoJack Horseman ended, creator Raphael Bob-Waksberg got to work on another animated series, and it might be even better than his career-defining hit. BoJack was a masterpiece, but Long Story Short is much more personal for Bob-Waksberg. It’s a semi-autobiographical story about several generations of a dysfunctional Jewish family.

The series has a completely unique nonlinear narrative structure. It jumps all over the timeline of its characters’ lives, flashing back and forward by a matter of decades to serve a given story. It’s like we’re poring through this family’s memories, uncovering their ugliest moments and their most beautiful moments.

Arcane

Although it takes place in the League of Legends universe, you don’t need to be familiar with League of Legends to enjoy Arcane. Arcane is a completely self-contained, standalone story about two sisters who take a very different stance in the war between their fellow scavengers in the neglected underworld and the ruling class in the affluent overworld.

Just about every episode of Arcane has some shocking twist or turn that keeps you locked into the overarching story (which the show wrapped up neatly in two perfectly paced seasons). This series is a masterpiece: beautifully animated, powerfully told, and poignantly acted by its two leads, Ella Purnell and Hailee Steinfeld.