This weekend is the 2025 Emmys ceremony, TV’s biggest night. Which means there is no hope for you catching up on all the new TV shows on your backlog in time to see what wins. Which REALLY means it’s a great time to blow off anything resembling homework and watch some great television instead.
While Netflix, Hulu, HBO Max, and Prime Video have become go-tos in the streaming era, we wanted to make sure there was truly something for everyone this weekend regardless of platform subscriptions. So here are three shows we highly recommend that you can actually stream for free, through the magic of AVOD.
Archer
Episodes: 145
Where to watch: Free with ads on Tubi; streamable without ads on Netflix and Hulu
Jon H. Benjamin is a national treasure. You might not recognize his face, but you’d recognize his voice, which he’s used to play some of the most beloved animated characters of the 21st Century. Old school animation fans may remember Benjamin as Coach John McGuirk in Home Movies, while pretty much everyone is at least familiar with his work as the pun-loving patriarch on Bob’s Burgers. But I’d argue that Benjamin’s best performance is the overly confident superspy Archer Sterling on the animated sitcom Archer.
Archer is streaming for free on Tubi, which means there’s no reason not to spend your weekend inside watching (or rewatching) the show. You’ll get to hear Benjamin deliver classic lines like “That’s how you gets ants” and “Karate? The Dane Cook of martial arts?,” while he fumbles his way through various top-secret missions. The rest of the cast, which includes Jessica Walter, Chris Parnell, and Aisha Tyler, is top-notch, too.
Be warned: Archer’s later episodes get a little weird, with season-long detours into genre experiments that don’t totally pay off. But the first few seasons are still some of the best comedy (animated or otherwise) of the century, and if you stick with it through season 14, Archer eventually sticks the landing. —Jake Kleinman
Spy x Family
Episodes: 37
Where to watch: Free with ads on Crunchyroll; streamable without ads on Crunchyroll Premium or Netflix
Spy x Family proves that the most unexpected setup might actually come with an endearing experience.
At the center of the show, you have Loid, a spy; Yor, an assassin; and Anya, a little girl who can read minds. These three are a make-believe family, but besides Anya — who can read minds, remember? — Loid and Yor don’t know about their true identities. This group was put together because Loid has the mission to learn what an important government figure is planning to do, while Yor doesn’t want to call attention by being single. As this unusual family tries to keep their image in a society where trust is a luxury due to a cold war with another country, they make us laugh and think about the kind of connections we can establish with other people.
There are already two seasons out, and if you start watching now, you’ll be all ready for the third one, which is releasing this fall. —Paulo Kawanishi
Mission: Impossible
Episodes: 120
Where to watch: Free with ads on Pluto; streamable without ads on Paramount Plus
After nearly 30 years of watching Tom Cruise dangle from various vehicles, you may wonder how Mission: Impossible was ever fit for the small screen. But in each installment, Cruise and his collaborators riffed on the same familiar formula — one established by creator Bruce Geller way back in 1966. The best of the movies echo the high-tension-meets-borderline-silly-solutions approach to the straight-faced spy show.
Much like the movies, Mission: Impossible finds a revolving cast of players working for the Impossible Missions Force (IMF). It’s a crime-of-the-week series with global stakes that often hinge on whether Leonard Nimoy can wear a fake beard well enough to convince the right authoritarian he’s actually a germ warfare scientist. With minimal stunt work and everyday interior sets, Mission: Impossible relied heavily on chemistry to make the heist-like operations work, a vibe J.J. Abrams reached for in M:I III and Brad Bird nailed the best with Ghost Protocol. Led by Peter Graves’ Jim Phelps by season 2 — a character that notoriously broke bad in Cruise’s first movie! — the teams are full of recognizable yet-to-be-famous faces (Nimoy! TV icon Barbara Bain! Future Oscar-winner Martin Landau! Lesley Ann Warren of Clue! Sam Elliot of various Westerns!) wearing disguises, utilizing spy tech, and pulling off modest car stunts fit for a Hollywood backlot.
There’s nothing Geller couldn’t pull off in a creative way for Mission: Impossible, and Christopher McQuarrie, who took over the last decade of Cruise’s franchise, clearly knows it. For the opening of Mission: Impossible – Fallout, McQuarried lifted the entire premise of IMF faking a nuclear holocaust (complete with Simon Pegg’s Dunn impersonating Wolf Blitzer to sell the worldwide news) from a season 1 episode called “The Horse Coper.” When one of the most successful action writer-directors on the planet is cribbing from a ’60s TV series, you know it’s legit. —Matt Patches
