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Waiting for the Out
As the writer of conspiracy thriller Utopia and Covid-era relationship drama Together, Dennis Kelly has form for creating darkly perceptive TV drama. This excellent series stars Josh Finan (whose performance in The Responder earned him a Bafta nomination) as Dan, a philosophy teacher with a troubled family past, working in a prison. As he explores issues around freedom, luck and destiny with the inmates, he starts to wonder if he actually belongs behind bars like his abusive father. Soon, his anxieties threaten to become a self-fulfilling prophecy.
BBC One, 3 January
Can You Keep a Secret?
Dawn French has made a new sitcom, which in itself should be cause for celebration. However, Can You Keep a Secret? is written by Simon Mayhew-Archer (producer of This Country and Funboys) and revolves around a couple trying to cope with the windfall they receive when one of them is mistakenly pronounced dead, which is even better. And Mark Heap is in it too. This one could be brilliant.
BBC One, 7 January
Black Ops
The first season of this comedy mined belly laughs from institutional racism, starring Gbemisola Ikumelo and Hammed Animashaun as a pair of Black community support officers talked into infiltrating a drug gang. Season two takes things up a notch: Dom and Kay are now working for MI5. It’s not as glamorous as it sounds though – although their admin jobs soon liven up when they’re approached by charismatic spy Steve. What follows finds a perfect balance between espionage and hilarity.
BBC One, 8 January
Heated Rivalry
Is ice hockey the sexiest sport on Earth? This show makes a strong case. Within minutes of meeting, ice-rink nemeses Ilya Rozanov and Shane Hollander are getting it on. And with its near-constant and incredibly raunchy sex scenes, Heated Rivalry is so horny it’s already got certain circles up in arms in the US. Perhaps this is what we all deserve, though: some TV that puts the puck in pucker up.
Sky/Now, 10 January
Industry
It’s all change in this brilliantly brutal thriller set in the world of high finance. The departure of Harry Lawtey’s Robert seems to have triggered a reset, so there will be a flurry of new characters led by Whitney Halberstram (Max Minghella), the founder of a flashy payment processing company. Advance reports describe him as “a tornado of cut-throat ambition” so he should fit in just fine. Fans of continuity will be relieved to hear that Harper and Yasmin are still around and creating chaos wherever they go.
BBC One, 11 January
A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms
“It’s a hedge knight. It’s like a knight but … sadder.” This Game of Thrones prequel leans into the undercurrent of sly humour that always existed within the original. The hedge knight in question is Ser Duncan the Tall (former Irish rugby union player and first-time actor Peter Claffey), an intrepid but hapless adventurer whose eagerness to earn his spurs isn’t always matched by his ability. Look out for plenty of embryonic origin stories, as ancient members of the Houses Targaryen and Baratheon start to establish bloody rivalries.
Sky Atlantic/Now, 18 January
How to Get to Heaven from Belfast
How do you follow a generational classic? Lisa McGee is sticking to home territory for this eight-part comedy drama. Like Derry Girls, it focuses on a tight-knit group of friends: Saoirse, Robyn and Dara embark on a funny, scary adventure prompted by news of the death of a schoolmate. The brilliance of Derry Girls lay in its ability to find constant comedy and humanity in darkness and danger. This voyage of discovery looks set to repeat the trick.
Netflix, February
Euphoria
Set five years down the line, Rue (Zendaya) is now in Mexico and seriously indebted to drug honcho Laurie, Jules (Hunter Schafer) is in art school and Nate and Cassie (Jacob Elordi and Sydney Sweeney) are miserable but about to get married. Sam Levinson’s scandalous high-school epic has been remarkable as both a hit-maker – basically everyone is an A-lister! – and a headline generator. This time, music’s golden girl Rosalía joins the cast. Let’s hope it’s just as unforgettable away from the melee of hormones and horror that is the high-school environment, eh.
HBO Max, April
Malcolm in the Middle: Life’s Still Unfair!
After his world-conquering stint on Breaking Bad, Bryan Cranston could pick any project he liked. And that project was a revival of Malcolm in the Middle, the 00s teen sitcom in which he played an ostentatiously panicky dad. Given that Cranston’s performance in the original was truly exceptional, these four new episodes should be worth the wait.
Disney+, 10 April
Margo’s Got Money Troubles
David E Kelley, the long-reigning king of TV’s most covetable trash from Ally McBeal to The Undoing, adapts this novel about a hard-up woman who finds her fortune on OnlyFans. Elle Fanning stars as Margo, Nick Offerman plays her ex-wrestler dad Jinx Millet and Michelle Pfeiffer (Kelley’s real-life wife) plays her mum, Shyanne. It’s sure to be a total scream.
Apple TV, 15 April
Amandaland
It is now fair to call Amanda Hughes the Frasier Crane of Motherland. In that show, she was a one-dimensional villain – selfish, aloof, oblivious – but last year’s Amandaland deepened her into something far more complicated. If the new series is able to continue this pattern, Lucy Punch’s character will become the tragicomic heroine of an entire generation.
BBC
Army of Shadows
Ronan Bennett follows his hits such as Top Boy and The Day of the Jackal by updating this second world war classic – and placing it in a near-future Britain that has been invaded by America. We follow the burgeoning British resistance fighters who are trying to keep their country intact … and get their freedom back. Explosive stuff.
Channel 4
A Woman of Substance
The ultimate rags-to-riches romp! Brenda Blethyn and Jessica Reynolds star as older and younger versions of Emma Harte, who goes from housemaid to business mogul … then one of the richest woman in the world in the 1980s. The last time Channel 4 showed this drama, based on Barbara Taylor Bradford’s book, 13.8 million people tuned in, instantly making it the broadcaster’s biggest drama ever. They’ve still never hit those giddy heights again. Can they double down?
Channel 4
Bait
Bait was created and written by its star, Riz Ahmed. The story of a struggling actor on the verge of a big career breakthrough, it is “easily the most personal thing I’ve ever done”, he has said. However, it is also about what happens when a trippy conspiracy theory throws you into an existential crisis, which might be why he also said: “Maybe I should have just done therapy.”
Prime Video
Babies
We’re huge fans of Stefan Golaszewski’s tender, funny yet always tinged with melancholy work such as Him & Her and Mum (which still makes us weep just to think of it). His latest show, Babies, sounds like no exception – with Paapa Essiedu and Siobhán Cullen starring as a couple who have to deal with the unparalleled grief of multiple pregnancy losses.
BBC
Beef
The best show of 2023 is back with a new series. The last, in which Steven Yeun and Ali Wong fell into a rapidly escalating disagreement, was an absolute masterpiece. This time round there’s a whole new cast, including Oscar Isaac and Carey Mulligan, and a brand new disagreement. Can it be as good as the first? Can anything?
Netflix
Blue Planet III
David Attenborough celebrates his 100th birthday in May 2026 and he’ll be marking it with another landmark natural history epic. In a strong field, the first two seasons of Blue Planet are among his most memorable works: not only do the depths of the ocean offer utterly mind-boggling sights but it’s in the sea that humanity’s impact on nature can be most easily seen. Increasingly, Attenborough has refused to ignore environmental issues so this is likely to be a bracing watch as well as a beautiful one.
BBC One
Buffy the Vampire Slayer: New Sunnydale
Buffy the Vampire Slayer has had a Joss Whedon problem for a while now. People still love it, but they have a hard time reconciling it with the actions that got its creator cancelled. The solution? New Sunnydale, a brand new Buffy set 25 years after the original. Sarah Michelle Gellar is back, heading up a new cast. Chloé Zhao (of Hamnet fame) has directed the pilot.
Disney+
California Avenue
Ever since 2011’s The Shadow Line, Hugo Blick has delighted in appearing every few years with a new, ambitious, boundary-testing standalone miniseries. California Avenue sounds like no exception. It’s about a woman on the run who takes refuge in a caravan park with her 11-year-old child. Erin Doherty, Bill Nighy, Helena Bonham Carter and Tom Burke star.
BBC
Dear England
It began as a letter, then became a play. Now Gareth Southgate’s 2021 state of the nation address has become a TV show. As with the stage version, Joseph Fiennes will play Southgate, leading a cast that includes Jodie Whittaker and Jason Watkins. If it’s faithful to the play – and it should be, since James Graham has written both versions – this will be stirring stuff indeed.
BBC
DTF St Louis
“I would like you to go about your business and do tasks on your phone, while you sit on my face.” Landing with big NSFW energy – the acronym means “Down to Fuck” – on the new HBO Max channel (launching in the UK in March), it stars Jason Bateman, Linda Cardellini and David Harbour in a tale of bored suburbanites who end up on a hook-up app … until one of them winds up dead.
HBO Max
Falling
Keeley Hawes and Paapa Essiedu play a nun and a Catholic priest who encounter all sorts of emotional turmoil when they fall in love. Written by man of the moment Jack Thorne, this is, shockingly, the first love story he has ever penned. There will be fireworks.
Channel 4
First Day on Earth
Six years after the astonishing I May Destroy You pretty much invented a new TV language, Michaela Coel returns with another authored show. Coel is writer, star and executive producer of this drama about a blocked novelist, Henri, who is offered a job on a film in Ghana (the home of her estranged father) and can’t resist a roll of the dice. However, nothing about west Africa – or her father – is as she thought.
BBC One
Half Man
As the follow-up to Baby Reindeer, Richard Gadd’s Half Man will surely be hit with a flood of public interest upon release. As yet, nobody knows what the show is – it’s described as being about brothers – but it will star Gadd alongside Jamie Bell, and hopefully won’t result in the inspiration for any of the characters appearing on Piers Morgan.
BBC One
Last One Laughing UK
Although the first season of Last One Laughing – a sort of condensed Big Brother about comedians trying to make other comedians laugh – came with no expectations, the second is already one of the most anticipated of the year. We are very hopeful about the lineup – which this time features everyone from Ultimate Traitor Alan Carr to Diane “Philomena Cunk” Morgan, Mel Giedroyc and David Mitchell. But the best news of all? Defending champion, the sublime Bob Mortimer, will be back too!
Prime Video
Line of Duty
Now we’re sucking diesel! After a year of rumours, the seventh season of this much-loved police procedural was confirmed in November. But AC-12 is dead, so long live the Inspectorate of Police Standards, which is the catchy moniker under which officers Hastings, Fleming and Arnott will now be working. In a plotline that looks unlikely to stretch plausibility to breaking point, the team will be investigating a detective inspector accused of being a sexual predator.
BBC One
Maud
Her last show All’s Fair may have brought about a flurry of zero-star reviews, but Glenn Close’s Maud sounds much better. Close plays “an old killer with a tortured past” who becomes tired of looking after everyone and sets out to begin a second act. Close is never better than when she has a role she can fully sink her teeth into. This sounds like exactly that.
Channel 4
Maya
Her series Back to Life was often just as sad as it was funny, so it’s no surprise that Daisy Haggard’s next show is a full-blown thriller. Maya is about a woman (Haggard) and her daughter (Bella Ramsey) who flee their lives and begin again in a witness protection programme in rural Scotland, while a pair of hitmen search for them. Everything about this one looks wonderful.
Channel 4
Mint
Within minutes of this drama opening, Shannon (played by Emma Laird) talks about her longing for romance and wanting her life to be magic … before literally soaring off the ground. With its magical realism and the use of camcorder footage, we can certainly expect surreal, experimental things from the first show by Charlotte Regan (who directed the movie Scrapper.) Soon enough, a love interest comes along in the form of Arran – played by Ben Coyle-Larner (AKA musician Loyle Carner.)
BBC
Number 10
Steven Moffat had us at “Press Gang in Downing Street”, but really Number 10 sounds more like a British West Wing than anything else. Moffat’s series about the inner workings of 10 Downing Street, concerning the individuals who keep such a bizarre residence going, has all the markings of a blockbuster.
Channel 4
Pride and Prejudice
As if the return of Netflix mainstay Bridgerton and the BBC’s The Other Bennet Sister weren’t enough to make period drama fans swoon into their smelling salts, here comes Dolly Alderton’s Pride and Prejudice. Will it become as beloved as the Colin Firth version? Let’s wait till Jack Lowden emerges from that lake, shirt sodden and billowing, to find out.
Netflix
Rivals
Finally, after far too long, the second series of Disney’s febrile Jilly Cooper adaptation – almost certainly the horniest show ever to revolve round regional TV franchises – will arrive in 2026. Expect bums, boobs, romps, backstabbers, cads, bounders, revenge, perms, poshness, bravado, bitchiness, ego, excess and deception. And bums.
Disney+
Small Prophets
This comedy was written by Mackenzie Crook and, like his previous creation, the utterly sublime Detectorists, it looks for magic in the mundane. The series centres on Pearce Quigley’s gently eccentric Michael Sleep – a man who works in a DIY store, hangs out with his dad Brian (Michael Palin) and pines after his beloved partner Clea who disappeared seven years earlier. Then Michael tries to create a homunculus and things start to get weird. Sophie Willan, Jon Pointing and Lauren Patel also star.
BBC
Spider-Noir
Nicolas Cage all but stole 2018’s Into the Spider-Verse as Spider-Man Noir, a monochrome 1930s private investigator who also has the powers of Spider-Man. Amazingly, that character is about to get its own series. Even more amazingly, Cage is reprising his role. Even more amazingly, it’s going to be live action. This could be, well, amazing.
Disney+
The Altruists
In the mould of The Dropout or Dopesick, The Altruists is a ripped-from-the-headlines drama about Sam Bankman-Fried, the real-life disgraced founder of a collapsed crypto exchange. Bankman-Fried’s fall from grace was certainly spectacular enough to warrant the treatment, so here’s hoping showrunner Graham Moore does it justice. Julia Garner and Anthony Boyle star.
Netflix
The Boroughs
After ending the year with the biggest bang imaginable in the Stranger Things finale, the Duffer Brothers already have their next project in the bag. The Boroughs stars Geena Davis and Alfred Molina and is described as a sci-fi set in a retirement village, where “a group of unlikely heroes must band together to stop an otherworldly threat from stealing the one thing they don’t have … time”.
Netflix
The Boys from Brazil
After spending the last decade on The Crown, Peter Morgan dives into a story of Nazi hunters in an epic miniseries adapted from Ira Levin’s 70s novel. The ever-intense Jeremy Strong stars as Yakov Liebermann (played by Laurence Olivier in the 1978 film), a Holocaust survivor who has devoted his life to tracking down Nazis on the run – then gets a phone call from Brazil with intel on a fugitive German eugenicist.
Netflix
The Cage
When The Responder – starring Martin Freeman as a scouse night cop on the brink of a breakdown – first appeared, it came out of the gates so fully formed and so spectacular that it was inconceivable that this was Tony Schumacher’s first show. And yet it was true. Now comes his second, The Cage, starring the brilliant Sheridan Smith and Michael Socha – about two Liverpool casino workers who discover they’re both robbing from the same safe …. and the same gangster. You wouldn’t want to bet against this one.
BBC
The Devil in the White City
This Martin Scorsese-Leonardo DiCaprio collaboration – about the serial killer who offed people in his Murder Castle in Chicago in the run-up to the 1893 World’s Fair – has been mooted for way over a decade, starting life as a movie. Will this be the year we finally see it … and as a full series no less?
TBA
The Miniature Wife
Like Succession meets, er, Honey, I Shrunk the Kids, The Miniature Wife sounds like an incredibly timely satire, tackling both romantic power plays and our extreme technological angst. Matthew Macfadyen’s Les has to deal with the fallout after he shrinks his wife Lindy (Elizabeth Banks) to six inches high. Move over, Rick Moranis!
Sky/Now
The Pitt
How frustrating to see the rest of the world fall in love with The Pitt – a real-time medical drama starring Noah Wyle of ER fame that swept the awards, reinvigorated network television and has set a template for the future of the medium – when it wasn’t available to watch here. Fortunately that will change soon, just in time for its second season.
HBO Max
The Reluctant Vampire
Rob and Neil Gibbons of Alan Partridge fame have written a sitcom about what Lenny Rush would be like if he had to pretend to be a vampire all the time. The result is billed as “a heartwarming show about finding your own identity while longing to fit in”. Pencil this one in as the next Ghosts.
BBC
The Testaments
The year after The Handmaid’s Tale ended, in steps Margaret Atwood’s sequel The Testaments to up the dystopian stakes on our screens. Brace yourself for scandalous kidnappings, teen rebels – and a very fed up Aunt Lydia (still played by the glorious Ann Dowd) trying to take Gilead down from within.
Disney+
Tip Toe
A new Russell T Davies drama is always a treat – and this one comes in the vein of his classics like It’s A Sin and stars David Morrissey and Alan Cumming, no less. Twenty-five years on from Queer As Folk, Davies and his team are going back to Manchester’s Canal Street to shed light on the LGBTQ+ community today amid rising danger and fear. As he has said: “This is a show I had to write because the world is getting stranger, tougher and darker, and frankly, the fight is on.” Bring it.
Channel 4
Time
First it was Stephen Graham with Sean Bean. Then it was Bella Ramsey, Tamara Lawrance and Jodie Whittaker. Now for the third instalment of Jimmy McGovern’s harrowing but gripping prison drama, David Tennant will be going head to head with Siobhan Finneran, who returns as the prison pastor (only now she’s lost her faith). It’s set in a young offenders institution when chaos hits, so it’s sure to be a riot of violence and raging hormones.
BBC One
Tomb Raider
For an absurdly long time, it looked like the only thing to emerge from Amazon’s $100m deal with Phoebe Waller-Bridge was a little-watched documentary about octopuses. But that changes in 2026, because her big new Tomb Raider adaptation will finally arrive, with Sophie Turner as Lara Croft. Let’s hope it was worth the investment.
Prime Video
Trinity
Jed Mercurio has a busy year ahead. As well as the return of Line of Duty, there is also Netflix’s Trinity – a high-stakes drama about a naval officer who becomes entwined with the secretary of defence. Gugu Mbatha-Raw is the officer, Richard Madden is the secretary, and if it’s anything like Bodyguard, this will be all we’ll talk about for weeks.
Netflix
Twenty Twenty Six
It may have its detractors, but John Morton’s Twenty Twelve and W1A were living proof that the BBC is its own biggest critic. Luckily, 2026 will see an update, set round the World Cup. Hughs Bonneville and Skinner return for more scathing satire about what it’s like to be trapped in the bureaucratic nightmare of an organisation unable to work out its own identity.
BBC Two
VisionQuest
After a string of skippable duds, the MCU’s television adventures continue with VisionQuest. Happily, there’s lots to be excited about here. Billed as the final part of a trilogy that began with WandaVision and Agatha All Along, it sounds like it will be an exploration of Marvel’s AI characters, from Vision to Ultron.
Disney+
