Imagine for a moment that the television was never invented. How would your life be changed? Absolutely, unequivocally for the worst. You’d spend your downtime reading books (like a nerd), and/or walking around outside, like, sipping little coffees and listening to birdsong, mind utterly unpolluted by daytime talk shows and prestige dramas about the mob and science teachers gone wild. Imagine!
TV gives us something to look forward to, not least as the world creeps further towards dystopia and each revolution around the sun feels a little more taxing than the last. Though the year in TV has been a little underwhelming, survey the moments that have nevertheless broken through: Fallout was a nuclear-grade spring highlight, House of the Dragon has left summer feeling a little more lit, and what did anyone talk about for like a month other than Baby Reindeer?
So we’re turning our optimistic gaze towards the next year, with some of our most hotly anticipated shows across streaming and broadcast set to arrive in 2025. There’s (probably) The Last of Us season two, the concluding season of Stranger Things, and new Black Mirror. All reasons to live. Rejoice in her benevolent glow!
January 1
We've got Lenny Henry. We've got Ashley Walters. We've got Richard Armitage, we've got Steve Pemberton, we've got Jimmy Nesbitt, we've got… Matt Willis? This cast is stacked. The show they’re stacking themselves into is about a detective whose fiancé mysteriously disappears, only for her to see him pop up on a dating app ten years later. Weird! She’s also got the unsolved murder of her father hanging over her, and as each mystery begins to reveal itself, perhaps – and this is just a wild guess here – we’ll learn that they’re linked?
1 January
SAS: Rogue Heroes follows the founding members of the SAS they’re off horsing around in WWII for their sins – first in Egypt, and now, in season 2, in Europe. The writer is Stephen Knight, of Peaky Blinders fame, and the cast includes the likes of all-action-everything Jack O’Connell and Sex Education favourite Connor Swindells. Gwilym Lee (from Bohemian Rhapsody) turns up in this season as brother and agitator to Swindells’s grump-in-chief David Stirling – where better for a family feud to play out than the front lines of a world war?
1 January
For the first two seasons at least, there’s been a refreshing lack of fame-mongering among the contestants of Traitors, which sees them secretly divided into traitors and non-traitors, with the non-traitor majority tasked with identifying and voting out the traitor minority each night, who are in turn able to “murder” a non-traitor each night. A prize pot is accumulated by contestants as they complete a series of missions, and at the end, if they manage to vote out all the traitors, the remaining faithfuls split the winnings. But, if there’s one traitor left, the money is theirs. Everyone’s gonna be talking about it, so you might as well get on board – and anyway, it’s actually pretty great.
January 17
The sci-fi drama where people are able to divide their consciousness into a work-self and a non-work-self – how had no one come up with this before? Season one saw Adam Scott continue with impressive ease along his transition from the comedic lightness of Parks and Rec et al to more serious dramatic roles, with able support from Britt Lower, Christopher Walken and Patricia Arquette. One to get you thinking, talking, and, most importantly, watching. But hopefully not severing. Unless…
January 28
Sterling K Brown (excellent in American Fiction) plays the bodyguard of James Marsden's (excellent in Dead to Me, underused in plenty of other not-so-good stuff) President of the United States, who gets killed. Brown becomes a suspect in an investigation that doesn’t seem to be playing it right down the line vis-a-vis the law, and sticking to the law. Something strange is going on, and we’ve gotta back Sterling to figure out what. Look at the guy. He’s gonna figure it out. He’s too handsome not to.
January 2025
In recent years professional wrestling has enjoyed a social media-led renaissance unlike anything we’ve seen for sports entertainment since its ‘90s heyday. Smart money says that will only spread further when WWE moves to Netflix and its audience of nearly 270 million, with ample opportunities for cage matches, hells-in-cells and chair shots galore. But it’s not just Raw and SmackDown — from January 2025 you’ll be able to watch WrestleMania, SummerSlam and the Royal Rumble with a streaming subscription. Forget the days of having to pay 40-odd quid on Sky Box Office. It’s a stunner of a deal.
20 February
Robert De Niro as a former POTUS? Yep. Makes sense. Just feels kinda right. In what’s now a startlingly (and surely accidentally) relevant bit of political drama, this particular former President, who’s been tasked with leading a federal investigation into a terrorist attack, appears to be suffering from some kind of cognitive decline. So, yeah, timely… but in this case, no one seems to notice the decline – or at least not at first. And that obviously has a few rather large consequences. Narcos writer Eric Newman is behind this one, which is surely enough to make anyone intrigued.
26 March
Seth Rogen keeps one foot in the pool of seriousness he dove into for The Fabelmans in this dramedy in which he plays the head of an old-school Hollywood studio struggling to keep up in the new streaming-heavy TV and film landscape. And it’ll be released on… Apple TV? Right… Catherine O’Hara and Kathryn Hahn also star, and in a sort of Curb Your Enthusiasm-esque move we have the likes of Ron Howard, Zoe Kravitz and Martin Scorsese all playing themselves. Sounds fun!
March 2025
Charlie Cox returns as his fan-favourite superhero following a three-year tenure in the Netflix series Daredevil. The twist? This new series is the first centred on the blind crime-fighter that will take place within Marvel’s interconnected cinematic universe. We don’t know a huge amount about the story, although the events of the Netflix show will be considered canon, and a handful of characters from it will reportedly return, like Vincent D’Onofrio’s Kingpin and Jon Bernthal’s Punisher. Expect to find out more in the coming weeks and months, starting with Disney’s D23 Expo in August.
11 April
Jon Hamm leads the way here as a recently-divorced-and-fired hedge fund manager who turns to stealing from his wealthy neighbours to maintain the lifestyle he and his family have become accustomed to. So one of those “keeping up appearances will drive you to insanity” kind of shows, with the added twist that in the process of his thieving, Hamm finds his esteemed community might have a little more to hide than he’d expected. X-Men and New Girl star Olivia Munn is also onboard, and a second season has already been commissioned – Apple is confident with this one.
Spring 2025
Suddenly and miserably more talked-about of late as a result of the election of everyone’s least-favourite reality-TV-host-turned-politician, this will be the final season of Bruce Miller’s dystopian drama based on Margaret Atwood’s novel of the same name about a society in which are relegated to enslaved child provision and no more. It’s picked up plenty of critical and popular acclaim across its fice seasons so far, and there’s no reason to think the sixth and final will be any different.
15 June
It kinda sounds like a comedy duo? “Ser Duncan the Tall and Egg.” Or a children’s book? Or… anyway, it’s neither of those, it’s a Game of Thrones prequel based on George RR Martin’s Tales of Dunk and Egg novellas, which follow aforementioned Duncan and Aegon Targaryen (Egg) on a series of adventures that take place around 90 years before the events of the novels everyone’s become more familiar with begin. All six foot five of former rugby player Peter Claffey has been cast as Dunk, while Dexter Sol Ansell will play lil Egg alongside a cast of long-underrated performers like Bertie Carvel, Sam Spruell and Daniel Ings.
First half of 2025
Rich people are weird! That’s, if not the actual narrative premise, then certainly the thematic one of White Lotus, which sees something dramatic happen to a bunch of people staying in a fancy hotel somewhere and looks at how their wealthy weirdness informs the dramatic thing and everyone’s reactions to it. But who are the rich people this time? Well we’ve got Parker Posey, Jason Isaacs, Walton Goggins (yes!), Aimee Lou Wood – who else d’ya need? Plus, Jennifer Coolidge's favourite spa worker (pictured above) from season one will be returning as the programme's single through-line character.
TBC 2025
Bella Ramsey and Pedro Pascal return to the post-apocalypse in HBO’s hit adaptation of the PlayStation games. Expect this one to stick close to the source material, just like the first season, picking up a few years after its frenetic finale. Ellie (Ramsey) and Joel (Pascal) have found a home in the Wyoming settlement founded by Joel’s brother, and all is well — insofar as all can be well when there are mushroom zombies hammering at your gates. But when a figure from Joel’s past arrives looking for revenge, they are thrust anew into a fight for survival that could change the fate of the world around them.
TBC 2025
Last we saw, the world of Stranger Things was going to shit, with a portal to the Upside Down torn open above Hawkins, polluting the town and exposing it to all sorts of Lovecraftian monstrosities. Despite his defeat at the end of season four, Vecna is still out there, somewhere, ready to wreak havoc and complete his vengeful conquest. Expect season five to conclude with the ultimate battle between good and evil, with plenty of the series’ signature nods to the films of the 1980s.
TBC 2025
The best Star Wars series was such because it wasn’t overly Star Wars, which is to say Andor is the only Star Wars spin-off show (so far) that didn’t compromise itself with overly gratuitous fan service, the expectation for its audience to have an encyclopaedic understanding of the Star Wars universe, and/or cookie cutter plotting. Let’s hope it keeps that up with a season expanding on its intrigue, espionage and thrilling cloak-and-dagger drama. A tough act to follow — especially given anyone who has seen Rogue One will know how this season ends. But we’re choosing to take a page out of the Jedi’s book and keep the faith.
TBC 2025
Billed in reports as the origin story for It’s Pennywise, Welcome to Derry will see Bill Skarsgård return as the shapeshifting, kid-killing clown, haunting the sewers of Maine in the ‘60s. The series was developed by It director Andy Muschietti, Barbara Muschietti and producer Jason Fuchs, and will hit HBO next year. In the meantime do not accept any balloons from clowns in storm drains, no matter how well they float.
TBC 2025
Charlie Brooker’s dark sci-fi satire returns for its seventh season next year. The flagship episode that everyone is already getting excited by? A sequel to best-in-class ep USS Callister, which saw a video game developer portrayed by Jesse Plemons torture the sentient AI crew of his in-game spaceship. As for the new season more broadly, expect your mind to be blown, nightmares haunted, and even more prescient soothsaying from a guy who just needs to stop predicting every single bad thing that happens.
TBC 2025
Jason Bateman, Jude Law. What a duo! Black Rabbit will see Law portray a New York City socialite who owns the hottest, most exclusive club in town, whose life may or may not be thrown into turmoil by the reintroduction of his chaotic brother (Bateman). Sounds like a recipe for the sort of scrap that’d get you thrown out of any VIP joint. Not much else is known about the show, but the first thing that comes to mind when we read that logline is The Bear, and can that ever be bad?
TBC
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What was Gareth Southgate’s England? Loyalists to the waistcoat will say he led the footballing revolution that this country desperately needed, reuniting the England national team with the people who had been so hurt by it. And the proof is in the inflatable unicorn: two Euros finals, a World Cup semi-final. The naysayers will point to the lack of silverware, the tedious tactics, the fact that watching the team at its worst was as unpleasant as feeding oneself feet-first through a woodchipper. The hit West End stage show Dear England wrestles with all of those things, but mostly paints a portrait of a good man, an honest man, who used his position of power to exact good not only in the footballing world but across a country that has endured a decade of division. Now comes a BBC adaptation with the star power of Joseph Fiennes to remind us anew of the gifts Gareth gave us.
TBC
Can you believe it took this long for a streaming company to stump up the cash for a new original series from the Midas hands of the creator of Breaking Bad? Sure, Gilligan was a little busy with spin-off Better Call Saul — and Netflix’s feature-length shot behind the wheel, El Camino — but come on. The writer is returning to familiar territory with his still-untitled new series for Apple TV+, which will take place in Albuquerque, New Mexico after “the world changes very abruptly.” It’s reportedly sci-fi, and the real Gillistans will know that he cut his teeth doing The X-Files, so it sounds like we’re in for a real genre homecoming.
TBC
Succession, but make it… Guinness? Long before the graphic designers of East London had even heard of splitting a G, patriarch of the beer-brewing brood Benjamin Guinness died and left a power vacuum for his children Arthur, Edward, Anne and Ben to try and fill. This drama will chronicle that scramble, with the efforts of James Norton, Louis Patridge, Say Nothing's Anthony Boyle and Jack Gleeson (Joffrey from GoT) helping it along the way. Sláinte!
