It’s January! The most sluggish, torturous month of the year—in a good year. This January, things are not better, we’re just older and more tired. But the TV is good, which isn’t a tradeoff, but is at least a nice way to take the edge off after we’re done standing in a corner of the room and screaming.
These shows are listed in chronological order, and the first few have already aired so you can get right to streaming.
The Cleaning Lady, Season 1
Maybe you like shows about people who, after being abandoned by the bureaucratic systems that are supposed keep them safe and healthy, take matters into their own hands and dabble in various criminal enterprises in order to save themselves and their families. Maybe you find shows with such conceits too stressful to watch even though you want to. Either way, in The Cleaning Lady, Elodie Yung plays a badass Cambodian doctor who brings her son to the US for a medical procedure. For various reasons, they are failed by the healthcare complex and she decides to do whatever it takes, and fight back.
Release Date: January 3rd
Available on: FOX
Search Party, Season 5
Search Party! The highly experimental satire/mystery/thriller series has just released its final season! I’m very proud of the way this show moved along, slipping on and off various generic conventions as it moved from season to season, all while slinging razor-sharp commentary. Good job, Search Party!
Release Date: January 7th
Available on: HBO Max
Archive 81, Season 1
So let me get this straight… in this series, an archivist must take over the restoration of tapes put together by a filmmaker who investigated a dangerous cult, and then gets sucked into a mystery about it? Literally, stuff like this is WHY people become archivists in the first place.
Release Date: January 14th
Available on: Netflix
Ozark, Season 4
Do you like money laundering, bleak mid-western landscapes, and Jason Bateman? If so, you’re in luck because Ozark is back! Part one of the final season, that is. Hopefully our characters can make a CLEAN break. I do apologize, yes, that is a “laundering” joke.
Release Date: January 21st
Available on: Netflix
Snowpiercer, Season 3
I absolutely, absolutely can’t wait for Season 3 of Snowpiercer to drop, but it’s not for the reason you probably think. I’ve never seen a single second of the show, yet I still cannot wait for it because my best friend wrote an upcoming episode!! A whole episode!! I am thrilled, despite not having much context. So, yeah, full disclosure, me writing this entry is a conflict of interest. I AM COMPROMISED.
Release Date: January 24th
Available on: HBO Max
The Woman In The House Across The Street From The Girl In The Window, Season 1
I’m looking forward to this pastiche of voyeuristic domestic thrillers starring Kristen Bell and a whole slew of wonderful character actors. Will it merely be a collection of jokes about contemporary thriller clichés delivered in deadpan, or a thorough exploration of those tropes? I’ll be the judge of that. Thinking this would be a good “wine show.” Wish I drank wine, though. Maybe I’ll make a cheese plate instead.
Release Date: January 28th
Available on: Netflix
The Afterparty, Season 1
The wildly talented Tiffany Haddish leads this goofy-seeming ensemble whodunnit about a group of former classmates whose high school reunion afterparty turns into a murder scene. A new entrant into the “millennial murder mystery” genre most prominently inaugurated by the inventive series Search Party (see above), I’ll be interested to see if it meaningfully explores its conventions, or merely tries them on for a few nights of fun. Lucky for us all, Ilana Glazer co-stars.
Release Date: January 28th
Available on: Apple TV+
Pam and Tommy, Season 1
Lily James and Sebastian Stan basically turn into Pamela Anderson and Tommy Lee in this new series about their 1995 sex tape leak. But it also seems to be about the history of the internet—most notably how, as soon as it was born, it became a means for sexploitation.
Release Date: February 2nd
Available on: Hulu
Reacher, Season 1
“Waiting is a skill like anything else.” And we waited. And now Jack Reacher is back! Alan Ritchson plays our favorite retired military police officer-turned-investigator in this explosive new series.
Release Date: February 4th
Available on: Amazon Prime
Severance, Season 1
Not an adaptation of Ling Ma’s towering literary achievement but similarly offering a unique take on a corporate hellscape, Severance is about an office where the workers’ memories about life outside work are inaccessible during work hours. Adam Scott is the lead but I’m even more excited by the presence of both John Turturro and Christopher Walken.
Release Date: February 18th
Available on: Apple TV+
The Endgame, Season 1
All I know about this one is that it’s supposed to be a show about a “sexy and twisted heist” (per IMDb), which is cool because so is my life.
Release Date: February 21st
Available on: NBC (television)
Law & Order, Season 21
Ah, Law & Order. Like the mighty vampire, Law & Order is apowerful, hypnotic entity with a remarkable inability to die. Yes, just when you thought the coast was definitely clear, that irrepressible primetime staple has sprung back up with intent to take over your Hulu watchlists and basically your lives. If it has claimed you before, it will come for you again. Sam Waterson co-stars.
Release Date: February 24th
Available on: NBC (television)
Killing Eve, Season 4
After second and third seasons that were less compelling than its sleek, sinister first season, maybe it is okay for Killing Eve to end soon. But not before it wraps up the star-crossed tale about the young psychopathic killer Villanelle (Jodie Comer) and Eve (Sandra Oh), the M16 agent with whom she is obsessed.
Release Date: February 27th
Available on: BBC America (and a week earlier on AMC+)
The Last Days of Ptolemy Grey, Season 1
Samuel L. Jackson stars in this six-episode series based on the Walter Mosley classic. The Last Days of Ptolemy is about a lonely older man on the brink of dementia, who winds up caring for an orphaned teenager (Dominique Fishback). And then they learn about a treatment that might be able to restore his slipping memories.
Release Date: March 11th
Available on: Apple TV+
Our Flag Means Death, Season 1
The best genre—aside from one in which someone gets to cry out “someone in this house is a murderer”— is the “pirate comedy.” And ahoy, a trailer has just dropped for Taika Waititi’s new series, a farce set on the high seas is about a wealthy landowner named Stede Bonnet who, in a super eighteenth-century kind of midlife crisis, decides he wants to give up everything and become a pirate. Bonnet fairly terrible at it, not only because he doesn’t know what he’s doing, but also because he wants to take piracy in a new (more gentlemanly) direction. Swashbuckling misadventures ensue. Rhys Darby helms the series, and it looks like Nat Faxon, Leslie Jones, and Fred Armisen co-star, with Waititi himself playing the way more serious pirate Blackbeard. Shiver me timbers.
Release Date: March something
Available on: HBO Max
Better Call Saul, Season 6
The beloved prodigal show returns! “Number one on your speed dial right next to your weed dealer.”
Release Date: ???
Available on: Netflix
Peaky Blinders, Season 6
Cillian Murphy said of this new installment of everyone’s favorite historical crime drama about gangs in Birmingham, “It’s going to be heavy!” Which makes the last five seasons what, exactly?
Release Date: ???
Available on: Netflix
Gangs of London, Season 1
This one is about gangs of London!
Release Date: ???
Available on: AMC+
