Happy new year, stream team—find a great new show to start off 2026 on a good note.
Add the titles you’re keen to see to your Flicks watchlist, and get a handy notification when new episodes drop. Happy streaming!
FX’s The Beauty: Season 1
I’ve been burned by Ryan Murphy many a time. His shows always have fantastic casts, a tantalising premise, buttloads of style, and then absolutely nowhere clever to go after a few shock-value-laden first episodes. Does that mean I’ll avoid this ludicrous sci-fi thriller, set in the world of supermodels? Fool me once, shame on you: fool me 15 times…
Rebecca Hall and Evan Petersen play FBI agents on the trail of a mysterious virus that makes people…hot. Literally and figuratively. The stunning, scorched corpses left behind must be tied to Ashton Kutcher’s sinister corporation which is literally called ‘The Corporation’. Bella Hadid, Anthony Ramos and Isabella Rossellini co-star.
HIS & HERS: Limited Series
In rom-coms, the old screwball subgenre of “comedy of remarriage” will always work like a charm—pitting estranged lovers against one another, and letting us see why they’re actually destined to be together after all. Tessa Thompson and Jon Bernthal are one such couple, in this mystery-thriller based on Alice Feeney’s 2020 novel of the same name.
One is a cop and the other’s a news reporter, and each suspects that the other must be responsible for the confounding murder case they’re both covering—so yep, it probably wasn’t an amicable split. With Pablo Schreiber, Marin Ireland and Poppy Liu in the supporting cast, the pair’s reunion is already a sure thing: it’s the twisty road there that’ll be worth watching.
Industry: Season 4
The young cast of this scintillating finance drama keep getting more and more famous—Myha’la, Marisa Abela and David Jonsson, to name a few—but most of them are still turning up to the cutthroat London offices of Pierpoint & Co, makin’ deals and takin’ names. Why? I can’t really say, because the work and social climate there is truly miserable. I also can’t say because I’m a big dummy and struggle to comprehend all the economic ins-and-outs that are being spat out a mile a minute.
Episodes of the fourth season will drop weekly, on the same day as the US release. Last season ended with a shocking death, a six-month time jump, and Abela’s Yasmin dealing with both a PR crisis and the acceptance of a loveless marriage proposal. Just another day at the office, really!
A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms: Season 1
Based on George RR Martin’s Dunk and Egg novellas, this prequel to the mighty Game of Thrones series promises to be a Westeros palate cleanser of sorts. It’s only six episodes, each dropping weekly and at the same time as the US, and doesn’t have as much of the hefty family-tree-tracking and destiny-following of the two other Martin TV shows we’ve watched.
Peter Claffey and Dexter Sol Ansell are Ser Duncan the Tall and his unlikely squire Prince Aegon: respectively, a lowborn hedge knight, and one of them white-haired Targaryen freaks, who just might wind up as a fairly nice and decent king someday. I am hoping for a Shrek/Donkey type dynamic, a bit of road trip buddy comedy. Wouldn’t mind seeing a big angry flying reptile or two, neither, as the series takes place almost a century before GoT: in an age of dragons!
Marvel’s Wonder Man: Miniseries
So it’s come to this: an MCU project that openly admits superhero fatigue is the real deal, and takes a meta approach to solving the problem. The terrific Yahya Abdul-Mateen II plays Hollywood actor Simon Williams, hoping to be cast in one of Marvel’s big-budget superhero epics—but he’s got a big secret he’ll need to hide in order to nab the role. Simon has actual superpowers, and apparently Marvel won’t cast real superheroes in their productions.
What are the rules here, with powers behind the scenes and on-screen, and how can Simon cover up his amazing abilities and wind up on red carpets and awards ceremony stages? We’ll find out—and Ben Kingsley’s returning ham, Trevor Slattery, will be along for the ride, too.
The Pitt: Season 2
With its utterly absorbing first season, this medical drama marked itself as 2025’s best show. I would give that honour to Pluribus, but we’re not getting more episodes of that show for, what, another two years??! Meanwhile, the tireless staff of Pittsburgh Trauma Medical Center have already served up another season of, well, trauma, ready to whiten our knuckles and increase our blood pressure this very month.
Each hour-long episode of the series represents an hour of narrative time, too, meaning we’re right there over the shoulders of doctors, nurses and desperate patients as the shift/season unfolds. I am enthralled to see what my faves are up to—or more realistically, what horrible, soul-crushing emergencies they’re coping with.
PONIES: Season 1
Horse girls take heed: the “ponies” of this Cold War drama’s title refer to “persons of no interest”, in this case two under-appreciated secretaries of the US embassy in Moscow, 1977. When their higher-up husbands are mysteriously killed, however, the pair become CIA operatives—the perfect, unsuspecting candidates to blow a USSR conspiracy wide open.
The period spy thriller offers some star power, too, with Emilia Clarke as the brainy Russian speaker Bea and Haley Lu Richardson as a small-town girl in a strange land. They should have sparkling chemistry together, as suspicious forces close in and grief nibbles at their already-frayed psyches.
Star Trek: Starfleet Academy: Season 1
With the end of January, most students are heading back to school (boo), and so goes it for the freshest batch of bright-eyed Starfleet cadets (yay!). In the 32nd century, the first new class of recruits in over a century are ready to come of age and explore the universe, under the guidance of Holly Hunter’s stern chancellor Nahla Ake.
The cast also includes a returning Robert Picardo as Voyager’s holo-doctor, comedian Tig Notaro, Stephen Colbert as a glorified PA system and the great Paul Giamatti as a Klingon-Tellarite antagonist—all ready to shepherd the future back to the utopia promised in the very first Star Trek series.
Steal: Season 1
Clock in, grab a coffee, log on, answer emails, chat with coworker—face violent thieves who need you and your bestie to nick a billion pounds. It’s not a great day for office worker Zara (Sophie Turner), in the enthralling set-up for this thriller series. She works at a pension fund investment company, and soon finds herself right at the core of an unspooling criminal mystery.
Who would dare to steal from ordinary people, pensioners no less? A detective who happens to be a gambling addict will need to juggle the competing interests of everyone involved in the shocking heist, and uncover why Zara and Luke (rising star Archie Madekwe) were forced to get involved. Might make you want to WFH.
A Thousand Blows: Season 2
What a difference a year makes: since the first season of this bare-knuckle British period drama, our lead characters have taken both mental and physical beatings, losing control of crime syndicate ‘the Forty Elephants’ and left as shells of their former selves.
Jamaican migrant Hezekiah (Malachi Kirby) and Stephen Graham’s bruiser Sugar are still reeling, right when underground queen Mary Carr (Erin Doherty) rolls back into town, ready to seize control of the seedy empire she built. You know what they say: it’s a long way to the top if you wanna rock and roll, and season two of Steven Knight’s rousing 1880s yarn promises to do both.
