With 2023 drawing to a close, the Film Stories team takes a look at the most anticipated TV shows of 2024.
Written by: Maria Lattila, James Harvey, John Moore
2024 is shaping up to be a great year for films, but it’s also shaping up to be a particularly ambitious year for television. If we said goodbye to many familiar faces in 2023, 2024 is all about making new friends. We have returning anthology shows, video game adaptations and of course, more Doctor Who on the horizon.
True Detective: Night Country (15th January, Sky Atlantic and NOW)
2024 will get off to an excellent start (hopefully) with True Detective: Night Country, a new season of Nic Pizzolatto’s wickedly fun anthology series. Pizzolatto has stepped down as head writer for season 4, making way for Tigers Are Not Afraid’s Issa Lopez. If you’ve seen the aforementioned 2017 crime-fantasy film, you know why we’ve included True Detective: Night Country on this list. Season 4 will take place in Alaska and will follow two detectives (Jodie Foster and Kali Reis) as they investigate the disappearance of eight men from a research station. We’re expecting this to be a particularly chilly, atmospheric thriller that could easily rank as the series’ best seasons. – ML
You can read our review of True Detective: Night County’s debut episode here (spoilers).
Masters Of The Air (26th January, AppleTV+)
Austin Butler, Barry Keoghan, Callum Turner, Ncuti Gatwa, Bel Powley, Anthony Boyle. Those are just a few of the incredible lineup that AppleTV+ has managed to agree to star in their World War II epic, Masters Of The Air. The 9-episode miniseries will follow the actions of 100th Bomb Group which gained itself the nickname “Bloody Hundredth”, thanks to all the deaths they suffered. It’ll be a jolly watch then, we assume.
The series is based on Donald L. Miller’s book and it counts Steven Spielberg and Tom Hanks as its executive producers. The series is also designed to act as a companion piece to The Pacific and Band of Brothers, so fans of those will be in luck. A sequel or companion piece has been in development for years and with Masters Of The Air, it has finally materialised and based on the trailer, we’re in for another heartbreaking, thrilling journey. Cary Joji Fukunaga, Dee Rees, Tim Van Patten and Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck are all directing episodes.
Mr. & Mrs. Smith (2nd February, Prime Video)
Based on the 2005 film of the same name, Mr. & Mrs. Smith is hitting Prime Video next February. Stepping into the shoes of Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie are Donald Glover and Maya Erskine, but judging by the trailer, they have that same sizzling chemistry as Brangelina back in the day. It seems that the new series makes one key change to the original premise, though. In the original film, Pitt and Jolie’s deadly secret agents worked for rival spy agencies without knowing it, whereas in the new TV show, they work together and their marriage is simply a cover-up. Of course, they catch feelings for each other, complicating their missions. We’ve all been there, right? – ML
Doctor Who (2024, BBC)
Doctor Who fans have been enjoying new adventures featuring David Tennant back as the Doctor, but it’s time to make way for Ncuti Gatwa as the 15ht Doctor. His tenure officially begins on Christmas Day as The Church on Ruby Road airs on BBC. Millie Gibson joins Gatwa as the Doctor’s new companion, Ruby. After the events of The Giggle, we’re not sure if Tennant will also be making an appearance in the new series, but whatever showrunner Russell T Davies has planned, we’re ready for it. – ML
Fallout (12th April, Prime Video)
2023 has paved the way for truly great video game adaptations. The Last Of Us was an immersive, gorgeously realised adaptation of Naughty Dog’s award-winning game and The Super Mario Bros. Movie proved to be quite the juggernaut at the global box office. Now, it comes down to Fallout to keep that momentum going. Based on the trailer, it will have no issue doing so. Ella Purnell leads an exemplary cast in this post-apocalyptic drama as Lucy, a young woman who ventures outside from the bunker she has lived in her whole life after catastrophic nuclear attacks have ravaged the world.
There’s also mutant bear and if that doesn’t get you excited about a TV show, I don’t know what will.
The Acolyte (2024, Disney+)
While 2024 will be another year without a movie, and it now seems likely that season 2 of the well-received, Tony Gilroy-led, Andor will be shunted to 2025, there will still be two big Star Wars TV updates next year to sate fans. For our money, the most interesting of these is The Acolyte, which seems to be set up as a pre-Phantom Menace (c.130 years BBY, timeline fans) High Republic-era whodunnit/murder mystery that teams up a Jedi with their former master to investigate a series of potentially related crimes.
Filming, we’re told, finished in June this year, saving it from a serious strike-related release delay, though the current speculation is that the show – conceived and run by Russian Doll co-creator/writer/director and confessed former Star Wars fan-fic writer, Leslye Headland – may slip from a first half of 2024 release and into the August slot taken by Asohka this year. The coming-of-age tale, Skeleton Crew, conceived by the Tom Holland Spider-Man trilogy director, Jon Watts, is then expected to follow in November or December with Jude Law and Ryan Kiera Armstrong among the leads. – JM
House of the Dragon S2 (Summer 2024, Sky Atlantic and NOW)
Before the first season of House Of The Dragon aired in 2022, it felt like the world had had enough of Game Of Thrones. The divisive final season had left many feeling a bit miffed in 2019, and most of the enthusiasm for HBO’s planned cavalcade of spin-offs seemed to have dwindled to nothing. Surely, a show specifically following Thrones’ most incestuous family couldn’t capture the magic of the original?
How wrong we were. House Of The Dragon season one proved every bit as blistering as Thrones’ golden era, rife with politics, back-stabbing and, yes, dragons. Now, with Westeros poised on the edge of what looks like a big old civil war, the best fantasy show of 2022 looks ready to make a scorching comeback. – JH
The Penguin (late 2024, Max)
Colin Farrell reprises his role as the villainous Penguin, aka Oswald Chesterfield Cobblepot, from The Batman in this HBO-backed TV show. The series is set one week after the events of Matt Reeves’ film and will follow The Penguin’s attempts to rise back to power in Gotham. That being said, we’re not expecting Robert Pattinson to show up as the caped crusader, but the cast does include Michael Kelly, Cristin Milioti, Theo Rossi and Clancy Brown, so we’re in excellent company. Despite some severe delays to production, the show has still retained its 2024 release window, but we would expect this to land very late in the year. Reeves is on board as an executive producer and Mare of Easttown director Craig Zobel is helming the first three episodes.
The Sympathizer (2024, Max)
After a bit of a break following his decade-long stint at the front of the MCU (and a quick go at playing Doctor Dolittle), Robert Downey Jr. made a welcome return to our screens in 2023 opposite Cillian Murphy in Oppenheimer (you might have heard of it). Now, he’s teaming up with Oldboy and Decision To Leave director Park Chan-wook for an historical black comedy-drama miniseries (try saying that four times fast) based on Viet Thanh Nguyen’s Pulitzer Prize winning novel of the same name. When a North Vietnamese plant (Hoa Xuande) in the South Vietnam army is forced to flee to the US near the end of the Vietnam War, he continues to report back to the Viet Cong while adapting to his new way of life. Downey is down to play “several antagonist roles”, and if the trailer’s anything to go by, this looks like it’ll go down a treat. – JH
Renegade Nell (Spring 2024, Disney+)
After sending Catherine Cawood off in fitting style with the third season of Happy Valley in 2023, Sally Wainwright is turning her pen into the adventure-fantasy market with Renegade Nell. Set in 18th-century England, Derry Girls’ Louisa Harland stars as Nell Jackson – a young woman framed for murder who quickly becomes the most feared highwaywoman in the country. Ted Lasso’s Nick Mohammed plays a “plucky but prickly little spirit” called Billy Blind, and the show is due out sometime in the spring – after the success of Happy Valley and Gentleman Jack, we can’t wait for this one. – JH
Echo (9th January, Disney+)
Echo is supposedly Marvel’s first project under the so-called Spotlight banner. In theory, it has very little to do with the larger MCU shenanigans, which still doesn’t tell us much because the whole thing is a bit of a mess at the moment…
Anyway, Echo follows the titular villain turned protagonist as she returns to her native Oklahoma to connect with her Native American roots and come to terms with her past, all the while Wilson Fisk is still after her. Alaqua Cox returns to the role after making a splash as one of the villains in Hawkeye. It’s nice to see Marvel spread their wings a little and try something new, not to mention highlighting a deaf, Native American character from their roster. Hopefully, Echo will be followed by many more series and films that don’t require you to be up-to-date on everything MCU related. – ML
