The Biggest TV Shows of 2025: Release Dates and Trailers
There’s a lot of TV out there in the year of our Lord 2025. Every day that inches by, another five or six things you mean to watch — a prestige historical drama, a splashy whodunnit with someone from proper Hollywood in it — are added to the pile of things you didn’t have time for in 2024, and 2023, and 2022.
So you turn to your partner, your flatmate, your own reflection in the mirror. What do you want to watch? I don’t know, they say. I just don’t know.
But don’t worry, friend. It’s OK. There’s a whole load of new telly coming this year, and we know already what the biggest and most exciting shows of the year will be.
Could there be surprise entrants and sleeper hits we know nothing of? Sure. But do we also know that Stranger Things is coming back? We absolutely do, and it’s one of a number of behemoths returning to TV this year. And the best news of all? You have less time to wait than you think. These are the best TV shows of 2025.
The Traitors
BBC, 1 January
The first season of Claudia Winkleman’s ultra-camp pressure cooker of suspicion, alliance building and wildly inaccurate accusations took us all by surprise; by the time it returned last year it was a phenomenon. Now it’s a juggernaut, and one which is trying to change things up to keep the game fresh. That game, incidentally, is very simple. Three players are Traitors; they murder non-Traitors, otherwise known as Faithfuls, who have to try to work out who is killing them off and banish them. Spectacular meltdowns, Machiavellian scheming and an array of melodramatic reinterpretations of pop hits ensue. Majestic stuff.
Severance Season 2
AppleTV+, 17 January
Perhaps the most anticipated return of any show this year – maybe any year, come to that – Ben Stiller’s head spinning dystopian thriller left its conscious-split protagonists at the end of the last season, a good two years and seven months back, just as they were getting some sense of the world outside their highly secretive, Pygmy goat filled workplace. The “Innies” at Lumon Industries all got a chance to see the life their “Outies” were living and, frankly, it left us with more questions than answers. We do know that we’ll see a bit more of Lumon, and a bit more of the outside world too. Bob Balaban and Gwendoline Christie join the cast this time.
Prime Target
Apple TV+, 22 January
London is absolutely crawling with spies right now. Just when you thought Ben Whishaw and Keira Knightley had shot most of them in Black Doves, a whole other load of spooks turn up – this time led by One Day and The White Lotus’s Leo Woodall. He’s maths whizz Edward, who’s just about to – right, stick with us here – work out a way of controlling every computer in the world because of something to do with prime numbers. Unsurprisingly, some unseen malevolent force doesn’t like the idea and sets about destroying it and him before he can finish it. Sounds silly, could be great.
White Lotus Season 3
Now TV, 17 February
Speaking of The White Lotus, Mike White’s scalpel-sharp dissection of the hypocrisies bouncing around some extremely well-appointed luxury hotels is back for a third run, this time "in and around Koh Samui, Phuket, and Bangkok". Carrie Coon, Scott Glenn and Fallout’s noseless wonder Walton Goggins – who said he literally burst into tears on getting the offer, so much does he love The White Lotus – head up the cast, and there are intriguing names all over the rest of the cast list too: Aimee Lou Wood, Jason Isaacs, Parker Posey and Blackpink’s Lalisa Manobal will be checking in, plus Natasha Rothwell will be back as Belinda from season one, who we last saw receiving a fat wedge from Jennifer Coolidge’s much-mourned Tanya.
A Thousand Blows
Disney+, 21 February
If there’s one thing that Peaky Blinders had too little of, it was topless pugilism. And if there’s a second thing Peaky Blinders had too little of, it was Stephen Graham. Two scenes in a pokey dockland office simply are not enough, Steven Knight! Fortunately, Knight seems keen to right that particular wrong with this tale of Victorian boxers slugging it out — and of the Forty Elephants, an organised crime syndicate run entirely by women. (Peaky Boxers? Punchy Blinders? Needs work.) Malachi Kirby, who you’ve seen in Black Mirror and Small Axe: Mangrove, stars too.
Dope Girls
BBC, February, date TBC
And if that still doesn’t quite scratch that interwar gang violence itch that the lull before the Peaky movie has left you with, try this. Set in Soho around the end of the First World War, it follows a group of women who would basically invent what we think of as the Great British night out – not content to head back to the kitchen when the men come back after the Armistice, some run into the grimy, glitzy underworld to make their fun and their money, while others line up on the side of the law to stop them. Julianne Nicholson of Mare of Easttown and Masters of Sex heads up the cast.
Andor Season 2
Disney+, 22 April
At last: a Star Wars series that didn’t make you want to launch yourself into a Sarlacc pit. Andor was the gritty, sexy, genuinely thrilling bit of the great Mos Eisley cantina that Disney’s Star Wars series can often appear to be. Set in the period just before the prequel film Rogue One, Diego Luna, who plays yer man Cassian Andor, says this season will “follow Cassian over the period of four years as he grows into the hero we see make the ultimate sacrifice”. We’ll meet up with Andor as he starts to get the rebellion going, with a bit of a time-jump and a story that takes in five years of plotting and scheming.
The Bear Season 4
Disney+, June
Like two stressed chefs on opposite sides of a galley kitchen, the third and fourth seasons were filmed back to back. That might not sound like a ringing endorsement, given how lukewarm the reaction was the season three, but let’s be real. Carmy, Richy, Sydney and the rest of the crew – plus this time, very excitingly, Jamie Lee Curtis – are a joy to hang out with, and even on an off night The Bear will serve you up the kind of quality most other shows would give their toques for.
Brian and Maggie
Channel 4, date TBC
Hard on the heels of the two dramatisations of the Maitlis-Prince Andrew interview comes this retelling of the tete-a-tete between political journalist (and former Labour MP) Brian Walden and a running-on-fumes, pre-Poll Tax Margaret Thatcher. They had been friends beforehand; they definitely weren’t afterwards. Walden is played by Steve Coogan (fresh from Joker 2 and doing Dr Strangelove in the West End, and before a movie where he befriends a penguin. The man has range) while Dame Harriet Walter is the Iron Lady, wearing a hairpiece of quite extraordinary architectural heft.
The Last of Us Season 2
Now TV, date TBC
The uber-hit of 2023 and ground zero of Pedro Pascal’s status as perhaps the most intensely horned-after men on the planet returns. There’s no official word yet on when its spores will blow in, but we’ve seen a snippet of Catherine O’Hara’s unnamed character asking Pascal’s Joel to name exactly the trauma that he’s carrying. “No matter how bad, say it out loud,” she says. “What did you do?” Fans of the games will know there’s one big emotional beat that has yet to happen on screen, and Pascal has suggested that there won’t be any huge swerves from the path set by the games. “But the important thing to note,” showrunner Craig Mazin told our US colleagues, “is that neither Neil [Druckmann, show creator] nor I feel constrained by the source material."
The Death of Bunny Munroe
Sky Atlantic, date TBC
Nick Cave’s script for Gladiator 2 did not feature sharks swimming around in the colosseum, but it did feature time travel and a giraffe being struck by lightning. Neither of those things seem likely to make the screen in this adaptation of Cave’s novel, which stars Westeros’s own Matt Smith as the titular Bunny – door-to-door salesman, sex addict and recent widower – as he and his nine-year-old son barrel about the south of England on a quest to who knows where. David Threlfall, Boiling Point’s Alice Feetham and Sherwood’s Robert Glenister are on board too.
The Night Manager Season 2
BBC, date TBC
Perhaps the most unexpected big hitter to come back this year: just nine years after the John Le Carre adaptation swept all before it, and making the Stranger Things team look slapdash and flighty by comparison, we’re getting a second season. The gang is returning en masse — Tom Hiddleston, Olivia Colman et al, though no news on Hugh Laurie’s arms dealer Dicky Roper — but details as to what’s going to happen are light. As importantly, though, season one’s writer David Farr is back on script duties. This won’t wrap everything up – there’s a third season in the pipeline too – but it will leap out beyond the story Le Carre laid out, something the writer’s sons say they’ve not done lightly.
Stranger Things
Netflix, date TBC
If the three years between Severance seasons has felt like a long time, spare a thought for Stranger Things stans. Nine whole years have passed since Eleven first popped up in Hawkins, Indiana in need of a tissue or two for her telekinetic nosebleeds, and it was July 2022 the last time the gang got together. But this is the finale, the culmination of all that running up hills and deals made with God, a two-part goodbye that has been described by its writers as being like if “season one and season four had a baby”, and if that baby had then been “injected with steroids”. Which, to be fair, sounds like something they’d have done at that facility Eleven scarpered from. Adding some steel and bona fide Eighties action star wattage this time is Terminator terminator Linda Hamilton.
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