We are only one month into 2023, and peak TV shows no sign of slowing down. If anything, the roster of high-profile, high-production-value, megawatt-star shows feels more packed than ever. Among the offerings: a video game turned HBO hit, the return of dormant faves like Happy Valley, remakes of classic films in Fatal Attraction, and an A24 TV venture starring Ali Wong and Steven Yeun on Netflix. There’s more to come, and we’ll be watching—check back here for regular updates on the best entertainment appearing on your small screens. 

The Last of Us on HBO (January) 

When it came to adapting The Last of Us, HBO had something of a conundrum on its hands. Based on a beloved video game that has sold an eye-popping 37 million copies, it came with a built-in fan base who made it clear from the first announcement onward that they were expecting it to hew as closely to the source material as possible; for those unfamiliar with the game or with a certain level of snobbery around video games, it also had to make the case that the medium could serve as a launchpad for gripping television. They needn’t have worried: Just three episodes in, and the show is already generating the kind of watercooler conversation that is HBO’s hallmark, with the powerfully understated performances of its two leads, Pedro Pascal and Bella Ramsey, earning particular praise. Already it seems the network has another hit on its hands—and deservedly so. —Liam Hess

Dear Edward on Apple TV+ (January)

Based on the best-selling book by Ann Napolitano, Apple’s Dear Edward skirts Lifetime TV territory but ultimately comes down on the right side of that line, thanks in large part to the anchoring performance of Connie Britton. The actor plays the widow of a man who has died in a plane crash that killed all its passengers barring one preteen boy, Edward, who becomes the focal point for the fears, hopes, and paranoias that surround the tragedy. The show traces the intersecting threads of the survivors. There’s a This Is Us kind of modern soapy-ness to the show. It is nonetheless, or perhaps because of this, strangely compelling. —Chloe Schama

Stonehouse on Britbox (January) 

BritBox is making a case for itself with a steady diet of excellent TV from the UK that you can’t see anywhere else. Sherwood was one of the best shows of 2022, and Stonehouse, a slyly dark and funny enactment of a bizarre episode from 1970s British politics, is a campy and expertly acted delight. The draw here is Matthew Macfayden, on loan from Succession and playing John Stonehouse, a Labour MP who fakes his own death to avoid an espionage scandal and flees to Australia. Macfayden lines Stonehouse’s buffoonery with sociopathic cruelty, badly mistreating his wife (Keeley Hawes, who is Macfayden’s actual wife) and doubling down on his bad behavior along the way to near redemption. At just three episodes this is high-minded, briskly effortless entertainment. —Taylor Antrim

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Fauda Season 4 on Netflix (January) 

The fourth season of this Israeli action drama on Netflix is absolutely relentless, full of jittery handheld camera sequences as nerve-wracking as anything this series has served up so far. Fauda, which follows the doings of a group of elite Israeli operatives who frequently go undercover amid Palestinians to root out terrorist plots, has loyal partisans as well as passionate critics who call the series Israeli propaganda. The fourth season won’t settle any debates, traveling to Brussels and Syria and positioning the Lebanese group Hezbollah as the adversary while skirting tough questions about occupation and keeping us invested in its bearded rough and appealing Israeli heroes. —T.A.

Poker Face on Peacock (January)

Natasha Lyonne stars in this goofy but lovable murder-mystery show. That’s a complicated summary but a fairly standard formula from creator Rian Johnson, who, with his Knives Out films, has established himself as a canny and assured creator of whodunits with outsized characters and friendly hearts. Here, Lyonne is carrying the show as a casino cocktail waitress who possesses an innate and mysterious ability to discern if a person is lying. In each episode, she untangles a different mystery, a formula that offers a refreshing reprieve from all the shows one must watch from beginning to end like so many 12-hour movies. Lyonne is having something of a renaissance ever since her bizarre and brilliant Russian Doll. If that show was indie antics on late-night Netflix, this one feels more like a throwback to the network prime-time mysteries of a pre-streaming era, but her charm carries it. —C.S.  

Yellowjackets Season 2 on Showtime (March)

When Yellowjackets premiered on Showtime last November, it became that rarest of things in the streaming age: a slow-burn, word-of-mouth hit. Finally, at the end of March, everyone’s favorite high school soccer players (and possibly cannibals) will return—minus those who have already perished in the wilderness—for another season of guilt, gore, and grappling with the past. Was Natalie captured by Lottie’s cult? Will Shauna get away with Adam’s murder? Did Travis really commit suicide? And what’s the deal with Taissa’s out-of-body episodes and creepy altar in the basement? Season two can’t come quickly enough. —L.H.

Love and Death on HBO Max (March)

True-crime wonks (and Hulu subscribers?) may recognize the story of Candy Montgomery, the charming Texas housewife who murdered Betty Gore—a close friend and the wife of Montgomery’s former lover, Allan—with 41 strikes of an ax in the summer of 1980. Closely following 2022’s Candy, a Hulu miniseries based on the same case (with Jessica Biel as Montgomery and Melanie Lynskey and Pablo Schreiber as the Gores), comes Love and Death (HBO Max), with Elizabeth Olsen as Montgomery and Lily Rabe and Jesse Plemons as the Gores. (Yikes!) David E. Kelly is responsible for this version, and it has all the trappings of his best work: evocative opening credits (this time to the strains of Nina Simone’s “Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood”); a gossipy, close-knit, upper-middle-class community; and an impressive fleet of star players. (Elizabeth Marvel and Krysten Ritter are in the mix too.) Never mind the fact that we know how it all ends; Olsen’s very engaging lead performance makes Love and Death one heck of a fun ride. —Marley Marius

Fatal Attraction on Paramount+ (April)

A classic erotic thriller turns sexy legal drama with Fatal Attraction, Paramount+’s forthcoming adaptation of the 1987 film by Adrian Lyne. Here, the story of Dan Gallagher—a New York lawyer and family man who meets a woman, Alex Forrest, through work; consents to a passionate affair; and then must fend off her increasingly erratic (and eventually violent) advances—picks up where the original one ended. While, in one timeline, we see the offending tryst play out in a different decade (the 2010s), updated setting (California), and with a capable new cast (Joshua Jackson as the dashing Dan; Lizzy Caplan—fresh from a devastatingly good, if criminally undersung, performance in Fleishman Is in Trouble—as the alarming Alex), another track finds Dan some 10 or 15 years later, alienated from his now adult daughter, seeking parole for Alex’s murder, and keen to prove that he actually didn’t do it. For all the sly winks to its source material (Caplan’s Alex, like Glenn Close’s, has a penchant for black leather), this Fatal Attraction is a very different beast. —M.M.

Beef on Netflix (Spring)

In Beef, Steven Yeun goes head to head with Ali Wong—two performers who are powerfully twitchy and captivatingly unhinged in the new Netflix show produced by A24. Yeun plays a less-than-gainfully-employed handyman, while Wong plays an entrepreneur who has built a business hawking the kinds of air plants you can’t escape whenever you enter a West Elm. He’s feeling guilty that his parents lost their motel and had to return to Korea while his deadbeat brother trades crypto; she’s dealing with the stress of attempting to sell her company to something like a Home Depot while her sculptor husband fiddles with his clay pots at home. Both these characters are feeling quite aggrieved, and when their paths literally collide in a road-rage incident, each becomes the target of the other’s ire. The show is dark and comic at the same time, a satire with its teeth sunk into some uncomfortable realities. —C.S. 

Tiny Beautiful Things on Hulu (April) 

Kathryn Hahn stars in Tiny Beautiful Things, another show with a strong female performance at its center. Loosely based on the Dear Sugar advice column that ran on The Rumpus and defined an early-aughts slice of online advice giving, the show follows its reluctant author as she mines her own troubled past for life recommendations that sometimes resemble something more like tone poems. Dear Sugar, in reality, was Cheryl Strayed, the author who went on to become famous for her memoir Wild. —C.S. 

Coming sometime in 2023… 

Dead Ringers on Amazon

In what is surely one of the most intriguing TV premises of the year, Dead Ringers stars Rachel Weisz as a pair of twin gynecologists—one of whose dubious ethical approach to the job ends up putting them both in jeopardy—and has been adapted by the white-hot writer Alice Birch, whose previous credits include Lady Macbeth and Normal People. (Finally, if that wasn’t enough to pique your curiosity, the show is also a gender-swapped update of David Cronenberg’s grisly 1988 horror-thriller of the same name, which starred Jeremy Irons as the lead.) Most of the show’s details remain cloaked in mystery for now, but if Weisz and Birch have anything to do with it, you can expect this deliciously depraved (and likely divisive) treat to be a conversation starter when it drops on Amazon Prime Video later this year. —L.H.

Happy Valley on AMC

After a seven-year hiatus, Sally Wainwright’s crime masterpiece Happy Valley returned (in Britain, at least; it’s expected to air on AMC in the US later this year) with a splashy New Year’s Day slot on the BBC. And if anyone was worried that the lengthy window between this series and the last would have seen Sarah Lancashire’s beloved police sergeant Catherine Cawood mellow out, they needn’t have. Opening with the discovery of a dead body in a quarry—which, of course, turns out to have a link to Catherine’s eternal foil, the now jailed Tommy Lee Royce, played once again with devilish charm by James Norton—she quickly reprimands her fellow officers after they make a patronizing comment to her with: “I’ll leave it to you—twats.” (Catherine, never change.) With more twists and turns than you can shake a truncheon at—and typically breathtaking performances by Lancashire and Siobhan Finneran as her meek sister Claire that are already generating awards conversation in the UK—Happy Valley looks set to burnish its reputation as one of the greatest British dramas of the past decade. —L.H.

The Idol on HBO

This dark, moody drama centers on a crestfallen pop star (played by Lily-Rose Depp) who gets sucked into the strange, twisted world of a modern-day cult leader and self-help guru (played by The Weeknd). The grungy and highly aestheticized series was cocreated by Euphoria mastermind Sam Levinson, along with Reza Fahim and The Weeknd, and coproduced by the ever-trending hitmaker A24. The road to air for The Idol has been a notably rocky one: In April of last year, Variety reported that the series was undergoing a major “creative overhaul”—halfway through filming—and losing a director and cast member in the process. Regardless of the off-screen drama, the onscreen experience is sure to be an interesting one for viewers. An exciting group of young stars is part of the mix, some of whom are making their acting debut. Notable appearances include Troye Sivan, Moses Sumney, Dan Levy, Blackpink’s Jennie Ruby Jane, Hari Nef, and others. With a particular focus on fast-paced editing and eye-grabbing fashion and a strong LA aesthetic pulsing throughout, fans of Euphoria and other A24 projects are sure to find something to love about this pop-minded series. —André-Naquian Wheeler

And Just Like That Season 2 on HBO 

Hate it or love it, season one of this Sex and the City so-called reboot-and-sequel series created plenty of viral moments and discourse when it premiered in December of 2021. The death of one of the franchise’s characters on a Peloton seemingly caused stocks to drop and motivated the company to issue a statement reaffirming the safety of its stationary bikes. Che Diaz, played by the sharp Sara Ramírez, became the patron saint of queer chaos. Carrie’s fashion reached new levels of kooky eclecticness. 

Now, the Sex and the City protagonists are coming back—sans Samantha once more. A key plotline of the show has been dutifully teased and promoted: Aidan and Carrie reunite. The internet erupted with a flurry of contrasting responses when an official photo of the long-running lovebirds walking around New York hand in hand was released. And we’re sure the actual series will only push fans’ emotions even higher. If Big painted Carrie as the suffering romantic, Aidan always showed a slightly different, more callous side to the masterfully complicated character. We have to ask: Will Carrie be all in this time? Or is our favorite furniture maker in over his head once more? Questions, questions. While And Just Like That season two might tonally feel like a far cry from the rich, grounded experience of the original SATC series, it is undoubtedly a great dose of nostalgia. And sometimes that’s more than enough. —A.N.W.

Succession Season 4 on HBO 

Everybody’s favorite family of light-to-moderate sociopaths (okay, upgraded to heavy for certain family members) is back for a fourth season in March. The Roy kids’ plot against their industry-titan father Logan—not to mention the presence of Alexander Skarsgård as the tech entrepreneur in the process of buying the family company—is sure to be required viewing for the fourth year in a row. Will we finally see Connor and Willa get married? Who will newly announced cast member Annabeth Gish play? What on earth is going to happen with Tom? Luckily, only a few months await until we have answers to all these questions and more. —Emma Specter