All the highlights coming to a small screen near you this year
Remember when streaming services were meant to save us money? That particular dream has aged about as well as most early-2020s optimism; between price hikes, ad tiers, and the sheer number of platforms now demanding a slice of your monthly budget, the average household is juggling more TV subscriptions than they’d like to admit. Cord-cutting promised simplicity, but instead we got cable’s fragmentation problem with a re-brand.
But this cloud has a silver lining. The competition for your hard-earned cash means these platforms are chucking money at making television shows that people actually want to watch. 2026 has delivered on that front already – A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms, Widow’s Bay and The Pitt’s second season have all made a strong case for staying subscribed to their respective services – and there’s plenty more where they came from.
Below, we’ve rounded up the shows we’re most looking forward to for the rest of 2026 and into early 2027 — the pick of what streaming platforms and traditional broadcasters alike have queued up for the months ahead.
Ted Lasso (Season 4 – Apple TV)
Three years after a third season that was widely assumed to be the show’s finale, Ted Lasso is back and, in typical fashion, he’s taken on a challenge nobody asked him to. This time around, Jason Sudeikis’ relentlessly upbeat American coach is steering a second-division women’s football team towards the light, which should give the show plenty of fresh dramatic territory without abandoning the warmth that made it such a phenomenon in the first place. Hannah Waddingham, Brett Goldstein, Juno Temple and most of the old Richmond faithful are back.
Release date: 5 August 2026
Reacher (Season 4 – Prime Video)
Jack Reacher is trading his usual small-town vigilantism for something a little more urban this time around. Season 4 drops Reacher in Philadelphia, where he finds himself tangled up in a conspiracy involving crooked politicians and extremists with an agenda. Sounds like just another Tuesday for the big guy.
The show has become one of Prime Video’s biggest hits (Season 3 reportedly out-streamed everything else on the platform bar Fallout), and it’s not hard to see why: the show’s old-fashioned good-versus-evil plotlines and its sharply drawn characters make it a very enjoyable watch, and Alan Ritchson excels as Reacher – a towering modern-day American samurai who, if he can’t overcome a problem using his big brain, will instead solve it with his even bigger muscles.
Release date: 12 August 2026
Lanterns (Season 1 – HBO Max)
Lanterns appears to be a whole new breed of DC Universe superhero story. Despite featuring not one but two Green Lanterns – grizzled veteran Hal Jordan (Kyle Chandler) and raw recruit John Stewart (Aaron Pierre) – it’s apparently closer to True Detective than Titans, with the Lanterns rocking up in small town Nebraska to investigate a murder and butting heads not only with the local sheriff (Kelly Macdonald) but each other. This grounded, low-power approach feels refreshing – although it’s clear that good old-fashioned superpowers will be making an appearance somewhere in the eight episodes.
Release date: 17 August 2026
Brothers (Season 1 – Apple TV)
In what is either the laziest premise of 2026 or a concept crafted in TV heaven, longtime pals and frequent co-stars Matthew McConaughey and Woody Harrelson play fictionalised versions of themselves in series. The pitch: after Harrelson’s daughter’s wedding collapses, he drags his family out to McConaughey’s Texas ranch for a reset – only for McConaughey’s mum to blurt out that the two lifelong friends could be real-life brothers. Cue an identity crisis on two fronts, since McConaughey’s also nursing dreams of running for Governor of Texas.
Thanks to the likes of True Detective, EDtv and, er, Surfer, Dude, we know that McConaughey and Harrelson have chemistry to burn. The real question is whether “two movie stars play themselves” has any legs beyond the novelty of the casting.
Release date: 23 Sept 2026
Vision Quest (Season 1 – Disney+)
Marvel’s WandaVision TV trilogy will come to a close this October, and we’re not sure how excited anyone will be for the news. It’s been five years since the genuinely interesting WandaVision kicked off Disney+’s golden era, but the shine has long since worn off Marvel’s TV series offerings – a true case of genre fatigue has set in among viewers.
Still, there’s a decent hook here: Paul Bettany is back as White Vision. With his memories restored, he’s trying to work out exactly who and what he is. James Spader returns as Ultron, which essentially means we get to watch Vision have it out with his dad, and in fact the show is apparently framed around three generations of fraught fatherhood, with Vision and Wanda’s son also playing a major role.
Arriving a couple of months prior to Avengers: Doomsday hitting cinemas, this show has a couple of important jobs to do: round off this story arc and get millions of wary (and weary) viewers hyped for Marvel’s biggest blockbuster of the year.
Release date: 14 October 2026
Crystal Lake (Season 1 – Sky Atlantic/Peacock)
This series serves as a prequel to seminal 1980 slasher Friday the 13th, and stars Linda Cardellini as Pamela Voorhees, the mother of the hockey mask-wearing, machete-wielding horror icon Jason. Interestingly, however, showrunner Brad Caleb Kane has described the series as, rather than a horror, a “psychological thriller” dripping with 1970s paranoia: “It has all the DNA of a slasher without quite being a slasher.”
Fans of the long-running film frachise will be delighted to hear that the filming locations include Camp No-Be-Bo-Sco in New Jersey – the actual site of the original movie’s Camp Crystal Lake.
Release date: 15 October 2026
Pride and Prejudice (Season 1 – Netflix)
Jane Austen’s novel has been adapted so many times that fans online have taken to calling the current wave of period romance a “yearn-aissance” – which is either encouraging or alarming, depending on your tolerance for bonnets and bodices. This six-part Netflix version at least has serious credentials behind it: the script comes from Dolly Alderton, and the cast includes Emma Corrin as Elizabeth Bennet, Jack Lowden as Mr. Darcy, Olivia Colman as Mrs. Bennet and Rufus Sewell as Mr. Bennet.
Early reactions to the first teaser (embedded above) have been mixed, with some fans clearly wary of another reinvention of a story that already has fantastic 1995 (TV) and 2005 (movie) adaptations. But the talented cast and Alderton’s ear for romantic comedy suggests this could be another banger – if it’s appropriate to describe a drama set in Regency England as such.
Release date: Autumn 2026
Blade Runner 2099 (Season 1 – Prime Video)
50 years on from Blade Runner 2049, Los Angeles has been rebuilt — just not by the humans who used to run it. Hunter Schafer’s Cora, a human fugitive on the run, adopts one last identity as a Blade Runner, teaming up with Olwen (Michelle Yeoh), a replicant with only days left to live.
This eight-part series has taken its time getting here. Filming wrapped back in December 2024, making post-production nigh-on two years. Whether that’s because it’s been made with meticulous care, or due to something less encouraging, is the question hanging over the whole thing — but with Ridley Scott as executive producer, we’re hoping the time was spent on more than just visual effects.
Release date: 25 November 2026
Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone (Season 1 – HBO Max)
The announcement of this show raised many questions. Firstly, do we really need a new screen adaptation of the Harry Potter books when there’s a bunch of perfectly serviceable movies to stream? Secondly, are the characters and plotlines interesting enough to justify all that time and investment? And lastly, when the books’ author delights in using her fame and fortune to further a divisive agenda that millions of people find distressing, do we really want to be shining a spotlight on her?
Controversy aside, there’s clearly a market for this: the teaser clocked 277 million views in 48 hours. And, with Succession producer Francesca Gardiner and Game of Thrones director Mark Mylod running the show and a cast that includes bags of talent, there’s every sign it’ll be well made too. HBO has plans for a full seven seasons, so barring an absolute disaster, it looks like the Boy Wizard is here to stay.
Release date: Christmas 2026
Neuromancer (Season 1 – Apple TV)
It’s hard to overstate the influence of Neuromancer. William Gibson’s 1984 novel didn’t just launch cyberpunk as a category – it gave the internet age half its vocabulary, long before the world wide web had even arrived. You can spot its DNA in everything from The Matrix to Ghost in the Shell to hundreds of video games that never quite admitted how much they owed it.
Which might partly explain why nobody’s managed to make a screen adaptation until now. Neuromancer has spent 40-plus years with an “unfilmable” tag attached – the plot is dense, the descriptions of cyberspace deliberately abstract – and other adaptation attempts have quietly died in development for decades. Apple’s version, led by showrunner Graham Roland, arrives at a time when the technology finally exists to visualise what Gibson could only describe.
The ubiquitous Callum Turner stars as Case, a hacker stripped of his ability to access the matrix after crossing his employer, attempting to claw his way back in with the help of Molly (Briana Middleton), a mercenary with retractable razor blades for fingernails and mirrored lenses for eyes.
Release date: 22 January 2027
