All the highlights coming to a small screen near you this year
Cord cutting – swapping a costly satellite or cable subscription and getting all your visual entertainment from cheaper, more convenient streaming services – was once sold to us as a utopian dream. And, for a while, it was just that. But the days of a monthly Netflix subscription costing less than a pint of beer are long gone, and the fragmentation of streaming services over the past decade or so means most of us are now subscribing to at least half a dozen of them.
The one good thing about this? It keeps them competitive, which means lots and lots of new TV shows to tempt us into that monthly outlay. And now, deep into 2026, we can say that’s it’s set to be another vintage year of TV. We’ve already had some great shows – A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms, Widow’s Bay and the second season of The Pitt all spring immediately to mind – and there are loads more to come.
In this article, we’re looking ahead to what we think might well be the best upcoming TV shows of 2026 – our pick of the stuff that streaming services and traditional channels have planned for release on the small screen this year.
Little House on the Prairie (Season 1 – Netflix)
The original series ran for nearly a decade before signing off in 1983, so Netflix’s reimagining has a long shadow to step out of. This version is described as part hopeful family drama, part epic survival tale, and part origin story of the American West, which suggests the show’s creators are aiming for something with a little more grit than Michael Landon’s broadly wholesome take on Laura Ingalls Wilder’s books.
Alice Halsey (Lessons in Chemistry) leads as Laura Ingalls, with Luke Bracey as her father Charles and Crosby Fitzgerald as Caroline. Notably, the cast also includes indigenous actors Alyssa Wapanatâhk and Meegwun Fairbrother, suggesting a more considered treatment of Native Americans that feature in Wilder’s original stories, in what would be a significant departure from the original series. The show has already renewed for a second season well ahead of its premiere, so Netflix’s confidence in it is clearly high.
Release date: 9 July 2026
Lucky – Season 1 (Apple TV)
Anya Taylor-Joy returns to TV after a six-year hiatus for this slick crime caper that’s basically “what if The Queen’s Gambit knew how to crack a safe?” Based on Marissa Stapley’s novel, the seven-parter sees Taylor-Joy’s eponymous grifter caught between a rock and several hard places when a major score implodes spectacularly; cue the FBI on one side and a seriously ticked-off crime boss on the other. Timothy Olyphant plays the father who schooled her in the dark arts of the long con, which should add some satisfying family texture to all the high-stakes running and scheming.
Release date: 15 July 2026
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
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
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
