Bodyguard
BBC1
A bravura 21-minute sequence depicting a terrorist incident on a train neatly sets up the professional courage, private life and ex-army career of David Budd (Richard Madden), now a specialist personal protection officer in the police. Sent to guard home secretary Julia Montague (Keeley Hawes), he must balance his hatred of her politics with a duty to keep her alive. The twisting plots and moral knots that showrunner Jed Mercurio brings to Line of Duty are strongly present here, too.
Continues 27 August
Vanity Fair
ITV
This is the fifth substantial TV adaptation of Thackeray’s 1848 novel, but the others were all made by the BBC, whose period-drama clothes ITV has stolen to fill its post-Downton hole. It will be intriguing to see how the satire of witty, slippery social climber Becky Sharp works on a more populist commercial network with ad breaks. The adaptation by Gwyneth Hughes (Remember Me, The Girl) has Olivia Cooke (Bates Motel) as Becky, and Michael Palin appetisingly cast as the book’s extremely unreliable narrator.
From 2 September
Wanderlust
BBC1
Toni Collette is a therapist facing issues of trust, sex and love in her relationship with her husband and through unexpected revelations about the desires of clients, friends and neighbours. The tone is billed as “18-rated”, which, of the two co-producers, sounds more in the tradition of Netflix than the BBC. The creative pedigree encourages salivation: producers Drama Republic made Doctor Foster, while writer Nick Payne’s previous credits include stage hit Constellations and the Julian Barnes movie adaptation The Sense of an Ending.
From 4 September
Press
BBC1
Having conjured up a worryingly believable succession crisis with his play-turned-TV film King Charles III, Mike Bartlett takes aim at another shaky British institution. Press follows the fortunes of two newspapers, one tabloid, one broadsheet, and both struggling with the pressures of a never-ending news cycle and an industry in decline. If it’s likely to prompt much nitpicking from hardened journos, there’s also a fair chance it will make for rollocking prime-time TV, given that its creator was also responsible for the much-loved Doctor Foster.
6 September
The Deuce
Sky Atlantic
David Simon’s dive into the seedy underbelly of mid-70s New York picks up slightly further down the line. The pimps are competing with porn directors, the cops are still corrupt and the mob’s designs on New York nightlife are coming to fruition. In true Simon style, this is a glacially slow burn that allows him to draw a full and compelling portrait of Times Square’s peep shows and hustlers. James Franco retains his dual lead role (he plays twins) in spite of the multiple accusations of sexual misconduct that have been made against him, and which are not the best look for a show about, er, sexual exploitation.
From 12 September
Maniac
Netflix
Battling with Kidding to be the trippiest show on TV this autumn is this comedy drama starring Jonah Hill and Emma Stone. They play a pair of directionless schmoes who join a pharmaceutical trial that promises to “fix” their minds. Directed by Cary Fukunaga of “the one good season of True Detective” fame, Maniac is likely to be a wild ride. Its trailer promises what Stone’s character calls “multi-reality brain magic shit”, features puppets, Lord of the Rings parodies and the alarming sight of Hill with a mullet.
From 21 September
The Good Place
Netflix
A year without The Good Place feels like an eternity in the Bad Place, so thank fork it’s back. The best, brightest, smartest, most humane sitcom on TV, The Good Place will continue to draw from sources as diverse as Kierkegaard and Lost in its relentless quest for decency. Things might be a little different this year – the last series ended with the cast being blown asunder – but it can’t come back quickly enough.
From 28 September
Trust
BBC2
Trust joins the ranks of Succession and The Romanoffs with a 2018 tale about an out-of-sorts dynasty. Danny Boyle’s look at the Getty clan and specifically the kidnapping of John Paul Getty III in 1973 has all the trappings of prestige TV. There’s a stellar cast: Donald Sutherland simmers as the patriarch, Brendan Fraser hits form again as Getty’s fixer James Fletcher Chace while Hilary Swank is on board, too, and there’s an episode in Italian as Boyle tells the story from the kidnappers’ point of view. It’s engaging, ambitious and brilliantly acted.
From September
Killing Eve
BBC1/BBC3
Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s spy thriller could be the best show of 2018. Grey’s Anatomy star Sandra Oh gets to show that she can do awkward hero shtick as well as be a mainstream soap stalwart. Jodie Comer is excellent as the cold-blooded assassin whom Oh has to track down. Their relationship as hunter and hunted is the main draw as Waller-Bridge easily transitions to life behind the camera and brings her fantastically puerile sense of humour to bear, as well as a knack of building nail-biting suspense. For those who want it to see all, the series will be available for instant bingeing on iPlayer.
From September
Black Earth Rising
BBC2
Hugo Blick’s thriller about prosecution of international war crimes and the west’s relationship with contemporary Africa might sound like something only a diehard Chomsky fan could get excited about. But Black Earth Rising stars Michaela Coel as an adopted child of the Rwandan genocide who becomes a top lawyer and is drawn into an international criminal court case. It promises the jetsetting location hopping of The Night Manager and McMafia but swaps glamour and gangsters for a morality tale for our times. Oh, and John Goodman is in it, too.
From September
Kidding
Sky Atlantic
Jim Carrey reunites with Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind director Michel Gondry for another gonzo exploration of the human psyche’s darkest corners. Carrey plays Jeff Pickles, a decent-hearted children’s TV host who suffers a catastrophic upheaval in his personal life and goes off the rails. It’s a setup that allows Carrey licence to indulge in the sort of anarchic comic shtick that has been his stock-in-trade for the past two decades, so expect fireworks. Catherine Keener, Frank Langella and Judy Greer round out a stellar cast.
From September
Doctor Who
BBC1
Peter Capaldi’s tenure as the Doctor was frustratingly spotty, but look at this. A new Doctor. A female Doctor. A new showrunner. An entirely new look. An apparently serialised throughline. Bradley Walsh. It’s a cavalcade of potential riches, but let’s urge caution. Revitalising a 55-year-old programme in a way that keeps fans happy while bringing in a new audience sounds near impossible. Fingers crossed Chris Chibnall and Jodie Whittaker can pull it off.
September/October
The Romanoffs
Amazon
Matthew Weiner follows the dizzying success of Mad Men with an eight-part anthology drama, focusing on those who have claimed to be descendants of the Russian imperial family slaughtered after the 1917 revolution. The plot offers Weiner the promising subject matter of conspiracy theories and US-Russian relations. If this were, like Mad Men, to run to eight seasons, there would need to be 64 claimants to the empty Russian crown, so this sounds like something smaller and more focused but, given Weiner’s track record, still tantalising. From 12 October
The First
Channel 4
Having abandoned House of Cards at exactly the right moment, Beau Willimon is back with a brand new series. The First follows humanity’s first visit to Mars. It has big names – Sean Penn and Natascha McElhone lead – and a relatively monstrous budget, so this looks like award bait of the highest order. Whether it’ll be any good is anyone’s guess.
From October
Camping
Sky Atlantic
This one could go either way. Julia Davis’s 2016 series Camping was a thing of grotesque beauty: a self-contained nightmare that got to the heart of ugly British leisure. Now there’s a remake. An American remake. That Lena Dunham wrote, and which stars Jennifer Garner, even though she’s the precise opposite of everyone who starred in the original. Which was perfect. This will have to be very, very, very good if it wants to win people over.
From October
House of Cards
Netflix
Let’s get this out in the open. Nobody is looking forward to the new series of House of Cards. The show stopped being any good long before allegations of sexual assault drove Kevin Spacey from the spotlight, and yet they’re still making more episodes. At least this will be the last seasom, with Robin Wright as president and Spacey’s shadow casting a pall over proceedings. The best that House of Cards can do is die with dignity, though we’d be silly to expect that. From 2 November
The Little Drummer Girl
BBC1
The BBC and US Network AMC enjoyed enormous success with their 2016 co-production The Night Manager, a dashing adaptation of John Le Carré’s spy novel starring Tom Hiddleston. Understandably then, the two networks have been digging in the crates for another Le Carré deep cut. They’ve emerged with this adaptation of his 1983 novel about a young woman (Florence Pugh, fresh from her ferocious turn in Lady Macbeth) who is recruited by an Israeli spy (Alexander Skarsgård) to become a double agent. Intriguingly, the three-parter is directed by Korean auteur Park Chan-wook (Oldboy, The Handmaiden), in his first foray into TV. From November
The Bisexual
Channel 4
Most of us would take a well-earned break after being awarded the Grand Jury prize at Sundance. Not Desiree Akhavan, who has followed up her win earlier this year for gay conversion-therapy drama The Miseducation of Cameron Post by writing and starring in this comedy series about the challenges of dating both men and women. Maxine Peake plays Akhavan’s ex; Brian Gleeson (brother of Domhnall) is the tortured novelist who becomes her new wingman as she negotiates single life.
Date to be confirmed
Butterfly
ITV
Eleven-year-old Max (Callum Booth-Ford) wishes to transition into Maxine. Mum (Anna Friel) is sympathetic to her child’s blurring identity, but Dad (Emmett J Scanlan) hopes the lad will grow out of it. Expect social media fuss over the narrative balance of the story and who has the right to write and act it, but both the script and the show’s makers are ready to have these arguments.
Date to be confirmed
The Circle
Channel 4
Channel 4 is trying to breathe new life into the dating reality format by mixing romance and technology. Contestants, who each live in a cube, try to attract each other using digital avatars and online presences. It all sounds very Black Mirror and has the potential for encouraging catfishing – when someone steals someone else’s identity to strike up an online relationship – on an epic scale among participants. The show is social experiment as much as contest, and viewers will be complicit.
Date to be confirmed
