Catastrophe series 4
(Channel 4) For the last few years, Catastrophe has been one of the very finest comedies on television. However, 2019 is the year it all comes to an end. And, from what little information exists, it may be a bumpy ride. “We got to the last scene of the sixth episode and really, really embarrassingly, I kind of lost my shit a little bit,” Sharon Horgan revealed back in September.
Start date: 7 January
Brexit: The Uncivil War
(Channel 4) AKA Benedict Cumberbatch’s Brexit film. Playwright James Graham has written this two-hour drama based on firsthand accounts of both the Remain and Leave movements. Cumberbatch plays the latter’s campaign director, Dominic Cummings. Co-starring Rory Kinnear, Richard Goulding and Oliver Maltman, Brexit: The Uncivil War promises to tell the tale of an epic game of cat and mouse – albeit a game where the cat eats the mouse and then poops all over your living room carpet. See Mark Lawson’s feature on Brexit TV.
7 January
True Detective series 3
(Sky Atlantic/Now TV) True Detective season 1 was a game-changing piece of drama that existed at the meeting point between incredible writing, beautiful acting and sublime direction. True Detective 2 also existed. Hopefully, next year’s third series will be a return to form. The trailers – featuring Moonlight’s Mahershala Ali hopping backwards and forwards in time – look like vintage True Detective. Even more excitingly, one episode counts Deadwood creator David Milch as a co-writer.
January
Fleabag series 2
(BBC Three) At this point, Phoebe Waller-Bridge can basically write her own cheques. For any other writer, Killing Eve would have been an all-time career highlight, but Fleabag remains her masterpiece. The first series was so perfectly self-contained, hinging on a flawlessly executed final-episode revelation, that it’s hard to know where a second series could go. But doubt Waller-Bridge at your peril. The woman can even fart on command. This will be unmissable.
February
This Time … with Alan Partridge
(BBC One) Incredibly, Alan Partridge has been away from the BBC for 15 years. He’s been no slouch in the meantime, making films, writing books and starring in several perplexingly underwatched Sky specials, but this still feels like a homecoming. Not a vast amount is known about This Time … with Alan Partridge, except that it seems to be an extended One Show riff that will at least momentarily see Partridge standing inside a giant petri dish. This cannot come soon enough.
February
Game of Thrones series 8
(Sky Atlantic/Now TV) Finally, winter is here. After years of interpersonal squabbling, the rulers of Westeros must finally face the full force of the Night King and his White Walkers, and by all accounts it will be spectacular. Playing out across six ludicrously expensive feature-length episodes that utilise more SFX than ever, this looks set to become the high watermark of everything that television as spectacle can accomplish.
April
Home
(Channel 4) After last year’s well-received Comedy Blap (Channel 4’s fancy name for a short, if you were wondering), Rufus Jones’s sitcom about a family who unknowingly return from a holiday in France with a Syrian refugee (Youssef Kerkour) in their boot receives a full series. Its tone is gentle rather than stridently satirical – understandable given the subject matter – but the gags are strong, the performances are likeable and the issues depicted could not be more timely.
April
The Virtues
(Channel 4) Shane Meadows projects are usually funny until they’re not. Punks and skinheads are all having a laugh, until they’re infiltrated by fascists. That creepy guy who is trying to woo your sister is harmless, until he turns out to be unhinged. But with The Virtues, Meadows seems to have reversed the formula. It tells the story of a labourer (played by Stephen Graham) – born in Ireland, put into care and then escaped to England – who goes back to deal with his demons. It’s bracing stuff, but in true Meadows fashion there’s humour interspersed with the grit. Told partly in flashback scenes filmed on handheld VCR cameras, it is visually ambitious – and Graham is magnetic as a man trying to overcome a painful history.
April
Chernobyl
(Sky/Now TV) HBO and Sky have teamed up for three big productions in 2019. This retelling of the biggest manmade disaster ever will focus on the people who tried to deal with immediate aftermath: in some cases to cover it up, and in others to ensure it could never happen again. Stellan Skarsgård plays Boris Shcherbina, the Soviet official charged with handling the fallout, Emily Watson is a nuclear scientist who wants to find out why the disaster happened and Jared Harris plays Valery Legasov, the Soviets’ man on the ground after the crisis.
May
Derry Girls series 2
(Channel 4) The first series of Lisa McGee’s Derry Girls was a monster of a show – Channel 4’s biggest new comedy in five years. A classic sitcom premise married to some timely 1990s nostalgia, where all the teens-go-mad action was flanked by the constant shadow of the Troubles. It’s such a perfect formula that a second series cannot feasibly disappoint.
Spring
Gentleman Jack
(BBC One) Sally Wainwright stays in West Yorkshire, but swaps Hebden Bridge for Halifax as she tells the story of Anne Lister, the 19th-century figure often referred to as the “first modern lesbian”. Suranne Jones plays Lister, who became the head of a powerful family after the death of her four brothers in 1826. The eight-part series tells the story of her rise and eventual marriage to Ann Walker, an heiress of a neighbouring estate. It looks set to be one of the highlights of 2019.
Spring
MotherFatherSon
(BBC Two) The headline of MotherFatherSon is that it stars Richard Gere in the first major television role of his career, playing a Rupert Murdoch figure in a series that sounds thematically similar to last year’s Succession. But the real draw is its writer: Tom Rob Smith wrote the breathtaking American Crime Story: The Assassination of Gianni Versace, and if he can bring even a fraction of that show’s claustrophobic tension to MotherFatherSon, it’ll be incredible.
Spring
Catch-22
(Channel 4) Long regarded as unfilmable – despite Mike Nichols’ perfectly serviceable 1970 adaptation – Joseph Heller’s black comedy is now coming to TV. Starring Christopher Abbott as Yossarian and co-starring Hugh Laurie and George Clooney (who also directs some episodes), Catch-22 has the potential to finally nail what was so special about Heller’s novel. Alternatively, it may mark the point where prestige TV finally overreaches itself. We’ll find out this year.
Summer
Beecham House
(ITV) ITV has so far struggled to find a ratings-winning replacement for Downton Abbey, but might this new period drama fit the bill? Created by Gurinder Chadha (Bend It Like Beckham) it follows residents of a 19th-century Delhi mansion owned by John Beecham, a former soldier haunted by the misdeeds he witnessed working for the East India Company. Set during the era when the British were battling for dominance over India, it should provide a pointed corrective to the dewy-eyed empire reminiscence being peddled as Brexit looms.
Date tbc
Big Little Lies series 2
(Sky Atlantic/Now TV) HBO’s whodunnit was one of 2017’s standouts with its tense thriller aspect butting up against a tale of small-town myopia and rivalry. The second season sees Jean-Marc Vallée try to repeat the feat while upping the stakes, as Meryl Streep joins Nicole Kidman, Laura Dern and Reese Witherspoon as Perry’s mother. She’s in town to find out what happened to her departed son, and she’ll need all her sleuthing to get past southern California’s scheming elementary-school parents.
Black Mirror series 5
(Netflix) After a mixed fourth series full of more needless baby murders than anyone could ever really want, Charlie Brooker’s tech-horror anthology is back for another run. Everyone is keeping tight-lipped about what this new series has in store, but we got a festive sneak preview in the form of Bandersnatch – the Choose Your Own Adventure-style interactive episode where you pick the fate of the protagonist from a number of different but equally harrowing options.
Date tbc
Catherine the Great
(Sky/Now TV) Following in the regal wake of The Favourite and Mary Queen of Scots comes the story of the Russian monarch who reigned in the 18th century. Helen Mirren stars as the titular ruler in a show which looks as if it has all the hallmarks of a prestige drama (big-name star, large budget, co-production with HBO). The four-parter will focus on the end of Catherine’s reign and her affair with Grigory Potemkin, which promises to be salacious and shocking.
Date tbc
The Crown series 3
(Netflix) The second regal performance of the year from Olivia Colman, though one that’s a world away from her gout-ridden, lobster-racing Queen Anne of The Favourite. She takes over from Claire Foy as Elizabeth II, as Peter Morgan’s monarchical saga moves into the mid-60s – a turbulent time for the house of Windsor, with Princess Margaret (now played, in a note-perfect piece of casting, by Helena Bonham Carter) attracting column inches for her affair with baronet Roddy Llewellyn. Also joining the cast this time around are Tobias Menzies as a now middle-aged Prince Philip, and Jason Watkins, playing Prime Minister Harold Wilson.
Date tbc
Good Omens
(Amazon/BBC2) Fantasy credentials don’t come much better than those of this Amazon series, which has been adapted by Neil Gaiman from the novel he co-wrote with the late Terry Pratchett. It stars David Tennant as a raffish demon who has formed an unlikely 6,000-year friendship with Michael Sheen’s buttoned-down angel. When a looming apocalypse threatens their bromance, the pair team up to save the world. Psychedelic visuals, epic set-pieces and some wild hairpieces sported by Tennant suggest this could be a blast. If that doesn’t sate your appetite, there’s season two of Gaiman’s other epic fantasy, American Gods, which comes back in March.
Date tbc
Line of Duty series 5
(BBC One) Stephen Graham has been lined up as the latest villain in Jed Mercurio’s police corruption saga, Line of Duty. All we know at the moment is that Graham will be a balaclava man, part of the murky group of criminals whose MO is killing someone you have been intimate with, smearing your DNA on the body, putting the cadaver in a freezer and threatening to ruin your life by framing you unless you obey their instructions. The last season dangled the prospect that the corruption that AC-12 has been sniffing out could be very close to home. In true Mercurio fashion, Graham’s suspect may be a classic bit of misdirection.
Date tbc
Poldark series 5
(BBC One) Series four of everyone’s favourite chest-baring period drama ended with a jolting death that suggested the cosy Sunday-night staple still has the capacity to shock. Might more surprises be in store for its fifth and final run? What we do know is that it will see Ross (Aidan Turner) ditch Westminster to return to Cornwall, though the arrival of a friend in need will force him to once again take on the forces of the establishment, not least – one suspects – the nefarious George Warleggan. A final reckoning between the two surely awaits.
Date tbc
