The New Year has well and truly begun! With January over, we still have eleven more glorious months ahead of us, each offering a delicious chocolate box of films and series for us to feast upon.
Although there are many exciting films on the horizon (like ‘Wicked: For Good’, for which I am obsessively counting down the days!), ostensibly television is the space to watch in 2025. Some of my personal favourites are returning this year. For instance, Apple TV’s ‘Severance’, which started airing its second season in January, came back with a bang, jumpstarting my intrigue in Mark S. and his loveable colleagues’ attempts to discover the truth behind Lumon, the ominously mysterious and sinister company for which they work.
However, perhaps my most anticipated TV show this year is the third season of HBO’s ‘The White Lotus’. This season of the satirical anthology series “sees a new crop of unhappy, rich vacationers at a luxurious resort” in Ko Samui, Thailand and is bound to be one of the most watched and talked about shows of the year. Creator Mike White has confidently stated that the previous two seasons (set in Hawaii and Sicily respectively) “were a rehearsal” for this third-instalment, which is expected to be even more scandalous and thought-provoking that the show’s previous offerings.
Each season of ‘The White Lotus’ follows the lives of several wealthy holidayers as they stay at a property of the fictious White Lotus hotel chain. The show acts as a social critique of many aspects of modern life, such as money and sex, and embroils its characters (played by big-name actors, such as Jennifer Coolidge, Theo James, Sydney Sweeney and Aubrey Plaza) in messy situations with a sprinkling of murder and spicy one-liners. I have no doubt that this third season, which features British icons Jason Isaacs (‘Harry Potter’) and Aimee Lou Wood (‘Sex Education’), will live up to the excellent calibre we expect from this show.
Although there are many exciting films on the horizon (like ‘Wicked: For Good’, for which I am obsessively counting down the days!), ostensibly television is the space to watch in 2025.
I am also intrigued by the imminent seventh season of Charlie Brooker’s dystopian Netflix anthology series ‘Black Mirror’ which is expected to be released some time in 2025. This season, featuring a “stacked cast” of talented actors, including Issa Rae (‘Barbie’), Paul Giamatti (‘The Holdovers’) and Emma Corrin (‘The Crown’), is sure to be a talking point in this year’s television calendar with six episodes that are sure to leave viewers with an indulgent feeling of existential dread.
However, I would be lying if I said I wasn’t worried about this upcoming series; the sixth season faltered slightly, with many viewers questioning how such a show can exist in the post-pandemic Trump era, where our lived reality is just as unsettling as the show’s content (the commentary on AI in Season 5’s “Joan is Awful” episode is emphatic of this). That being said, even though technology may be “catching up with Brooker”, I predict a return to form for ‘Black Mirror’.
These are but a few shows I am looking forward to this year. I imagine that the final seasons of ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’, ‘Squid Game’ and ‘Stranger Things’ will be sure-fire cultural lightning rods too! So, I implore you, in the digital age of streaming, to stay alert: your next great New Year watch could be just one click away.
