The Abandons
Thursday 4 December, Netflix
Gillian Anderson and Lena Headey star in this new Western from the creator of biker gang saga Sons of Anarchy. Set in the American wilderness of the 1850s, Anderson plays a wealthy ruthless landowner and mining heir, Constance Van Ness, who will stop at nothing to expand her empire – and I mean nothing. Among those who stand in her way at a nearby cattle farm is Irish refugee Fiona Nolan (Headey), who shares her homestead with a ragtag gang of orphans she has adopted as her own. I already know whose side I’m on.
Percy Jackson and the Olympians series two
Wednesday 10 December, Disney+
Author of the Percy Jackson novels Rick Riordan was reportedly excluded from the making of the 2010 film adaptation of The Lightning Thief. Not so with the more successful TV version, which brought Riordan and his wife Becky on board to create a more faithful version of the first book in the Camp Half-Blood Chronicles series, which imagines a world in which Greek gods and their offspring live in modern times. This second instalment adapts The Sea of Monsters and sees demigod Percy (Walker Scobell) save his friend from the clutches of a cyclops.
Man vs Baby
Thursday 11 December, Netflix
Rowan Atkinson returns as Trevor Bingley, the hapless bloke who was mercilessly terrorised by a persistent bee in 2022’s Man vs Bee. Having been deterred from house sitting, he’s now found a job as a school caretaker, charged with keeping the place spick and span over the Christmas holidays. But when no one picks up baby Jesus (played by a real baby) from the Nativity, clumsy Trevor becomes a reluctant – and rather awful – babysitter. What could possibly go wrong…
Taylor Swift: The End of an Era
Friday 12 December, Disney+
Taylor Swift’s record-breaking Eras Tour is already available to watch on Disney+, but this month she’s releasing a new extended version including songs from her 2024 album The Tortured Poets Department. More exciting, however, is the accompanying six-part documentary series, filmed as Swift travelled the world as part of one of the most successful tours in music history. As well as giving an insight into the work it takes to create a phenomenon, the documentary offers an “intimate” look at her life behind the scenes. It features appearances from fellow singers Gracie Abrams and Sabrina Carpenter, as well as her American football player fiancé Travis Kelce.
The Revenge Club
Friday 12 December, Paramount+
This new psychological thriller starts just like any other – with a woman who thought she had the perfect life having the rug swept from under her feet. Slow Horses’ Aimée-Ffionn Edwards is Emily, who is blindsided when her husband decides he wants to leave her. In an attempt to cope, she joins a support group where she finds catharsis and camaraderie. But as she gets closer to her fellow divorcees – particularly Callum (Line of Duty’s Martin Compston) – their small acts of revenge snowball until one of the group’s exes is found dead. Can Emily really trust her new friends?
Fallout series two
Wednesday 17 December, Prime Video
Fallout is a rare video game adaptation that actually works. Set in a post-apocalyptic world after a nuclear bomb forced humans to live underground, the series one finale revealed that the disaster had been engineered by the very company who made the bunkers everyone now lives in. Plucky protaganist Lucy (Ella Purnell) is reeling from the news (and the fact that her father was involved in the cover-up) and is now on her way to New Vegas with the Ghoul (White Lotus‘s Walton Goggins) to uncover more of the truth. But the wasteland above the bunkers is a dangerous place, and there’s no guarantee they’ll make it out of the desert alive…
Emily in Paris series five
Thursday 18 December, Netflix
Changing the name of such a popular show would be a marketing nightmare for Netflix, so even though Emily Cooper (Lily Collins) is living in Rome, we’ll still be watching Emily in Paris. The world’s most incompetent PR agent moved to the Italian city to head up the agency’s new office, but also in the pursuit of new hunk on the block Marcello. But the course of true love never did run smooth, and Emily also has to contend with Gabriel’s confession of his true romantic feelings at the end of the last season. Sacre bleu! Or should that be o mio dio?
Amadeus
Sunday 21 December, Now
Decked out in the 18th century’s best wigs and sharpest tails, Will Sharpe plays the 18th-century rock star Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. This bold, stylish drama from writer Joe Barton (Black Doves, Giri/Haji) charts the composer’s dazzling rise to fame and disastrous fall from grace, kicking off with his arrival in Vienna in search of creative freedom. There he meets devoutly religious court composer Antonio Salieri (Paul Bettany), who vows to take down Mozart and besmirch his name in society. Salieri’s jealousy develops into a 30-year obsession – and a realisation that the only way to go down in history is to intertwine himself in Mozart’s God-given genius.
The Lowdown
Friday 26 December, Disney+
Ethan Hawke’s new series received rave reviews when it started in America in September, so I’m glad we haven’t had to wait too long for it to make its way to Disney+. Hawke plays Lee Raybon, a self-titled “truthstorian” and citizen journalist inspired by real-life historian Lee Roy Chapman, who exposed the founder of Tulsa’s involvement in the city’s infamous race massacre of 1921. Hawke’s newshound (who also happens to own a bookshop) similarly digs into local stories and unearths corruption. Obviously, there are those who’d rather Raybon kept his findings to himself – and will go to dangerous lengths to shut him up.
