2025 is juuuust around the corner—but you may not have seen your fave TV show of the year just yet. Not when December’s programming includes Keira Knightley as a stressed-out spy, Jude Law as a space-dad, and the long-awaited second chapter of Squid Game. Which shows will get the green light from you?
Add each title to your Flicks watchlist to get notified when episodes drop: the perfect reason to avoid your pesky, loving family over those languid summer holidays.
Black Doves: Season 1
Black Doves: Season 1
This British thriller series has already been tapped for a second season, before we’ve even been blessed to see Keira Knightley and Ben Whishaw in sexy spy mode yet. Must be onto something! When Knightley’s secret lover is killed, her spy agency sends an old mate, Whishaw’s scowling assassin, to protect her, launching the pair into the deepest depths of London’s criminal underworld.
There’s a sense of odd similarity here to the recent Day of the Jackal remake, with the Bond series’ Q and Moneypenny (Lashana Lynch) currently starring in duelling, steamy spy series. It should be nice to see the bloke who normally gives Bond his gadgets finally getting his own mitts on some—and Knightley’s poise adds an extra sense of gravitas to the twisty proceedings, too.
Bump: Season 5
Bump: Season 4
Forget polishing off leftovers and binning all that spent wrapping paper with your annoying family on Boxing Day. You could instead be spending the post-Christmas haze with the Chalmers-Davis clan—and in fact it’s your last chance to do so, with season five wrapping up a saga of teen pregnancies, tragic diagnoses, and family drama that manages to be absorbingly entertaining and acutely relatable at once.
Over four heartfelt seasons, Nathalie Morris’ protagonist Oly has gone from unprepared teen mum to a relatively confident and self-assured adult, now facing her second pregnancy while mum Angie (a brilliant Claudia Karvan) grapples with her daunting health condition. We’ll miss the warmth of this gem of an Aussie drama: don’t take the last chapter for granted this holiday season.
Creature Commandos: Season 1
This motley crew of animated anti-heroes are, as promo material informs us, “your last, worst option” when it comes to saving the world. You’ve got Frankenstein’s monster (David Harbour) and his Bride (Indira Vharma), Sean Gunn’s Weasel, Frank Grillo as Rick Flagg Sr., and Alan Tudyk as three separate and equally bizarre characters, all wrangled by Viola Davis’ Amanda Waller ever since mushy organic humans caused so much trouble in her various Suicide Squad experiments. One of the opening entries in James Gunn’s new command of the DC Universe, this resolutely quirky and morbid show reminds us of another DC hero’s credo: they’re the heroes we deserve, but not the ones we need right now.
Dream Productions: Limited Series
Dream Productions: Limited Series
Inside Out 2 was Pixar’s most recent hit, and this episodic return to the world inside Riley’s mind is not another sequel; not a prequel; but a mid-quel, taking place right after the events of the original film. Hopefully it’s anything but mid. The hilarious Paula Pell and Richard Ayoade voice the Hollywood-esque bigwigs that put together Riley’s dreams, directors who must reflect the troubled tween’s daily life back at her in nightly productions. “Dreams really do come true”, the show’s tagline tells us: “every night, on time and on budget.” We love media that’s about making media, and this surreal odyssey inside the mind might end up resembling a kid-friendly take on The Franchise.
Laid: Season 1
Laid: Season 1
In this high-concept new rom-com series, Stephanie Hsu faces every single gal’s nightmare: she’s gotta reconnect with all her exes and warn them about a unique STD she may have inflicted upon them…namely, that everyone she’s ever had sex with seems to be dying in surreal ways. I’m talking crashed chandeliers, death by sauna…the works. The show is a US remake of a really quite underrated and nutty Aussie comedy, and its quirky plot is well-deserving of a second shot at life. Hsu, too, has entirely earned her lead role as a stressed-out desperado, and her bestie is played by Zosia Mamet: two talents who have mostly been relegated to wacky sidekick parts, and will now get a chance to shine in the most hilariously uncomfortable of situations.
One Hundred Years of Solitude: Limited Series
There are “unadaptable books”, and then there’s Gabriel García Márquez’s multi-generational, 1967 magical realist epic: a pivotal work in the canon of Latin American literature that covers seven generations of the Buendiá family’s tragedies and miracles. Has Netflix perhaps bitten off just a bit more than it can possibly chew, considering the author previously refused to sell the rights to his story? Some production tidbits to give you hope: it’s filmed in García Márquez’s native Colombia, with almost 500 local and Indigenous workers making the props and set for the story’s fictional setting of Macondo, represented in three different timelines. And, as the late writer fervently requested, it’s adapted entirely in Spanish, and runs for 16 episodes…almost enough time to cover most of the text’s grimy and magical moments.
No Good Deed: Season 1
No Good Deed: Season 1
There’s some canny casting going on in this new limited series: Ray Romano and Lisa Kudrow are both old hands at the sitcom, and here they’ll be between four far stranger walls than either of those 1990s sets. Teyonah Parris, Abbi Jacobson and Luke Wilson round out the supporting cast, with creator Liz Feldman’s lucky charm Linda Cardellini returning from their work together on the oh-so-loveable Dead To Me.
With so many funny folks all vying to buy the same villa, the domestic stakes are high enough: but Feldman has shown a morbid sense of humour in the past, and she’ll likely apply the same turns, twists and blackhearted moments to this story.
Secret Level: Season 1
Secret Level: Season 1
The creators behind Netflix’s Love, Death + Robots have made a traitorous, cross-platform move that is nonetheless extremely beneficial for us sci-fi fans! In another adult, animated anthology, video game stories unspool into standalone episodes, with characters voiced by the likes of Keanu Reeves, Arnold Schwarzenegger (and his kid Patrick??), Kevin Hart, and New Zealand’s own Temuera Morrison. Can it capture the absorbing escapism we get from playing games, or will it just feel like a montage of extra-long cutscenes? I’m sure the sage, cool-headed online gaming communities that love each title to death will let us know their thoughts either way.
Squid Game: Season 2
Talk about a tough follow-up. The first season of this twisted, completely addictive South Korean drama exploded overnight in 2021, and so creator Hwang Dong-hyuk has had a few years to contemplate the perfect next move. Thing is, since the story revolves around a barbaric game of death with only one winner, he’ll need to conjure up an (almost) entirely new cast for us to care about—and come up with a few new fatal playground games to put them through, to boot.
Can the show’s sophomore season reach the same unturnoff-able heights of that opening chapter, now that some of the mystery’s been revealed and our appetite has already been sated once? Settle in on Boxing Day to find out.
Star Wars: Skeleton Crew: Season 1
Star Wars: Skeleton Crew - Season 1
What do you get if you hurl the Goonies into a galaxy far, far away? It might look something like this family-oriented Star Wars effort, starring Jude Law as the force-sensitive guardian of four lost kiddos, who will encounter bizarre creatures and foreboding new planets in their journey home. It all looks a fair bit sweeter and more accessible than Lucasfilm’s lore-expanding sequel and prequel series of late, and Nick Frost adds some funny as the voice of a decrepit droid drawn along for the ride. The show’s created by Jon Watts and Christopher Ford, who brought youthful, welcoming energy back to the Spider-Man franchise with their Tom Holland film trilogy: a promising pick for whole-fam entertainment this December.
The Sticky: Limited Series
The Sticky: Limited Series
Ever heard of the “Great Canadian Maple Syrup Heist”? No, probably not…but I’m sure you’re now desperate to learn everything about it. The brilliant Margo Martindale stars as a maple syrup farmer caught up in a criminal plot when authorities try to ruin her: she’ll have to team up with a Bostonian mobster and a French-Canadian security guard to take on Quebec’s multi-million-dollar syrup supply. The show promises a cameo from executive producer Jamie Lee Curtis, as well as a perfect mix of salty crime-comedy and sweet characters.
