Middle-aged women and teen girls take centre stage in many of the series dropping this month, in settings that range from dystopian nightmares to irreverent Aussie comedies (and sometimes both at once). Here are the debut shows Jenna Guillaume reckons you should be most excited about for March…
Daisy Jones and the Six (March 3)
Daisy Jones and the Six is already a cultural phenomenon in book form, authored by Taylor Jenkins Reid, and now it’s set to do the same thing as a series. Loosely inspired by Fleetwood Mac, Daisy Jones and the Six follows the rapid rise, enormous success, and spectacular fall of a fictional rock band in the 1970s.
Real life rock royalty heir Riley Keough plays the titular Daisy Jones, while Sam Claflin plays her bandmate Billy Dunne, with whom she has an intense relationship. Camila Morrone, Suki Waterhouse, Josh Whitehouse, and Timothy Olyphant also star.
Rain Dogs (March 7)
A fictional adaptation of creator Cash Carraway’s memoir Skint Estate, Rain Dogs is a dark comedy that explores poverty, dreams, and deep loves that aren’t romantic. It centres around Costello Jones, a working class single mother and aspiring writer who hustles to survive and to give a different life to her precocious 10-year-old daughter, enlisting the help of her best friends and found family along the way. With a star turn from lead Daisy May Cooper, the eight-episode series is as moving as it is funny.
School Spirits (March 10)
Being stuck in high school for a literal eternity is probably most people’s idea of hell, and it’s the exact afterlife American teen Maddie is dealing with after being murdered on her school campus. With the help of her undead support group, Maddie tries to navigate life after death, the close proximity but insurmountable distance of those she left behind—and what exactly happened to her to cause her death. It’s a spooky and fun teen murder mystery that will appeal to fans of shows like Pretty Little Liars and Wednesday.
Better (March 14)
After her son becomes deathly ill, a corrupt detective reckons with her own wrongdoings and decides to make amends for her crooked past. But her newfound path to redemption doesn’t exactly sit well with the criminal with whom she’s developed a strong, mutually beneficial relationship—and whom she is now tasked with bringing down. With standout performances from leads Leila Farzad and Andrew Buchan, Better is a tense five-part thriller that focuses on a different kind of anti-hero than the white middle-aged men we’re used to.
Extrapolations (March 17)
Scott Z. Burns created a prescient thriller in 2011’s Contagion, which saw a huge uptick in interest at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020. Now, Burns is returning to another globally vital topic—climate change—as showrunner for the anthology series Extrapolations. It’s not the first time Burns has focused on the climate crisis, having produced the documentary An Inconvenient Truth, but now he’s using fiction to reveal potential truths in this not-too-distant-future story. With each episode focusing on a different set of characters, the show will explore the very real effects of climate change on humanity’s lives, loves, and belief systems.
An impressive cast is assembled to bring the dark-but-necessary tale to life, including Meryl Streep, Kit Harrington, Edward Norton, Sienna Miller, Daveed Diggs, Diane Lane, David Schwimmer, Matthew Rhys, Keri Russell, Gemma Chan, Forest Whitaker, Marion Cotillard, Heather Graham, Murray Bartlett, Tobey Maguire, and Hari Nef.
Class of ‘07 (March 17)
Another stuck-at-high-school premise, this time with a very living cast of characters and an extra brutal reunion twist. An Australian Catholic girls’ school’s 10-year reunion takes a dramatic turn for the worst, to put it mildly, when an apocalyptic wave wipes out everything surrounding them except their hill-top school. The show has got all the dramatic tension of a normal high school reunion story, and its extremely heightened stakes serve to make it even more fun, not to mention weirdly funny! It stars a great ensemble cast led by Emily Browning and Caitlin Stasey.
Wellmania (March 29)
The wellness industry has modern culture in its grip, often going to very dark places. Journalist Brigid Delaney sought to put such trends to the test in her non-fiction exploration Wellmania, which has now become the inspiration for this fictional comedy-drama of the same name. Delaney serves as co-creator with Benjamin Law, while the series stars the hugely popular Celeste Barber as a woman named Liv, whose career aspirations and life are put on hold when she must pass a health test. It sets her on a quest for wellness and all the fads that term now entails. Wellmania looks to be sharp and funny, with an undercurrent of heart.
The Power (March 31)
Teen girls are frequently one of the most disempowered and disrespected demographics in the world, and this series explores what would happen if the tables were suddenly turned. The sci-fi thriller, based on Naomi Alderman’s best-selling novel of the same name, is set in a world where all teen girls inexplicably develop the ability to electrocute people at will—along with the ability to pass the power on to other women. Chaos and a total upending of the world order ensues, naturally. The always-great Toni Collette stars as a politician and mother, with Auli’i Cravalho playing her newly-powerful daughter, and John Leguizamo appearing as her husband.
