New year, new you, new stuff to keep your eyeballs occupied. We love a fresh start, and January is packed with plenty of original and worthwhile streaming material. We’ve handpicked 10 of the most promising projects arriving on your platforms this month, including the long-awaited return of Apple TV+ hit Severance.
Add titles to your Flicks watchlist to get notified when new episodes drop!
Black Snow: Season 2
Nothing heats us up like a cold case, and after the sobering yarn of “Blackbirding” and missing persons that Detective Cormack (a brooding Travis Fimmel) tackled in season one of this Stan Original, we’re ready for more rugged intrigue and shocking revelations. Travis Johnson (hey, another Travis!) wrote up a favourable review of season one, describing the series as “a moody, well-made crime drama that forefronts a little-explored area of Australian culture and history…what sets Black Snow apart is the way it takes us into the Australian South Seas Islander community.”
This time, we’re getting not only one new case but two, with Fimmel on the trail of a missing woman and also his own brother, who mysteriously disappeared during their childhood. The past deserves excavation, dark truths resurfacing even decades later—and we deserve well-executed, homemade stories like this.
Goosebumps: The Vanishing
Starring David Schwimmer as a scientist dad who goes from daggy to downright terrifying, this second season in Disney’s R.L. Stine adaptations is clearly inspired by ‘Stay Out of the Basement’, the second volume in Stine’s seminal string of spooky books for kids (yeah, okay, I read a buttload of Goosebumps as a kid).
That means we’ll see him slowly transformed by his own messed-up experiments, but also that this new thread of terror will be tied to the events of season one, which partially took place in the early 1990s. The trailer is soundtracked by a creepy, slowed-down Kylie Minogue cover, and features some surprisingly gross veggie body horror: plant-based isn’t always better, people.
High Potential
I reckon my mum would make a good sleuth. She’s always listening to those bloody true crime podcasts, and she can turn any conversation (read: interrogation) from frosty to intimate and warm in a matter of seconds. The hilarious Kaitlyn Olsen plays one such character in this new crime-comedy, surprising everyone with her knack for solving cases despite being a humble and inexperienced single mum. The series is based on a successful French show, and beefcake Daniel Sunjata appears as Olsen’s by-the-book partner: we can totally see where this dynamic is going and we’re locked in already.
Lockerbie: A Search For Truth: Season 1
Who let Colin Firth’s daughter die in a tragic airplane crash?! We simply will not stand for any misery being inflicted upon this lovely, award-winning, ever-crushworthy bloke. In this aching drama based on true events, Firth is Dr Jim Swire, the devastated dad of one of the many victims of a Pan Am plane explosion in Scotland in 1988. Perhaps seeking to drown out in grief in a flurry of information and conspiracy, Swire’s journey to find justice will take him across continents and political divides, hopefully ending on a note of closure if not eye-opening revelation. A worthy illumination of real loss and systemic failure, with Firth a capable empathetic centre.
Missing You: Limited Series
The tenth offering from suspense writer Harlan Coben’s 14 book deal with Netflix, this tense thriller series definitely has a tried-and-true format to follow. If you already whipped through The Stranger and Fool Me Once, the latest tale of intrigue and spiralling reveals will be a done deal for your watchlist. It follows a single detective (Rosalind Eleazar) looking for love and finding it, but in the most tantalising and troublesome of ways: in the form of the fiance who ghosted her without a word and disappeared years before, now reaching out via a dating app match.
Coben is clearly a dab hand in his field, and the additional romantic tension will only supersize your need—and Eleazar’s character’s desperation—to find the truth.
On Call: Season 1
Pretty Little Liars star Troian Bellisario and 13 Reasons Why actor Brandon Larracuente are all grown up now, and tackling a job with immense moral and physical stakes—appearing as Long Beach officers in this brand new crime drama. Attending to emergency calls at all hours, the pair are also wracked with turmoil after the death of a fellow officer, and if the name Dick Wolf as a producer doesn’t clue you in on the personal-professional gossip we’re in for, then I suppose you’ll just have to tune in and get hooked without any warning.
I always find that conversation really flows when you’re driving, perhaps because there’s no pressure to make eye contact while chatting. Or because neither of you can leave as quick as you might want to. Let’s cross our fingers that this nimble and tense new show captures that easy intimacy between passengers, heading to a complicated and possibly dangerous destination.
Paradise: Season 1
Sterling screen talent Sterling K. Brown takes centre stage in this intriguing drama, which takes place in an elite community comprised of some of the world’s most powerful and wealthy people. Would such folks harbour dark secrets, cascading into a vast web of conspiracy that even Brown and the secret service can’t detangle without serious risk to their own lives? Nahhh, unlikely. I’m sure this mysterious new show, with big stars such as James Marsden and Julianne Nicholson (still somehow so under-appreciated!), will end on a nice note of everybody getting together for a block party barbecue. Stormy, thorny viewing released at the peak of summer, for some reason.
The Pitt: Season 1
This hot new medical drama has been building considerable buzz, which sounds unusual for such a generic setting…until you learn a little more about its inventive structure. The first season’s 15 episodes each capture just one hour of chaos at a modern-day Pennsylvania hospital, conveying the mile-a-minute disaster and negotiating that the staff must wearily endure. Honestly, sitting through all 15 episodes in one go might feel as tiring as doing the shift yourself. Noah Wyle is our central self-destructing doctor, and he looks very McConaughey in the exciting show’s promo imagery, no?
The Rig: Season 2
Out of the frying pan, into the fire. Or, uh, whatever the super cold and foggy version of that metaphor would be. In this returning sci-fi mystery, the poor beleaguered workers of rig Kinloch Bravo have been swept away to secret facility the Stac, where further conspiracies and terrifying deep-ocean threats simply will not leave folks like Iain Glen and Martin Compston alone.
Adam Fresco has checked out the sophomore batch of episodes and liked what he saw, his review assuring fans of the first season “that things go from bad to even bloody worse, as the surviving Bravo crew, fresh from the fire, are thrown into a whole new frying pan of dire machinations, deadly mystery, and devious manoeuvrings.”
Severance: Season 2
Geez, thanks a lot, Severance: season one was so addictively intriguing, funny, sad and just plain good that its cliffhanger has done us serious damage, leaving us dangling for about three years to find out what’ll happen to the rebellious “innies” of Lumon Industries. Fans might just gulp down this sophomore chapter in one greedy go, desperate to catch up the tortured workers of a mysterious biotech company who retain no memories of their work once they head home each day. After years of rumours regarding behind-the-scenes producer bickering, the creative team and cast are presumably back in fine, mind-mashing form, ready to clock back in for more capitalist bleakness.
