Steve Newall previews six of the best shows streaming on NEON in 2025.
Now that we’ve stopped looking back on the year that was, it’s time to take a breath and then get excited about the huge amount of excellent viewing to come this year. There will be plenty about what’s streaming on NEON to tell you about throughout 2025—here, we highlight half a dozen upcoming shows that look set to be NEON standouts.
The White Lotus
As we reluctantly get back to work routines, it’s nice to see the return of a show that makes travel look so appealing—but then takes gleeful pleasure in wringing comedy and drama out of its poor characters (not literally poor, they are of course mostly rich and privileged).
After superb seasons set in Hawaii and Sicily, Mike White’s anthology ensemble comedy series relocates to Thailand with a fresh group of troubled/troubling characters.
This season you’ll meet three women on a girls’ trip (Leslie Bibb, Carrie Coon, Michelle Monaghan) and an older man/younger woman couple with a two-decade age gap (Walton Goggins and Aimee Lou Wood). Elsewhere, there’s a wealthy businessman and his wife (Jason Isaacs and Parker Posey) holidaying with their kids, and behind-the-scenes drama with the resort staff (including the perhaps unexpected return of season one’s spa manager Belinda).
Our patriotism is going full bore, too, with Aotearoa’s own (and awesome) Morgana O’Reilly among the cast.
The Handmaid’s Tale
“Something big is about to happen” proclaimed a video teasing this modern dystopian classic’s return—and you can bet on it, with the upcoming sixth season of The Handmaid’s Tale also being its last. The show has steadily upped the ante of what it is prepared to do to its characters, suggesting plenty of consequences, chao and (likely) carnage to come.
Fans have had a minute to gather themselves though, with The Handmaid’s Tale’s last episodes having premiered way back in late 2022. You should be primed then, to pick up the story of June (Elisabeth Moss) from the cliffhanger she was left on, trying to flee an increasingly authoritarian Canada with babe in arms.
Coincidentally aboard the same train: Serena (Yvonne Strahovski), June’s nemesis, Gilead co-founder—and Commander Waterford’s widow. Collisions are imminent, between these two and in the show’s other unresolved struggles, both inside Gilead and beyond…
The Last of Us
If you’re among those who haven’t played the second video game in the acclaimed series, let me tell you right now ahead of season two: you are not ready for this shit, and that is exactly why you should watch it anyway. That applies to gamers too… Frankly, I’m getting emotional thinking about some of the narrative beats coming this season—and that’s not factoring in how the show will deviate from, or expand upon, what we think we know from the world of the games.
Still, we were 100% with Bella Ramsey when they shared thoughts about one significant event in the game (“If that does take place in the show, I don’t know that I’m emotionally ready for it”) to Esquire back in 2023.
As the first astonishing season concluded, so had the journey of Joel and Ellie (Pedro Pascal and Bella Ramsey) to find a cure for the fungal infection that had turned most of humanity into parasitically controlled killing machines. In the closing episode, Joel made choices that haunt this new season, prioritising Ellie’s life over those who would remove her brain in order to study its immunity—Joel acting without consent, or even telling her.
Ellie can tell something’s off, and that’s a vibe not helped particularly by the introduction of new characters and crises— fresh faces in season two including Kaitlyn Dever, Isabela Merced, Jeffrey Wright, Catherine O’Hara and Beef standout Young Mazino. Yeah, I’m not ready for this shit—and can’t wait.
A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms
One of the joys of George R.R. Martin’s Song of Ice and Fire series—which spawned mega-hit Game of Thrones and prequel House of the Dragon—is a breadth of tone that embraces sly humour and low stakes adventure alongside all the larger scale powerbrokering, warfare, infanticide and scuttling around dark corridors.
Possibly channeling some of the team-up buddy-cop vibes seen sometimes in GoT, new series A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms comes with what’s reportedly a lighter tone (though it might be a bit much to rule out dark corridors entirely). Based on Martin’s Tales of Dunk and Egg novellas, this show’s scale looks smaller—welcomely, for variety’s sake—as it follows the adventures of its titular duo.
“A century before the events of Game of Thrones, two unlikely heroes wandered Westeros…a young, naïve but courageous knight, Ser Duncan the Tall, and his diminutive squire, Egg,” says the official logline. “Set in an age when the Targaryen line still holds the Iron Throne, and the memory of the last dragon has not yet passed from living memory, great destinies, powerful foes, and dangerous exploits all await these improbable and incomparable friends.” And some sweet jousting, by the looks of it.
IT: Welcome To Derry
As the IT films made clear: weird evil shit has been going down for ages in the small Maine town of Derry. Fortunately for real-life Maine residents, it’s a fictitious town plagued by weird evil shit—but that would not come as any relief to the characters from the many, many tales Stephen King has set in Derry (including IT, of course).
Bill Skarsgård returns here as Pennywise alongside director Andy Muschietti, with a structure that echoes the 27 year gap between chapters of IT. That’s the length of time between Pennywise’s outbreaks of terrror, before the monster once again returns to its slumber—reflecting this, the show’s first season is set in 1962, one iteration before the 1989 events of IT.
Promising to go back even further, and expand on the fragments we already know about the historical awfulness of Derry, there’s fertile foul ground for this new series to explore. And perhaps a balloon or two to pop…
Yellowjackets
Following a high school soccer team whose small plane crashes in the wilderness, and their grown up equivalents some twenty years later, Yellowjackets quickly established itself as more than a teenage girl Lost clone.
Fun when it wanted to be, grim and spooky at other times, its two seasons have been compulsively consumed, aided by great casting, including impressive choices of actors playing the same character decades apart—Juliette Lewis/Sophie Thatcher, Christina Ricci/Samantha Hanratty, Melanie Lynskey/Sophie Nélisse and more recently, Aotearoa’s Simone Kessell/Courtney Eaton.
The new season is without one significant core cast member, with their journey ending in the closing minutes of the season two finale. Yellowjackets’ ranks are being bolstered though, with the addition of Hilary Swank and Joel McHale (whose villainous turn in The Bear begs more in that vein). While details are scant on what season three has in store, it looks to get cultier and weirder out there in the mountains if this Instagram post is anything to go on…
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