Ready for a round of summer binge-watching? Liam Maguren rounds up the biggest shows of 2024 streaming on NEON—and some you should binge in preparation for 2025.
Summer days are all about the outdoors. Hiking. Swimming. Backyard cricket. Beachside touch rugby. BBQing. Gardening. DIYing. The stuff Kiwi holidays are made of.
Summer nights, however, are for slobbing. After all that physical activity, you’ll have earned the right to melt into your favourite TV-watching position and binge those shows you’ve been meaning to catch up on.
NEON brings some of the most bingeable shows to our shores and this holiday season is the perfect time to catch up on this year’s—and prepare for next year’s—best.
The Penguin
Smash through 2024’s biggest shows
One of the most talked-about shows of 2024, The Penguin sees Colin Farrell reprise his role as the notorious gangster from 2022’s The Batman (also currently on NEON). As Flicks editor Steve Newall wrote: “The characters are interesting and earn our investment, the crime drama is compelling, the show’s depiction of a struggling city resonates, and the series builds and builds towards…” well, you can watch all eight episodes right now and find out.
Another big blockbuster spinoff, Dune: Prophecy turns the clock back on Denis Villeneuve’s films (both currently on NEON) by 10,000 years to explore the Game of Thrones-like tension between the Great Houses like Atreides and Harkonnen. That might seem like a long time gap but, as Steve Newall says, certain connections to the films are “shown in terrifying fashion here.” Depending on when you read this, you’ll be able to catch up on the first season just in time for the finale on 23 December.
It may very well have you hankering for another GoT fix. Enter the second season of House of the Dragon, the follow-up to BAFTA and Emmy-winning prequel series to the juggernaut George RR Martin saga. “It’s quintessential Game of Thrones stuff,” Daniel Rutledge teased in his write-up, “just the greatest adult fantasy TV show we’ve got, doing what it does best again.” All episodes are now bingeable.
Industry
Catch up with this year’s returning shows
A show that’s steadily been rising to greatness, Industry has clocked in its third and best season this year. The unapologetic, suspense-filled financial series attaches the viewer to a new generation of investment bankers as they slowly trade bits of their soul for money and status. On this new season, Clarisse Loughrey says “television’s most ruthlessly compelling offering” is “an anti-comfort show. That’s the heart of its brilliance.”
With the fifth season finally reaching its conclusion, now’s the best time to see what all the fuss is about with Taylor Sheridan mega-series Yellowstone. If season one has you hooked, take comfort in knowing that it’s “a show that’s dependably not changed a bit since it first became a hit,” as per Adam Fresco’s piece on the latest season.
Dark City: The Cleaner
Claiming the award for Best Production Design at this year’s NZTVAs, Dark City: The Cleaner adapts Paul Cleave’s Christchurch-set crime novels with Cohen Holloway playing an ordinary, everyday bloke who has a real knack for being a secret serial killer. Co-starring Chelsie Preston Crayford as a woman he severely underestimates, it’s a show Katie Parker praised for being “twisty and unpredictable… an unexpectedly audacious and instantly addictive series.”
If you’re really dedicated to a gargantuan binge-watch, dunk your head into all 120 episodes of Larry David’s groundbreaking script-less comedy Curb Your Enthusiasm, which blessed us with the 12th and final season earlier this year. Once you’ve crossed the finish line of this 24-year-long series, read up on Luke Buckmaster’s piece: The self-reflexive genius of the Curb Your Enthusiasm finale.
The Last of Us
Jump on the bandwagon of 2025’s most anticipated shows
HBO’s groundbreaking first season of The Last of Us marked a seismic shift in how videogames can be adapted to screen, nimbly swaying between faithful retelling of Naughty Dog’s iconic game and bold changes to the original narrative. Catch all those episodes if you haven’t already; the highly anticipated second season, streaming early next year, looks set to cover elements of the bold PS4 sequel The Last of Us: Part II.
The White Lotus creator Mike White’s out to collect another stack of Emmys in 2025 with a third season of the star-studded satirical who-done-what mystery series that teases a death and a killer at a flash resort before rewinding the clock back a week. The previous seasons make for perfect summer viewing—the first set in Hawaii, the second in Sicily—while the thick aroma of unchecked privilege going wayward smells good on any day of the week.
Showtime hit Yellowjackets will also grace 2025 with a third season. The series weaponises the quadruple threat that is Melanie Lynsky, Tawny Cypress, Christina Ricci and Juliette Lewis as women bound by a horrific survival experience. As Clarisse Loughrey summises: “What Yellowjackets has more adventurously decided to tackle, and which crystallises in season two, is the idea that trauma itself can fundamentally alter a person’s soul.”
Gangs of London
After a long wait, we’ll finally be getting a resolution to a long-dangling cliffhanger with Gangs of London season 3. Created by The Raid filmmaker Gareth Evans and his go-to cinematographer Matt Flannery, this gritty gangster crime series boasts the kind of set pieces you’d hope from the action-savvy duo. Back in 2022, Daniel Rutledge anointed the second season as having “the best TV violence of the year.”
For anyone who caught Nathan Fielder’s incredible warp-your-brain experiment The Rehearsal, where he builds sets and hires actors to help real people “rehearse” big upcoming moments in their lives, you’re probably both surprised and delighted to hear that HBO deemed it possible to greenlit a second season. For everyone else, binge this show and you’ll understand. If that leaves you hungry for more, there’s also The Curse, which pairs Fielder with Emma Stone.
Sweetpea
Limited time? Binge a limited series
Watch Fallout star Ella Purnell meekly murder people in just six episodes with darkly comedic British thriller series Sweetpea. Purnell plays Rhiannon, a human welcome mat who discovers her unassuming manner makes her a perfect serial killer and seeing her get away with it proves to be addictive viewing. “Each part ends on a tormenting cliffhanger,” Eliza Janssen attests. “I had no choice but to stay up super late and keep binging.”
The latest from living filmmaking legend Park Chan-wook isn’t a feature, but a seven-part espionage thriller set during the ashy ends of the Vietnam War. Cowboy Bebop’s Hoa Xuande leads miniseries The Sympathizer as a half-French, half-Vietnamese communist spy embedded in the States as a refugee, starring alongside Sandra Oh and many Robert Downey Jrs. Park may only direct the first three eps, but as Clarisse Loughrey writes, his images “haunt the rest of The Sympathizer like ghosts.”
Murder is Easy—as easy as binging this Agatha Christie adaptation, which cracks the case in just two episodes. It’s been a big couple of years for David Jonsson, who leads the series, coming off the back of the aforementioned Industry, indie rom-com darling Rye Lane, and this year’s Alien: Romulus. Here, he’s sleuthing through a series of suspicious “accidents” that one woman believes is the work of a killer. Then, she ends up dead.
The Jinx
Docuseries to dive into
If you’ve managed to somehow live this past decade knowing nothing about 2015 true-crime docuseries The Jinx, this is an immediate must-watch. A top-shelf example of the genre, the lasting impacts of Andrew Jarecki’s jaw-to-the-floor series were explored with follow-up episodes released this year. Amelia Berry can attest: “The Jinx: Part Two not only delivers a brilliant follow-up to one of the best documentary series of the 2010s, but serves as a reminder that true crime can deliver truly great filmmaking, journalism, and storytelling.”
High profile shows have been made about the opioid epidemic but for a robust dissection of the devastating, hard-to-fathom destruction of this terrible act, you’ll want to see The Crime of the Century, which finally reached NZ thanks to NEON earlier this year. From hard-hitting, Oscar-winning documentarian Alex Gibney, this two-parter “lays it all out,” Dominic Corry observed. “An incredibly compelling four-hour descent into a contemporary hellscape in which half a million people died as a result of some companies enhancing their bottom line.”
If that one’s a big heavy, lighten the load with the more uplifting local three-parter Wheel Blacks: Bodies on the Line, which follows Aotearoa’s wheelchair rugby team in the lead-up to the Paralympics. I had the privilege of talking to creators Robyn Paterson and Jai Waite, the latter of whom is a former Wheel Black. “Sport’s such a great vehicle for acceptance,” Waite told me. “All of these guys have been through something, like myself. Playing a sport like this, getting to the level that they have, and then finding themselves… Those are the moments I think for me.”
