The world of streaming never, ever sits still – and there's plenty coming down the pike as we leave June and enter the month of July. This week we've finally had the UK heatwave abate, which means it might be more straightforward to stay inside of an evening and watch some fun new shows and movies without melting.

On that note, I've taken a look at all of the new additions coming to Netflix and Prime Video this week, since they're the two biggest streaming services out there, and picked out three highlights that I think will interest people. There's a really broad set of genres to enjoy this week, so check them out below with trailers and details on which day they'll arrive.

Elle

• Streaming on: Amazon Prime Video from 1 July

This charming prequel series takes a look at Elle, the star of Legally Blonde, but winds the clock back to her high school days for a different era. Reece Witherspoon has been replaced with Lexi Minetree, who frankly looks almost impossibly like a young Witherspoon, and the whole show is unsurprisingly going to open with explosions of pink colour.

Things will get more drab when Elle is forced to move to Seattle, though, where she finds it much harder to fit in and make friends. With a savvy mind and an eye for detail, though, it looks like helping to uncover a local legal scandal might just be the making of her reputation – and it could put her on a new course in life.

Enola Holmes 3

• Streaming on: 1 July on Netflix

Enola Holmes has quietly become one of Netflix's biggest franchises, after two movies that clearly did really quite massive numbers for the streaming service. It's now got another sequel coming out, starring Millie Bobby Brown again as Sherlock Holmes' younger sister Enola.

This time around she's trying to organise her wedding in Malta, of all places, but gets severely distracted when Sherlock is kidnapped. For someone to get one over the most intelligent detective in the world, something must have really gone wrong, and it'll be up to Enola to put things together and work out what's happened and how she can put things right.

Human Vapor

• Streaming on: Netflix from 2 July

My final pick is a niche one, but I think it looks really promising and might have the potential to break out and become a cult hit. This Japanese series will follow a bizarre, possibly supernatural series of killings that starts when an expert turns into gas live on TV, rightly terrifying people.

As detectives rush to work out how something so seemingly impossible could have happened in front of so many people, they start to uncover evidence of twisted schemes and abandoned projects. It looks really dark and fun, and the special effects as people die seem fascinatingly impressive, so don't be surprised if this one does better than you might expect.

Heatwave or no heatwave (and here in the UK, it's outrageously warm), the streaming wars continue without any let-up. In fact, those people lucky or farsighted enough to already have an air conditioner or cooling fan set up in their home will probably be looking for more streaming content than usual, as they cower inside to avoid the heat outside.

Well, if that sounds like it might describe how you're planning to spend your weekdays over the next few days, then you might, in turn, be wondering what's being added to the likes of Netflix and Prime Video this week. I've scoured through each listing to pick out three highlights getting added this week, so that you know what you can binge if you need to.

Avatar: The Last Airbender Season 2

• Streaming on: Netflix from 25 June

One of Netflix's very biggest shows is back this week, with a run of new episodes that almost certainly cost tens of millions to make, but at least do look likely to be impressively gorgeous and grand in scale. Following Aang and his friends as their adventures around the different kingdoms continue, it looks like we'll get more action and element-bending CGI than before.

That's good, too, because it's been a long wait for a new season, in a way that arguably has undermined the momentum of the show a little. That's a problem that's slightly plaguing Netflix at the moment, but it hopefully shouldn't change the fact that we've got a really enticing season to watch here.

Little Brother

• Streaming on: Netflix from 26 June

For those looking for more of a one-off to help them unwind one evening, Netflix has another big addition, a new comedy starring John Cena as part of his continuing renaissance as an actor. He's always been game to try fun material, and that looks like a great way to describe Little Brother. In the movie, he plays a guy with a successful family life who finds things going very wrong when a connection from high school returns.

That connection is played by chaotic comedian Eric Andre, a performer so unpredictable that there will almost certainly be some jaw-dropping moments in the movie. Whether he's allowed to be truly profane could be a big determining factor in the film's success, frankly. We'll know more when it drops on Friday.

See You At Work Tomorrow!

• Streaming on: Prime Video from 22 June

There's no two ways around it – Prime Video is having one of its leaner weeks this week, especially by comparison with Netflix, but that doesn't mean it has nothing to offer. Korean dramas and comedies have quietly become global cult sensations in recent years, and Prime Video is adding a new series called See You At Work Tomorrow! .

It's about the complicated dynamics of workplace demands and the search for love, and it seems to have its focus on a few different potential couples as they work out whether they could possibly be something together. This could be a really charming little show to distract you from the heat, so give it a look if you're in the mood for some lighter fare from today onwards.

The scale of the streaming industry now means that it can be quite hard to keep a grip on what franchises are doing huge numbers without you even realising it. That's a label I would use for Outer Banks, a show that Netflix has turned into a cult, but one that I've never dipped my toe into. Now it's getting a fifth and final season and fans seem to be rabidly excited.

The trailer dropped earlier this week, and gives us a look at the surviving members of the central cast as they try to reckon with a major event at the end of last season. It confirms again that this is the end of the road for them, but makes it clear that we can expect some fairly explosive action as things come to a head.

For the uninitiated, Outer Banks started as a sort of modern take on The Goonies, starring improbably beautiful teenagers in North Carolina who hear tales of a legendary treasure that's eluded searchers for generations. Now, seasons later, that treasure has been found and lost, confiscated and stolen, and the central feuds between two young groups of treasure hunters has deepened with time.

Just as important, though, is the fact that local law enforcement has become an enemy to our main characters, with some corruption and seediness seeping into things. Now that the original treasure arc is largely resolved, this season should be more about getting our characters the send-off their fans want.

That said, plenty of fans out there think the show might have been best served by ending after Season 3, when that original arc was basically wrapped up, so this season has a challenge on its hands. It has to justify the show continuing a little longer, while also being entertaining enough to be more than just an extended finale.

We'll know whether it meets that brief when it drops on 20 August, in a couple of months' time, but even if it's a damp squib you can still expect it to do some huge numbers in Netflix's charts. After all, the huge streamer doesn't renew shows out of sentimentality – this one has a major fanbase to rely on.

I love a good genre mashup; whether a show is one half sci-fi and another half whodunnit, or horror inflected with comedy, it's always really fun to see material that doesn't just stick to one lane. In the streaming era, I'd argue that some of the biggest platforms (like Netflix) are starting to realise that these blends can work really well for audiences, too.

That would explain some of the logic behind its new show The East Palace, a Korean drama that does things quite differently. At points in its debut trailer you could think that it's going to be a traditional prestige historical drama, but as things go further you'll start to see that it's got heavy dashes of fantasy too, and a little horror to spice things up.

Set in a fictional but deliberately credible historical era, the show will star Nam Joo-hyuk as Gu-cheon, a ghost-slayer. His unique power is that he can in fact transform into a ghost himself (and it's him you'll see with a cluster of swords on his back in the trailer's latter stages) in order to slay demons and ghosts, before returning to his corporeal form.

He'll apparently be teaming up with a courtly lady, Roh Yoon-seo as Saeng-gang, who can hear the dead and indeed communicate with them, making her a very useful asset to him. They're going to be hired to investigate paranormal situations and hauntings associated with the titular East Palace, to try to figure out what on earth's causing so much trouble there.

Beyond that (much of which is from the show's blurb), the trailer is actually fairly ambiguous – we don't really get a look at a main antagonist, for example, which doubtless will exist when it's available to stream on 17 July, in a month's time.

Regardless, though, it looks really sumptuous and has oodles of visual character to boast about, including some CGI sequences that look absolutely draw dropping from the glimpses we see in tightly-edited sequences. Whether the show can live up to the promise this trailer gives off, we'll find out in due course.

Netflix, like many of the best streaming services apart from it, has been slowly but surely building up quite a repertoire when it comes to steamy romance dramas. It figured out quite a few years ago that audiences absolutely love a bit of relationship drama, and it's built out more than one mega-franchise from that genre. One of the first big hits for its efforts was Heartstopper.

This very British story about coming of age and coming out in the UK while at school became a huge fan favourite and ran for three seasons before Netflix decided that the best way to send it off wasn't a fourth season. Instead, we're getting a finale film, and it just got its first trailer ahead of arriving on 17 July.

Heartstopper Forever will pick up the story of Nick and Charlie as they head into a genuinely pivotal part of their lives, at the end of school. They're deciding what's next for them individually and as a unit, with Nick making ready to go to university and Charlie finding himself more and more as his introversion falls away.

As anyone who had a teenage relationship will know, though, these sorts of thresholds in life tend to bring a huge amount of angst and worry with them – and that looks to be guaranteed from the trailer. Nick's clearly feeling all sorts of anxiety about what his life looks like without Charlie right there by his side, and Charlie in turn is worried about their codependency.

Of course, that all sounds a bit worrying and negative, but I have a pretty good feeling that Heartstopper won't take the route of a super sad ending. Worst case we might get a relationship break while Nick sorts himself out an uni, but I reckon we get a rosier outcome for this pair. Netflix knows just as well as the original author of the graphic novels that the show's based on that people don't really want super depressing endings, after all.

If you're a huge fan of the series, you'll want to circle 17 July in your diary or get a calendar reminder in there – it's likely to be a big day for the romance genre on streaming.

I've never held back from heaping praise on Apple TV's commissioning team over the last few years because of the way it's consistently taken fun bets on interesting new sci-fi ideas, so it's only fair that Netflix gets a proper nod for unveiling an equally intriguing project. It's just trailed The Last House, which looks like a fascinating blend of sci-fi and horror elements.

The original movie will star Wagner Moura (fresh from an Oscar nomination for The Secret Agent) opposite Greta Lee, as a pair of parents whose life is upended when they discover they can't leave their home one morning. From the looks of the first trailer, though, it's not that they're under house arrest – something far more sinister is actually unfolding.

In fact, it looks like the sealing-in doesn't just happen to our family – it might be happening to everyone, putting their survival skills to the test in a very unique way since they can't get outside. We see a timelapse of how the family manages, including some indoor crop cultivation, but the movie seems keen to underline the fact that it's not just a survival story.

The supernatural storm happening outside the house when it gets sealed is clearly something otherworldly, and it looks fairly heavily implied that the movie might just have aliens in it. These aren't confirmed or even glimpsed on-screen in the trailer, but as it ends we see that the characters might be getting stalked by something in their home.

There are some really arresting images in the trailer, too, including a look at the outside world once nature has reclaimed it after a few years of people being locked inside. That brings up shades of The Last of Us, although this looks like it's going in a different direction.

In fact, when you think about it for more than a second, the film might end up being a fairly direct allegory for the lockdowns we all endured during the height of the coronavirus pandemic a few years ago. Literally being locked in while nature heals outside, and being forced to rely on each other for help and companionship? Horror story stuff!

The Last House arrives on Netflix on 7 August, so it's a little way off, but that might mean we get another look at before too long.

We're finally getting into the proper summer weeks now, and that means that plenty of countries around the world are getting hot enough to make you want to cower inside with the lights turned down once the evening finally cools down – which means streaming is on the menu. The rest of June gives the likes of Netflix and Prime Video some major new competition – the World Cup.

If you're not a big football fan, though, the best streaming services on the market still have some excellent new additions to offer up. You might find it a little harder than usual to find people to talk about them with, but that might feel refreshing, if anything. I've picked out the three big arrivals you need to know about, so check them out below.

I Will Find You

• Streaming on: Netflix from 18 June

This thriller looks like it's almost guaranteed to be a hit on Netflix when it comes out later in the week, with a really top-level cast but also a plot that seems laser-targeted to hook people in. It stars Sam Worthington as a father wrongly convicted of killing his son, serving out his jail time knowing he's innocent.

When he's visited by a mysterious character (Britt Lower of Severance fame) with evidence that his son isn't even dead, let alone that he did the crime, he's faced with a burning need to get out of prison and set things right. It looks like we'll get a blend of prison breakout action, but also some good old-fashioned whodunnit investigating, which could make this a really strong debut in the Netflix charts.

Your Fault: London

• Streaming on: Prime Video from 17 June

Prime Video has made a total mega-franchise out of the Our Fault movies, having already concluded a Spanish-language trilogy. It's now releasing the second part of its English-language reimagining, which relocates the action to London but still stars step-siblings Noah and Nick, with their forbidden romance now starting to get incredibly heated.

The second movie will open with them in the throes of love, having finally gotten together last time around, but there are storm clouds on the horizon. With Noah going to university and encountering all sorts of new people, and Nick getting drawn further into the underworld of racing that he loves so much, they're going to have a fight on their hands to stay together.

Voicemails for Isabelle

• Streaming on: Netflix from 19 June

If you want some steamy romance with a little less complicated legality involved, then check out Voicemails for Isabelle on Netflix at the end of the week, which seems a little more traditional (in a good way). It starts Zoey Deutch as a young woman who recently lost her sister, struggling to make her way through adult life without one of her biggest support pillars there to help.

She occasionally leaves voicemails on her sister's old phone number as a way of still feeling connected and acknowledging her grief, but she doesn't realise that the number has been reassigned to a very eligible young bachelor. He starts to fall for her while feeling bad about the access he's getting to her confessionals, but I have a feeling the end for these two will be decidedly romantic.

Whenever Netflix chooses a new IP to be a big TV project, it doubtless has an almost scientific method behind the scenes. After all, we're now years into the streaming era and it's adapted a whole host of books, mangas and games into shows, many of which have done enormous numbers for it. Still, though, that doesn't stop every project from being at least some sort of a risk.

Take the latest big novel series that it's adapting, which just so happens to be one of the most influential and best-selling in American history: Little House on the Prairie. The books have already been made into one long-running and much-loved series, but now Netflix is updating things with a higher budget and doubtless the hope that it'll run for ages, too.

After a teaser a couple of weeks ago, we got a proper trailer this week to showcase a bit more of what awaits the Ingall family when they upend their life and migrate to the prairie of Minnesota. Those huge open expanses promise the possibility of a better life for them all, but also hold clear and present dangers that need to be tackled head on.

The trailer shows us how the family will indeed be prepared for the challenges of life on the frontier, but it also makes clear that they'll only survive and thrive if they can make connections and find friends to rely on. That won't be hard, though, since anyone who's read even just the first book will know that the whole Ingall clan has hearts of gold – they're good people to their core.

It'll be really interesting to see how much appetite people have for this sort of quasi-Western historical drama, which is so much less absurd and thrill-a-minute than many competing shows. The whole attraction of the series is likely to be its slower pace and more gentle storytelling, although the trailer still shows us wolves and other frightening parts of outdoor life.

The show clearly also aims to tackle the question of indigenous Americans and the way they were treated in this period of history. Whether it can do so with total clarity, or if it'll sugarcoat things a little for the wide family-friendly audience it's courting. I'm fascinated to see how that unfolds, when the show arrives on 9 July, in just under a month's time.

When you tot up a list of Netflix's biggest series in your head, you'll probably default to some expected answers like Squid Game and Stranger Things, but it can be easy to forget that it's also spawned some impressive movie franchises of its own. True, the majority of Netflix's original movies don't get sequels, but at least one of its series is still going strong.

Enola Holmes debuted back in 2020 and looked at the time like a fairly transparent attempt to capitalise on some of Netflix's biggest acting contracts. It took Millie Bobby Brown from Stranger Things and Henry Cavill from The Witcher and stuck them in a film together, and the result was a hit with audiences. Now, six years later, we're getting a threequel.

The film picks up some time after the events of the second movie, with Enola (Sherlock Holmes' spirited younger sister) living in bliss with her love Tewkesbury. When he proposes that they actually marry, though, it kicks off a chain of events that she has little control over. Firstly, it looks like the ceremony will have to happen in Malta for some reason (not just because of tax breaks for movie projects, either).

Once they're actually on the Mediterranean island, though, it would seem that Sherlock's going to go and get himself kidnapped, leaving Enola in the lurch with another major mystery to solve. Frankly, from a viewer's point of view, one can only hope that the film actually gets to that moment really quickly, since the more time spent sleuthing, the better.

The fact of the matter is that this series could run and run from here – after the first movie I wouldn't have said they had loads more material to uncover, but now that Enola's character is pretty established, it's just a matter of writing more mysteries. With Henry Cavill clearly game to pop in for a few days' filming each time, and Mille Bobby Brown basically a co-founder of Netflix at this point, what's stopping them?

Well, probably the big executive viewership counter in the sky, for one. It's clear that Netflix is brutal with whether shows and movies deserve sequels, based entirely on engagement when they release – so it'll be pivotal to observe how Enola Holmes 3 performs when it comes out on 1 July.

The neverending quest for streaming supremacy is one that surely consumes execs at both Amazon Prime Video and Netflix. The latter is the world's biggest streaming service, but it knows full well that it can't rest on its laurels if it wants to stay that way. So, each and every week it and Prime Video race to put up more, better new content for people to watch.

If you're looking at a relatively clear schedule of evenings this week, and you're wondering what new material might be arriving on either platform for you to watch, you're in luck. I've combed through the release schedules to pick out the three new arrivals on Prime Video and Netflix that you need to know about, and you'll find them here with trailers and release dates for your convenience.

Every Year After

• Streaming on: Amazon Prime Video from 10 June

Amazon's almost certainly backing a winning horse in the form of Every Year After, which adapts a best-selling romance novel and looks like it could spawn a new franchise all on its own. It stars a young woman who's back in the small town she used to spend her summers in, and unexpectedly finds herself reconnecting with the ex-boyfriend she bonded with back then.

He's got a new partner, though, and she's having trouble figuring out what she wants from life, which is almost certainly the foundation for a pretty compelling tussle between what they want and what they think is right. Expect some seriously steamy moments and plenty of anguish in this new show dropping midweek.

Outlast: The Jungle

• Streaming on: Netflix from 10 June

Netflix isn't the only streaming service that likes to take turns at competing with hugely long-established shows from network TV, and this new reality TV series looks like it's aimed directly at Survivor, which is an institution in the US. It puts a load of very beautiful people into challenges that will test their endurance and teamwork.

From raft-building to hunting and gathering, it looks like some of the challenges on show will be really tough, but the really interesting side of things is the more inter-personal one. With alliances quickly forming but rules allowing for team-switching whenever you like, people's loyalties are likely to be pretty fluid.

The Rest Is Football

• Streaming on: Netflix from 10 June

In case you're living under a rock, it's the World Cup starting this week, which means the ultimate feast for football fans. Gary Lineker's podcast empire has seen him go from strength to strength since leaving the BBC, and now he's been licensed by Netflix to produce daily podcasts in video form, reacting to the biggest games and talking about those still to come.

With co-hosts Alan Shearer and Micah Richards, he's going to welcome a wide array of impressive footballing guests, too, and the episodes will come out at 6AM every morning, making this the perfect way to start your footballing day if you're in the UK. Lineker's media empire might only just be getting started, frankly.

After its acrimonious split from EA Sports, FIFA claimed that it would go it alone with future football games – a move that many expected would result in a new partnership with Konami and its PES / eFootball franchise.

However, it came as a bit of a shock to learn that a few years later, Netflix would be picking up the slack instead. Now we can see exactly what it had in mind.

It has unveiled that the long-awaited new FIFA game will be released on 11 June, to coincide with the launch ceremony and first match of the World Cup in North America. And perhaps the most surprising news is that it will be completely free to play.

FIFA World Cup: Launch Edition will be available to all Netflix subscribers no matter the tier, and it can be played using a mobile phone as the controller. As it runs through the Netflix app, you'll be able to play it on pretty much any smart TV or via a streaming device, and up to four players can join in.

We've not tested it ourselves yet, but the gameplay looks similar to FIFA games of yore (and the EA Sports FC series). Netflix does point out though that this is a "streamlined football simulation game", so don't expect it to compete with Ultimate Team or eFootball for hardcore footy game action.

It's been developed by Delphi Interactive, which is a fairly new studio that's only previously collaborated on 007 First Light with IO Interactive. But it is fully licensed, has the real-life World Cup stadiums, teams and player names, and is, again, completely free to play.

Also, considering this is called the "Launch Edition", it suggests that a more feature-rich game might be in the pipeline too. So we'll see if that comes to fruition once the World Cup is done and dusted.

If you're interested in the business behind streaming, here's one tiny, perhaps obvious little trick. You can broadly tell how much power a showrunner or writer has by whether they get a mention in the full title of a show. Tyler Perry's a great example, since his output almost always has his name attached, and now you can add thriller-writer Harlan Coben to the elite, too.

Harlan Coben's I Will Find You might be known by just I Will Find You by 99% of the people who end up watching it, but that doesn't stop the fact that the author's name is clearly a big deal at Netflix after a series of successful outings for the streamer. This new show got a proper full trailer this week, and what a scary-looking time it promises to be!

The show stars Sam Worthington as David, a grieving father who's been convicted for killing his son, while knowing that he did no such thing. When he's approached in prison by a visitor, he's initially reluctant but then unable to ignore her. She's Rachel, played by Severance's Britt Lower, and she seems to have proof that his son never died in the first place.

What was treated as a murder might have been a kidnapping, and that means David has to immediately consider how he's going to get out of prison to start investigating. From the looks of this trailer, the show will therefore divide into a few genres, with at least part of its runtime shaping up as a Prison Break-style escape story.

Once he's out, it would seem we'll be getting more of a traditional mystery thriller from then on, but there are some really intriguing questions floating around even just from the teaser and this new trailer. One of them is quite who Rachel is, and why she knows so much about David's case, and the bigger question is who exactly the abductor is, and what their motivation could be.

It's all very enticing stuff, and I have a pretty good feeling that this will do numbers on Netflix when it comes out – it has all the right ingredients to be a mainstream success. It drops on 18 June, so it's about two weeks away, which means you don't have long to wait to see if I'm right.

Netflix just unveiled one heck of an interesting-looking original movie, and its cast alone makes it easily worth paying attention to, even if you don't have time to check out its frankly bonkers trailer. In the Hand of Dante is coming on 24 June, and promises to tell an era-hopping story of obsession with a deliberate arch noirish tone.

The movie stars Oscar Isaac as Nick, seemingly a modern-day scholar obsessed with the works of Dante Alighieri, whose most famous work was the Divine Comedy, in which he described the nine circles of hell. Nick dreams of knowing the unknowable about the great writer, but never expects to have his wish answered.

In a noir-inspired black and white timeline, which seems to be set in the present day, Nick is accosted by the literal Italian mob in New York and offered the chance to find and study the lost original manuscript of The Divine Comedy, a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity fraught with danger.

On the way to finding it, he'll clearly fall in with Gal Gadot as a femme fatale, and once he gets his hands on it, all manner of shenanigans will break loose. What's more interesting, though, is the fact that we'll also get glimpses of historical scenes, in which the mainline cast take on new roles, with Isaac filling in as Dante himself, for instance. These scenes are contrasted with the present day by being presented in vivid colour, too.

The whole thing looks completely surreal and quite beautiful, but the cast list bears dwelling on. We've got, alongside Isaac and Gadot, Gerard Butler, John Malkovich, Al Pacino, Jason Momoa and, most amazingly of all, Martin Scorsese in yet another cameo, this time in a nearly ludicrous Gandalf-like beard and long-hair combo.

That's one heck of a list of actors, and it's enough to make me curious about the film despite frankly very middling early reviews. It's sitting on a hugely dividied 43% score on Rotten Tomatoes after reviews from film festivals last year, which might just mean that it's interesting enough to bear some proper inspection if you have a Netflix subscription.

Streaming never lets up – and with the heat finally dissipating here in the UK, it's a lot more bearable to imagine staying in to binge some TV this week than last week. If you're subscribed to either Netflix or Prime Video, which are very much the two biggest streaming services out there, then you might be wondering if there's anything new coming to either.

Well, I've gone and looked into that very question for you, and found some pretty juicy news, ensuring that you should be able to pick from the three highlights below. They run a gamut of genres, too, so there should be enough variety to keep anyone satisfied. You'll find a trailer for each, too, to help you get a sense for what it offers.

Clarkson's Farm Season 5

• Streaming on: Prime Video from 3 June

I'm fairly sure that when Amazon greenlit Clarkson's Farm for the first time, years ago, it probably didn't anticipate the show going on to be this sort of massive success, and a franchise that probably drives Prime subscriptions in its own right. It's become a sensation, and has launched Clarkson into the hearts of many non-motorheads for the first time.

He's still a rambunctious fellow, though, and has sharp edges, as his presence and input into massive farming protests in recent UK history demonstrate – and these will be covered by the new season of the show. He's become a lightning rod for debate about the industry, and the new episodes will likely keep that ball rolling.

Office Romance

• Streaming on: Netflix from 5 June

Sometimes Netflix knows that people don't actually want movies that shoot for the stars and look to collect awards and acclaim – they want silly romances between beautiful people against pretty backdrops. That's what's offered up by Office Romance, which has a very utilitarian name and stars Brett Goldstein opposite Jennifer Lopez.

He's a lawyer working for her, but sparks won't take long to fly between them and the romance that the title hints at is clearly going to explode fairly quickly. In fact, this doesn't look like a movie that takes itself particularly seriously, so strap in if you want a nice, uncomplicated story to enjoy one evening this week.

The Legend of Vox Machina S4

• Streaming on: Prime Video from 3 June

Another Prime Video franchise that has done better than I would ever have anticipated is Vox Machina, which adapts the first Critical Role campaign into an animated show and makes it even easier to watch and digest. It's tremendous fun, making for a far more concise story than that mammoth broadcast was.

Of course, you'll want to watch the previous three seasons before tucking into these new episodes, but the arrival of a new run is always a great opportunity to discover a show for the first time, so this could get a swell of interest. At a time when D&D is bigger than ever, Vox Machina looks like it's riding the wave cannily.

Netflix can't ever really let a month go by without some pretty major additions – it's a massive streaming platform and knows full well that it needs to keep people's attentions. The best way to do that? Get new shows and movies onto its library all the time, ensuring that no week is empty.

Each month, therefore, I spend a little time before the calendar changes, checking out whatever Netflix is adding in the four-ish weeks to come. For those of you wondering what you'll get as part of your subscription in June, this is the place to be. I've picked out five highlights for you, and down below you'll find all of them with their trailers and release dates.

Avatar: The Last Airbender Season 2

• Streaming from: 25 June

It's been a long old wait for the second season of Avatar:The Last Airbender's live-action remake. Netflix has high hopes for the show, and it clearly has a huge budget, but you've got to hope the gap before next season doesn't end up being this same length of time.

Still, for those who enjoyed the first set of episodes, this looks like a pretty terrific step-up in scale, as the show widens its scope and escalates its stakes. The element-bending powers on show are even more amazing than before, and our slightly aged-up characters all look like they'll have the familiar and satisfying arcs from the original cartoon. Expect this one to do huge numbers when it arrives late in June.

I Will Find You

• Streaming from: 18 June

Netflix has become a real factory when it comes to thriller series, and one of its most proven methods has been to adapt best-selling novels – the sort that you see in airports for those looking to enjoy a barnstorming read while flying long-haul. It's a really great way to get a great plot, but you have to pair it with the right actors and tone to really stick the landing.

This show takes a Harlan Coben story and puts Sam Worthington in the lead role as a father who's in jail for the murder of his son – expect he not only didn't kill him, but it would seem that nobody did. What begins as a murder mystery might morph into a kidnapping case, but with a whole bunch of personal feelings clouding up the characters' objectivity. Sign us up for this one!

Office Romance

• Streaming from: 5 June

Sometimes Netflix knows it can just go for the low-hanging fruit, and this rom-com seems like it isn't shooting for the stars. It stars none other than Jennifer Lopez as a high-flying boss, literally. She runs an airline and has absolutely no time to waste on frivolous romances, with a reputation for hard management and low patience.

That all changes, though, when Brett Goldstein walks into her office as a new lawyer for the company. They have an instant spark, and it's fairly clear from the spoilerish trailer above that they're not exactly going to sit on their hands and ignore their urges. This seems to be a classic romantic tale, and might even be less rom-com and more pure rom.

Little Brother

• Streaming from: 26 June

Well, for those looking for the "pure com" equivalent to the above option, here's one for you. Little Brother looks like it might have just come from an extended experiment in which John Cena let longtime absurdist comic Eric Andre see if he could make him break into laughter while shooting scenarios, since the movie sees the former very much playing the straight man to the latter's wild card.

Cena's character accidentally finds himself reconnecting with someone he last knew at school, discovering that Andre's just as weird as ever, and watching his entire life start to revolve around this one totally bizarre dude. The movie's chances of being genuinely great are slim, but Cena is always game and you never know what Andre's going to pull, so we'll be watching this with interest.

Voicemails for Isabelle

• Streaming from: 19 June

My final pick is the rom-com we've been looking for. This movie stars Zoey Deutch as a young woman grieving the loss of her sister and using voicemail messages to her now-defunct number as a way to feel connected to the sibling she lost. What she doesn't realise is that the number has now been reassigned, and that the man of her dreams is listening in.

When he figures out why he's been getting these voicemails out of nowhere, he starts to wonder if he can help her out, and his innocent intentions quickly blossom into what looks like a fairly swooning love affair. Sure, it's a lot like You've Got Mail, but that's no real bad thing, and a charming pair of lead actors could make sure this one ends up being a great little bit of fun.

It's always nice to see an actor you rate doing well, and I think Netflix has found itself a really reliable romcom performer in the form of Zoey Deutch. She's already anchored one of my favourite little cult Netflix movies, opposite Glenn Powell in Set It Up, and now she's starring in another Netflix movie some eight years later.

Deutch plays Jill, one of two main characters in Voicemails for Isabelle, which might not have the catchiest title of all time, but does look like a great bit of romantic fun nonetheless. Netflix gave the movie a proper trailer this week, ahead of a release date of 19 June, and I'm quite taken with it.

Jill is a young woman grieving the loss of her sister, Isabelle, and has found a relatively sensible way to process the loss; she still phones Isabelle's old number every so often and leaves her voicemails updating her on what's going on in her life, including both her professional travails as a chef and the challenges of modern dating.

Little does she know, though, that the number has been reassigned, and an extremely eligible and handsome man is listening in sheepishly. He's Nick Robinson as Wes, and when he starts to figure out her routine he can't help but introduce himself. The trailer doesn't exactly disguise the fact that they'll end up falling for each other, either.

Still, we'll clearly get some tension in the middle act, as Wes wrestles with the fact that Jill doesn't know he can listen to her voicemails, and confronting her with that information is likely to not go down all too well. Whether they can get past that isn't too hard to guesstimate, but the journey is always most of the fun in this sort of heady romcom.

The trailer makes its own comparisons to You've Got Mail, one of the most imitated romantic movies ever, so I don't have to – but in Deutch I think Netflix has one of the few actors who can hold a candle to Meg Ryan's level of chutzpah. Here's hoping the film lives up to that lofty comparison when it arrives in a couple of weeks' time.

Streaming never stands still. While broadcast TV was never exactly a slow world, it still feels almost wild how much content the likes of Netflix and Amazon Prime Video pump out on a weekly basis to keep their subscribers happy. If you're a paid-up member of either of those streaming services (or both), you're probably wondering what's coming this week, in fact.

Well, good news – both Netflix and Prime Video have a major new arrival to boast about, and one of them is long-awaited. I've taken a look at every new original project coming to the pair of them and picked out three that you should know about, and you'll find them below with trailers and release dates for your convenience.

Spider-Noir

• Streaming on: Prime Video from 27 May

This is a really big one for Prime Video – when it first announced that it would spin out Nicolas Cage's character from the Spiderverse movies, it was a little hard to visualise what that might look like. Now, though, we're on the verge of being able to watch Spider-Noir, and successive trailers have made it look like a really good time.

Uniquely, the show is going to be available to watch in two distinct formats – a traditional black and white version, but also a vivid colour version, and you can choose between the two as you go (or watch one after the other if you're sufficiently taken with it). That's a fun twist, but the core story also looks pulpy and enjoyable, so there's every chance this turns into a real hit.

The Four Seasons – Season 2

• Streaming on: Netflix from 28 May

First The Morning Show and now this – Steve Carell has a habit of appearing in the first season of shows before his role is much reduced moving forward. Luckily, that seems to work well for him and the shows both, and The Four Seasons seems to be going from strength to strength in this new season, with the rest of the cast all returning to pick up the story of adult friends.

They'll go on another series of trips through a year, processing grief and working out the kinks in their relationships. It looks like parenthood is in the crosshairs this time around, too, which means we could get some really touching moments as they work out what they want from the rest of their lives.

My 2 Cents

• Streaming on: Netflix from 27 May

For those who want something a little more out of left field, this Italian animated show looks like a perfect choice to experiment with. It comes from celebrated creator Zerocalcare, and tells what looks like a semi-surreal story of figuring out what your middle age is actually going to look like.

The main character is, in fact, a version of Zerocalcare, sharing his life with Cinghiale, a literal wild boar, in a world where some animals do live alongside humans (or possibly are just metaphors for the types of people you meet). They're trying to run a neighbourhood spot, but struggling with the weight of organised crime, financial demands and more. It's a melting pot and could just steal in as your favourite new show if you let it.

I say this every week, but what a week it is for streaming – if you're a Netflix or Prime Video subscriber, then you've got some real treats lined up. I've been through the whole schedule for both platforms with a fine-toothed comb, and picked out some highlights that you need to know about.

From huge spy thrillers to the latest series from Stranger Things' creative team, there are some really interesting projects being added this week, and each of them looks pretty perfect for a mid-week binge or viewing session. Ahead of the real heights of summer, curl up with one of these and you should have a great time.

Tom Clancy's Jack Ryan: Ghost War

• Streaming on: Amazon Prime Video from 20 May

There was definitely a time when I didn't think we were getting more Jack Ryan from Amazon – or, at least, that John Krasinski's time in the role was up. How wrong I was, though. He's back this week for Prime Video in what it's been billing as a special cinematic event, which is arguably a polite way of saying it spent more than usual on the film's effects budget, so it needs to do quite well.

The movie, thankfully, looks like a great big helping of thrilling fun. Ryan's getting drafted back into yet more fieldwork, since he's so clearly made for it. This will take him around the world once again, with a bunch of action clearly happening in London, and Sienna Miller will be joining as a punchy British agent to spice things up.

The Boroughs

• Streaming on: Netflix from 21 May

This one has looked super interesting for quite a few weeks now – I'm convinced that it's part of Netflix's strategy to get some big new shows in the wake of Stranger Things ending. From some of the same creative team, The Boroughs has a similar premise, in that it's set in a small community that has very weird things happening to it.

Unlike that huge older show, though, this time around it's not kids in the starring roles. Rather, The Boroughs stars older actors, since it's actually a retirement community that it's set in. When Alfred Molina's character arrives and starts to make connections, he swiftly realises that odd occurrences are normal in The Boroughs, and he'll clearly become obsessed with the idea of discovering just what's really going on.

Ladies First

• Streaming on: Netflix from 22 May

Now, this one might divide opinion. I'll be honest, I'm in the camp that thinks it looks almost satirically diabolical – with a trailer that barely tries to disguise the fact that it's a low-hanging-fruit kind of comedy. Others, though, might think it gives off the vibe of a charming throwback to 90s comedies and simpler times.

The movie stars Sacha Baron-Cohen as a conceited pig of a man who wakes up in a world run entirely by women when he gets a bang on the head. That includes being transformed into an assistant rather than the boss at work, which is now run by Rosamund Pike. She looks like she's having fun with the role, at least, and there are surely some laughs to be had while it teaches its morality tale.

We're living in an attention economy, as agreed upon by brainiacs paid a lot more than me, and that means that the best streaming services, from Prime Video to Netflix, all know that they need to work hard to get hold of people's eyes. Sometimes that means high-concept fantasy and sci-fi shows that have long runtimes and big budgets. Other times it means frenetic sketch shows like Tom Segura's Bad Thoughts.

It really isn't all that long since the show's first season came out, but it looks like Netflix either enjoyed the day one metrics it put up, or had a feeling that it would do good numbers even before that, because we just got a trailer for a new season, dropping on 24 May.

The trailer confirms that much is the same about the show, meaning it stars Segura in a whole heap of sketches, many of them putting him in frankly outrageous costumes and prosthetics to sell the comedy. From the looks of the sketches we see, there will be some insane props for him to interact with, too.

If you're hoping for a sketch show that carefully keeps itself to matters of good taste, this isn't going to be the one for you. The first season of the show got mixed reviews, but one thing everyone could agree on was that it wasn't afraid to take things into touchy territory, and some of the sketches we glimpse in the trailer underline that policy again.

Frankly, it's worth paying attention to some of the sheer production design on offer in the trailer, too, since it looks more intricate than the first season's. The costuming, styling and effects are all pretty on-point, which suggests that Netflix is standing behind Bad Thoughts as something of a flagship.

It's also clearly able to produce the show at a fair old clip, so don't be surprised if Segura has a third season up his sleeve and already at the concept stage right now.

I've written recently about how Netflix seems to have found an approach (like others of the best streaming services on the planet) around adapting bestselling novels to fuel its search for new franchises and series. While many of these novels are modern page-turners, it's also clear that Netflix is happy to adapt older and more storied material, too.

It's underlined that point once again this week by unveiling a sweeping-looking trailer for East of Eden, a major new adaptation of the seminal novel by John Steinbeck from 1952. It has a huge star in a leading role, in the form of Florence Pugh, but also takes a quite surprising approach to the source material, making for a really quite interesting project.

East of Eden doesn't yet have a release date, although that teaser trailer does narrow things down a little and confirm that it'll come out this autumn. What it does show us is a whole lot of Pugh, in various costumes and parts of the novel, before revealing who she's playing: Cathy Ames.

For those who've read the book, that seems to be something of a shock, since Cathy isn't actually necessarily the main character of the novel. She's seemingly a huge part of it, though, and in many people's eyes is a fairly classic villain – so it would seem that the show's creator Zoe Kazan is deliberately trying to give her a new framing and take a different look at the story in question.

Kazan has real form, of course, as an actor herself but also having jumped to fame by writing and starring in The Big Sick back in 2017, which was a real critical darling. East of Eden is arguably her most ambitious project yet, though, not least because the novel is considered one of the masterpieces of mid-century writing in English.

The series will run to seven episodes in total, and it's not like it's going to tell Cathy's story at the exclusion of other beloved characters. The life and times of the Trask family will indeed be told in full, so I've personally got a bit of a countdown running in my head, now. I like to read great books before I watch adaptations of them, so I'd better get a move on and put East of Eden on my to-read list soon.

Netflix is on a roll right now, with its multi-tiered subscription model seemingly paying off. It claims that it now has 250 million monthly active viewers on its cheapest, ad-supported plan. That's up by 60 million in just a matter of months, and shows that there are plenty out there willing to put up with adverts to keep the costs down.

Sadly though, it looks like the streaming service is taking this to heart. It's doubling down on ad-supported content.

According to Variety, Netflix will expand its ad-tier to 15 new countries next year, including Ireland, the Netherlands and other locations in Europe and South America. It will also roll it out in Thailand and New Zealand.

That's only to be expected, really. However, it also plans to bring adverts to its new vertical video feeds and podcasts, which will also start to appear in 2027. There's also no word on whether this will be for those on an ad-supported tier, or if it will also appear on that sort of content for subscribers on all of its plans.

Vertical video is a new addition by Netflix – which joins Disney+ and Amazon Prime Video in TikTok-ifying its service. However, the Netflix Clips are fairly innocuous at present and are simply snippets from shows on the platform.

They are effectively trailers, therefore.

Adding commercials doesn't seem to make much sense in that context – after all, they are adverts in themselves.

As for podcasts, that's a more natural fit. It's rare to see or hear a podcast or influencer feed without some form of sponsorship or advertising these days. The audience pretty much expects it.

Still, considering how much profit Netflix regularly posts anyway, and how dominant it is in the streaming market, it's a shame that it's not more concerned with viewer value than trying to eke extra pennies from its viewers. It's not exactly the cheapest service anyway.

Netflix knows, just like every other one of the biggest and best streaming services on the market, that it has to find ways to create franchises and series that people want to not just watch, but keep coming back to. After all, that's not only its stated mission, but also its best route to keeping its shareholders happy and paid-up. This means that picking up intellectual property with established fans is sort of its dream scenario, if it can do so affordably.

For obvious reasons, I don't have any insight into what Netflix paid for the rights to Little House on the Prairie, but given how beloved the novels are in the US, it wouldn't surprise me if it was quite a chunky deal. Now we're getting closer to the series actually arriving, and it just got another teaser underlining how charming it's likely to be when it does start streaming.

Telling the story of a family making the huge decision to move out into the great expanse of the prairie in Minnesota, the show promises to adapt at least the first novel in a series that eventually spanned dozens of books. That's why Netflix is likely so keen to drum up interest in the show – if it does well then it could run and run, like the original network TV adaptation did in the 1970s and 1980s.

This show will be much more high-budget, of course, since that seems to be the default for basically any streaming production. Still, its tone looks to be very similar, since it's based on the same source material. This means that while it might have some thoughtful moments ruminating on the truthfulness of the heroic American origin story, it's likely to be fairly saccharine overall.

In point of fact, this teaser shows us more of the local town that the family will come to know, and it looks like a surprisingly integrated one, given the time period being showcased. Whether that's a major part of the plot, or whether this is a slightly utopian version of the stories, we'll have to wait and see, but I'd assume it's more likely to be the former than the latter.

Still, Bridgerton has already shown how you can rewrite history into a sort of alternate world and still attract legions of fans, and Netflix will doubtless hope that Little House on the Prairie can imitate that sort of impact when it arrives on 9 July.

A new week is upon us, and we're in the depth of May now, which means the weather is changing for the better here in the UK and sunsets keep getting later – which can make it feel all the more lovely to sit and watch some streaming action while the sun does set. It's a beautiful time of year, and the likes of Netflix and Amazon are having to work extra hard to own your eyeballs of an evening.

That means a pretty constant tide of new arrivals on both streaming services, such that every week has some big new hit to check out. If you're casting about for your next obsession and you've wondered what's coming to Prime Video and Netflix this week, I've got answers. Here are three brand-new additions that might float your boat this week, with trailers and details of when they're available.

Good Omens 3

• Streaming on: Prime Video from 13 May

This one has been quite a long time coming. Amazon had a lovely little cult hit on its hands when it released Good Omens, years ago at this point. The main duo of David Tennant and Michael Sheen have brilliant chemistry, as other projects have repeatedly underlined, and their double act as an angel and demon working together with reluctance has been a fan favourite.

The show ground to a halt a little, though, when it ran out of material to adapt (and when co-creator Neil Gaiman was accused of a heap of impropriety). Now, it's getting one final outing to give the characters a proper send-off. Although Amazon's billing it as Season 3 in some places, it's really a feature-length special to close things out, and should be a joy for those who've wanted a more final ending to the show.

Nemesis

• Streaming on: Netflix from 14 May

Netflix knows how to do cheese. I'm not saying that Nemesis will be pure silliness, and it definitely seems like a show that's going to take some big swings at serious plotlines and dramatic twists. Still, when you watch its trailer it's impossible to get the sense that the show has at least a bit of its tongue in its cheek.

This story of a powerful criminal who moves in high circles, alongside the detective who's convinced he can bring him down, looks like a fairly classic one. What I love about it, though, is how much dramatic slow-mo there is, and how ridiculously pristine all the costuming and haircuts are. Everyone is drop-dead gorgeous, and looks perfect at all times, making for almost a superhero movie level of unreality. We'll see if it can pull the tone off when it comes out midweek.

Devil May Cry Season 2

• Streaming on: Netflix from 12 May

Netflix is impressive in quite a few ways, but one of the interesting subplots in its streaming dominance has been its approach to animated shows. It's slowly become a good producer of niche shows that attract rabid fanbases, and these shows are often enjoyably profane and adult. Devil May Cry, like Castlevania, is a great example, adapting a videogame series without compromising its tone.

The show features some dynamite fight scenes, which will be familiar to those who've played the series over the years, and its second season looks like a thrill-ride. This time around our main character Dante is going to be dicing with his estranged brother Virgil, a huge character in the canon. That means some massive fights are incoming, and it looks like a fun escalation over what came before.

Netflix has known for a while that people love thrillers – it's a genre that has consistently proved its worth on the streaming charts, whether that's for Netflix itself or its many rivals. In recent times it's also one of the streaming platforms that's realised how to churn out reliably-plotted thrillers at a fair old clip: adapt best-selling novels.

Anyone who's ever nipped into an airport book shop will know the many, many paperbacks that line the shelves with easy to understand prose, and plots that might be a little outlandish, but keep you turning the pages. Harlan Coben's written plenty of them, and now he's got another adaptation coming in the form of I Will Find You, which just got its first teaser trailer.

The show will star Sam Worthington and Britt Lower, the latter of whom is basically a massive star by default thanks to her major role in Apple TV's Severance, and it looks like a typically twisty and unpredictable story from Coben. It looks like Worthington's character will start out in jail for the crime of killing his own son, knowing full well that someone set him up, without a way to prove that.

Lower will visit him, though, and show him a photograph that changes everything – evidence that his son might still be alive, and was never killed in the first place. It's not clear how they'll get Worthington out of prison, but I can only assume he'll end up free one way or another, so that he can start to hunt down whoever ruined his life in such a dramatic fashion.

The show looks like it'll have a fairly dark tone, as is typical of Coben's material – he's not one of those thriller writers who keeps things light, and is perfectly happy to delve into distressing topics. This looks like a classic story of a tortured parent doing whatever he can to set things right, but the big question will be whether such a resolution is even possible.

The show's coming to Netflix on 18 June, so it's well over a month away. If I know anything about Netflix's hype scheduling (and I do), I'd put money on our getting another, longer trailer in a couple of weeks' time, to get people more excited for what could be a very popular new show.

We might be fairly unanimous in our view here at T3 that the best streaming service for sci-fi fans right now is Apple TV, but that doesn't mean that Netflix is giving up without a fight. It knows that sci-fi is a simply huge genre for streaming fans, and after the end of Stranger Things it's on the hunt for a new series that could scratch that same itch for viewers.

Right from its first teaser trailer I had a sense that could be the niche that The Boroughs is aiming for, and now it's got a longer trailer that makes the similarities between the two franchises all the more striking. The show starts on 21 May, and looks like it has a very similar tone, albeit with a totally different plot.

The show stars the excellent Alfred Molina as an ageing grandfather who begrudgingly agrees to move into a retirement community called The Boroughs. There, he very quickly starts to feel like there's something odd going on beneath the too-happy surface. People all seem to be having amazing times, but he's plagued by paranoia and glimpses of freaky things.

He's clearly to going to find at least a couple of like-minded residents played by Geena Davis and Denis O'Hare, and together they'll start to investigate odd occurrences that the authorities seem keen to ignore. The trailer makes it very clear that there's at least one monster or alien stalking the community, although its origins are surely a huge part of the plot.

Some of the creative team behind The Boroughs is straight from Stranger Things, which makes loads of sense when you watch the trailer. They're both charming and a little funny, but it's very clear that we'll get moments of real tensions and borderline horror, making the show fit right into the same category.

Of course, Stranger Things proved very ably that it's a category that can include tens of millions of fans, so Netflix will doubtless be hoping this could be the start of a new franchise. It'll be one with much older stars, of course, but in many other ways the similarities are impossible to ignore.

Netflix has proved time and time again that it has the sway to bring huge actors in for new shows and movies, but that doesn't stop me from getting fairly impressed when it does so regularly. When it united the likes of Tina Fey, Will Forte and Colman Domingo for The Four Seasons last year, I wondered whether it would get another season, and how soon.

Almost unbelievably, the answer to those two questions are "yes" and "this year", which indicates that Netflix is stepping up its desire to get shows on production schedules that don't lead to two-year gaps between seasons. Audiences want more regular programming, it would seem, and the trailer embedded below suggests that The Four Seasons will oblige.

The show will again pick up the same group of friends that it showed us last time out, albeit with one of them no longer present after dying during the course of the first season. Still, their number might swell back up during this season, since babies are clearly on the agenda.

One of them is heavily pregnant in the trailer, while at least one other couple is in the process of deciding whether it's too late for them to become parents, too. That's an immediately interesting mix of emotional levers for the game to pull on, and there's sure to be plenty more in that vein. From mental health troubles to managing libidos as you age, this show isn't scared to get into touchy territory, after all.

Impressively, it's coming out on 28 May for Netflix subscribers, which makes it only just a shade over a year between the two seasons so far. Of course, given the show's name, it woul be nice to imagine that Netflix will let it run further, but that'll depend on its audience figures once it does arrive.

Still, you can be confident that this season will once again be split into four sections, each of them comprising a trip that the friends take together. That was how the last season worked, and it seems to be a returning framework this time around.

When a week starts with a bank holiday (like this one in the UK), it's always a good time. There's nothing quite like a shorter working week, and that blessing pairs even more perfectly with chilling out and bingeing some new shows or movies on your favourite streaming service.

If you're a Prime Video or Netflix subscriber then you're probably already accustomed to checking what's being added to the service most weeks. This time, though, I've taken that step for you, and whittled things down to three highlights that you should know about – two from Netflix, and one from Prime Video. They could give you a really enjoyable week of streaming if you're on the hunt for new content.

Legends

• Streaming from: 7 May on Netflix

I've been carping about Legends for a few weeks now, and it has every sign of being a sleeper hit from Netflix, in my opinion. I always like it when Netflix quietly funds British productions that wouldn't look remotely out of place on the BBC, and this fits that bill.

It tells a fictionalised account of a true story, one that saw the UK turn to customs and border enforcement agents to see if they would be interested in taking their efforts against drug traffickers to the next level. Finding undercover agents who were in jobs that didn't really stretch them, Legends seems to tell a fascinating tale, and has a great cast.

Remarkably Bright Creatures

• Streaming from: 8 May on Netflix

For those wanting something a bit less heart-pounding and bit more heartwarming, this looks like a surefire thing. Remarkably Bright Creatures stars the iconic Sally Field as Tova, an ageing woman living a quiet life as the cleaner for a small-town aquarium, who quietly has a tragic recent past.

When a young man joins her department and seems to have similarly emotional trauma rocking him beneath the surface, they start to forge a connection that looks sure to bring some tearjerking scenes. The twist is that the film's narrated by the octopus whose enclosure Tova cleans with such dedication, giving it an offbeat tone and some comedy chops.

No Place To Be Single

• Streaming from: 8 May on Prime Video

I'm not going to dress this up – No Place To Be Single looks cheesy in the extreme. Still, I can't pretend that people don't want this sort of shmaltz in their life now and then. It offers up a classic story that sees two city boys inherit a rural property, and despite their plans to sell it, start to fall in love with the countryside life.

It'll help that there will be plenty of beautiful people to catch their eyes, but it seems like one of the biggest stars will be the Italian scenery, which looks just gorgeous. The trailer embedded above shows that there will be a cheesily dubbed version in English, but I'm guessing the original Italian version will be a little better of an experience.

There's nothing like learning that what you're watching is a true story to make it hit home harder, and it certainly seems like the UK show Netflix just unveiled will make quite an impact on people. The Witness just got its first trailer, and it looks like a generation-spanning story of trauma, but, you know, in a good way.

The show arrives on Netflix on 4 July, and the fact that we already have a trailer makes me think that Netflix thinks it's got something really high quality on its hands. After all, it often waits until much sooner before a show launces to start showing it off like this.

The show, which is based on a real-life events, shows us the story of Alex and his father Andrè, who are the victims of a brutal crime when Alex is just an angelic little two year old. His mother is murdered and it looks like culprit still hasn't been found even years later, with the young Alex being the only witness to the crime.

It seems we'll get a couple of timelines to follow in the show, although we can't know yet whether they'll be in sequences or if we'll cut between them. In one, Andrè is trying his best to keep it together and keep his son safe as the fallout from the murder takes place, while his own mental health obviously takes a battering.

In the other timeline, a more grown-up Alex is still reckoning with the impact of his mother's death, and his relationship with his father. That's going to get even harder when investigators try to re-open the case, potentially in the hope of finding the person who committed the crime before they can hurt someone else.

The trailer makes it clear that this will be an emotional rollercoaster, but it also looks like phenomenally well-made British TV, something that Netflix has been getting better and better at producing. Here's hoping it lands well when it comes to the streamer in July.

Netflix is the biggest fish in a big sea – it's the best streaming service in the world if sheer volume is a big priority for you, and uploads dozens of old movies and shows each week to keep your media library stocked with material. If you're more interested in the Netflix Originals that get added, though, you're in the right place.

I keep tabs on Netflix's pipeline all the time, to ensure that you've got the best visibility on its all-new projects, which are often the biggest and most attention-grabbing additions to its lineup anyway. If you want to know what to look out for this May, keep reading and you'll see the five highlights that should make it a memorable month on Netflix.

Legends

• Streaming from: 7 May

This is one of the most intriguing shows Netflix has trailed recently, not least because it's a profoundly British project. Retelling a true story about customs officers volunteering to go undercover as part of drug smuggling enforcement, it promises a surprisingly gritty story of how people can step up to the plate when offered the chance to do something truly challenging.

It has some familiar faces in the cast, not least in the form of Steve Coogan, and looks like it'll have a more global focus than you might think, as its characters go around the world trying to put illicit supply chains out of operation. Expect tension and peril, though, once they're in organisations that would chew them up in an instant if their identities were discovered.

The Boroughs

• Streaming from: 21 May

Another really interesting show from Netflix promises to tell a somewhat familiar sci-fi story in a very new way, thanks to its cast of older actors. The Boroughs is set in a retirement community where strange things seem to be happening, and it looks from the trailer we've seen like aliens are almost certainly on the agenda.

The show has some big overlap with the creative team that made Stranger Things, which suggests that Netflix probably has high hopes for it. It also seems to be going for a similar tone, balancing lighter, almost comic moments against a willingness to get genuinely scary in some other sequences.

Remarkable Bright Creatures

• Streaming from: 8 May

If you suspect that May will have you feeling schmaltzy and looking for more heartwarming fare, Remarkable Bright Creatures seems like a slam-dunk (or a very gentle equivalent). It takes a look at how people can find comfort in unexpected places, all through the lens of a narrator that's technically an octopus in an aquarium.

Based on a best-selling novel, it's set in a small community and takes a look at Tova, played by Sally Field. She's an older woman with tragedy in her recent past who's trying to do her best and carry on living, and when a young man without much family to speak of gets a job with her, it's clear that they'll find quiet contentment in a platonic bond.

Ladies First

• Streaming from: 22 May

I'm not saying this one will be critically adored. In fact, I strongly suspect that Ladies First will be another debacle in the eyes of taste-makers, but that won't stop it storming up the Netflix charts thanks to a fairly mass-appealing concept. Sacha Baron-Cohen stars as an utterly horrendous boss in a chauvinistic, male-dominated company.

A concussion seems to send him to an alternative timeline, though, where woman are in charge, and that sees him have to rapidly buck up his ideas to fit in. He's particularly challenged by an ice-cold Rosamund Pike, who's clearly having fun with the role. It looks like a bad film from the 90s, honestly, but don't be surprised if this one does huge numbers as an easy comedy option.

A Good Girl’s Guide to Murder Season 2

• Streaming from: 27 May

The first season of this charming show was a hugely popular one, telling a whodunnit story with a slightly different focus and a younger cast, but still sticking to a fun and thrilling tone. Now we're getting a second season, and it promises to continue the story of Pippa Fitz-Amobi (Emma Myers).

She's going to have an all-new mystery to figure out, and her cast of friends will be back for the ride as she gets more than a little obsessed by her case. In fact, there will be some new additions, too, as the show scales up a little thank to the popularity of its last season. In the UK, the show will be on BBC iPlayer, but the US can catch it on Netflix at the end of the month.

The world of streaming is one of constant churn – people hoover up content at a crazy pace, which means all the biggest and best streaming services know that they need to keep pace and deliver more. Netflix and Prime Video stand as two of the biggest in the market, and they don't generally let a week go by without trying to bring something fairly significant out.

This week's no different, and if you've just finished up a series or you're looking for something new to sink your teeth into, I've done the hard work by looking at everything coming to these two platforms. I've narrowed things down to three must-watch picks, so check them out below.

Man On Fire

• Streaming on: Netflix from 30 May

This intriguing Netflix reboot updates a story and movie that many people associate extremely tightly with Denzel Washington, one of cinema's true titans. This time around, it'll instead star Yahya Abdul-Mateen as a troubled ex-soldier who now works privately in security, and has a storm coming even if he doesn't realise it.

What should be a simple protection job for a young woman in his care turns into something way bigger when sophisticated and coordinated attackers start to track his every move, and how he balances his responsibilities with his PTSD will be a core part of the character work in the show. It looks like a great action thriller that shouldn't be missed.

The House of the Spirits

• Streaming on: Amazon Prime Video from 29 April

For something much more emotional and sweeping, Prime Video is stepping up with an adaptation of a modern classic novel from Isabel Allende, and it's one that takes a look at much of the twentieth century of Chile, the country in which it's set. With a huge cast and a story that spans generations and time settings, this is an epic South American production.

It tells the tale of one family through decades of upheaval in Chile, charting emotionally-charged personal stories but also using them to explore the societal change that happened in those time periods, and looks like it's going to be sumptuous in terms of production design. If you want something liable to make you think a bit more, this could be a perfect pick.

UEFA Champions League Semi-Final 1st Leg – PSG vs Bayern

• Streaming on: Amazon Prime Video on 28 April

This one's only for those of us in the UK, but it's sure to be one of the great matches of the season. Prime Video gets one game per watchweek in the UEFA Champions League, but as the competition narrows these matches tend to get more and more desirable. This time around, there's no arguing with that.

The first leg between PSG and Bayern should be a super interesting match full of superstars – with the Ballon D'or currently in PSG's Dembele's hands, but potentially transferring to Bayern's Harry Kane next time around. That said, the outcome of that award might depend pretty heavily on this tie, so it's sure to be a thriller between two enormously attacking teams.

If there's one thing that the age of streaming has proven in recent years, it's that people absolutely love spicy content. Sure, we're all perfectly keen for medical dramas, spy thrillers, family dramas and all the many other genres that seem to perennially do well, but romance has grown and grown.

From titans like Bridgerton to genre affairs like Outlander, there are now a whole host of mega-franchises rumbling on with more and more seasons, spinoffs and legions of fans. If you're looking for something fresh, though, and you're more interested in what's going to be new both this year and in 2027, then I've done a deep dive for you. Here are six projects, some coming very soon and others a little more distant, that promise to upend what we know about romance TV, and offer some steamy new options for those looking to live vicariously through their TVs.

Pride and Prejudice

• Streaming on: Netflix in 2026

Starting out with the big one, there's an absolute titan of the romance genre hoving into view very soon thanks to Netflix, which has made a big-money, big-cast adaptation of Jane Austen's beloved Pride and Prejudice, starring Emma Corrin as Elizabeth Bennet and Jack Lowden as Mr Darcy.

So far all we've had is one look at the Bennet family in a photograph (featuring Olivia Colman in the maternal role, a surefire hit) as well as the brief teaser trailer above, which is a great study in building one's anticipation. Given the amount of love for the book and previous adaptations, this could be a massive romance release, but it'll also have to at least live up to previous versions, which is a tall order. It will arrive sometime this year.

Off Campus

• Streaming on: Amazon Prime Video from 13 May

Okay, so maybe Jane Austen isn't the steamiest or raunchiest of authors – leave that to more modern fare, like this imminent show on Prime Video. It aims to capitalise on the Heated Rivalry buzz, but with a more tangential relationship to ice hockey. Off Campus is a classic university love story of a reluctant, studious young woman falling for the campus bad-boy.

Its own teaser trailer has already made it clear that this story will get plenty physical when it arrives, so for those looking for a more explicit look at what young love can be like, this is likely to float your boat. It starts in mid-May, so is a great option for anyone pining for romantic fare right now.

Maximum Pleasure Guaranteed

• Streaming on: Apple TV from 20 May

This one might be raunchy rather than steamy, but it definitely looks like it's going to tackle some parts of the equation around modern love that other stories on-screen are often prone to skimming past. Maximum Pleasure Guaranteed stars the excellent Tatiana Maslany as a struggling single mum who can't seem to shake an addiction to adult streams.

She's got much more than just that going on, though, including a growing suspicion that something funny is happening in her local area, and the sense that a criminal conspiracy might be waiting to be uncovered. It might not be a show for those looking for pure sensual lovey-doveyness, but if you want a thriller with some erotic notes, it could be a great new arrival.

Every Year After

• Streaming on: Amazon Prime Video on 10 June

Now we're moving into shows that don't yet have trailers – and are therefore a little more distant right now, albeit they're confirmed and either in production or post-production. First up is Every Year After, which is coming to Prime Video in June and adapts a best-selling novel: Every Summer After.

The show will chart a young couple who have a major romance once summer while working, but steadily start to wonder whether what started as a fling might be more meaningful. In fact, the key question seems to be how you deal with the idea that your first love might just be your soulmate, and all that entails.

Big Swiss

• Streaming on: HBO Max from TBC

This one's probably the most distant project on this list, but Jodie Comer has repeatedly talked about how excited she is to star in an adaptation of the hit novel Big Swiss, which has a really unique idea at its heart. It's about a young-ish woman who finds an odd job helping a sex therapist to transcribe their sessions.

Over the course of these transcription sessions she starts to develop something close to an obsession with one of the clients, who she calls Big Swiss, a woman who she actually decides to meet up with once she does some light stalking. If that makes it sound like a dark comedy, you're probably spot on, and the book had a lot to say about boundaries, unconventional love and complicated people – perfect material for a well-made HBO adaptation, which is in the pipeline.

This Summer Will Be Different

• Streaming on: Netflix from TBC

This is an interesting one. Every Year After, a couple of spots above this, is based on a novel by Carley Fortune, and Netflix clearly felt like that was a smart buy by Amazon – it's also adapting another of Fortune's novels, This Summer Will Be Different. Frankly, they sound impressively similar, too.

This is a more adult drama, though, starring characters in their 20s and revolving mostly around Lucy, who vacations with her best friend on an idyllic island over a few different summers. Across that time she starts to fall for a forbidden fruit, otherwise known as her best friend’s brother. It's a classic framework for a very steamy story, and Netflix has the romance pedigree to suggest this one could be an audience hit. It should be filming this year, so might appear in 2027.

It's always interesting when a new movie shoots to the top of Netflix's chart – some combination of marketing, algorithmic favour and genuine appeal takes hold and people flock in droves to see the hot new thing. In Netflix's particular case, the charts seem to be really resistant to snobbiness, too, with plenty of movies having occupied the top spot despite dire reviews.

Now a new one is taking its turn – Thrash, which I suspected could be a breakout hit the moment I saw its first corny teaser trailer. It takes the long-established shark movie format and injects a ridiculous twist by basically crossing it with another type of disaster movie: environmental disasters. Now it's sitting pretty at the top of the global Netflix movie charts.

Thrash has a fun central premise, to be clear. It asks the question of what would happen if a coastal community were ravaged by a huge hurricane, and in the process lost its flood defences. Its key twist, though, is that in the process of the storm's fallout, a huge meat shipment crashes into the floodwaters and acts as a giant chunk of bait for a shark infestation to come in from the ocean.

I want to be fair here – that's a dynamite idea, one that takes the silly ingenuity of Sharknado and makes it just credible enough to actually retain a somewhat realistic tone. It does that while still being able to put its cast of characters in life-or-death situations that are objectively ridiculous, but not totally fanciful despite that. However, there's a sting in the tail, despite the movie's chart success: its reviews are horrible.

I'm not a big fan of Rotten Tomatoes, with its weird binary "good or bad" score system, and prefer Metacritic, which aggregates actual star ratings (albeit a little arcanely). It has Thrash sitting on an average review score of 48/100 from critics, with a user review score of just 4.6. Those are rookie numbers, obviously, and they make me wonder if this will be a film that Netflix sees as the start of a franchise based on its streaming metrics alone.

After all, Netflix runs a careful business. The biggest priority is getting people to watch things, but it's also clear that if it can also make movies that review well with critics and audiences, it would aim to do so. So, while Thrash has a classic idea at its heart, mixing thriller subgenres with abandon, it currently isn't looking like it'll become anyone's favourite shark movie, for all that matters to Netflix.

Netflix pretty much never has a week off, but even by its standards there are big weeks for releases, and there are slightly smaller ones. You can tell this is a good week for the huge streamer, because my round-up normally includes Prime Video but doesn't really need to this time around.

That's right, Netflix has three huge additions of its own this week, and I'd argue that any of them could be the headliner, so whether you're looking for an action thriller, a creepy new series or a throwback to what you loved about Stranger Things, keep reading to find out what you'll be bingeing this week.

Apex

• Streaming from: 24 April

I've been looking forward to this one right from the first teaser trailer, and not just because I'm a huge fan of Taron Egerton. He's really been going for fun villainous roles recently, and Apex looks like it's going to take that to a whole new level, with Egerton playing a creepy Aussie who has Charlize Theron in his sights in the outback.

He sets her a crazed challenge, giving her the duration of a song to get as far from him as possible, before he starts to hunt her down as a twisted bloodsport. Luckily, it looks like she's grittier and more determined than he could ever know, and we'll get some gnarly fights, chases and survival sequences in what looks like a super fun new thriller for Netflix.

Unchosen

• Streaming from: 21 April

If you're looking for a thriller that veers into far darker and more psychological territory, then it's a good week for you, since Unchosen is also coming out, with a scary look at what life in a cult can actually look like. It stars Sex Education's Asa Butterfield as a controlling husband whose wife yearns for something she can't even really identify.

Her life is strictly regimented by the structures of the Christian cult that she's part of, but when a stranger comes to the community asking for sanctuary, she feels a bond with him that she can't quite understand. From there, it looks like things will get very twisty and potentially a little twisted, too. It seems like proper grown-up fare, and could be a sleeper hit.

Stranger Things: Tales From '85

• Streaming from: 23 April

Netflix was never going to let Stranger Things go completely – this is the biggest streaming service in the world, and it knows how to milk a franchise. That might be a slightly harsh framing, of course, and it overlooks the fact that Stranger Things: Tales From '85 looks pretty charming, filling in a gap between seasons when the kids were still kids.

It'll tell a story involving a couple of new characters, exploring how our main cast moved on from some of the events of the show's second season, and its animation style is really lush and detailed. We'll be hugely interested to see how the show lands, and what it signals about people's interest in the franchise.

Netflix confirmed this week that it's adapting one heck of a popular franchise – a series of books, in fact, that's sold millions upon millions of copies. While that might make you assume, in 2026, that it's some romantasy fare or BookTok craze that'll be coming to streaming, the truth is far more innocent.

This week we got a trailer for Little House on the Prairie, a classic of young American literature, and it looks like it'll unsurprisingly aim to preserve the innocent and simple tone and content of the source novels. Generations of Americans grew up with these books, so the show might have quite a lot to live up to when it arrives on 9 July.

If you pay a lot of attention to how Netflix trails its shows (and I do), then the fact that we're getting this teaser a good few months before the show starts is a good indicator that Netflix hopes it'll do big numbers when it does drop. Why not, after all? It's got huge brand recognition and the potential to be a whole-family sort of show, rather than one aimed at particular demographics.

The show, like the books, will tell the story of the Ingall family as they make a seismic move to Minnesota to live on the great plains, in that titular little cottage. Set in the 1870s to start with, it portrays an evocative and much mythologised period in US history, but does so with a reputation for simple stories and an aversion to overly dramatic moments.

It's a little bit like Little Women in that way, and if it can get half the adulation that greeted Greta Gerwig's version of that story a few year ago, it'll be one of the best-received shows of the year basically by default. This isn't the first time Little House on the Prairie has been converted for TV, either, with a long-running show from the 1970s and 80s running to some 200 episodes before it ended.

Netflix's executives will doubtless be daydreaming of a similarly beloved run, but first it'll have to stick the initial landing, so we'll see how it fares when it starts streaming in July.

Netflix is set for a major update and it's coming in the next couple of weeks. The company has confirmed that an "updated mobile experience" will be available by the end of April, and it will lay the groundwork for one of the biggest content additions in years.

The app for iPhone, iPad and Android devices will get a fresh redesign that puts the user at the heart of the new experience.

"We are launching an updated mobile experience at the end of the month that includes a vertical video discovery feed," said the company in a letter sent to shareholders as part of its Q1 earnings report.

"This redesign will better reflect our expanding entertainment offering and make it easier for members to engage how and when they want."

Netflix sees TikTok as a direct rival today, and so is embracing vertical video as a new content stream to appeal to a similar audience. New content will include video podcasts and live sporting events.

The streaming service will also embrace generative AI going forward – not for content creation, but to better recommend shows and movies, including with conversational discovery.

This potentially means you could chat to Netflix about the sort of content you'd like to watch and it'll give you suggestions – not just regular search results.

Netflix also plans to add more games to the service, which you can play on your TV. It currently offers a growing selection of party games in several regions as part of a beta test. They are generally couch co-op and puzzle games that can be played using a mobile phone as a controller. This will continue.

It's unclear though whether the mobile games currently available through its phone and tablet apps remain in its future plans.

I can really get on board with the best streaming services embracing cheesy stuff – while there is always room for pretentious arthouse movies and contemplative dramas, it's simply a fact that sometimes audiences just want to switch their brains off and enjoy something a little silly. That's exactly how I'd describe Nemesis, which got a trailer this week.

The series is coming to Netflix on 14 May, so it's around a month away, and something about the trailer makes me find it unbelievably funny, even though it's very much not intended as a comedy. This is a crime show, one featuring two perspectives – a master criminal leading a gang of thieves, and the obsessed cop who's chasing him down.

The show's from the creators of Power, so if you enjoyed that series you're almost certain to have a good time with Nemesis, and it certainly has a lot going for it. The main characters, for one thing, are both absolute pillars of beefiness, and there will clearly be some big action scenes involving both of them throughout its run of episodes.

They won't just be contending with each other, though, with a supporting cast of characters helping them towards their respective goals, and it seems like there will be at least a couple of moments where they also meet each other before anything can be proven. It's a cat-and-mouse classic, basically, but the tone is so, so sincere.

To expand on what I find funny, something about the way the trailer treats the main cop character tickles me – he's running around with no uniform on, seemingly with a new look every scene, but also always looking absolutely pristine. It's a really amusing twist on the classic trope of a troubled detective, and I can't quite get past it.

Still, based on how Power did for Netflix, there's every chance that this runs away and becomes a massive success. You can check it out for yourself in mid-May when it drops.

Netflix is far from the only one of the biggest and best streaming services to figure out that people absolutely love sci-fi right now. It, like Apple TV, Prime Video and others, continues to invest eye-watering sums in new series and movies that explore "what if" questions, and it just unveiled a new example that takes the genre to some very interesting places.

The Boroughs, which just got its first trailer and confirmation of a 21 May release date, is from the same executive producers as Stranger Things, suggesting it could be quite a big bet from Netflix, although it has one major twist. Where Stranger Things starred a cast of, well, children at the start, The Boroughs instead flips things and goes with a cast of elderly actors.

Okay, so "elderly" feels rude, but I had to make it clear that they're not just older than teenagers, and the whole point of The Boroughs is that it's set in a retirement community. We see Alfred Molina's character being dropped off their by his daughter (presumably), and starting to get used to a slower pace of life.

That will clearly be disrupted, though, by the presence of extremely unsettling things in the community, including glimpses in this trailer of what seem to be aliens. We see a creepy little hand opening an oven at one point, and even more brief looks at some other angles of limb-ful little guys.

Crucially, though, I think there's a clear tonal overlap between The Boroughs and Stranger Things. The latter knew how to play with the border between horror, tension and comedy, and it seems from this trailer like the new show will do at least some of the same. There are quips and wise-cracks, and it looks like we'll get to know a decent-sized little cast.

Other than Molina, that includes Geena Davis, Alfre Woodard, Bill Pullman, Clarke Peters and Denis O’Hare, so it's quite a decent lineup. What'll be really interesting is finding out whether the show can sustain its mysteries through a whole season, of course. We'll know more about that in late May when it arrives on Netflix.

If there's one thing you can rely on in the world of entertainment, at this point, it's that all the biggest and best streaming services will reliably upload a whole heap of new content each and every week. From brand-new shows to fan-favourite movies, all these platforms know they have to keep the additions coming or risk people cancelling expensive subscriptions.

That's absolutely as true for Netflix and Prime Video as it is for any other service, and it means that this week, like many before it, is a big one for both streamers. There are some big series coming to Netflix, as well as a massive sporting event for Prime Video, so if you want to check out what your evenings could be in for this week, keep reading!

Beef Season 2

• Streaming on: Netflix from 16 April

Beef was a breakout smash hit for Netflix the first time around, telling a crazy story of escalating anger between Stephen Yeun and Ali Wong, but it also had a pretty darn definite ending. That means this new season of the show picks up an entirely new story, this time starring the ever-excellent Oscar Isaac opposite Carey Mulligan.

Rather than two strangers who fall into a feud, this time they're a married couple who have a properly explosive fight one evening, halted only when they realise that two young employees have witnessed them. That's the inciting incident this time, and it looks like the question of exactly who is "beefing" with whom will be more complicated and multifaceted this time around. Strap in for a tense and painfully personal ride.

Roommates

• Streaming on: Netflix from 17 April

For those looking to sink into the loving embrace of a heartwarming comedy series, Netflix has something a little easier than Beef for us this week, too. Roommates looks like a quintessential coming-of-age story about a relatively shy young woman going to college and hoping to reinvent herself – but finding that her relationship with her new roommate is far from simple.

Expect big laughs based on classic college tropes, but also an exploration of how friendships don't always conform to your expectations. Of course, those of us who lived through university hopefully also know that things aren't always as deep as they seem at that moment, and the show seems to know that – it looks like a really charming setup, so we'll see how it does on release.

UEFA Champions League Quarter-Final: Liverpool vs PSG

• Streaming on: Amazon Prime Video from 7PM on 14 April (in the UK)

This is a big fat game of football, and no mistake – Liverpool face an uphill struggle to avoid going out of the Champions League to French reigning champions PSG for the second year in a row. The Reds lost the first leg by two goals in Paris, and while they have the ultimate pedigree for comebacks in this competition, their squad isn't in the best shape.

Prime Video gets to pick the game it wants each Tuesday from the Champions League, so this is its only game from the round, but it's a wise choice given how games at Anfield can go. Put money on Liverpool losing, but don't be surprised if there are a couple of interesting twists along the way.

It's been one of those pleasing cultural developments over the last decade or so that, despite the increasingly huge global reach of all the best streaming services you could choose from right now, there's still a massive footprint for UK projects, shows and movies. We might not be the biggest country in terms of population, but we still know how to produce great telly.

So, it's never a huge surprise when Netflix unveils a trailer for a new show that looks like it could easily have been a BBC or Channel 4 production a decade ago – and that's how I'd describe Legends. This crime show takes a fictionalised look at how the police enlisted the UK border force to fight drug trafficking back in the 1990s. Now it's got a first trailer, embedded below for you.

The show looks pretty fascinating, based on an apparently true story of how the government decided that its overstretched resources needed more manpower to infiltrate drug-running organisations. It turned to customs officials to offer them the chance to train for undercover work, and Legends takes a look at how that whole process might have felt from the inside.

We see a group of customs officials, including the excellent Tom Burke in what looks like a leading role, as they learn more about what they're expected to do, and get trained up in covert skills despite backgrounds that don't really suggest an aptitude for the work. Crucially, their handler seems to be played by Steve Coogan, who's arguably the biggest name in the show.

It looks like a fascinating story, though, and from the trailer there's every chance that the production levels are high enough to look properly convincing – not least because we're going to see some foreign settings as the team's undercover work escalates. The human angle of people trying to prove they can do more than others might assume is a really nice hook, too.

This will be a limited series, so only six episodes in total, and it'll drop on Netflix on 7 May, giving you a little less than a month before it's ready to watch. If you're in the mood for a fun but extremely tense story, I have a feeling this could be a safe bet when it arrives.

While there might now be a simply huge market for sci-fi and fantasy shows, all the best streaming services know that they can't afford to neglect more traditional genres, too. There's a massive audience who want movies they can take at face value, with well-done emotional beats and stories set in the real world.

Netflix is, unsurprisingly, an absolute specialist when it comes to this sort of stuff, and it just gave us a proper trailer for a movie that absolutely ticks the boxes I've mentioned so far. Remarkably Bright Creatures is based on a novel of the same name, and seems likely to be a surefire hit with mainstream audiences, although it might be more emotional than some people are expecting.

The film stars none other than Sally Field in the lead role as Tova, a slightly lonely older woman working as a cleaner in a small town's aquarium. She strikes up an affinity of sorts for the giant pacific octopus whose tank she cleans, and that animal seems to act as the narrator of the movie (voiced by Alfred Molina).

As he observes matters from his unique perspective, he gets to watch as a new arrival joins her staff – a younger man (Lewis Pullman) who isn't exactly having the best time. With a mother who left while he was young, he's searching for his father, but also trying to figure out just what it is that he wants from life. As it becomes clear that Tova lost a son of her own, the parallels between these two quiet humans will start to be made obvious.

The movie looks incredibly sweet, in short, and clearly has plenty of emotional depth to it – in fact, I wouldn't bet against it being something of a tearjerker. One of those happy ones, though, where it gives you some sadness to work out, but ends up with an ending that's optimistic enough to ensure that you're not just crushed when the credits roll.

That's not informed by any knowledge on my part, though; I haven't read the book, so don't have a clue how Tova's story will end, I'm just going off clues in the trailer. Still, if you want to know more for yourself you can check out the movie on Netflix from 8 May, in a little less than a month's time.

Although it can be a little complicated to choose between the many, many subscriptions and tiers on the market, when you take in the whole picture, it's fair to argue that we're in the golden age of streaming right now. We've written a few times here at T3 about how that's doubly true for sci-fi fans, but luckily, the eating is also good for lovers of fantasy.

It's a genre that has scaled the highest heights of popularity thanks to shows like Game of Thrones, and while there aren't quite as many fantasy shows coming down the immediate pike compared to the upcoming slate of sci-fi additions, there are still some massive projects for you to look forward to.

I've gathered some of the ones you should care about most, right here, with information about when to expect them all – so keep reading to see what massive fantasy shows you should know about. No new seasons or shows that already exist, just new projects!

Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone

• Coming to HBO Max – Christmas 2026

Rumoured to be perhaps the most expensive TV production of all time (at some $100 million per episode, not per season), the HBO version of Harry Potter has been the topic of intense debate and interest – with J K Rowling's insane political views doing its stars no favours at all.

Still, regardless of that furore, you can probably put safe money on this being one of the biggest TV launches in history for HBO, tapping into a franchise that's already spawned two enormous film series and shows no signs of losing fans. After Hogwarts Legacy became a gargantuan hit in the gaming world, brace for another bout of Pottermania when the show arrives at the end of this year.

God of War

• Coming to Amazon Prime Video – no date announced

Don't be shocked if we get a teaser for this one sometime this summer – even if Amazon is playing its cards close to its chest in terms of the show's timings. 2016's reboot-slash-sequel to the God of War series was noticeably cinematic in its style, full of interesting camera work and a more introspective attitude to Kratos' unbridled fury, now that he's a father.

Navigating through the world of Norse gods and goddesses, this should be an enticing adaptation of one of the most celebrated games of the last decade, and it'll be really interesting to see how close of an adaptation it is. Given its very solid work on the Fallout show, Amazon seems like a relatively safe pair of hands for this fantastical but presumably violent journey.

Fourth Wing

• Coming to Amazon Prime Video – no date announced

So many of the biggest fantasy series and movies of all times come from one clear source – novels. There's a huge canon of staggering fantasy literature out there, from historic greats like The Lord of the Rings to more recent fare, and this series is going to tap into one of the most current obsessions: romantasy.

This subgenre is focussed a little harder on love affairs, but in interesting and innovative settings, perfectly encapsulated by Fourth Wing, which is being adapted by Prime Video from Rebecca Yaros' novels. This could be a huge moment for a book genre that has become absolutely massive, if it can break out and become an equally big show, but the asterisk is that we don't have any information about when it might move into production.

The Stormlight Archive

• Coming to Apple TV – no date announced

If you had to pick the biggest fantasy author on the planet right now, it would be quite a short contest. No one seems to shift books quite like Brandon Sanderson, both in terms of how many he sells and how many he writes – he's a machine, but has carefully guarded the rights to his stories over the years. That's finally resulted in a major partnership with Apple TV, though.

He'll help the streamer develop Mistborn into a movie franchise, but the TV project will be The Stormlight Archive, which promises to be longer and more sprawling. Fans adore this series of books, and Apple is the best streaming service on the planet, in my opinion, so this might be the strongest prospect of the whole lot on this list.

Powerless

• Coming to Amazon Prime Video – no date announced

The last project I'm shining a spotlight on is another really interesting one from a strategic point of view, since it indicates that Prime Video is in the process of preparing to bet big on romantasy. As well as Fourth Wing, it's also acquired the rights to the Powerless trilogy, which is similarly beloved by its ultra-fans and similarly purple in terms of its subject matter.

With a perhaps slightly more traditional world of magic, the books are also noteworthy because they're arguably aimed at slightly younger readers than some others, making them young adult fiction. That might make this even more commercially viable, but it could also limit the series' appeal, something that Amazon will have to finesse if it does manage to bring this one to full production at some point in the next couple of years.

April is upon us, but thankfully we've all been able to put April Fool's behind us by this point – we're now fully into the swing of the month, and here in the UK we're basking in a part of the year that brings a bunch of bank holidays with it. So, if you're mourning your return to work after the long Easter weekend, you might want some streaming action to take the edge off.

Anyone trying to recuperate from a heavy weekend of festivities or family exposure will probably be in the market for some new shows and movies, so I've done the hard yards for you all. I've scoured the listing of everything coming to Netflix and Prime Video both, and that's left me ideally placed to point you at the three highlights you need to know about this week. Check them out below, with trailers for your convenience.

The Boys Season 5

• Streaming on: Amazon Prime Video from 8 April

This might be the single biggest streaming launch of the month, let alone just this week, with millions of fans waiting rapt for the conclusion of The Boys, which has been wowing us all with profane and hyper-violent visions for years now. The superhero show has rewritten the rules about what we expect from adult shows on streaming platforms, and promises to keep doing that in its fifth and final season.

There are some huge showdowns in the pipeline, but while the B plots are plenty interesting, let's be honest; we're all here to see both whether Homelander dies, and how he does, if so. It'll be one of the most cathartic moments in recent TV history if it happens, but this show being the way it is, don't bet against some crushing character deaths along the way.

Big Mistakes

• Streaming on: Netflix from 9 April

Dan Levy's new project with Netflix has a really interesting trailer that made my ears perk up very directly. Like the excellent and much-loved Schitt's Creek before it, Big Mistakes will take a look at a dysfunctional family that's forced to work together when it hits hard times. While it's also a comedy, though, this new show does look a little darker in tone.

It'll see Levy's character and his sister get into very hot water when they fall into a world of criminality, with some organised criminals and others being rather less formal in their approach. That's going to make for some harem-scarem moments and a caperish tone that seems potentially very fun, all with what looks like a bigger budget than Levy's had before. The signs are very good, basically.

Sheng Wang: Purple

• Streaming on: Netflix from 7 April

While new shows and big launches are great, sometimes when a weeknight comes around, you just want to get a takeout and curl up with some nice, gentle comedy. Sheng Wang's work definitely falls into that category – he'll have you chuckling along nicely but is unlikely to head into massively complicated territory.

Of course, that's just going from his past work, and there's every chance he does something surprising during this comedy special filmed by Ali Wong. The trailer makes it clear that it's going to be lovely, though, full of jokes about adult life in all its complexities and idiosyncrasies.

When Netflix first unveiled Man on Fire I found it more than a little surprising that it was taking a cult favourite Denzel Washington movie and turning it into an action-packed streaming series, but the more I see of it, the more it starts to make sense. Casting the excellent Yahya Abdul-Mateen II is the first in a few excellent decisions the showrunners have made, for one.

After a teaser trailer dropped in mid-March, we've now been given another look at the show, in the form of a quick action sequence that presumably happens fairly early on in the season. It shows our main character, John Creasy, coordinating what should be a straightforward job, until things start to go drastically wrong.

Creasy is supposed to be a high-level operator who's compromised only by his severe PTSD from events that we'll doubtless learn more about over time, and that's led him to the private sector. Here he works for whoever will pay him, trading on the reputation he's built from previous security jobs and other work.

So, when we see this infiltration go very wrong, with masked attackers taking all of Creasy's colleagues captive before they can even kick off their plan, that's not a good thing. We then see Creasy get attacked by his own set of assailants, although he's able to fight them off in impressive, improvisational style.

Obviously, this isn't a huge amount to go on (and I do sometimes wish Netflix's sneak peeks ran just a little longer than they do), but it's still a pretty encouraging glimpse at the sort of action scene that Man on Fire might bring to the table. It also clearly evokes the sort of gun fu chess that has become so popular in action movies since the John Wick franchise made it massive.

That movie's influence is now fairly outsized, and I think it's clearly in evidence in this short sneak peek, so it'll be fascinating to see how the full series builds on that when it comes out on 30 April.

Subscriptions – there's no getting around them. If you want to access the biggest and best streaming services in the world right now (and countless other services besides), you're going to have to sign up for an account and subscribe, and as we all know, that can bring with it some financial jeopardy.

After all, without pointing fingers or naming specific names, we've probably all been burned before by subscription auto-renewals, leaving you high and dry by the time you realise what's happened. Now, though, the UK is promising to do something about it.

The government has just announced that it's going to bring in laws forcing companies to make subscriptions easier to cancel, bringing in some standardisation to how you can expect to exit these agreements. It's also going to, crucially, ensure that there's a two-week cooldown period after an annual subscription auto-renews, in which you'll be able to cancel it and get a refund, and the same will apply after a free trial, too.

The full list of requirements is as follows, per the government:

• Clear, simple information before signing up to any subscription
• Reminders before free or discounted trials end, or 12month+ contracts automatically renew
• Straightforward cancellations, including online exits for online sign ups
• A new 14-day cooling off period, after a free or discounted trial ends, or when a contract renews for 12 months or longer

While some streaming services do make it fairly easy to cancel your subscription (with Netflix, in fact, being pretty good on this front), there are others that make things a little more complicated.

We've also all been subjected to the "why not stay with this discount" or "are you sure" pages that can be a little manipulative, and it sounds like those are also going to come in for some scrutiny.

So, this could mean that all the big streaming services have to change their policies to align with the new laws when they're announced in detail, ahead of an apparent deadline in early 2027, and there's no downside to that for customers.

That said, it's probably outside of streaming that the biggest impact will be felt – there are some huge names in the software world that make cancelling your subscriptions a genuine challenge. Adobe has a pretty bad reputation on this front, and it'll likely be one of the companies more affected by the change if and when it happens.

With that 2027 threshold still quite a long way away, though, you're going to have to stick to traditional methods for now, to keep on top of your subscriptions. That might be a date circled in the diary, a reminder on your phone, or (if you're lucky) a service that already makes it easy to cancel, and therefore won't have to update much when the new rules come into play.

When you have a franchise as big as Stranger Things on your hands, it's probably not too hard to imagine it being difficult to wave goodbye to the money that it brings into your streaming service. We all basically knew when Netflix announced that Stranger Things would end with Season 5 that it likely had more plans for the world of Hawkins, though, and now that's proven accurate.

It's been some months since Stranger Things: Tales from '85 was first announced and then teased, but now we have a proper trailer for the show, making it clear that it'll tell a fairly typical Stranger Things story in a very new, animated style, and that it'll introduce at least one big new character to make that story work.

The big new addition in this trailer is Nikki, a punk-haired rebel who looks like she's a little older than most of the cast of characters at this point in the story (after the second season, that is). She's going to get ambushed by one heck of a scary monster while out walking one day, and it seems like that's the inciting incident that gets our main gang of characters involved.

Given that they thought they closed the portal to the upside-down so recently, it's baffling that there are still demonic monsters appearing in Hawkins, so they set out to figure out what's happening. There will presumably be some dovetailing with where the start of Season 3 of the main show finds them, although that's not exactly confirmed.

The trailer also leaves me with one big question – given we're clearly going to get a lot of screentime with this new Nikki character, how's the show going to explain away her absence in subsequent seasons of the show? Hopefully, this isn't an indication that she's doomed from the start, and we can cross our fingers that she just moves away or something before the live-action show's action picked up.

Given she's never mentioned in the show, though, it's a good reminder of how fleshing out previous episodes in characters' lives can be a complicated approach. If something big happens to them all but they never mention it again, that can seem fairly weird. We'll see how Tales from '85 threads that needle closer to the time, I guess. It should start streaming on 23 April.

The clocks have changed here in the UK, which means we're finally back in a land where you can look outside as work ends and still see daylight – a dream come true for many of us in recent months. That doesn't mean we don't all want cosy nights in watching the latest streaming additions, though.

It's a great time of year to snuggle up and watch new shows and movies, and those of us with access to the best streaming services have plenty to choose from. If you're a Netflix or Prime Video subscriber, you're in the right place, since I've spent time going through the long list of everything they're each adding this coming week. For mid-week binge ideas, keep reading.

XO, Kitty Season 3

• Streaming on: Netflix from 2 April

This show started as a simple spin-off from To All The Boys I've Loved Before, putting Lara Jean's younger sister Kitty in the centre of the frame as the new protagonist, but it's grown into a sensation all of its own. In practise, it tells quite a similar sort of story, about the trials and tribulations of young love, but that's no bad thing.

This third season promises to bring some proper resolution to Kitty's life, as she strives to get a better balance going between her and Min Ho, her boyfriend. They're not as happy as they should be, which is never easy, and fans were ecstatic to learn that Lana Condor would return in multiple episodes as Lara Jean for some older sister guidance.

Mission: Impossible - The Final Reckoning

• Streaming on: Amazon Prime Video USA from 3 April

It's not coming to Prime Video globally, sadly, but in the US, lucky subscribers get to watch the thrilling conclusion to a massive modern series, in the form of Mission: Impossible - The Final Reckoning. Once again, Tom Cruise is back as Ethan Hunt as he continues to hunt down the rogue AI that he started chasing in the previous film.

This entry isn't the best of them all (that's Fallout), but it still delivers some stirring fights and chases, while the final stunt sequence involving two stunt planes it one of the maddest things ever committed to celluloid, and is worth the price of admission alone. So, given you won't have to pay a penny extra, that makes this a surefire hit for a midweek movie night.

Aaron Chen: Funny Garden

• Streaming on: Netflix from 31 March

Netflix has long been a good home to comedians, with a big history of airing comedy specials and helping talent to find a massive audience – so I'm buzzing that it's picked up Australian comic Aaron Chen. He's a super odd presence onstage, with a vibe that's not unlike fellow antipodean Sam Campbell.

This special hasn't been given a trailer at the time of writing this piece, so I'm very curious to see what sort of topics it'll hit on. Regardless, it's pretty much guaranteed to be up the street of anyone who likes a bit of alternative comedy, and could introduce you to your new favourite standup.

April looms in a very immediate way at this point, and from what I've seen it's going to be a seriously significant month for Netflix. There are some massive movies and shows coming down the pike, with dozens upon dozens of additions coming througout the month.

I've taken a fine-toothed comb to that list and have gone through it in its entirety to pick out five highlights that I think you're either likely to care about or should care about. Between these five, you should have some really fun viewing ahead of you if you're a Netflix subscriber this April.

Apex

• Streaming on: 24 April

As far as I'm concerned, this looks like the most enjoyable movie Netflix might have released in quite a while. It stars Charlize Theron as a woman going on a camping and hiking trip that she hopes will be refreshing and decompressing, until she meets a downright creepy Australian local played by Taron Egerton.

Things get way more complicated than just social anxiety, though, when it becomes clear that Egerton is following her on her trail, with a fully loaded hunting crossbow and the very real intention to hunt her down. She'll have to reach into the very marrow of her bones to summon up the courage to get away from him, and the trailer makes it clear some amazing chase sequences are in the mix.

Beef Season 2

• Streaming on: 16 April

Beef was a huge hit for Netflix, but it was also clear from the start that it was a one-season show that had a very definitive ending. Netflix wasn't going to let that sort of critically-acclaimed concept lie dormant, though, and it now has a second season telling an entirely new story with a new cast.

It stars Carey Mulligan and Oscar Isaac as a married couple who have an absolutely massive row one night, but don't realise until it's way too late that two of their young staff members have witnessed some very juicy parts of it. From there, things will spiral out of their control as the ramifications of their fight starts to become almost impossible to calculate.

Man on Fire

• Streaming on: 30 April

This impressive-looking reboot of a famed and beloved movie draws from the same source novel, and makes the bold move of recasting an iconic role in the lead – one played by Denzel Washington in such memorable style. Luckily, in Yahya Abdul-Mateen II the series has a super charismatic and powerful leading actor to carry the load.

He'll play an ex-soldier now working in the world of private security, whose life becomes very complicated when a client's family comes into the line of fire. He'll have to protect that client's daughter while operating in a region he's not all that familiar with, and that promises some huge shootouts, fights and car chases.

Roommates

• Streaming on: 17 April

For something a little more light-hearted there's a new comedy series coming that looks extremely charming, telling a coming-of-age story set at college in the US. It's a classic and very fertile place to tell this sort of tale about the meaning of friendships and self-worth, and this time will be all about two roommates who find they're opposites yet get on like a house on fire.

That is, until they don't – because college is also a time when things are febrile and feelings can change in ways you don't even really understand. In this case, what starts so well begins to sour quickly, and the way it all plays out will hopefully be full of laughs and some emotional moments, too.

XO, Kitty Season 3

• Streaming on: 2 April

Finally, if you're in the mood for something more purely romantic in its spirit, XO Kitty returns at the start of the month, and promises to finally bring resolution to the love troubles that Kitty's been dealing with during her time in Seoul. While she's in theory settled on the man she loves, that's brought some complications with it.

She'll need a big support network to figure out what she wants next, and that includes an appearance from Lana Condor as her iconic older sister Lara Jean, who will clearly fly from the US over to South Korea to lend a helping hand emotionally. The show might be a spin-off, but it's attracted a huge fanbase of its own, so this could be a pretty big release for Netflix to open up April 2026.

I write about streaming a whole heap – many pieces a week, dedicated to newly-released trailers, news and teasers, and that exposes me to a lot of trailers. It's a responsibility that generally means I'm well on top of what's coming down the pipeline, not just for the best streaming services out there but also to cinemas.

That's a big upside, and it's always nice to check at 2PM here in the UK to see if any of the big studios or streamers have uploaded anything I should be paying attention to. That's generally when those big uploads happen, making it a fun part of the day – but also one that almost always involves a minor annoyance.

I've already written a few pieces this year about how I've been making the predictable journey into becoming an enthusiast for physical media, and that's meant I'm more aware than ever of video bitrates, codecs and the threat of visual artefacts and glitches.

That makes it extremely frustrating when I see big studios upload massively anticipated trailers, only to click into them and find they're topping out at a suspiciously unimpressive-looking 1080p. In some cases, like the Dune: Part Three trailer I've embedded below, this does eventually turn into a 4K version once YouTube has processed things properly, but you can't rely on that.

Plenty of massive trailers in recent weeks are languishing in 1080p because that's all their creators have bothered to make, despite the fact that they're almost guaranteed to be sitting on 4K files or better. Even the new trailer for the Harry Potter series on HBO, which will surely be the biggest TV show of the year when it comes out in late 2026, is stuck on 1080p.

I have YouTube Premium, and now basically can't live without it, and that sometimes means that I get access to an "enhanced bitrate" version of these streams, and I can just about tell the difference when that's active, but the fact that such a boost is locked behind a paywall frankly sucks.

Even when the trailers are 4K, you can still often get pronounced colour banding and artifacting, although capturing this and demonstrating it through web-compressed images is tough – the below sunset from that Dune trailer shows it if you can squint, though.

Look, I know there are practical realities at play here – and way more layers of admin and secrecy than I can probably imagine when a big trailer is being readied for upload. Still, I've seen other massive creative studios (like Rockstar for its GTA 6 trailers) manage to have a 4K version live and waiting for an embargo.

Why can't movie studios and streamers catch up with that? If it's a simple matter of someone high-up getting extremely familiar with how YouTube's upload tools actually work, then I'm begging those people to do so.

To plenty of people it might not matter much, but when you're among the first to watch a huge trailer, it sucks that you're likely to be watching it in the worst quality in which it'll ever be available. Sort it out, I beg!

I'll happily admit to being a pretty huge fan of Taron Egerton. Since the slightly boring days of the Kingsman film he's made fun choice after fun choice in terms of his career, and I still think his turn in Rocketman isn't talked about as much as it should be. Now, he's turning villainous again, in a new Netflix movie that looks unbelievably fun and potentially very stressful.

Apex stars the AAA-rated Charlize Theron as Sasha, who's travelled to the Australian outback in search of a break from life that will really push her. Instead of going on solo hikes and waking up to beautiful rugged views, though, she finds herself in a life-or-death hunt when she becomes the focus of a local.

Egerton's playing that local, who she first meets when she asks for directions to a remote hike at a petrol station. He's only too happy to direct her, and from the trailer embedded above it looks a lot like those directions might be part of a plan to have her walk directly into a trap.

After he torches her supplies while she sleeps, Egerton's waiting in the morning to tell Sasha the rules of the game he's cooked up. He'll play a song, and she has the duration of said music to get as far away from him as possible. When it's over, he'll start hunting her down with a very menacing-looking crossbow, and there's only one way he wants things to end.

It looks like the definition of a two-hander of a movie, and Egerton's clearly having a great time with the openly evil character he gets to play. It's also fairly clear from the trailer that at some point they'll be forced to work together, since they end up chained together going down some white-water rapids.

How that unfolds will be part of the fun of the movie when it does come out, of course, so I don't want to speculate too much, but it looks like the locals they come across at night could have something to do with it.

We'll find out more when the film debuts on 24 April for Netflix subscribers – circle that date on the paper calendar you definitely own if this looks like it could be a pulpy movie night.

The tide of steamy romance dramas shows no signs of letting up – and if Amazon Prime Video has anything to do with it, there might be a massive new one on the way. In the last few months people have been going crazy for Heated Rivalry, which is a product of Canada and can be watched on Sky TV or Now here in the UK, and seems to have ignited a passion for sports romances.

Obviously, every big streamer and TV network will have had its eye on Heated Rivalry's numbers, but Prime Video seems to have done the best job of filling the void it's left behind, since it has Off Campus ready to go. Like Heated Rivalry, it's set around the game of ice hockey, although it's much less gay and also not out until 13 May.

Still, that's soon enough that it'll be available to watch before the second season of Heated Rivalry comes out to steal the oxygen from the room once more (it was teased at Sky's big Up Next event last week). The show will revolve around a surprising college romance between Hannah Wells, a hardgoing music student, and Garrett Graham, their college's star hockey player and a known womaniser.

She's theoretically repulsed by everything he stands for, but unsurprisingly attracted by his bad-boy attitude and approximately 24 abs – it's a classic quandary for a young woman who's the main character of a romance novel. Or novels, in this case, since the show is based on a best-selling series by author Elle Kennedy.

Now the show has a first teaser trailer, as you'll have seen above, and in truth it's one of the more restrained we've seen in recent months for shows of this type. Obviously it's not a major challenge to figure out the rough plotline that the central thrust of the show will follow, but this still gives us little to go on in terms of tone or performances (since there are literally almost no lines).

Still, we see some abs, we see some lips bitten, and we see glimpses of passionate love scenes between main characters. What more could you want, at this stage? Time will tell whether Off Campus actually captures the Heated Rivalry zeitgeist, though.