29 TV shows to watch out for in 2017

The BBC Culture team round up the best of what’s coming up on the small screen over the next 12 months, including crime dramas, comedies and the return of Twin Peaks.

American Crime Story (FX) takes a different slant in its second season, moving out of the courtroom and into the flooded city of New Orleans. The Ryan Murphy-run miniseries, which tapped into the zeitgeist in 2016 with The People v OJ Simpson, will be tackling Hurricane Katrina and what director Anthony Hemingway described as “the awful crime and tragedy that happened when it first started”. Whatever it is, says Hemingway, it won’t be Treme. Meanwhile, a four-part drama from Bafta-winning writer Danny Brocklehurst (Ordinary Lies), In the Dark (BBC) stars MyAnna Buring (Downton Abbey) as a pregnant female detective pulled back to her hometown when her best friend’s husband is embroiled in a case. Over on ITV, Unforgotten is a crime drama that focuses on the lives behind the police reports. Nicola Walker (Spooks) and Sanjeev Bhaskar (The Kumars) star as detectives looking into cold cases, season two opening with a corpse inside a suitcase and a group of seemingly disconnected characters. Bipolar former CIA officer Carrie Mathison (Claire Danes) will no doubt reach for her usual weapons as Homeland (Showtime) returns for its sixth season: fragmented jazz, bottles of pills and a one-night stand with someone she met in a hotel bar. With a storyline taking place just after a US general election and a new female president who’s been described as part Clinton, part Trump and part Sanders, it’s likely to be compelling viewing. Another big-hitting political thriller returns in 2017 – but without its lead. With the tagline ‘New day. New hero’, 24: Legacy (Fox) is a Jack Bauer-free spin-off from 24’s original writers Joel Surnow and Robert Cochran. Corey Hawkins stars as war hero Eric Carter, attempting to prevent the largest terrorist attack on American soil with the help of the CTU over 12 real-time hours.

David Lynch’s Twin Peaks (Showtime) is back on 21 May after a break of more than 25 years. Kyle MacLachlan reprises his role as FBI Agent Dale Cooper, and Laura Dern and Naomi Watts are among the famous names joining him. They aren’t the only Hollywood stars swapping the silver screen for the small screen – Nicole Kidman has two TV projects coming up. As well as HBO’s Big Little Lies, she’ll star alongside Elisabeth Moss in the new season of Top of the Lake (BBC Two/Sundance). The new series, titled China Girl, moves the action from New Zealand to Australia – and follows the investigation into a body that has washed up on Sydney’s Bondi Beach. Fresh from her Golden Globes triumph, Claire Foy will lead the cast of The Crown (Netflix) as it enters its second season. It’s due in late 2017, and will cover events up to 1964. “We leave behind a certain kind of Britain and enter a new Britain,” creator Peter Morgan said recently, suggesting that Prince Philip and Prince Charles will play a more central role in the new episodes. Another of Netflix’s 2016 success stories, Stranger Things, is expected to return this summer, perhaps answering fans’ questions about Eleven’s mysterious disappearance. And it isn’t the only sci-fi hit returning – Doctor Who (BBC One) is back, with Peter Capaldi joined by new co-star Pearl Mackie for Steven Moffat’s final episodes. Meanwhile, Game of Thrones (HBO) begins its “end game”, as the show returns for its penultimate season this summer, with Emilia Clarke’s Daenerys finally on her way to Westeros.

One of the most exciting benefits of TV’s move online has been the opening up of foreign programmes to English-speaking audiences, and in 2017, Norwegian state broadcaster NRK’s Valkyrien, about a doctor who sets up an underground clinic in a ghost station of the Oslo metro, looks set to continue the trend by being streamed on Channel 4’s Walter Presents. The tone for Netflix’s first German-language production, Dark – a supernatural family drama that time-hops between 1968 and the present day – is sure to be similarly sepulchral and another Norwegian show, Acquitted, which returns in 2017 for a second season, is haunting and intriguing, but hardly cheerful. The first series of this ambiguous homecoming drama set amid fjords and mountains set viewing records when it was broadcast two years ago by the country’s main commercial broadcaster TV2. The Vatican, the mafia, drugs, politics and prostitution all feature in Suburra, which has been spun off from a hit Italian movie into a slick and sexy series in a co-production between the Italy’s RAI and Netflix. Similarly, The Swingers (VIJF), an erotic thriller set in the unlikely surrounds of Dutch suburbia, comes with plenty of polish and visual flair. Broadcast as Nieuwe Buren (New Neighbours) in the Netherlands, the series follows a respectable, middle-class couple who move to the suburbs in expectation of their first child – but when they lose it in a miscarriage, are drawn into a world of wife-swapping and murder.

With President Selina Meyer (Julia Louis-Dreyfus) being ceremoniously kicked out of the Oval Office in season five, what will the new series of Veep (HBO) hold for her? On Twitter, Louis-Dreyfus has called Meyer’s fall from grace ‘Selexit’, while Vulture point out an art-imitating-life parallel with a certain Hillary Clinton, suggesting she may soon be spotted hiking in the woods in upstate New York. Hillary advocate Lena Dunham has announced that the sixth season of Girls (HBO), will be the last, and judging from the trailer, things will be as messy as usual. As Dunham put it: “In the Girls’ universe, nothing ever ends too neatly.” On the other side of the pond, Sharon Horgan and Rob Delaney return for the third series of the Emmy-award-winning Catastrophe (Channel 4), which will feature Carrie Fisher’s last TV performance as Rob’s mother. And Sharon Horgan and Graham Linehan’s one-off comedy Motherland (BBC Two), described by the Guardian as “a terrifying, no-holds-barred glimpse into parenthood”, returns for a six-part series. Expect more gastronomic adventures – and Roger Moore impressions – from Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon, who travel through Spain for season three of The Trip (Sky Atlantic). When asked by a fan on Twitter if the show will follow the same format as the previous two series, Brydon responded with “Same format? Same jokes”. Drew Barrymore, adopts the Santa Clarita Diet (Netflix) for her small-screen lead debut. In the show’s trailer, a chirpy Barrymore sings the praises of the eating plan, which has a dark twist. “I satisfy all my cravings… and eat whoever I want”. Yes, she’s a zombie, and her diet consists of human flesh.

It’s a mark of the artistic credibility TV now possesses that some of the most talked about literary adaptations of the next 12 months won’t be seen in cinemas but on the small screen. There’s a third series of the BBC smash Poldark, about the trials and tribulations of an often shirtless, wheat-threshing Revolutionary War veteran after returning to his native Cornwall. But there are also many adaptations of sci-fi and fantasy books this year. The acclaimed producer of Hannibal and Pushing Daisies, Bryan Fuller, is turning Neil Gaiman’s American Gods (Starz) into a lush spectacle starring Ian McShane as the god Odin in a mythopoetic US where deities like Loki, Anubis, and Czernobog still exist but try to blend in with ordinary people. Margaret Atwood’s dystopian novel about a future where women are only valued for reproduction, The Handmaid’s Tale (Hulu), arrives on the box with Elisabeth Moss as Offred, a handmaid who’s been assigned to bear children for a military leader. Len Deighton’s SS-GB, which imagines what would have happened if Britain had surrendered to Nazi Germany in World War Two, will be the BBC’s answer to Amazon’s The Man in the High Castle – it’s scripted by long-time James Bond screenwriters Neal Purvis and Robert Wade. And Netflix’s A Series of Unfortunate Events is based on the children’s book series by Lemony Snicket but has received major praise for its adult themes and unique Gothic absurdist tone. Then there’s a series that breaks all genre classifications: I Love Dick (Amazon), based on Chris Kraus’s 1997 novel-memoir hybrid, which brings Kathryn Hahn and Kevin Bacon to TV as an artist and the media theorist she’s obsessed with. Perhaps there is no greater sign of TV’s cultural ascent than the migration of movie stars in its direction: Nicole Kidman, Reese Witherspoon, Shailene Woodley and Laura Dern appear in HBO’s adaptation of Liane Moriarty’s 2014 novel Big Little Lies, about women who become friends and discover the ways in which violence has affected their lives.

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