The presidential election and related programming dominated much of our collective mindshare and certainly our small screens this week — but, thankfully, looking ahead to the coming week means we’ll all soon return, as it were, to our regularly scheduled programming. Between the new and returning TV shows set to debut over the next several days, as well as streaming movies worth checking out, there’ll be plenty to stream to take your mind off the chaos of current events.
We’ll take a closer look at several of the biggest and best TV shows (and one movie) worth checking out below. And we’ll start with the final season of one of the biggest TV shows of recent years — a surprise hit which took Middle America by storm and became a sort of Red State Game of Thrones.
Yellowstone: Season 5, Part 2 (Paramount, Nov. 10)
Yellowstone, a ratings bonanza for the Paramount Network, is returning for the highly anticipated second part of its fifth season this weekend.
The show is unquestionably one of the biggest TV hits in recent years, with ratings that have made it one of cable’s most-watched TV shows. Its fifth season premiere alone back in 2022 drew around 12.1 million viewers. In terms of the story, it chronicles the Dutton family, led by John Dutton (Kevin Costner), who controls the largest contiguous cattle ranch in the US.
Per Paramount, “Amid shifting alliances, unsolved murders, open wounds, and hard-earned respect — the ranch is in constant conflict with those it borders — an expanding town, an Indian reservation, and vicious business rivalries.” Tackling issues around everything from Native American rights to land ownership and corporate exploitation, the show continues to resonate with viewers across diverse backgrounds.
I love sitcoms. I love their predictability, their half-hour runtimes, and the way they’re sort of like a warm bath for your soul after a long day — basically, they’re the TV equivalent of comfort food to viewers like me, and this new NBC mockumentary set in a hospital is a great example of what I’m talking about.
Think of St. Denis Medical like a cross between Scrubs and The Office. It will follow the doctors, nurses, and patients who come through the doors each day at an understaffed and underfunded hospital in Oregon, a place where the dedicated doctors and nurses are trying their best to balance treating patients while maintaining their own sanity. The cast includes Wendi McClendon-Covey as a sort of Michael Scott version of a hospital administrator, and its co-creators include The Office producer and Superstore creator Justin Spitzer.
Apple’s Bad Sisters is one of the rare current TV shows that has a perfect 100% score on Rotten Tomatoes.
This Irish black comedy created by Sharon Horgan is infused with humor, beautiful cinematography, and sharp writing that explores the complex family dynamics of the Garvey sisters — Eva, Grace, Ursula, Bibi, and Becka. The audience is given revelations via flashback, with the show exploring each sister’s motivation for wanting Grace’s abusive husband John Paul gone (making the show basically a whodunnit, since Bad Sisters opens with toxic control freak John Paul’s funeral).
Meanwhile, insurance investigators start snooping around, not because they don’t want to pay out a policy as a result of the death — but because they can’t, on account of their firm being broke. So they need to prove the death wasn’t natural or accidental, just as much as the sisters need to prove that it was. The moral of the story: Some of us will go to exceedingly great lengths for family.
Netflix has yet to win the award that it’s coveted the most for years now: A Best Picture Oscar. At the risk of doing the same thing I do every year (by saying “this could be the year!”) let me go out on a limb and hazard a prediction. Wait for it … this could be the year!
The motivation for my optimism this time is French director and “renegade auteur” Jacques Audiard’s film Emilia Pérez, the stars of which include Zoe Saldaña and Selena Gomez. What’s it about, you ask? How’s this for an uncommon feature: A crime musical about a Mexican cartel leader who wants to fake her own death before undergoing gender-reassignment surgery.
Emilia Pérez follows four women in Mexico, each pursuing their own happiness. Cartel leader Emilia (Gascón) enlists Rita (Saldaña), who’s an unappreciated lawyer stuck in a dead-end job, to help fake her death so that Emilia can finally “live authentically as her true self,” Netflix explains. Long story short, it’s great to see Netflix taking risks, at last, with its original movies.
Silo: Season 2 (2024) Apple TV+, Nov. 15)
The last we saw of Silo, Apple’s dystopian sci-fi thriller based on Hugh Howey’s New York Times bestselling series of novels, Juliette (Rebecca Ferguson) had been cast out of the silo in order to “clean.” It was essentially a death sentence, given that the show’s protective silo exists in the first place to protect the remaining humans who live inside it from the apocalypse-scarred wasteland aboveground.
Only … Juliette not only doesn’t die. She’s stunned to see what looks other silos within walking distance around here, which immediately suggests all sorts of other possibilities about the show’s narrative (what else that we thought we knew might be wrong?)
Silo is part of a crop of top-tier sci-fi TV shows on Apple TV+ that also includes series like Foundation and Severance. Put Silo on your list if you like well-written sci-fi, riveting cinematography, and epic world-building. The show is built around the rules, mysteries, and myths that govern life in the silo — as well as the suspicions that those in charge might not be telling everyone the truth about things.
Cobra Kai: Season 6 (2024) Netflix, Nov. 15)
Next on our list is one of the biggest surprise Netflix hits of all time.
Who’d have thought that one of the longest-running Netflix TV shows would be a spinoff of The Karate Kid movies, with the series actually serving as a sequel (given that it’s set more than 30 years after the events in the original movie). Johnny Lawrence (William Zabka) and Daniel LaRusso (Ralph Macchio) reignite their old rivalry, but the show’s neat trick is in its reversal of perspectives that fans of the movie were accustomed to.
Cobra Kai highlights Johnny and his story, zeroing in on his struggles and turning him into a character with more depth than he’d previously had. Moreover, the story here is accessible for both fans of the movie franchise as well as new audiences — and while it’s packed with fun action and comedy, it also tackles serious themes like redemption and rivalry, bullying, and generational conflict.
All while, oh yeah, giving viewers plenty of epic karate showdowns.
Finally, we come to Netflix’s $250 million Arcane, reportedly the most expensive animated series of all time.
Set in the universe of the popular League of Legends video games, the show (which reportedly cost a quarter of a billion dollars to make) debuted back in 2021 and collected several Emmy Awards. Created by Christian Linke and Alex Yee, the show features breathtaking visuals and is one of Netflix’s most celebrated animated series ever. “Arcane is just the beginning of our larger storytelling journey and partnership with the wonderful animation studio that is Fortiche,” co-creator Christian Linke said during a League Dev Update.
“From the very beginning, since we started working on this project, we had a very specific ending in mind, which means the story of Arcane wraps up with this second season. But Arcane is just the first of many stories that we want to tell in Runeterra.”
The season’s second batch of episodes (consisting of episodes 4-6) is what arrives this week, followed by “Act 3,” Episodes 7-9, on Nov. 23.
