The new year is almost here! Once you recover from all the hoopla of the holiday season, it’s back to the grind. That means looking for a great new show to sink your teeth into to help unwind after a long day at work or school.
All the popular streaming services have exciting new shows coming in January, many with tremendous promise to become big hits for 2024. Read through the synopses, bookmark a few shows, and prepare to curl up on the couch with these five TV shows you need to watch in January. They all represent exciting additions to the streaming selection for various services next month. Looking for more? Check out the best new shows to stream on all the top streaming services.
Created by Brad Falchuk, who is behind such hits as American Horror Story, Glee, and Pose, The Brothers Sun is a black comedy action series. Living in California since he was a child, Bruce (Sam Song Li) finds his life upended when his older brother, Charles (Justin Chien), visits from Taipei, Taiwan. Bruce doesn’t remember much about his life before, but his older brother is quick to remind him that his family is involved in serious criminal activities.
Now pulled back into the family business, Bruce must adapt to this new life, something his “Mama” Eileen (Everything Everywhere All At Once’s Michelle Yeoh) tried so desperately to pull him away from. Stream all eight episodes of the series, which is one of many to come as part of a deal Falchuk and co-creator Byron Wu forged with Netflix in 2022.
Stream The Brothers Sun on Netflix.
Streaming on both Disney+ and Hulu, Echo is the latest series and 10th overall in the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) franchise. A spinoff of Hawkeye, it follows Maya Lopez (Alaqua Cox) as she heads back home and tries to reconnect with her Native American roots. But she’s also dealing with a lot of anger, including toward crime lord Wilson Fisk/Kingpin (Vincent D’Onofrio), who also happens to be her adoptive uncle (and the man responsible for the death of her father).
Unlike other Marvel shows, Echo will be much shorter at just five episodes, all of which will be released at the same time. It’s also the first Marvel series to receive a TV-MA rating. For fans of the Phase Five shows, Echo is the next to check off the list. This series is also the first under the Marvel Spotlight banner, which will produce shows designed to focus on more “grounded, character-driven stories” versus being part of the larger MCU narrative.
A British crime thriller, Criminal Record employs a premise that has been told time and time again: a pair of detectives, one a veteran and one a rookie, are paired up to investigate a murder. Peter Capaldi is veteran Detective Chief Inspector Daniel Hegarty and Cush Jumbo (The Good Fight) is rookie Detective Sergeant June Lenker.
It’s not so simple, though: The case ties to an old one Hegarty worked back in the day and could prove that the man he has locked behind bars is actually innocent. The pair are at odds with one another as it becomes clear that there’s much more to the story. You can watch the first two episodes of Criminal Record on launch day. A new episode will follow weekly through February 21, for a total of eight.
Stream Criminal Record on Apple TV+.
If you love the 2012 Seth MacFarlane movie Ted starring Mark Wahlberg and Mila Kunis (as well as the 2015 sequel), you’ll be excited to check out the seven-episode prequel series of the same name. Set in the 1990s, it takes place during a time when the sentient teddy bear Ted (voiced by MacFarlane) becomes friends with his teenage owner, John Bennett, now played by Max Burkholder. Fans will see what life was like for a young John and his best friend. The antics they get up to as adults pale in comparison to when John was coming of age. Yes, Ted is still his same vulgar, inappropriate stuffed animal self. But while he’s John’s worst influence, he is also his biggest supporter.
The cast includes Alanna Ubach as John’s mother, Susan, and Scott Grimes as his father, Matty. Giorgia Whigham also stars as Blaire, a cousin living with the family while attending college. Ted might sound like a friendly sitcom, but this is no Alf: Ted is R-rated just like the movies.
It has been a long, six-and-a-half year wait for the new season of True Detective, and it’s finally here this month. Called True Detective: Night Country, the crime drama continues the anthology format strategy of featuring a new cast of characters and completely new stories in every season. This season stars Jodie Foster and Kali Reis and shifts the location to Alaska. Foster is Liz, a detective investigating the case of six men who have gone missing from a research station.
The fourth season overall in the series that has previously starred Matthew McConaughey and Woody Harrelson; Colin Farrell (The Banshees of Inisherin), Rachel McAdams, and Vince Vaughn; and Mahershala Ali and Stephen Dorff, True Detective: Night Country promises to be just as twisty, exciting, and thought-provoking. It’s the first season not to be written by creator Nic Pizzolatto, who handed over writing and showrunning duties to Issa Lopez, a rising star producer, writer, and film director who is reportedly working on several projects with Guillermo del Toro as well.
Stream True Detective: Night Country on Max.
Some of the best shots in Grok Imagine’s AI-made Odyssey don’t contain actors. Ancient landscapes stretch into the distance. Close-ups of grimy hands suggest people who have touched something rougher than a keyboard. For a few seconds, the illusion holds.
https://twitter.com/imagine/status/2113712964419063911
YouTube videos could soon look better without eating quite so much data, right? Thankfully, the platform plans to introduce a new video format called AV2 on its web player in early 2027, promising more efficient streaming and potentially fewer playback hiccups on slower internet connections. The big headline is a roughly 30% improvement in compression efficiency over AV1, YouTube's existing video format. That doesn't guarantee every video will use 30% less data, but it could make streaming a little easier on both internet connections and data allowances.
What is AV2, and why should viewers care?
YouTube is changing how its Home page works, giving viewers more control over what shows up there and making some of the app’s most-used sections easier to reach. Custom Feeds are now replacing the existing topic chips for eligible users, while YouTube is also testing a redesigned top bar on mobile that moves Subscriptions closer to the Home feed.
YouTube first started experimenting with Custom Feeds earlier this year, letting you type out what you wanted to watch and turning that request into its own stream of recommendations. Now, the feature is starting to look less like a side experiment and more like something YouTube actually wants people to use as part of their everyday Home page.