With a new year comes new hopes, new fears, and new resolutions. While we all want to lose a little weight or be more active, my main resolution for 2025 is simple: watch more shows. Fortunately for all of us, Netflix is more than willing to help us achieve that goal.
January 2025 has a lot of new shows to feast on, with the most prominent being the second seasons of the hit action series The Recruit with Noah Centineo and The Night Agent. But there are also three underrated shows on Netflix that deserve your time and attention.
Need more recommendations? Check out the best new shows to stream this week, as well as the best shows on Netflix, best shows on Hulu, best shows on Amazon Prime Video, and best shows on Disney+.
Don’t underestimate Harlan Coben. The bestselling murder mystery novelist has become his own franchise on Netflix, with his last show, Fool Me Once, becoming a monster hit for the streamer. That one was released in early January, so Netflix is hoping lightning strikes twice with the New Year’s Day release of Missing You, a new limited series based on the 2014 novel of the same name.
Detective Kat Donovan’s fiancée Josh went missing 11 years ago. She’s over it, at least she thought she was, until one night while surfing a dating app, she sees his picture on a profile. Is Josh alive? And if so, why did he go missing all those years ago? Kat’s ensuing investigations yields answers she may not understand or even want. But she has to know the nature of Josh’s disappearance, and why she played a role in it.
Sounds intriguing, right? Coben is a master of this sort of thing, and Netflix seems to have found a groove in churning out these adaptations. Like the others, the novel’s American setting has been changed to an English one, so those desiring a good British crime mystery won’t be disappointed with Missing You. If you’re still craving more of Coben’s work, check out the excellent 2006 French-language adaptation of Tell No One.
America, 1857. The young nation is still in its embryonic stage, but it’s already close to collapse. A civil war is coming, and on the frontier, blood is being spilled daily as settlers battle over land, religion, and honor. This is the setting for American Primeval, Netflix’s new Western show from Friday Night Lights creator Peter Berg.
Glow‘s Betty Gilpin stars as Sara Rowell, a widow who is trying to protect her young son from the dangers of the world around them. They team up with Isaac (Taylor Kitsch), an emotionally wounded man with a past he’d like to forget, and Two Moons (Shawnee Pourier), a Native American teenager who has fled her village and is looking for a new home. Together, they form a found family as they explore the American West and evade all the dangers that come with it.
When it premiered in September 2023, Castlevania: Nocturne was welcomed with open arms by fans of the original Castlevania show. The sequel series contained all the superior animation and voice-over acting that the original had, and advanced the storyline of the Belmont family and its never-ending war on vampires. Now, Castlevania: Nocturne is back, and it’s poised to be the best season yet.
France, 1972. At the height of the French Revolution, the Vampire Messiah is at full power, and Richter Belmont needs all the help he can get. Fortunately for him, he’s teamed with Dracula’s son, the half-human, half-vampire Alucard, to stop Erzsebet Báthory’s reign of terror before her bloodlust drowns France and its warring citizens in a river of blood.
China just gave Hollywood a cautionary tale about AI filmmaking. Sanxingdui: Future Past, billed as the country's first fully AI-generated movie, hit theaters on October 23 and bombed at the box office.
According to Futurism, the film's reported $1.5 million production budget landed on more than 10,000 screens. Yet it pulled in only about $181,000, averaging roughly $20 per screen, making the budget difficult to recover.
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?