CABLE | Anya Taylor-Joy Runs Out of 'Lucky' on Apple TV

"I don't have time for your cowboy haikus right now."

Apple Studios / Hello Sunshine

The talented and wide-eyed Anya Taylor-Joy stars capably in the entertaining crime thriller miniseries Lucky, based on bestselling author Marissa Stapley's novel of the same name. Created by screenwriter Jonathan Tropper and showrun by Cassie Pappas, audiences are dropped into the eponymous con woman's exciting identity-swapping dealings on the run when she wakes up alone in Las Vegas with no memory of what was supposed to be a getaway after one last big score.

CABLE | Javier Bardem and Amy Adams Strike 'Cape Fear' x Fantasia 2026

"I see something eating at you."

Universal Content Productions / Amblin Television

Cape Fear, the revenge miniseries adaptation of the 1957 potboiler novel The Executioners by John D. MacDonald and both its classic 1962 and 1991 film adaptations, stretches the Southern gothic psychological thriller material across ten episodes. Created and showrun by screenwriter/producer Nick Antosca and executive produced by the duo of Martin Scorsese and Steven Spielberg, the eventual and originally attached director of the film remake, this contemporary television interpretation still maintains its strong Hitchcockian overtones.

CABLE | Wong Kar-wai Colours 'Blossoms Shanghai'

"Neon signs glowed like a sea of flowers."

Jet Tone Films / Tencent Pictures

Blossoms Shanghai, Chinese auteur Wong Kar-wai's first television drama series, broadly romanticizes 1990s Shanghai in the lushly complementary vein of what his cinematic masterpiece, In the Mood for Love, did for 1960s Hong Kong, but only on the small screen. Created and directed by Wong, scripted by Qin Wen, and based on author Jin Yucheng's award-winning 2013 novel, Blossoms, it tells a vaguely historical yarn of late twentieth-century Eastern capitalism wrapped in melodramatic intrigue.

CABLE | 'Skeleton Crew' Escapes A 'Star Wars' Adventure for Kids

"You have a lot to learn about pirates."

Lucasfilm

Skeleton Crew, the latest cutthroat Star Wars spin-off miniseries, clearly channels Amblin's iconic 1980-90s era of children's adventure films in the mould of The Goonies meets Treasure Island—displaced to "a galaxy far, far away." There's plenty of well-needed coming-of-age discovery and wonder, but some inconsistent elements and a slightly adrift tone never totally feel cohesive inside its greater shared universe.

CABLE | Colin Farrell Steals A 'Batman' Crime Saga – 'The Penguin'

"I always thought you were capable of more."

Warner Bros. Television / DC Studios

Produced by The Batman director Matt Reeves, his The Penguin television spin-off miniseries once again stars an unrecognizable Colin Farrell (heavily made-up with extensive prosthetics) as the eponymous comic book supervillain named pejoratively after the aquatic flightless bird. Set in the immediate aftermath of the events of Reeves' 2022 film, we follow Farrell's Oz Cobb (renamed from "Oswald Cobblepot" in the comics) as he takes advantage of Gotham City's criminal power vacuum.

CABLE | L.A.'s Sterling NBA Franchise – How the Rich Got 'Clipped'

"He says a lot of things he shouldn't."

FX Productions

Clipped, FX's sports drama miniseries based on ESPN's 30 for 30 podcast series The Sterling Affairs by sports reporter Ramona Shelburne (also an executive producer), dramatizes the wild ownership scandal that rocked the Los Angeles Clippers basketball team during the NBA's tumultuous 2023-24 season when controversial longtime owner Donald Sterling (Ed O'Neill) sparked a player revolt after his extremely racist remarks were leaked by his notorious media-obsessed, visor-wearing mistress V. Stiviano (Cleopatra Coleman).

CABLE | 'The Sympathizer' Betrays South Vietnam on HBO

"All wars are fought twice."

A24 / Rhombus Media

The unlikely international filmmaking pairing of Korean auteur Park Chan-wook and Toronto director Don McKellar adapts Vietnamese-American professor Việt Thanh Nguyễn's bestselling 2015 Pulitzer Prize-winning debut novel The Sympathizer (aka Cảm tình viên) into a dizzingly postmodern historical miniseries dissecting the complex political machinations in the immediate aftermath of a post-Vietnam War United States in the late 1970s.

CABLE | The Talented Andrew Scott Cons 'Ripley' on Netflix

"Everything about Tom is perfectly vague."

Showtime Studios

Accomplished screenwriter Steven Zaillian tries his hand at adapting mid-century novelist Patricia Highsmith's seminal literary character, Tom Ripley, as a miniseries this time. The succinctly titled Ripley, based on the previously adapted 1955 psychological thriller The Talented Mr. Ripley, stars British actor Andrew Scott, taking over the eponymous role of the menacing, social-climbing American con artist turned serial killer let loose in coastal Italy.

CABLE | 'Scott Pilgrim Takes Off' Gets Remixed on Netflix

"My parties are curated."

Science Saru / Universal Content Productions

Toronto native and cartoonist Bryan Lee O'Malley readapts his famed graphic novel series once again—this time in television anime form. Scott Pilgrim Takes Off achieves the remarkable task of creating both something totally fresh and new storywise while also balancing the familiar comfort of the cult source material, including the entire cast of the live-action film adaptation, Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, reprising their respective roles vocally.

CABLE | 'Ahsoka' – Rosario Dawson Rebels Against 'Star Wars'

"We are no Jedi!"

Lucasfilm

Longtime Star Wars writer/producer Dave Filoni brings the eponymous fan-favourite former Jedi Padawan apprentice animated character to live-action screens for her own solo miniseries starring Rosario Dawson, reprising her guest appearance in The Mandalorian. Ahsoka starts slow with an odd flatness to its expositionary dialogue that (re)establishes the stakes and a new intergalactic mission.

CABLE | Timothy Olyphant Shoots 'Justified: City Primeval' on FX

"Look at the marshal doing cop work."

Sony Pictures Television Studios / FX Productions

Timothy Olyphant's seminal cowboy lawman, Deputy U.S. Marshal Raylan Givens, created by famed American pulp novelist Elmore Leonard, is finally back. Continuing where the six-season neo-western Justified series (adapted from the short story "Fire in the Hole") left off on FX, this sequel miniseries continuation wisely takes the novel City Primeval: High Noon in Detroit, another Leonard crime saga that notably does not feature Givens character in it, as its source material.

REEL | Jay Baruchel and Glenn Howerton Invent 'BlackBerry' x SXSW 2023

"Why would anyone want a phone without a keyboard?"

SXSW Film & TV Festival

Toronto filmmaker Matt Johnson gives BlackBerry the slick tech biopic treatment (think The Social Network but Canadian) based on the book Losing the Signal about the Waterloo, Ontario-based creators of the eponymous smartphone device, Research in Motion (RIM). It's an unlikely story of total non-players outside the major consumer electronics industries somehow starting and then dominating mobile telecommunications for a brief window of time.

CABLE | Rachel Weisz Doubles 'Dead Ringers' on Prime Video

"We're as close to perfection as you can get in this field."

Amazon Studios / Annapurna Television

British playwright Alice Birch reworks David Cronenberg's eerie 1988 Canadian psychological thriller Dead Ringers—in turn based on Bari Wood and Jack Geasland's 1977 novel Twins—into a haunting, gender-swapped contemporary series. Rachel Weisz stars as the self-destructive identical twin sister gynecologists, Elliot and Beverly (originally portrayed by Jeremy Irons), who maintain a rather unusually close but antagonistic relationship.

CABLE | Beware the Hive – 'Swarm' Stans Prime Video x SXSW 2023

"Who's your favourite artist?"

SXSW Film & TV Festival

Co-creator Donald Glover, who also directs the pilot, and playwright/showrunner Janine Nabers' new half-hour psychological horror series Swarm stars Dominique Fishback as an obsessive fan of a Beyoncé-like world-famous pop superstar ("Ni'Jah") who ends up down a bloody path of murder and mayhem across the country. From there, each episode unfolds a different yet eerily impressionistic perspective on extreme toxic fandom.

CABLE | Ewan McGregor Awakens 'Obi-Wan Kenobi'

"Your need to prove yourself is your undoing."

Lucasfilm

An ageless Ewan McGregor returns as the storied Jedi Knight ten years after the events of Star Wars: Episode III – Revenge of the Sith in his eponymous six-part miniseries, Obi-Wan Kenobi. Played at least initially much wearier and defeated, this Kenobi tries to bridge the gap between his known character history to varying results.

CABLE | Under the Celebrity Skin – 'Pam & Tommy' Forever

"It's like we're seeing something we're not supposed to be seeing."

Annapurna Television / Point Grey Pictures

Lily James and Sebastian Stan star as the titular notorious '90s former married couple, Baywatch actress Pamela Anderson and bad boy Mötley Crüe drummer Tommy Lee, in the explicit biographical miniseries Pam & Tammy based on the now infamous scandal involving the unauthorized release of their private honeymoon celebrity sex tape in 1995, as reported in Rolling Stone in 2014.

CABLE | Post-Pandemic Future Present – Surviving 'Station Eleven'

"To the monsters, we're the monsters."

Paramount Television Studios

Based on Canadian author Emily St. John Mandel's beloved and bestselling 2014 literary dystopian novel of the same name, Station Eleven offers a haunting yet stunningly reverent vision of post-apocalyptic life after a devastating flu-like pandemic ravages ninety-nine percent of the world's population. Adapted by fellow novelist turned showrunner Patrick Somerville, his ten-episode miniseries version brings such wondrous life and humanity to its captivating characters' hope for survival.

CABLE | A Very Marvel Christmas – 'Hawkeye' Hits the Mark

"You saved our city."

Marvel Studios

Marvel Studios' latest miniseries keeps its story refreshingly small-scale and low-stakes for a fun yet relatively grounded six-episode buddy comedy action-adventure set during Christmas in New York. Starring Jeremy Renner as everyone's least favourite Avenger, Clint Barton—the one good at archery without any powers—Hawkeye's first standalone entry, created by Jonathan Igla, is loosely based on the acclaimed comic book run (Lucky the Pizza Dog!) by writer Matt Fraction (a consulting producer) and artist David Aja.

CABLE | 'The Falcon and the Winter Soldier' Strikes Back

Marvel Studios

Marvel Studios' second streaming series effort, The Falcon and the Winter Soldier, starring Anthony Mackie and Sebastian Stan as the eponymous superhero sidekick duo to Captain America, recreates much of the same tried-and-true blockbuster formula transplanted to the episodic television format.

CABLE | Sound and 'WandaVision' – Marvel Channels the Sitcom

Marvel Studios

Stars Elizabeth Olsen and Paul Bettany revisit their Avengers characters, Scarlet Witch and Vision, through sitcom television history in the trippy new throwback miniseries WandaVision, created by screenwriter Jac Schaeffer. It's a highly original, surreal take on comic book storytelling using the half-hour comedy format to explore its strange universe of superheroes.