Trust Us, You'll Be Watching A Lot Of TV In 2019... Here's What To Look Out For

Black B*itch
Wanna hear something weird? It’s taken us this long to find a starring vehicle for Deborah Mailman. I know, right? She’s been enhancing movies and shows for decades, it seems, but the six-episode ABC political drama Black B*tch (working title, apparently) is the gifted Mailman’s first lead role in a series. She plays a charismatic activist appointed to the Senate by embattled prime minister Rachel Griffiths, and you’ll never guess what ensues. Oh, wait, “high-stakes ambition, betrayal and treachery”? You did guess.

True Detective S3
HBO is trying a bit of brand rehab for this title in 2019 after the second season was widely considered something of a slump (true confession: I liked it), recruiting Oscar winner Mahershala Ali for the lead role of a cop investigating a missing-persons case spanning three decades. Acclaimed Hold The Dark filmmaker Jeremy Saulnier directing two episodes of the eight-episode season is cause for celebration, as is the presence of Deadwood creator David Milch in the writers’ room.

Stranger Things S3 
How effective is the whole Stranger Things phenomenon? So effective that a trailer for the Netflix series’ upcoming third season, which will undoubtedly once again pit its young heroes against some form of small-town spookiness, didn’t even need to show any footage – it simply tossed out the titles of the episodes, including ‘The Mall Rats’, ‘The Bite’ and ‘The Battle of Starcourt’, and let the fans’ imaginations run wild. Gotta tell ya, the Brothers Duffer have done such a superb job of evoking ‘80s pop culture in the first two outings that my interest is positively piqued.

Bloom
If you could take a sip from the Fountain of Youth, would you? Ok, let me rephrase that: if you could take a sip from the Fountain of Youth and turn back the clock to when you looked like Aussie Vampire Diaries star Phoebe Tonkin, why wouldn’t you? Sounds good, sure, but naturally there are complications in this homegrown series airing on streaming service Stan, and co-starring up-and-comers like Ryan Corr and all-Australian legends like Bryan Brown and Jacki Weaver.

Five Bedrooms
God bless ‘em, Ten keeps trying to lure the young people back to free-to-air TV with comedies, dramas and comedy-dramas about 20-somethings living under the same roof, sometimes successfully (The Secret Life Of Us), sometimes less so (Wonderland). In that vein, we have this tale of five unlikely friends who meet at the singles’ table at a wedding and impulsively decide to together buy a house none of them could afford alone. “It could be genius, it could be a disaster – but they’re not putting their lives on hold any longer,” reads the tagline.

Curfew
British TV is not necessarily the first place one would turn to for a gritty, futuristic tale of competitive street-racing, which is why we can’t help but be intrigued by Curfew, in which a diverse array of characters put the rubber to the road and the pedal to the metal to win freedom from the totalitarian regime controlling their lives. Sean Bean stars in this, which pretty much guarantees his character will meet his demise somewhere around episode three, right?

Years & Years
We can’t give you an exact figure but it’s safe to estimate that 85% of television out of the UK has flowed from the pen of one Russell T Davies, and the former Dr Who showrunner is dropping something very ambitious in 2019 – a six-episode BBC drama revolving around the Lyons family of Manchester, beginning one crucial night in the present before leaping 15 years into the future, where Britain and the world are – spoiler alert – very, very different.

Euphoria
Hey, what’s the matter with kids today? I dunno, but maybe Euphoria, HBO’s US adaptation of an acclaimed Israeli series about “drugs, sex, identity, trauma, social media, love and friendship” – all seen through the eyes of an unreliable, drug-addicted teen narrator, played by the gifted actor-singer Zendaya Coleman – can provide some hint.

I Am The Night
With Wonder Woman 1984 pushed back to 2020, audiences are just gonna have to wait a while for their next team-up of director Patty Jenkins and actor Chris Pine (aka The Best Chris). Or are they? The duo joins forces once again for this hard-boiled tale of intrigue, identity and murder in post-WWII Los Angeles, reportedly inspired by the Black Dahlia case.  

Devs
Not a lot is known about this one as yet, but all you really need to know is that it’s set in the cutting-edge tech milieu of San Francisco, stars the mightily talented and charismatic Sonoya Mizuno of Maniac and Crazy Rich Asians fame and is the television debut of novelist, screenwriter and filmmaker Alex Garland, who has Ex Machina and Annihilation to his name. To quote tasteful Simpsons drunkard Barney, just hook it to my veins.