Looking for something new to watch? The Mail’s TV experts have sifted through hundreds of programmes to bring you 20 of the best shows and films to stream on demand right now…
Molly-Mae: Behind It All
Reality TV star Molly-Mae Hague lets the cameras in for this series about her life
Year: 2025
Certificate: 12
After shooting to fame on Love Island and making appearances in numerous episodes of the At Home With The Furys reality shows (alongside her ex-partner Tommy Fury), Molly-Mae Hague now headlines her very own fly-on-the-wall documentary series.
In the wake of her high-profile split from Fury in 2024, the show follows the feisty and sometimes outspoken Hague as she charts a new life, coping with motherhood, juggling the demands of a life lived in the tabloid spotlight and attempting to set up her own business, Maebe.
Anyone who enjoyed her previous reality show outings is going to find a lot to enjoy here as the six-part series (the first three episodes drop now with the remainder arriving in the spring) promises to go behind the headlines to reveal the real Molly-Mae. The quality of the production is much higher end than your average reality series as it does so, too – witness all that swooping, thoughtful music in the background – which occasionally sits amusingly (deliberately, presumably) at odds with such moments as her ordering a Chicken Big Mac from a drive-through. (Six episodes)
Severance (Series 2)
The return of Ben Stiller’s dazzling dystopian thriller about office workers trapped in a loop
Year: 2025
Certificate: 15
If you’ve not seen series one of Severance, don’t read beyond this point as it will contain spoilers for how that ends. OK? Then we’ll begin.
Ben Stiller’s stylish thriller about a dystopian workplace returns in expanded fashion for its second series, with ten episodes to continue its tangled story – that’s one more than in series one, and it also comes with an eye-popping reported budget of around $20 million an episode which, if you consider the general lack of large-scale blockbuster action, is really quite surprising.
The way series two begins is quite surprising, too – it opens with Mark (Adam Scott) back at work almost as if nothing had happened, but with a new set of colleagues. What happened to the friends he escaped from Lumon with at the end of series one? Did their protests against the harrowing impact of severance in the real world have no impact at all? And why is one of the new employees a child?
Those and plenty more questions pop up as the series continues (look out for Gwendoline Christie as it does), and don’t bet on a hard end to the story when these episodes are done. Stiller has said that a third series is in development. (Ten episodes)
Twin Peaks
The late David Lynch’s sinister and supernatural small town story
Year: 1990-2017
Certificate: 18
The late David Lynch was a singular filmmaker and he wasn’t to everyone’s taste. You had to try him to know if you liked him, though, and few of his projects reached more people than Twin Peaks, the eerie small town mystery that steadfastly refused to explain itself across two series in the 1990s – and then again when it returned, in 2017.
On the face of it, the show could have been a simple whodunnit about the murder of beauty queen Laura Palmer, with Kyle MacLachlan’s Agent Dale Cooper as our sleuth – and perhaps that’s what TV executives thought they were getting. What Lynch delivered, though, was a winding, supernatural journey into the dark side of humanity and what fuels it; and refusing to fully explain what it was all about was, perhaps, part of the point.
Watch it for yourself and see what you think because, at the very least, Twin Peaks is an important piece of TV history. If you’re after a modern equivalent, the closest thing on now is probably Severance (Apple TV+) or FROM (Sky/Now), both of which recently began new series. (Three series)
The Crow Girl
Katherine Kelly and Eve Myles star in serial killer series
Year: 2025
Certificate: 15
As the bodies of drugged and murdered young men start turning up around the city, DCI Jeanette Kilburn (Eve Myles) and her partner DI Lou Stanley (Dougray Scott) realise that they have a serial killer to catch. They quickly decide on a prime suspect, but without enough evidence to arrest him they’re stuck. Until, that is, they decide to turn to the man’s psychotherapist Dr Sophia Craven (Katherine Kelly) for help.
Adapted from the international hit thriller novel by Swedish writer Erik Axl Sund, this is a dark and stylish six-part serial-killer drama that drip feeds audiences with hair-raising realisations about the crimes and their perpetrator. Myles is predictably excellent as Kilburn, moving between at-home mumsy charm and at-work brisk professionalism with ease, while Kelly is equally good as icily perceptive shrink Craven. (Six episodes)
Back In Action
Cameron Diaz came out retirement for this fun spy comedy with Jamie Foxx
Year: 2025
Certificate: 12
Fifteen years ago, international spies Matt and Emily (Jamie Foxx and Cameron Diaz) abandoned their glamorous globetrotting existences in order to become parents. Now, though, their covers have been blown and they have to dust off their old action skills in order to keep themselves and their teenage kids alive.
With much of the action taking place in London, it’s boisterous high-octane stuff full of car chases, fist fights, explosions and gun battles, but with its tongue firmly in its cheek as the startled kids wake up to the fact that there is so much more to their bland suburban mom and pop than they ever expected.
Foxx and Diaz are on bubbly form (it’s particularly good to see the latter back after a ten-year break to focus on her own family) and the film crams in supporting turns from Glenn Close, Kyle Chandler, Andrew Scott and Jamie Demetriou. (114 minutes)
Marilyn Manson: Unmasked
Shock story of the rise and fall of shock rocker Marilyn Manson
Year: 2024
Certificate: 15
Shock rocker Marilyn Manson was never for the fainthearted and made a career out of pushing boundaries and being sexually provocative. Manson, aka Brian Warner, wanted you to think he was a bad man, a self-styled antichrist. He wanted that, and the success, fame and money that came with it.
With hindsight, he waved red flags wherever he went. He was always inappropriate, always creepy, always misogynistic. But everyone thought it was an act. His downfall began with accusations by his former fiancée, the actress Evan Rachel Wood, and more women followed. Within 24 hours of the first allegations he was dropped by his record label.
This three-part docuseries hears from Wood extensively (in episode two), as well as other accusers, as well as supporters, former bandmates, collaborators and assistants. It strives to be balanced, but it’s hard to ignore that the most powerful testimony comes from Wood. ‘I didn’t call it rape for many, many years’ she says of the infamous Heart-shaped Glasses video. It’s the psychological abuse, for her, that cuts the deepest. (Three episodes)
Super/Man: The Christopher Reeve Story
Bafta-nominated documentary featuring interviews with Reeve’s children
Year: 2024
Certificate: 15
The life story of the Superman star is told by his three children and Gae Exton, his partner for a decade, in a Bafta-nominated documentary that deals, centrally, with how Reeve turned his paralysis after a horse riding accident into a foundation that continued to help people long after his death. Reeve’s partner in that and in everything was his wife Dana, who died two years after he did in 2006, and the portrait of their marriage is a warm and uplifting one.
This isn’t a saccharine picture of a man or his life, though; it’s a film about progress and reaching for higher things in spite of adversity. Hope without expectation, is how Dana puts it at one point, in just one clip from a rich collection of archive footage that’s weaved around the new interviews.
We also hear plenty from celebrity friends of Reeve including Susan Sarandon and Glenn Close, and there are many clips of Robin Williams, who the family would call on to cheer Christopher up in the darker moments after the accident. Theirs was clearly a deep friendship, and Close mentions that she thought Williams ‘would still be alive’ if Reeve had not died.
All told, this is the kind of documentary that’ll leave you feeling better about humanity than you did before but, fair warning, it’s also likely to bring tears in the second half. (104 minutes)
Emilia Pérez
Zoe Saldana stars in an audacious musical crime drama with 11 Bafta nominations
Year: 2024
Certificate: 15
When a fearsome cartel boss contacts defence lawyer Rita (Zoe Saldana), she can only guess at what he wants. None of her suppositions come close to the truth though: that the mobster wants to transition to become a woman and start a new life away from crime.
Stylish and violent, operatic and musical, this is a whirling, enthralling amalgam of tones and situations. Saldana is fantastic as Rita but she’s matched almost every step of the way by trans actress Karla Sofía Gascón as the mob boss, Selena Gomez as their blonde bombshell wife and Adriana Paz as a battered woman swept up into the madness of the story.
It’s far from easygoing – swerving from crime drama to musical and back again in a heartbeat – but it is hugely rewarding. All four leads are clearly hot awards contenders, and the film as a whole has 11 Bafta nominations, placing it second after Conclave (which has 12). (132 minutes)
Kneecap
Bafta-nominated, Belfast-set musical comedy about an Irish-language rap group
Year: 2024
Certificate: 18
Imagine The Commitments but played out against a simmering backdrop of sectarian violence in Northern Ireland. Oh, and with Irish-language rap music switched in instead of soul. That’s pretty much what Kneecap offers as it tells the somewhat fictionalised story of the formation of a real-life Irish hip-hop trio in the late 2010s.
Bright and vibrant, saucy and riotously silly, Kneecap is an exuberant low-budget lump of fun. The lead roles are mostly played by the members of the group – all of whom do an excellent job despite a lack of acting experience – but the supporting cast is fleshed out by more established faces. Not least a certain Michael Fassbender who plays singer Naoise’s former republican paramilitary dad, still living his life on the run from the authorities decades after the ceasefire. It’s little wonder that it’s secured a Bafta nomination and, if you’re watching this year’s nominees and have a Prime subscription, Love Lies Bleeding is part of that, too. See where to watch this rest of the nominated films with our on demand guide here. (105 minutes)
The Lost Women Spies
Gripping docudrama about British female spies in World War Two
Year: 2025
During the Second World War, many British female agents served on the front line because they could blend into local life more easily. However, it was also illegal under British law for them to serve in such a way and, as a result, they had no protection under the Geneva Conventions should they be caught. A lot of them went missing during their service and the woman who was in charge, Vera Atkins, was determined to find out what happened.
In theory all this should have been deeply secret but Vera kept her files and, in the year 2000, boxes of them were found in a shed in Cornwall. This documentary from the makers of U-Boat Wargamers is partly the result of that, and uses a neat blend of historians and dramatic reconstruction to weave the story of Vera and her agents over the course of six episodes. The risks these women were taking seem all the more astonishing when you realise how little protection they had. The agents make for fascinating characters – some may well be familiar, such as Noor Inayat Khan, codename Madeleine. (Six episodes)
Rachel Parris: Poise
A mix of musical numbers, political satire and musings on turning 40 from The Mash Report star
Year: 2024
Rachel Parris came to prominence on The Mash Report but she’s been around for years, as part of the hit improv stage show Austentatious, acting on TV comedies and as a musical comedian in her own right. She’s about to turn 40 in her 90-minute show Poise, the starting point for which is that Parris is now all the things she thought she’d never be – a wife, a mother and, perhaps most extraordinarily in these times, a homeowner.
As such, a thread in this show is finding herself – but Poise is about as far from milennial naval-gazing as you can get. Parris is a confident and undeniable onstage presence, a comic who has masterered the fine line between self-deprecation and controlling a room as she takes us on a tour of her current anxieties and such absurd situations as being asked to be a brand ambassador for the sex toy site Lovehoney.
The show involves plenty of songs, including an audience singalong in which Parris’s music teacher background becomes very clear indeed; there as also several razor-toothed excursions into politics. She has a particular point of view here and, even if you don’t agree with her, she’s so pointedly hilarious in her manner of expression that it doesn’t really matter. Rachel Parris is a woman of many facets in short, and it seems likely she’ll just get deeper, more interesting and more funny, with every passing future show. (93 minutes)
Geoff Norcott: Basic Bloke
The comedian delivers a one-hour set on middle age and motorway service stations
Year: 2024
Geoff Norcott, a face familiar from TV panel shows, is absolutely in his element on the stand-up stage. In a one-hour show that feels relatable yet unpredictable, he goes deep on the town where he’s performing (‘Stevenage… It’s got everything that you need. And nothing that you want’), works the crowd to discuss everyone’s favourite motorway service stations and, as a man in his late forties, drills into the behaviours of the middle-aged man and the women who stick with them.
Norcott claims there only two traditional jokes in the whole show, but the laughs from the audience here are constant. The ‘Basic Bloke’ title is accurate in terms of describing his stage persona but not in terms of what he gives the audience across the hour, as he dives from memorable stories into largely insights that might give you something to talk about, after – along with the laughs they give you in the moment. It’s also worth noting that his ‘basic bloke’ is much kinder than your average male stand-up, which is a quality that shouldn’t be undervalued in comedy. (60 minutes)
Riviera
Julia Stiles in a glitzy and addictive Euro-thriller
Year: 2017-2020
Certificate: 15
A soapy, escapist crime drama set among in the elite in the French Riviera – what’s not to love about this three-series show that became one of Sky’s biggest hits? Originally created by the Oscar-winner Neil Jordan, who is generally known for heftier fare (The Crying Game, Michael Collins), he actually disowned the show after saying his darker scripts were reworked. It stars Julia Stiles as Georgina Marjorie Clios, a gorgeous American art curator and the second wife of philanthropic billionaire Constantine (Anthony LaPaglia). When Constantine dies in a mysterious yachting incident, Georgina becomes immersed into a world of lies and double dealing.
What follows is hours of glitzy and ridiculous fun that, in its final series, features the welcome addition of Rupert Graves as Gabriel Hirsch, an antiquities expert who crashes into Georgina’s life. Riviera is one of those shows that it’s easy to look down on, but it’s also just as easy to enjoy. (Three series)
Pennyworth: The Origins Of Batman’s Butler
Fantasy origin story for Batman’s butler, Alfred Pennyworth
Year: 2019-2022
Certificate: 15
The origin of Batman’s butler, Alfred Pennyworth, is explored in this US drama, starring Jack Bannon (who played Sam Thursday in Endeavour). Just out of the SAS, Alfred is haunted by nightmares and dreaming of a future as a ‘security consultant’.
His dad wants his son to be a butler, like him; Alfred wants to carve his own path, and does so in an alternate mid-20th-century London, where fascists are threatening to take over. He works in a nightclub, romances a dancer, Esme (Emma Corrin, Diana in The Crown), and steadily becomes drawn in to a simmering civil war that takes a major step up in season two. Look out for Batman’s future parents, Thomas Wayne and Martha Kane.
This is one to watch if you like stories about rough diamonds doing their best. Alfred is a gentleman at heart, but lethal when he needs to be, and Bannon plays him with the twang of a young Michael Caine and a dash of Bond. The script has a lot of nice one-liners which fuel that, and singer Paloma Faith gives a must-see performance as sociopathic fascist enforcer Bet Sykes. (Three series)
Harlots
Battle of the Georgian brothels, starring Samantha Morton
Year: 2017-2019
Certificate: 15
This drama series set in Georgian London is a filthy and decidedly modern take on how women who earned a living selling sex lived in 1760s London (one in five of them, we are told). The bawdy wordplay is a highlight, along with the cast – Samantha Morton as intelligent brothel owner and mother Margaret Wells, with Jessica Brown Findlay – Lady Sybil in Downton Abbey – as her daughter Charlotte, and Lesley Manville having enormous fun as her snooty rival, Lydia Quigley.
Over three consistently strong series we follow the rising and falling fortunes of these delightfully scandalous women. Series two introduces Liv Tyler as troubled aristocrat Lady Isabella Fitzwilliam, into whom Mrs Quigley has sunk her claws. And in the climactic third series, with Mrs Quigley confined to the mad house, the women face a threat from male pimps muscling in on their business. (Three series)
Alien: Romulus
The seventh film in the sci-fi horror franchise takes it back to basics
Year: 2024
Certificate: 15
While attempting to strip a seemingly abandoned and derelict space station for parts, a group of young space colonists find themselves facing attacks from the same creatures that destroyed the original Nostromo craft. Such is the plot of this Alien adventure and, while it may be the seventh movie in the franchise, it feels very much like a return to the glory gory days of the first film Alien and its original sequel Aliens. Chronologically, it’s actually set between the two.
As the scrappy workers battle the slimy, acid-blooded xenomorphs in the battered corridors of the space station, Evil Dead director Fede Álvarez successfully brings the visceral feel of stalker/slasher horror films back to the series, while Mare Of Easttown’s Cailee Spaeny makes a very capable lead, stepping confidently into the kick-ass heroine shoes of Sigourney Weaver. She’s surrounded by an excellent cast of rising actors, including David Jonsson (Industry, Rye Lane) and Archie Renaux (Shadow And Bone). (119 minutes)
An t-Eilean (The Island)
Lies, loss and long-buried secrets in Scotland’s western isles
Year: 2024
Certificate: 12
The most expensive Gaelic drama yet, though that’s not exactly a vast pool. This crime drama certainly makes the most of its beautiful location on Scotland’s western isles – lots of aerial shots of crystal-blue lochs, and untouched, verdant, heather-strewn heathland – as it weaves sinister secrets, lies and murder into the air surrounding a wealthy family on the island of Harris.
It opens with the murder of Lady Mary Maclean, shot dead by an intruder, her injured husband and self-made millionaire, Sir Douglas, at her side. He survives and the murder is a high-profile case, taken over by police from the larger nearby island of Lewis.
Accompanying the team from Lewis is PC Kat Crichton, a family liaison officer who was born on Harris. She has history with the Macleans, which she does not declare – and it’s not good. A few ominous flashbacks later and Kat’s connection to the family is revealed, at a fateful Hogmanay ten years earlier. Kat has good reason to deeply resent, if not hate, Sir Douglas.
He’s a domineering, controlling patriarch, and in the early stages at least, all roads point to Sir Douglas being the guilty party, or at least being the source of a lot of pain for his deeply dysfunctional family. Kat has an ally in his daughter Sine, and Sir Douglas’s three other grown-up children are all nursing their own wounds. (Four episodes)
Civil War
Alex Garland’s startling film about a US split down the middle
Year: 2024
Certificate: 15
Writer-director Alex Garland’s timely film imagines a US split down the centre, with the Western Forces of Texas and California embroiled in a vicious civil war against the rest of the states, and on the road to attack a White House occupied by an authoritarian president.
It’s a perilous time for people in general and the press in particular: ‘They shoot journalists on sight in the capital,’ we are told, in a film that follows just such a group (including Kirsten Dunst’s photographer) on a journey from New York City to Washington DC.
The movie is much quieter than you might expect, especially at the start. Its expertise lies in moments of tension between people, never more so than the encounter between the journalists and a gun-toting militiaman played by Jesse Plemons. ‘What kind of American are you?’ he asks them; a lot hangs on the answer.
Yet, despite the division in moments like that, the film is also much less obviously political than you’d expect, too – Garland’s aim is certainly not to alienate. (108 minutes)
Unstoppable (2025 film)
The true story of a one-legged college wrestling champion
Year: 2025
Certificate: 12
Inspirational is an overused term but it’s hard not to apply it to the story of Anthony Robles, a sportsman who defied being born with only one leg and overcame poverty and everyone’s disbelief to become one of the all-time greats of US college wrestling.
When They See Us’s Jharrel Jerome stars as Robles in this stirring sports biopic, giving a powerful and charismatic performance as the athlete who refused to let his lack of a limb hold him back or downgrade his ambitions to match other people’s doubts.
Jennifer Lopez is fantastic as his equally determined mother, heading a supporting cast that oozes quality, with Michael Peña, Bobby Cannavale and Don Cheadle all giving fine performances. The result is a classic punch-the-air-in-triumph underdog sports movie. (116 minutes)
Bad Boys: Ride Or Die
Will Smith and Martin Lawrence’s fourth outing as Miami cops
Year: 2024
Certificate: 15
When the reputation of their late former captain (Joe Pantoliano) is tarnished by allegations of corruption, Miami police detective Mike Lowrey (Will Smith) and his partner Marcus Burnett (Martin Lawrence) set out to clear their old friend’s name. Their investigation, though, takes them down a rabbit hole of corruption at the very highest levels of law enforcement. Soon, they and their families are in serious danger from a cabal of corrupt cops.
Coming four years after Bad Boys For Life and a staggering 29 years after the first film in the franchise, this fourth outing for Smith and Lawrence is as thrill-packed and fun-filled as ever. The series’s trademark over-the-top action sequences are still jaw-droppingly impressive and its use of music remains strong, but as always it’s the reliably believable buddy-buddy chemistry between Smith and Lawrence that brings the whole thing to life. (115 minutes)
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