From Tina Fey’s new relationship comedy to an action drama from the creator of Lost, and the return of Sarah Jessica Parker and co in the third season of the Sex and the City sequel.

Tine Fey stars in and co-created this comedy about three couples, long-time friends with enough disposable income to vacation together four times a year through different seasons. As in the 1981 film it is based on, everyone is rattled when one pair heads for divorce. Fey and Will Forte play one of the couples. Colman Domingo and Marco Calvani are another, a same-sex twist that is the most obvious update from ’81. And Steve Carell plays a man who is leaving his wife (Kerri Kenney-Silver) for a younger woman (Erika Henningsen), a timeless part of the plot. Fey has called the show “a love letter to long-term relationships, both platonic and romantic”, adding, “I hope audiences feel like they are inside a big sweater with us, and also having a dinner party with us.” So if you like dinner parties in chunky sweaters, this is the show for you.

The Four Seasons premieres 1 May on Netflix internationally

Star Natasha Lyonne and creator Rian Johnson (Knives Out) have brought their popular homage to the classic Peter Falk series Columbo, and 1970s television in general, back for a second season. Lyonne stars as Charlie Cale, who has an incredible knack for running across murders, scoping out who’s telling the truth and who’s lying, and solving the case by the end of the episode. Now on the run from a different crime boss than in the first season, Charlie is still on the road, travelling to a different place in every episode, each featuring a slew of guest stars. This time they include Cynthia Erivo, Awkwafina, Giancarlo Esposito, Kumail Nanjiani, John Mulaney, Katie Holmes and about two dozen others, as Charlie stumbles across trouble at a funeral home, a baseball game and an alligator farm. Running through it all are Lyonne’s trademark sardonic delivery and the series’s fast-paced retro feel. 

Poker Face premieres 8 May on Peacock in the US and Sky Max and NOW in the UK

Judy Blume’s 1975 YA novel about first love is reimagined with an update in this series set in Los Angeles in 2018, with a cast largely composed of black actors. High school students Keisha (Lovie Simone), a track star, and Justin (Michael Cooper Jr), a basketball player, are childhood friends who lost touch. When they meet again at a party and fall in love, they face all the intense feelings and decisions that brings. Over the years, Blume’s novel has been banned in several US states for the direct way its characters confront the question of when to have their first sexual experience (Blume’s honesty is exactly what many fans like about her) and the issue needed a new lens for the 21st Century. But the series’ showrunner, Mara Brock Akil, has also leant into the timeless theme of romance, and the Los Angeles setting feeds into it. “What better metaphor for this love story than what LA represents,” she has said. “You’re looking for a place to follow your dreams, and love is a part of that.”

Forever premieres 8 May on Netflix internationally

Retro television is having a moment with Poker Face and this action drama set in 1972 in the Southwest US. JJ Abrams is an executive producer and, along with LaToya Morgan, wrote the first two episodes of the series, which stars Josh Holloway, still best known as Sawyer from Abrams’s Lost, as a swaggering driver for a crime syndicate. Rachel Hilson plays the first black female FBI agent, who chases him down, with Keith David as the syndicate’s boss. In addition to the cat-and-mouse crime story and possibly wavering loyalties, Duster has knife fights, cars flipping over and dust all around. Abrams told The Hollywood Reporter that the series came about because “I had this image of a phone booth in the middle of the desert and a car driving up, and a guy getting on the phone to find out where he was meant to go next”.  That turned into a show that he calls “a crazy story” with humour, absurdity and lots of plot turns.

Duster premieres 15 May on Max in the US

Television is full of sci-fi series, but this one has a comic twist and Alexander Skarsgård, as a robot who manages to hack his own system and go rogue. “I am a security unit,” he announces in his cheery voiceover. “I was built to protect and obey humans. And humans are idiots.” Chris and Paul Weitz (About a Boy) created the show, based on Martha Wells’ series of books, The Murderbot Diaries, and have given it a Blade Runner-meets-Black Mirror style. Although the title robot calls himself Murderbot, he doesn’t really want to kill anyone. He prefers sitting around bingeing his favourite show, The Rise and Fall of Sanctuary Moon, a series-within-the-series with John Cho and Jack McBrayer playing the leads. When he lands on a new planet, his social awkwardness creates a very human problem, which makes him, Skarsgård told Empire magazine, “more relatable than most characters I’ve ever played”. Of course, he has played Tarzan and a vampire, so relatable is a relative thing.

Murderbot premieres 16 May on Apple TV+ internationally

Nicole Kidman and her collection of improbable wigs – see The Undoing or The Perfect Couple – are now television mainstays. In season two of this series based on a Liane Moriarty novel, she returns as psychedelic-dispensing wellness guru Masha Dmitrichenko, still Russian-accented but now with a pin-straight bob instead of a waist-length mop of waves. She has also relocated her week-long retreat from sunny California to the snowy Austrian Alps, where another crop of troubled, privileged characters turn up – like The White Lotus but with a cult-like, possibly charlatan therapist. As Kidman told Vanity Fair about Masha, “She morphs. She adapts.” New characters are played by another starry cast, including Henry Golding, Christine Baranski, Mark Strong, Lena Olin and Murray Bartlett. Let the wig-games begin. Vulture has even ranked them.

Nine Perfect Strangers premieres 21 May on Hulu in the US and 22 May on Amazon Prime Video in the UK

Julianne Moore and Meghann Fahy star in this dark comedy about power, class and control, set over one weekend on a wealthy resort island. Moore plays Michaela, a philanthropist and animal activist who is also iron-fisted in her control of island society. Her personal assistant, Simone (Milly Alcock, who played the younger Rhaenyra Targaryen in House of the Dragons), is so in thrall to her that Simone’s sister, Devon, (Fahy) comes to the island to stage an intervention. Kevin Bacon plays Michaela’s billionaire husband, with Glenn Howerton and Bill Camp among the supporting cast. The series was created by Molly Smith Metzler, who also created the hit Netflix series Maid. She based Sirens on her 2011 play Elemeno Pea, and has said that the show has “a Greek mythology vibe”, presumably because Michaela sends out such a siren’s call to Simone. But details are scarce, so for all we know this siren, as in mythology, could turn out to be half bird. Fully human or not, Moore is always worth watching.

Sirens premieres 22 May on Netflix internationally

Matthew Goode stars in this crime thriller, the latest show from Scott Frank, the creator of terrific series including The Queen’s Gambit and Monsieur Spade. The hero, Carl Morck (Goode), is an abrasive detective in Edinburgh whose partner has been paralyzed on the job, sending him into a tailspin and landing him a low-profile role as head of a new cold-case unit called Department Q. Headquartered in a basement, his unit of misfits is meant to be no more than a publicity move for the police – but as in Slow Horses, the band of outcasts is smarter than their prized colleagues. Frank based the show on a series of Danish novels and changed the setting to Edinburgh, where it was shot. Meanwhile, Morck has been made into an Englishman, a fish out of water whose ex-wife is Scottish, which accounts for his very bad attitude toward all Scots. The top-flight cast includes Kelly Macdonald and Shirley Henderson.

Dept Q premieres 29 May on Netflix internationally

An unlikely family tangle is beneath the plot of this thriller with Jessica Biel and Elizabeth Banks as estranged sisters who have very different lives. Biel plays Chloe, a polished media executive who lives in upscale comfort with her lawyer husband (Corey Stoll) and teenage son. Banks plays Nicky, a recovering addict who is struggling financially. When someone in the family is murdered, the death and their old sibling rivalry converge, as the sisters come together to find the truth of what happened. Lorraine Toussaint, Matthew Modine and Gloria Reuben are also in the cast. Olivia Milch, who co-created the show with Regina Corrado (based on a 2019 novel by Alafair Burke) told Glamour that the question of which sister is better “changes moment to moment”, which sounds just right for a thriller.

The Better Sister premieres 29 May on Prime Video internationally

As she ambles into her next chapter in life, nearly 30 years after Sex and the City premiered, Carrie Bradshaw (Sarah Jessica Parker) still has great shoes, as seen in the trailer for the third season of this sequel series. The new season puts her where the last one ended, in a new apartment and trying a long-distance relationship with Aiden (John Corbett). But Carrie is now writing a novel, instead of the personal column she used to write. As always, Charlotte (Kristin Davis) and Miranda (Cynthia Nixon) have their own issues. Sarita Choudhury and Nicole Ari Parker return as recently-acquired core friends Seema and Lisa, while Rosie O’Donnell and Patti LuPone appear as brand new characters. The show has inspired long-loyal, opinionated fans, who will want to know whether or not two old favourites are missing: Che Diaz (Sarah Ramirez), Miranda’s former partner who was a love-them or hate-them character, and Kim Cattrall, whose phoned-in cameo as Samantha last season – really, she was shown in a car on the phone for a minute – was a fizzle.

And Just Like That… premieres 29 May on Max in the US and Sky Max and NOW in the UK