What to Watch in January: 19 Notable TV Shows & Streaming Movies
The month ahead will bring new TV shows from noted film directors Rian Johnson, Nicolas Winding Refn, and Hirokazu Kore-eda, plus the first TV adaptation of hit video game The Last of Us, a new comedy from the creators of Ted Lasso, and more. In the gallery on this page, our editors have selected the most interesting TV and movie titles debuting at home in the next month, listed in order by premiere date.
Drama series debuts January 15 on HBO and HBO Max
The latest videogame franchise to make the jump to television (but the first such series for HBO), The Last of Us comes from Chernobyl creator Craig Mazin along with Neil Druckmann, the co-president of the game studio (Naughty Dog) that created the critically acclaimed PlayStation games. Retaining the post-apocalyptic setting and many of the characters from those games but expanding the story, the nine-episode series follows the smuggler Joel (played by The Mandalorian's Pedro Pascal) and Ellie, the orphaned teen girl in his care (Bella Ramsey, Game of Thrones) as they attempt to escape from a quarantine zone and travel across the remains of the United States two decades after human civilization has been mostly wiped out by a fungal pandemic.
Gabriel Luna, Anna Torv, Nick Offerman, Nico Parker, Murray Bartlett, and Melanie Lynskey also star, and some of them will be portraying new characters who were not in the games. (And a few voice actors from the game series, most notably Merle Dandrige, who plays Marlene, will also make the jump to the TV show.) Directors include Ali Abbasi (Holy Spider) and Jasmila Zbanic (Quo Vadis, Aida?) as well as Druckmann himself. HBO reportedly spent well over $100 million on the Canadian-filmed series, though you can probably pick up the games at Best Buy for far less.
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