Gladiators, Breathtaking with Joanne Froggatt, The Tourist: The biggest TV shows of 2024

The television we have got coming up in 2024 looks truly excellent, with fantastic shows coming to the BBC, ITV, Netflix, Prime Video and more. There are prequels, sequels, spin-offs and original stories galore, from intriguing mysteries to exciting crime action, wondrous fantasies and post-apocalyptic thrills.

Let’s take a sneak peek at the most anticipated series coming in 2024.

Fool Me Once

This kicked off on Netflix on New Year’s Day, providing a thrilling adaptation of the Harlan Coben novel of the same name. Starring Michelle Keegan, Joanna Lumley, Richard Armitage and Adeel Akhtar, the series follows Keegan’s character Maya who, after her sister and her husband were murdered in quick succession, sees her partner on her “nanny cam” and starts to question everything.

Fallout

Post-apocalyptic drama Fallout, based on the Bethesda video games, will land on Prime Video in April. Never Let Me Go star Ella Purnell plays protagonist Lucy, a “Vault Dweller” who has been raised in a secure underground fallout bunker after a nuclear war apocalypse. The video games earned legions of fans, so there are high hopes for this drama adaptation.

The Tourist

Jamie Dornan returns for series two of BBC One’s The Tourist, in which he plays a Northern Irish man who wakes up with amnesia in an Australian hospital and must chase clues to establish his identity. This new series brings fresh cast members and a new setting in Ireland, where Dornan’s Elliot tries to uncover more about his mysterious past, and promises lots of twists and turns along the way when it returns on New Year’s Day.

The Traitor

The fan-favourite game of truth and deception, The Traitors, is returning to BBC One for a second series today. Claudia Winkleman is back to host as contestants compete for a huge cash prize by working out who among them is Faithful and who is a Traitor – and it is likely to be a truly gripping watch.

Gladiators

In the 1990s, sports game show Gladiators was a family favourite. In 2024, it returns to BBC One with a whole new cast of super-strong Gladiators going head to head with contestants in athletic and physical tasks as Bradley Walsh and his son Barney host. The revival of the show, filming for which took place at the Utilita Arena in Sheffield, brings old-favourite games back to the screen along with some new, equally physically demanding inventions through which fitness-fanatic contestants battle it out against the uber-athletic Gladiators.

Playing Nice

Having wrapped up Happy Valley in 2023, James Norton will be back on our screens in a new role. Alongside Malpractice’s Niamh Algar, he stars in Playing Nice, an ITV series set in Cornwall following two couples who discover that their children were switched at birth. The four-part psychological thriller tells the story of the couples’ horrifying dilemma: do they keep the toddlers they love and have raised since infancy, or reclaim their biological child?

Love is Blind UK

The UK is finally getting its own version of hit reality series Love Is Blind, hosted by Emma and Matt Willis. The show follows singletons as they look for love and get engaged, all before they meet in person – instead dating in purpose-built “pods” which allow them to talk but not see each other. The UK version is on Netflix some time in 2024.

House of the Dragon

Game Of Thrones prequel House Of The Dragon caused a stir when it first came to Sky Atlantic and Now in 2022, telling the story of the Targaryens nearly 200 years before the events of Game Of Thrones. In 2024, cast members including Emma D’Arcy and Matt Smith will return for the anticipated second season, and while the plot has been kept under wraps, we are promised plenty of dragon action.

The Gentlemen

Coming to Netflix in 2024 is a series inspired by Guy Ritchie’s The Gentlemen, with Ritchie himself creator, co-writer and executive producer. Also titled The Gentlemen, the series stars The White Lotus 2’s Theo James as Eddie Horniman, who unexpectedly inherits his father’s sizeable estate only to discover that it is part of a cannabis empire.

Breathtaking

Naturally, the events of the Covid pandemic are still very much etched into our minds – especially for those who worked on the front line as the virus took hold and ground life as we knew it to a halt. Coming soon to ITV is a thought-provoking drama about the work of an NHS doctor in the eye of the storm during the early days of the pandemic. Based on the memoir of doctor Rachel Clarke, who also wrote the programme with Jed Mercurio and Prasanna Puwanarajah, the three-part drama will star North Yorkshire’s Joanne Froggatt as a frontline hospital consultant, showing the realities of life for healthcare workers during those unprecedented times.