The Guide #119: Every show, film and album we’re looking forward to in 2024
Up! It’s time to rouse yourself from that four-day festive food coma, and contend with the fact that 2024 is almost here. I don’t like it, you don’t like it, but we have to get on with it.
To help, here’s the Guide’s annual year-ahead preview, full of the TV, movies and music you should be getting excited about for next year. I’ve tried to stick to things that I know, or am at least fairly confident, are arriving – no mad stabs on a possible new My Bloody Valentine album this time around – but still, a few of the below are somewhat TBC.
Next week normal newsletter service will resume, with our Take 5 picks and You Be the Guide returning. See you on the other side!
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TV
True Detective: Night Country15 Jan, Sky/Nowin the UK; 14 Jan, Max (US); 15 Jan, Binge (Aus)Kicking off a highlights of the year list with the fourth season of a show lots of people wrote off long ago might not be the most confidenceinspiring move, but there are enough promising signs to suggest that True Detective’s return may be a triumphant one. For a start, creator Nic Pizzolato, who drove the show into the ground in the second and third seasons, is being kept at arm’s length this time: instead, Mexican film-maker Issa López has taken on writing and directing duties with Barry “Moonlight” Jenkins execproducing. And it stars Jodie Foster, in her first major TV role. Meanwhile, the premier suggests a return to the rugged landscapes and occult-tinged horror of season one: it’s set in remote Alaska, where the bodies of eight people have been discovered at a research institute. See? Now you’re intrigued.
Masters of the Air26 Jan, Apple TV + globallyEven in an age of stretchedout series, of shows that take years to make it to the air, we have been waiting for this spiritual sequel to Band of Brothers and The Pacific for a very long time. 2013 was when the Spielberg and Hanks-produced drama about the “Bloody Hundredth” US air force unit first went into development at HBO, before Apple TV+ announced that it had spirited it away in 2019. Since then both Covid and the mammoth scale of its production have held the show up but it’s finally ready. Like Band of Brothers before it, Masters of the Air’s cast is stuffed with the next generation of acting talent, although the show’s long gestation has meant that some of its ‘next big things’ have become ‘big things’ already. Austin “Elvis” Butler, Barry Keoghan and the Doctor himself, Ncuti Gatwa, all feature.
3 Body Problem21 Mar, Netflix globallyLooking for something to fill that Game of Thrones-shaped hole?
Well, there’s the new season of House of the Dragon coming in 2024 – though in truth the further I get away from season one, the less impressive it seems. Didn’t really amount to much more than an interchangeable cycle of platinum blond twentysomethings shouting at each other in big castles. So instead, let’s opt for another show that could just about be classed as Thrones-affiliated. Based on Liu Cixin’s much-loved sci-fi novel about an encounter with an alien civilisation, it marks the return of David Benioff and DB Weiss, the showrunners who made Game of Thrones so great in the first place (before, admittedly, burning the whole thing down in its final season). Expect something potentially even more enormous here, spanning centuries and galaxies.The WaySpring, BBC One/iPlayer in the UK; US and Aus TBCThis three-part drama is notable enough for its premise alone – a family contends with a sudden spasm of social unrest in their small south Wales town. But what really has our interest piqued is the trio behind it: actor/ master orator Michael Sheen; playwright/writer James Graham (Brexit: The Uncivil War, Sherwood); and most bewildering of all Adam Curtis, everyone’s favourite psychedelic state-ofthe-world video essayist. Quite what these three will cook up is anyone’s guess, but it should be a major plank in what looks set to be a big year for British TV, with Joe Barton’s Netflix thriller Black Doves starring Keira Knightley, Jed Mercurio’s Covid drama Breathtaking and Sally Wainwright’s Disney effort Renegade Nell all on the way too.
SeveranceTBA, Apple TV+OK so this one is on the list in hope, rather than as a cast-iron guarantee of its arriving in the next 12 months. But Ben Stiller’s workplace sci-fi, about office employees who have had their brains bifurcated so work and play time are kept separate, has been off our screens since spring 2022, so it’s fair to be a little impatient. Especially given its first season ended with one of the greatest finales in recent memory, ladling on big revelation after revelation before ending with a cliffhanger even Sly Stallone would balk at. When it returns it will do so with Gwendoline Christie, Bob Balaban and Alia Shawkat added to a cast that was already stacked to begin with (Adam Scott, Patricia Arquette, Christopher Walken, John Turturro). Much-anticipated doesn’t even begin to cover it.
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Music
Kali Uchis – Orquídeas12 JanThe astonishing rise and rise of Latin pop shows few signs of slowing in 2024, and this Columbian American artist looks well placed to capitalise on that. Uchis’s last album, Red Moon in Venus, was an all-English language affair, full of slinky modern pop, soul and R&B. Now on this quick-turnaround follow-up (Red Moon in Venus only came out last March) she performs entirely in Spanish for the first time on an album. Musically the palate is different too, with lead track Labios Mordidos, a collaboration with Columbian star Karol G, seeing Uchis lean into sweaty reggaeton.
The Smile – Wall of Eyes26 Jan
Thanks to the now-standard policy of stars not announcing new albums until milliseconds before they come out, there’s a dearth of confirmed big releases for 2024. So thank heavens for Thom Yorke and Jonny Greenwood’s Radiohead side-project The Smile, who are back next month with album number two. Based on early noises it looks set to continue down the loose, warm, semi-improvised style of debut A Light for Attracting Attention, though over a slightly tighter eight tracks. Lead single Bending Hectic – a lovely, noodling jam that turns sharply into Paranoid Android style pyrotechnics – suggests very good things indeed.
The Last Dinner Party – Prelude to Ecstasy2 FebEven before releasing a single album, this London five-piece have experienced a career’s worth of drama. There was the initial hype –