Eleven of the best TV shows to watch this November

From a small-screen spinoff of the Denis Villeneuve Dune films to the return of Sharon Horgan’s Bad Sisters, these are the shows to stream this month.

Casting is the biggest lure in this action thriller, with Eddie Redmayne as an assassin-for-hire, code-named Jackal. The character first appeared in Frederick Forsyth’s 1971 novel, which became a 1973 film with Edward Fox, but the story has been updated to the present.

Now Lashana Lynch is Bianca, an MI6 agent determined to catch the Jackal. “I will find him and kill him myself,” she tells her sceptical bosses. He varies his look with disguises, eluding her as she chases him across Europe amid explosions and shootouts. Redmayne is known for more sympathetic roles, like Stephen Hawking in The Theory of Everything, but he has said that playing this villain was part of the series’ appeal.

“They have a really complex moral compass and do horrendous things, but are also extraordinarily talented,” Redmayne told Vanity Fair about The Jackal and Bianca. “You’re drawn to them and repelled by them in equal measure.” Charles Dance and Richard Dormer also feature in the show, which was created by Ronan Bennett (Top Boy).

The Day of the Jackal premieres 7 November on Sky Atlantic and NOW in the UK and 14 November on Peacock in the US

This show about sisters and murder in Dublin won the 2023 Bafta for best drama series, but it is also a delicious dark comedy. In this second season the five Garvey sisters can’t avoid more fallout from the past, when Grace (Anne-Marie Duff) killed her abusive husband, and her siblings helped cover it up.

Now Grace marries a new love, apparently borrowed from Sandra Oh because he is played by Owen McDonnell, Oh’s husband on Killing Eve. Sharon Horgan, who also created Bad Sisters, plays the responsible Eva, with Eve Hewson as the freewheeling baby of the family, Becka, Sarah Green as Bibi, and Eva Birthistle as Ursula, a nurse whose skills are handy because people around that family tend to need medical help.

Two terrific new cast additions include Fiona Shaw as a nosy neighbour and Thaddea Graham as a smart, underestimated young detective who has her suspicions about the Garveys. The plot often hinges on near-escape – how many times can the sisters narrowly avoid being locked up? – and it is great fun to watch them try.

Bad Sisters premieres 13 November on Apple TV+ internationally

Patrick Raden Keefe’s 2018 non-fiction book about the Troubles in 1970s Northern Ireland was compelling because of its strong narrative and focus on characters, which makes it a natural source for this fact-based drama. The story begins when Jean McConville, a suspected member of the Irish Republican Army, is abducted. The series then takes us inside the IRA.

Lola Pettigrew plays the central character, Dolours Price, who along with her sister, Marian (Hazel Doupe), was imprisoned for setting off a car bomb in London in 1973. Maxine Peake plays an older version of Dolours, who told her own story later in life (the centrepiece of the 2018 documentary I, Dolours) and who died in 2013.

Anthony Boyle (Masters of the Air) plays the IRA strategist Brendan Hughes, and Josh Finan is Gerry Adams, the best known of the real-life characters, who was instrumental in the Good Friday peace agreement of 1998 and has always denied an association with the IRA. The show may be historical, but its theme of political violence is resonant and timely.

Say Nothing premieres 14 November on Disney + in the UK and Hulu in the US

Nothing says confidence more than renewing a show for a second season before the first has even premiered, which is the case with this crime series based on James Patterson’s Alex Cross novels. (The earliest was published in 1993 and the most recent just last year.) Aldis Hodge, who has shown intensity and charisma in smaller roles in One Night in Miami and The Invisible Man, stars as Cross, a police detective and forensic psychologist in Washington DC, on the trail of a serial killer.

John Sampson (Isaiah Mustafa), his best friend and partner on the force, is by his side as the widowed Cross grapples with the psychological fallout from his job while raising two small children.

The Cross novels have already been adapted into three films, with Morgan Freeman starring in two sturdy ones, Kiss the Girls (1997) and Along Came a Spider (2001) and Tyler Perry in a flop, Alex Cross (2012). Still, the odds favour a success, and a breakout for Hodge.

Cross premieres 14 November on Amazon Prime internationally

One of the most intriguing aspects of Denis Villeneuve’s Dune films is the Bene Gesserit, the religious order of women who have developed supernatural powers. Lady Jessica (Rebecca Ferguson), mother of Paul Atreides (Timothée Chalamet) is a member.

This spinoff takes place in the same Dune universe, and tells the origin story of the Bene Gesserit. Emily Watson stars as Valya Harkonnen and Olivia Williams as her sister, Tula, founders of the order.

“We like to say this show is set 10,000 years BC, meaning ‘Before Chalamet’,” Watson told Empire magazine. Mark Strong plays Emperor Javicco Corrino, ruler of the Imperium. The show, one of the season’s most anticipated, has a built-in Dune audience.

But Jessica Barden, who plays the younger Valya, tells Den of Geek that the series may undercut movie viewers’ expectations that the Harkonnens are evil. “Is this a villain?” she asks. Or, “Is this just a regular young person who has a thing she wants to avenge in the way we all do sometimes?” One thing that hasn’t changed is the landscape. There is a lot, a lot of sand.

Dune: Prophecy premieres 17 November on HBO and Max in the US and 18 November on Sky Atlantic and NOW in the UK

It seems like a strange Venn diagram, where roughhewn Billy Bob Thornton and suave Jon Hamm land in the same series, but here it is, part of the ever-expanding Taylor Sheridan universe. Unlike Sheridan’s biggest hit, Yellowstone, this one is not set on a ranch but in the oil fields of Texas, with Thornton as Tommy Norris, a crisis manager for an oil company, and Hamm as Monty Miller, an oil baron.

The men and their families have history. The cast also includes Andy Garcia, Ali Larter and Demi Moore, who plays Monty’s wife, Cami.

The show was created by Sheridan and Christian Wallace, host of the 2019 podcast Boomtown, which inspired the series. Official descriptions are not usually worth repeating, but this one, echoing the podcast’s, is too grandiose to ignore.

Paramount says Landman is “an upstairs/downstairs story of roughnecks and wildcat billionaires fuelling a boom so big it’s reshaping our climate, our economy, our geopolitics.” Also, it’s a soap opera.

Landman premieres on 17 November on Paramount+ in the US and 18 November in the UK

The standup and actor Jimmy O Yang (Silicon Valley) stars in this action dramedy as Willis Wu, an actor playing a small part in a Law and Order-style crime series called Black & White, a show within this deliberately head-spinning series.

Charles Yu adapted Interior Chinatown from his 2020 novel, which is written in the form of a television script, and wittily tackles issues of Asian stereotypes and representation. Willis, unable to break out of small background roles like a waiter in a Chinese restaurant, says in the trailer, with good reason,

“I feel like I’m a background character in someone else’s story.” Things change when Detective Lana Lee (Chloe Bennet) recruits him to help investigate a crime because he knows Los Angeles’ Chinatown, a twist that might lead him to his missing brother, who vanished 12 years before.

Ronny Chieng (The Daily Show and Crazy Rich Asians) effectively delivers his comic lines as Willis’s best friend, Fatty Choi. Taika Waititi, an executive producer of the show, also directed the first episode.

Interior Chinatown premieres 19 November on Hulu in the US

Ted Danson, a master of the sitcom from Cheers in the 1980s to, more recently, The Good Place, stars in another, a role that would seem preposterous if it weren’t also true. A Man on the Inside is based on the 2020 Chilean documentary The Mole Agent, which won the Oscar for best international film, about a man who goes undercover at a nursing home to investigate possible abuses.

Danson plays Charles, a retired widower in San Francisco with time on his hands, who answers an ad looking for a spy. Stephanie Beatriz plays the manager of the home Charles infiltrates, and Stephen McKinley Henderson and Sally Struthers play residents.

The show was created by Mike Schur, known for sophisticated sitcoms including The Good Place, Brooklyn 99 and Parks and Recreation. The combination of Danson and Schur makes this fictional version of the real story sound especially promising.

A Man on the Inside premieres 21 November on Netflix internationally

The Jamaican-born novelist Marlon James, whose books include the Booker Prize winner A Brief History of Seven Killings (2014) and the Africa-set fantasy Black Leopard, Red Wolf (2019) created this crime series, with a setting close to home. Tamara Lawrance (The Long Song, Time), plays Millie Black, a detective formerly with Scotland Yard, who returns home to Jamaica to work for the Kingston police.

(James’s parents were both police detectives.) She and her partner, Curtis (Gershwyn Eustache Jnr), are soon embroiled in a disturbing missing person’s case. Joe Dempsie (Gendry Baratheon on Game of Thrones) plays Luke Holborn, sent from Scotland Yard to investigate a case that may overlap with hers.

“This is just another story about Jamaica,” Millie says in the trailer “but like every story about this country, this is a ghost story” – a hint at the way James layers social awareness over crime-solving.

Get Millie Black premieres 25 November on HBO and Max in the US and 2025 on Channel 4 in the UK

Colman Domingo, often seen on the Oscar campaign trail these days, (last year’s Rustin, which earned him a nomination, and this year’s Sing Sing) stars in this topical thriller as a television pundit, Muncie Daniels, who finds himself in the midst of a conspiracy.

He stumbles across a dead body in the woods, which turns out to be the corpse of a white supremacist and Muncie is framed for the murder.

His trajectory takes him from looking polished on television to hiding at night in a body of water reaching up to his neck.

“It was a unique protagonist,” Domingo has said of the role, adding cryptically that Muncie is “someone who has centrist beliefs, and now they’re being thrust into the world to really hard-core believe in something, and to reexamine the people that they believed were possible enemies.” He also added, “We do live in a very mad, mad world right now.”

The Madness premieres 28 November on Netflix internationally

Michael Fassbender stars in this thriller based on the great, globally popular French series The Bureau. He plays a CIA agent, Martian, a version of the character played by Matthieu Kassovitz in the original. After spending years undercover, Martian has now been reassigned to the London Station, but carries the baggage from all that time living under a false identity, as he resists the company psychologist, reengages with a former love and grapples with a new global threat.

In addition to Fassbender, there are other big names all around. Richard Gere plays Martian’s boss and Jodie Turner-Smith is his ex-lover, along with Jeffrey Wright, John Magaro and Katherine Waterston.

The show was written by the playwright Jez Butterworth and his brother John-Henry Butterworth, who together have worked on films including Edge of Tomorrow and Ford v Ferrari. And Joe Wright (Darkest Hour) directed the first two episodes. If The Agency resembles The Bureau, it will be endlessly taut and suspenseful.

The Agency premieres 29 November on Paramount+ with Showtime internationally

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