Netflix, Prime Video, Disney+, Apple TV+: 10 of the best new shows to watch in October

It’s 1979, and the eyes of the world are on Perth as the Australian city prepares to host the Miss Universe beauty pageant. (Such things were quite popular in those days.) But a power strike threatens to plunge the region into a blackout – not good for viewership figures – and there’s an even bigger disaster on the horizon: the Skylab space station is about to crash to earth close to the city. This retro dramedy series focuses on three families living through these seismic changes. Will their relationships withstand the pressure in these apparent end times? Or will the sky fall on their heads? And will Miss Universe go ahead? Radha Mitchell, Jesse Spencer and Deborah Mailman head the ensemble cast, along with Iain Glen from Game of Thrones.
We’re back at school for a third series of Heartstopper, and those beating hearts just won’t stay still for a second. The series centres on the blossoming relationship between Charlie (Joe Locke) and Nick (Kit Conner), students at Truham Grammar School. As the new series begins, the summer holidays are coming to an end, and the new school year will bring lots of challenges – not all of them academic. Charlie is ready to declare his love for Nick, while Nick is starting to get a greater understanding of Charlie’s mental-health issues. As Charlie, Nick and the rest of the Heartstopper gang grow older, it’s starting to dawn on them that they’re going to have to be more mature in their choices and behaviour.
Gael García Bernal and Diego Luna first starred together in the Alfonso Cuarón film Y Tú Mamá También. The lifelong friends reunited on screen in this Spanish-language series about a fading boxer and his manager, who are seeking one last shot at glory. García Bernal plays Esteban “La Máquina” Osuna, whose career in the ring and personal life are both in the doldrums, and whose mental faculties are beginning to falter. His best friend, Andy Lujan (Luna), reckons he can help Osuna get back on top, but it’s going to take a lot of work to get the Machine back in fighting form, and it’s going to take a lot of luck to deal with the shadowy forces running Mexico’s boxing world.
The action-espionage series Citadel, starring Priyanka Chopra Jonas and Stanley Tucci, has become one of Prime Video’s most-watched series, and a second series is in production. For impatient fans, here is its first international spin-off, set in Italy and starring Matilda de Angelis as Diana Cavalieri, an undercover agent for the Citadel spy agency, who has infiltrated the evil Manticore syndicate. But when Citadel is destroyed by Manticore, Diana suddenly finds herself alone and vulnerable behind enemy lines, and must find a way to disappear before her cover is blown and she is disappeared.
“Any resemblance to persons living or dead is not a coincidence” the tagline goes for this seven-part psychological thriller starring Cate Blanchett, Kevin Kline, Sacha Baron Cohen and Lesley Manville, and written and directed by Alfonso Cuarón. Blanchett plays the crusading journalist Catherine Ravenscroft, whose talent for exposing wrongdoing and misdeeds has earned her acclaim and respect. But when she receives a copy of a new novel, The Perfect Stranger, she is shocked to discover that she’s the main character – and she’s not exactly the heroine. All the sins and transgressions from her past that she has worked hard to hide are there in black and white, and now she has to find out who is the mystery author who knows all her darkest, most intimate secrets before he destroys her and the life she has built with her husband, Robert (Cohen), and son, Nicholas (Kodi Smit-McPhee).
The iconoclastic lawyer Mickey Haller is back in driving seat in the third series of the drama based on the bestselling crime novels by Michael Connelly. Some things never change – Haller is still using the back seat of his Lincoln as an office, and he’s still getting up the wrong people’s noses – but in this series he’s on a personal crusade to bring the killer of his client Gloria Dayton, aka Glory Days, to justice. As his team begins investigating, however, it becomes clear that there’s a wider conspiracy going on – and an ever-increasing threat to Haller’s life. It’s based on the fifth novel in Connelly’s Lincoln Lawyer series, The Gods of Guilt.
We’ve been waiting with fevered anticipation for the classic Jilly Cooper bonkbuster to come to our screens, and finally it’s here, starring David Tennant, Aidan Turner, Danny Dyer, Katherine Parkinson, Alex Hassell, Emily Atack, Nafessa Williams and Victoria Smurfit in a story set in the world of independent television in the 1980s. Turner plays the smoothie TV presenter Declan O’Hara, who is recruited by a crooked TV mogul, Lord Baddingham (Tennant), to work at his ailing Corinium television studios. With Baddingham locked in a deadly rivalry with the oily showjumper turned Tory MP Rupert Campbell-Black (Hassell), the scene is set for a saucy romp in the Cotswolds, as Campbell-Black sets his eye on O’Hara’s gorgeous daughter Taggie (Bella Maclean), and Baddingham sets his sights on winning the battle to retain control of Corinium. This is the second in Cooper’s Rutshire Chronicles series (the first one is Riders, set in the horsey world of showjumping), so Disney would be mad not to mine this rich seam of steamy material for future TV series.
Welcome to the offices of Flinley Craddick, in the latest international iteration of the hit TV mockumentary created by Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant. The packaging company is an Australian cousin of Dunder Mifflin, and if you’re wondering what David Brent would be like if he were a woman and from Down Under, meet Flinley Craddick’s managing director, Hannah Howard, played to the cringey hilt by the comedian and actor Felicity Ward. When Hannah learns from head office that her branch is to be shut down and her staff will be working from home, she makes it her crusade to keep everyone coming in to the office. Surely no one would prefer working from home to spending the day in her scintillating company?
Jessica Raine and Peter Capaldi go head to head once more in the second series of this nightmarish, time-twisting and mind-melting psychological thriller – which is a good thing, as series one ended on a huge cliffhanger and left so many questions unanswered. You can be sure series two will pile on more puzzles and conundrums to keep you awake at night. As series two begins, Lucy (Raine) is living a double life – literally – and having difficulty keeping a grip on these divergent realities. She teams up with mysterious criminal Gideon (Capaldi), a man who can “remember” the future, in the hope of preventing a tragedy from recurring.
If you think being a diplomat is just an endless round of cocktail parties and state banquets, spare a thought for Kate Wyler, whose posting as US ambassador to Britain has given her enough excitement and danger to last a lifetime. Still, Kate is back for more in series two, and she’s got a seemingly insurmountable task: proving that it’s Britain’s own prime minister and not a rogue nation who is behind the deadly attacks on London that brought her to the job in the first place. Keri Russell returns as Kate, with Rufus Sewell as her husband, Hal, who was almost killed in the explosion at the end of series one, and who is now her only ally in a world where no one can be trusted.