The White Lotus to Zero Day: 11 of the best TV shows to watch this February

From the return of HBO's holiday-resort satire to a political thriller starring Robert De Niro and the latest violent period drama from Peaky Blinders creator Stephen Knight.

After Jane Austen died, in 1817, her sister, Cassandra, destroyed many of her letters, guarding her privacy and setting generations of Janeites' and scholars' hair on fire. Miss Austen, based on Gill Hornby's bestselling novel, imagines what might have been behind all that. The series is wonderfully cast, with Keeley Hawes as Cassandra. It begins years after Jane's death, when Cassandra visits Isabella Fowle (Rose Leslie),  the niece of her long-dead fiancé, with the secret purpose of trying to find letters from Jane that might be in the vicarage. In flashbacks, Synnove Karlsen is the younger Cassandra and Patsy Ferran the young Jane. Max Irons and Alfred Enoch are also in the cast, because an Austen story always needs romance. Hawes teased the show in an interview with the Guardian, saying: “It feels like a classic costume drama, in the vein of Colin Firth in Pride and Prejudice. Modern takes like Bridgerton are brilliant, but this feels like part of the Austen canon, so her fans will be pleased." The Austen industry is in overdrive this year, the 250th anniversary of her birth, but few projects are as tempting as this.

Miss Austen premieres 2 February on BBC in the UK and 4 May on PBS in the US

Kaitlyn Dever, who has been great at comedy (Booksmart) and drama (2019 miniseries Unbelievable), takes on a bit of both in this fictional version of a true story. She plays Belle Gibson, an Australian influencer and con woman, who falsely said she had brain cancer and was curing it with natural ingredients and lifestyle, turning that lie into a financial empire selling apps and cookbooks. The show goes beyond her to include four other women in her orbit. One of them is under her spell, another becomes a business rival. The series is set in the early 2010s, at the dawn of Instagram, and tackles the rise of social media influencers. You can guess at its appeal. The show seems to echo the Netflix hit Inventing Anna, with Julia Garner as Anna Delvey, who masqueraded as an heiress, and was convicted of grand larceny and theft of services for her cons.

Apple Cider Vinegar premieres 6 February on Netflix internationally

Laverne Cox stars in one of the last projects executive produced by the comedy legend Norman Lear, who died in 2023 at 101. She plays Desiree, a New York art gallery owner whose business collapses, and who returns home to Mobile, Alabama after 23 years away. Putting a new gender spin on some old sitcom tropes, the premise is that her father, Harry (comedian George Wallace), a car-wash owner she hasn't spoken to in all that time, has no idea that the child he thought of as his son has transitioned. Desiree moves into her old room, and the odd-couple, city-girl-in-a-small-town jokes begin, including one that has Harry putting money in a "Pronoun Jar" whenever he accidentally calls Desiree "son". Cox has been a staple of red carpet awards coverage lately. However this series turns out, it's probably time to remember how good she was in Orange is the New Black.

Clean Slate premieres 6 February on Amazon Prime

This drama about the decades-long aftershocks from a high-school soccer team's plane crash is another show returning after such a long gap, almost two years, that you need a refresher course before watching. Last season, as if being stranded in the woods and resorting to cannibalism when they were teenage girls wasn't enough, the adult versions of the characters faced life-or-death horror at the isolated location where Lottie (Simone Kessell) has formed a cult. As the adult Shauna (Melanie Lynskey, the show's anchor) says in the third season trailer, "Someone wants us dead". Whoever it is already got poor Natalie in season two. The back-and-forth in time continues, with the main cast returning, including Lauren Ambrose as the adult Van, and Liv Hewson as her younger self, Christina Ricci as adult Misty, always up to something suspicious, and Elijah Wood as Walter, her demented citizen-sleuth colleague. Hilary Swank makes some guest appearances in the present day timeline. All we know so far is that she is already drenched in blood.

Yellowjackets premieres 14 February on Paramount Plus with Showtime in the US and Paramount Plus in the UK

Season three of Mike White's mordant social satire is set at the White Lotus resort in Thailand, and now there are snakes and monkeys along with the usual emotional upheaval. Belinda (Natasha Rothwell), the spa manager at the Hawaii White Lotus in the first season, returns to take a training course at the new location. This time the guests include three old friends on a girls' trip, played by Carrie Coon, Michelle Monaghan and Leslie Bibb, along with Jason Isaacs and Parker Posey as a married couple. Lalisa Manobal, better known as Lisa from the South Korean group Blackpink, plays Mook, a health and wellness counsellor at the resort, where health and wellness are undoubtedly in short supply. 

The White Lotus premieres 16 February on HBO and Max in the US and 17 February on Sky Atlantic and Now in the UK

This political thriller starring Robert De Niro is intriguing and timely. When a cyberattack hits the US, causing devastation and deaths, former president George Mullen (De Niro) is called in to head a commission investigating the source, working against a barrage of problems and forces: big tech, Wall Street, rival political factions and a world of disinformation. Connie Britton plays Mullen's former chief of staff and Jesse Plemons is a former aide with political ambitions of his own. Joan Allen plays Mullen's wife, and Lizzy Caplan their daughter, a member of Congress. The plot deals with the slippery nature of truth itself. "That's the spine of my character in the show," De Niro has said. "Don't dodge anything. Don't play games. Be honest about what's going on so that the public knows what's going on." Angela Bassett plays the US president in casting that would have landed very differently if the US election had gone another way.

Zero Day premieres 20 February on Netflix internationally

In this animated family series from Pixar, eight members of a middle-school co-ed softball team, the Portland Pickles, are preparing for a championship game, with Will Forte as the voice of Coach Dan. Each episode focuses on a different character, from the school-age players to parents and coaches, and looks at their individual hopes, fears and insecurities, in a show whose message is to consider other people's points of view. There was recently a flutter of attention to the series for an extraneous reason, though, after word emerged that lines of dialogue identifying one character as transgender had been cut. Chanel Stewart, the 18-year-old trans actress who voices that character, told Deadline she was "very disheartened", and that "I was excited to share my journey to help empower other trans youth". In a statement, Disney said, "When it comes to animated content for a younger audience, we realize that many parents would prefer to discuss certain subjects with their children on their own terms and timeline."

Win or Lose premieres 19 February on Disney+

Steven Knight, the creator of Peaky Blinders, is right in his wheelhouse with another period piece about a criminal gang inspired by real-life stories, this time set in Victorian London and the world of illegal bare-knuckle boxing. Hezekiah (Malachi Kirby of Small Axe) and his friend Alec (Francis Lovehall, also of Small Axe) are Jamaicans who have come to London and who try to seek their fortunes as boxers. Hezekiah finds himself taken up and exploited by Mary Carr, the leader of the all-female band of robbers known as The Forty Elephants. Erin Doherty, who played Princess Anne as a young woman in The Crown, is far from that role as Carr. Stephen Graham stars as a boxer named Sugar Goodman, determined to defend his turf from the upstart Hezekiah. The stalwart Graham has played plenty of gritty characters, in Peaky Blinders and recently in Blitz, but had to bulk up for this role. "Five meals a day, loads of protein, ice baths, I became like a proper athlete," he told Empire.

A Thousand Blows premieres 21 February on Hulu in the US and Disney+ internationally

David Attenborough's nature documentaries have proven there is an apparently bottomless appetite for the genre. This variation stands apart because it has Tom Hanks narrating, with a sense of wonder. The series is an ambitious 10-part look at the Americas, with each episode focusing on a different area, ranging from Canada to Patagonia, the Atlantic coast to the Amazon. The production was epic, with 180 expeditions that took five years, making it what is likely the most expensive non-fiction show Universal Studios has ever done. Universal co-produced the show with the BBC, which also produces the Attenborough series. The music is composed by Oscar-winner Hans Zimmer, whose movie scores include Gladiator and Dune. But the soundtrack here also includes animal sounds, waves, and Hanks luring viewers in by saying, "A wandering salamander. To find a mate he sets out on an extraordinary journey."

The Americas premieres 23 February on NBC in the US and in 2025 on BBC One in the UK

As Taylor Sheridan's prequel to his mega-hit series Yellowstone returns, the presence of either Harrison Ford or Helen Mirren might be enough to make you want to watch, and despite the near-death of Ford's character in season one, this series still has both. They are back as Jacob and Cara Dutton, who are enduring an especially hard winter on that familiar Montana ranch, not to mention the threat from an evil land-baron played by Timothy Dalton. Meanwhile, their nephew Spencer (Brandon Sklenar), is heading back from his African safari to help out, and Spencer's wife, Alexandra (Julia Schlaepfer), an aristocrat from the UK, is trying to get across the Atlantic to her new home on the range (culture shock awaits). Ford growls in the teaser trailer, "This ranch is under attack. Our whole way of life is under attack," which is pretty much an all-purpose Dutton line, available to use in any Yellowstone iteration.

1923 premieres 23 February in the US and 24 February in the UK on Paramount+

Suits, which ran on cable channel USA Network from 2011 to 2019, turned out to be an ideal show to binge. When the series about a firm of high-powered New York lawyers landed on Netflix, it became one of the most streamed series of 2023. We may never know how much that had to do with one of its stars being Meghan Markle, now the Duchess of Sussex. We do know that she is not in this spinoff set on the opposite coast. Neither is the rest of that cast (so far), with the exception of some guest appearances by Gabriel Macht as Harvey Specter. The main character now is Ted Black (Stephen Amell), a former federal prosecutor in New York now running a powerful Los Angeles firm specialising in criminal and entertainment law. Aaron Korsh, the creator of Suits, also created the LA version. At first it was a different series, about Hollywood agents, which NBC passed on. He reconfigured that idea to exist in the same universe as Suits, and here we are.

Suits LA premieres 23 February on NBC in the US

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