Nine of the best TV shows to watch in December

From the small-screen adaptation of a classic novel to the return of the phenomenon that is Squid Game, these are the shows to stream in December.

Jude Law stars as a mysterious maybe-Jedi in this latest Star Wars spin-off, but the adventure story belongs to four children lost in another galaxy trying to find their way home. “I think it’s a lost Jedi temple,” one of them says when they stumble across a hole in the ground, and before they know it they’re hurtling along in a space ship. They run across creatures who seem like descendants of the characters in the original Star Wars cantina and meet Jod Na Nawood (Law) who offers to help them get back to Earth. For Star Wars fans: the series is set in the same time frame as The Mandalorian. For everyone else, it has echoes of films like The Goonies and ET. Law told TV Line, “It definitely has that 80s feel,” of a gang on a fantasy-fuelled adventure. Apparently everyone wants to work on Star Wars somehow, because the directors for the show include Lee Isaac Chung (Twisters), Davie Lowery (Pete’s Dragon) and the Daniels (Everything Everywhere All at Once).

Star Wars: Skeleton Crew premieres 3 December in the US and 4 December in the UK on Disney+

What if there was a show like The Diplomat but almost everyone was an assassin? This captivating political spy thriller starring Keira Knightley feels like that, which is high praise. Knightley plays Helen Webb – not her real name – who is married to the British Minister of Defence (Andrew Buchan) but is also spying on him for a mercenary information-gathering organisation called Black Doves. When Helen’s lover is killed, she is in danger, and her handler, played with chilling calm by Sarah Lancashire, calls in Helen’s old friend Sam (Ben Whishaw, dynamic as ever) to help protect her. The show was created and written by Joe Barton, who also created Giri/Haji (2019), the sophisticated, artful suspense series set in Tokyo and London that is among the best of recent years. Black Doves absolutely has his fingerprints on it.

Black Doves premieres 5 December on Netflix internationally

The title makes a lot more sense when you know the plot of this comedy, inspired by a real-life crime known as the Great Canadian Maple Syrup Heist. In 2012, thieves stole about $18m worth of maple syrup from Quebec’s reserves, reselling it on the black market, and disrupting the syrup economy. Really. In this highly fictionalised version, Margo Martindale plays an invented character, Ruth Landry, a maple syrup farmer in danger of losing her business, who joins forces with a Boston criminal (Chris Diamantopoulos) and a Canadian security guard (Guillaume Cyr) to pilfer barrels of syrup. Ruth sees the robbery as a way for the little guys of the world to get even, but of course things go awry. Jamie Lee Curtis, an executive producer of the show, guest stars.

The Sticky premieres 6 December on Amazon Prime internationally

Given the blockbuster status of both Inside Out (2015) and this year’s sequel, Inside Out 2, a television spinoff of those animated movies was inevitable. This series is set in between the two films, and features Riley and her many emotions before she hits adolescence. That means there are none of the new characters from the sequel, no Anxiety or Ennui, but the old emotions are still there, processing Riley’s memories every night. The lovely, comic conceit is that her dreams are produced by a movie studio in her mind. Joy (the voice of Amy Poehler) returns, along with Fear (Tony Hale), Anger (Lewis Black) and Disgust (Liza Lapira). Paula Pell is the voice of Paula Persimmon, a harried director of dreams who is under pressure to produce a hit, and Richard Ayoade is Xeni, a pretentious daydream director angling to make his first feature. There are only four episodes, but this colourful series with the look and feel of the movies is sure to be a hit with Inside Out fans.

Dream Productions premieres 11 December on Disney+

Gabriel Garcia Márquez always refused to allow his 1967 novel, One Hundred Years of Solitude, the masterwork of magical realism, to be made into a film. He believed that no movie could contain its extravagant narrative, following seven generations of the Buendía family in the fictional Colombian village of Macondo. Garcia Márquez died in 2014, and his two sons agreed to this miniseries, on the premise that a long form would give the story space to do it justice, and on the condition that it be shot in Colombia in Spanish. Viewers will get to decide if that works when the first half of this 16-part series arrives on Netflix this month. There are no major English-language stars among the Latin American cast and crew, which puts the focus on the story and its characters. Readers of the much-loved novel will recognise Jose Arcadio Buendía, who founded Macondo, and the pivotal character of his son, Colonel Aureliano Buendía, as well as scenes that include ghosts, premonitions, the introduction of ice to the town and Remedios the Beauty ascending to heaven.

100 Years of Solitude premieres 11 December on Netflix internationally

Two great sitcom veterans meet a topic people can never stop talking about – real estate – in this series, which stars Lisa Kudrow and Ray Romano as Paul and Lydia Morgan, a cash-strapped, empty-nest couple who put their enviable 1920s-era house on the market. Frenzied potential buyers flock to the Los Feliz neighbourhood of Los Angeles to compete for it, but there’s a catch. There is a creepy secret in the house’s past (we don’t immediately know what) that the sellers have to grapple with and the buyers would be lucky to find out. Linda Cardellini, Abbi Jacobson, O-T Fagbenle, Luke Wilson and Teyonah Parris are among those desperate buyers. The show was created by Liz Feldman, the mastermind behind the dark comedy Dead to Me, and promises to be similarly off-kilter.

No Good Deed premieres 12 December on Netflix internationally

This series has refused to stay dead so often that you might wonder if Dexter is the serial killer we see on screen or, in fact, a vampire. First there were eight seasons of regular Dexter (2006-2013), with Michael C Hall as a forensic analyst in the Miami police department, moonlighting as a vigilante killer of bad people. Then there was the sequel series, Dexter: New Blood (2021) and now Dexter: Original Sin, a prequel that depicts him as a young man making his dual career choice, forensics plus murder.  Patrick Gibson (The OA, Shadow and Bone) stars as the young Dexter in the show, set in 1991. Christian Slater is his father, Harry, who teaches him to kill only the evil, and Sarah Michelle Gellar is the new character of Tanya Martin, Dexter’s boss during his forensics training. Hall narrates here as the inner voice of Dexter, but he will be back on screen in the upcoming Dexter: Resurrection, an especially well-named sequel in the works, and expected next year.

Dexter: Original Sin premieres 13 December on Paramount+ with Showtime

Stephanie Hsu (Oscar-nominated for Everything Everywhere All at Once) stars in this comedy as Ruby, whose ex-boyfriends keep dying, inexplicably. Not her fault, but she’s thinking – maybe it is? Whatever the reason, she feels obliged to track down all her surviving exes, from serious loves to one-night stands and brief encounters in a restaurant bathroom, and warn them that their lives may be under a cloud. Zosia Mamet plays her best friend, who joins her on the search. The show was created by Nahnatchka Khan, the creator of Fresh Off the Boat, and Sally Bradford McKenna, a writer for Will and Grace. Their mordantly comic premise is a clever way to bring in a flood of guest stars as Ruby’s exes, including Simu Liu, Finneas O’Connell and John Early.

Laid premieres 19 December on Peacock in the US

You couldn’t have predicted this when Squid Game premiered in 2021. But with its dynamic plot of a children’s game in which the winner gets rich and everyone else dies, and its colourful neon green and pink costumes, it helped usher in greater receptiveness for Korean television in the West, and still holds the record as Netflix’s most watched show ever. Lee Jung-jae, who won the Emmy for best actor in a drama for his role as the survivor and winner in the first series, returns this season as Gi-hun. Determined to end the game from within, he signs up to play again. This time, after each round of the lethal Red Light, Green Light game, the players vote on whether to continue on or go home to a life of poverty. “I wanted to pose the question: Is the majority always right?” the show’s creator and director, Hwang Dong-hyuk, told The Hollywood Reporter about the new twist. That echoes the explanation he gave the Financial Times about the first season’s success. Despite its heavy theme of income inequality, he said, “It was just an entertaining show that also had food for thought.”

Squid Game premieres 26 December on Netflix internationally