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 Country
15 Jan, Sky/Now in 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 confidence-inspiring 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 exec-producing. 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 Air
26 Jan, Apple TV+ globally
Even in an age of stretched-out 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 Problem
21 Mar, Netflix globally
Looking 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 Way
Spring, BBC One/iPlayer in the UK; US and Aus TBC
This 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-of-the-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.
Severance
TBA, 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 – Orquídeas
12 Jan
The 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 Eyes
26 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 Ecstasy
2 Feb
Even before releasing a single album, this London five-piece have experienced a career’s worth of drama. There was the initial hype – breathless reviews of their live shows, an NME front cover – and then the mother of backlashes as they were accused of being industry plants, nepo babies and everything in between. It will be a relief then, surely, for the music to do the talking. Prelude to Ecstasy’s four advance singles have suggested Sparks, Kate Bush, Arcade Fire and a little hint of Mitski’s tremulous torch songs – a pretty potent combination.
MGMT – Loss of Life
23 Feb
With all due respect to the Connecticut psych-poppers, it did look like MGMT were slightly floating off into irrelevance around the time of their 2018 album Little Dark Age, which although hailed as a return to form by critics, didn’t make much of a dent. But then TikTok took that album’s moody lead single and ran with it, using the song to soundtrack memes about everything from the Ukraine invasion to former Chelsea forward Eden Hazard. It now has half a billion listens on Spotify, nearly as many as their biggest hit Kids. They return in 2024 for an unexpected victory lap with new album Loss of Life, which they have described as “20% adult contemporary”. Judging by its early singles the other 80% is Bowie and Bolan-esque glam.
Tour-a-geddon
Various dates and locations
2023 was the year where tours took precedence over albums, as a clutch of superstars were finally able to unveil grand live productions after Covid-related interruptions. That trend will continue into 2024 and then some. After a brief hiatus, Taylor Swift cranks her Eras tour back into action in February, with the UK leg starting in June. There’s big pop arena tours aplenty, including Olivia Rodrigo, Doja Cat and a Girls Aloud reunion tour that has people very excited. There seems to be a strange trend for package deals involving 90s rock giants at the moment – take your pick between co-headlining tours involving The Manic Street Preachers and Suede, and Smashing Pumpkins and Weezer this summer (or just do both). Finally, one person who absolutely will not be doing a co-headlining tour this summer, and would probably punch you in the mush for even suggesting it, is Liam Gallagher. But old eyebrows does have a busy 2024 planned: as well as a collaboration album with John Squire, he’ll be heading out on tour to celebrate 20 years of Definitely Maybe, the rest of Oasis be damned.
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Film
Poor Things
12 Jan UK; 18 Jan Aus; out now in the US
Yorgos Lanthimos’s steampunk-tinged black comedy makes an early claim for being simply the “most” film of 2024: most depraved, most freaky, most reliably funny and somehow in its own way the most sweet, too. The premise is part-Frankenstein, part-Pygmalion, with Emma Stone playing an “experiment” created from the body of a suicide victim and inexhaustibly curious about the world of excitement around her – not to mention inside her. She encounters the worst possible person to accompany her on this awakening in Mark Ruffalo’s moustache-twirling cad, while Willem Dafoe is in full “Lighthouse mode” as the misshapen mad professor who brings Stone’s ingenue to life.
The Holdovers
19 Jan in the UK; 11 Jan in Aus; out now in the US
First a gripe: this is an extremely Christmassy movie. Christmas is central to the plot and its central themes (belonging, loneliness, family and so on), and its poster features a whopping great bauble. So, then, why is it not being released in the UK until the end of January? The vagaries of cinema scheduling are truly baffling. Still, even if you’re watching it on 4 July, there’s plenty to enjoy in this Alexander Payne-directed tale of a boarding school student (newcomer Dominic Sessa) who finds himself trapped with its grumpiest history teach (Paul Giamatti) and cafeteria chef (Da’Vine Joy Randolph) over the holidays. A lovely, low-stakes comedy-drama in the mould of Hal Ashby or Mike Nichols.
All of Us Strangers
26 Jan in the UK; 19 Jan in Aus; out now in the US
For years Andrew Scott has been crying out for a whopping great canvas for his talents, and in Andrew Haigh’s brilliant, devastating drama he gets the biggest one possible. Scott plays a fortysomething screenwriter who, in the course of researching a new script, returns to his suburban family home and encounters his parents who died when he was a teenager. But how much credence should we give to his memories? Paul Mescal also stars as the neighbour/lover Scott encounters in his otherwise abandoned apartment block, in a work that is ghost story and gay romance entwined. If there are many films better than this one next year, we will have done very well indeed.
Civil War
26 Apr in the UK and US; Aus TBC
Alex Garland’s most recent work – Annihilation, Ex-Machina, Devs, Men – has stuck within the borders of speculative sci-fi or horror: either things that could only really happen in the future, or that are purely in the realm of the fantastical, though no less scary for that. But Garland’s latest, starring Kirsten Dunst, Wagner Moura, Nick Offerman and Jesse Plemons, looks scary precisely because of how close it looks to now. Sure, the US civil war being waged in his film doesn’t map on to present-day politics – it features an unlikely alliance between the republics of California and Texas for a start – but the scenes of social unrest and bone-dry contempt between neighbours can’t help but feel familiar.
Gladiator 2
22 Nov UK and US; Aus TBC
2024 is a big year for sequels and prequels and there are plenty of promising ones we could have flagged up here: for example, both Dune Part 2 and Furiosa: A Mad Max Story are unlikely to be anything other than great. But for pure intrigue factor it’s hard to look past Ridley Scott’s follow-up to his sandal-clad smash of 2000, though yes, it’s a shame Scott chose not to adapt Nick Cave’s “Maximus in Hell” treatment for the sequel. Instead it follows Lucius, the young nephew of evil emperor Commodus, who, after having been saved by Maximus in the first film has spent 15 years in the wilderness – and now finds himself dragged back into his past. It’s yer man Paul Mescal again in the starring role – Scott decided to cast him after bingeing on four episodes of Normal People in a row.
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