If you live in a part of the world where January is a hardscrabble month of inclement weather, you might well be tempted to lock yourself away for the rest of the year, fearing the sun will never return. Should you succumb to this awful temptation, there would, at least, be a wealth of brilliant television to fill your days, as some hotly anticipated science fiction and science-focused TV series are arriving in 2025.
We don’t have to wait too long for sci-fi gold: three years after it first aired on Apple TV+, returns for its second season on 17 January.
This psychological thriller follows employees of the shadowy megacorp Lumon Industries whose memories of work are surgically “severed” from their home lives, effectively creating two people in a single body, one of whom only exists at the office. Unable to communicate with their “Outies” – and subject to the abasements of corporate culture – the “Innies” begin to chafe at their confinement. It is the perfect show to watch if you are returning to office life after the holidays.
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Another long-awaited show, the gritty Star Wars series Andor (Disney+; see right), will arrive in April for its second and final season. Back in 2022, we saw how self-interested thief Cassian Andor (Diego Luna) was radicalised by the banal evil of the Empire and joined the Rebel Alliance. In season two, he is set to lead the resistance to victory at any cost.
Andor isn’t the only sci-fi series bowing out this year. Survival thriller (Netflix) returns for its final season in 2025, and it is your last chance to visit the monstrous worlds of Gilead and the Upside Down in The Handmaid’s Tale (Disney+/Hulu) and Stranger Things (Netflix) respectively, at least until their spin-off series arrive.
Sticking with horror, anthology show Black Mirror(Netflix) airs its seventh season of technological dystopia this year. Creator Charlie Brooker has promised a return to “OG Black Mirror” – which seems to signify especially bleak stories – as well as the series’ first sequel, following on from season four’s Star Trek-inspired episode “USS Callister”.
Severance is the perfect show if you are returning to office life after the holidays
Meanwhile, the first TV show of the Alien franchise is slated for mid-2025. (Disney+/Hulu) takes place in 2120, just two years before the events of the original, and sees a mysterious vessel crash-land – you guessed it – on our planet. With early trailers revealing that “Mother Earth is expecting”, you can bet there will be plenty of psychosexual torment in this series.
In a more family-friendly region of time and space, the adventures of the Fifteenth Doctor (Ncuti Gatwa) and Ruby Sunday (Millie Gibson) are expected to continue on BBC iPlayer and Disney+ in May. The Doctor Who duo will be joined by new companion Belinda Chandra (Varada Sethu) this time round. Intriguingly, Sethu appeared in the previous season as a different character, Mundy Flynn – something timey-wimey is clearly going on.
If that’s not enough Doctor Who for you, a five-part spin-off series, The War Between the Land and the Sea, should also arrive later this year. It sees UNIT face off against a classic Doctor Who enemy, the Sea Devils.
If you would prefer something a little closer to reality, try (ITVX), which airs this month. When two couples learn that their babies were switched at birth after a mix-up at the hospital, they are forced into each other’s orbit.
Their uneasy friendship soon gives way to suspicion, as they accuse each other of poor parenting and trying to take back their biological child. This four-part thriller is sure to dig into difficult questions about the parent-child bond, and just how much comes hardwired.
There is also (Netflix), billed as a “true-ish story based on a lie”. It stars Kaitlyn Dever as wellness guru Belle Gibson, who falsely claimed that she had cancer and that she was managing her condition using diet, exercise and alternative medicine.
We live in a time of rampant misinformation and distrust of vaccines, so the story of Gibson’s wellness empire should be a cautionary tale.
Dever also appears in the next instalment of post-apocalyptic drama The Last of Us (NOW/Sky/Max), playing a soldier seeking vengeance for her loved one’s death. Set five years after the previous season, the world remains ravaged by a Cordyceps fungus that turns the infected into zombie-like monsters.
In season one, Joel (Pedro Pascal) became a father figure to Ellie (Bella Ramsey), but their relationship has grown strained with time. Expect yet more heartbreak and jump-scares in season two, which should arrive in the first half of the year.
With filming over for season three of Foundation, an Apple TV+ adaptation of Isaac Asimov’s stories, we can reasonably expect the show to return some time in 2025. Inspired by its concept of psychohistory, a mathematical and sociological means of forecasting future events, we can attempt to predict which series will arrive later on in the year.
For All Mankind (Apple TV+) looks like a safe bet. In this alternate history, the space race never ended and humans landed on Mars in 1995. Season five takes place in the 2010s, when a fully fledged colony has been built on the Red Planet.
Elsewhere (specifically on Paramount+), Star Trek: Starfleet Academy may reach our screens before 2025 is done. The new series is set in the 32nd century after a cataclysm, as it follows the first new class of Starfleet cadets in over 100 years.
Cyberpunk fans may rejoice at the arrival of Neuromancer (Apple TV+), which sees washed-up hacker Case (Callum Turner) and the cybernetically enhanced Molly Millions (Briana Middleton) team up for the heist of a lifetime. And there is also Blade Runner 2099, of which little is known except that it is set – as you might expect – 50 years after Blade Runner 2049.
Other additions to the Apple TV+ sci-fi stable this year may include Murderbot, starring Alexander Skarsgård as the titular security android who has gained free will, and a series from Breaking Bad creator Vince Gilligan so hush-hush that not even its name has been officially announced.
Now that’s what I call speculative fiction.
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