The TV Shows We Can’t Wait to Watch in 2021

December 28, 2020

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New Year’s Eve will be a little different this year, and not just because “Auld Lang Syne” will be sung over Zoom instead in the arms of friends and family and your traditional tuxedo/ball gown outfit will be replaced with sweatpants and the t-shirt you’ve been wearing for three days. Flipping the page to 2021 will be a relief after the eternal darkness that was 2020, and optimism will fill our hearts as we arbitrarily pin all our disappointment and fears on a time-measuring system created 500 years ago.

But there is something that’s legitimate to be optimistic about: the 2021 TV year. Below, we’ve put together a list of shows that we’re most excited for in 2021. Comedies, sci-fi epics, adaptations, and more are all coming over the next 12 months, in what could be one of the best years of TV ever.

Note: With the coronavirus pandemic delaying production on several shows, many of our picks below come with an asterisk as we don’t know for sure that they’ll be out in 2021.

Mr. Mayor

Premieres Thursday, Jan 7 on NBC
In recent years, NBC’s must-see Thursday night sitcoms have been coming in bits and pieces rather than a full-fledged block, but two people who have been huge parts of NBC’s glory days of yore — Cheers‘ and The Good Place‘s Ted Danson and 30 Rock‘s Tina Fey — are hoping to build a foundation for a new one. Danson plays a rich dude who runs for mayor for a very sitcommy reason — to impress his teen daughter — and wins before he really knows what he stands for. Fey and her 30 Rock co-founder Robert Carlock have a knack for writing good workplace comedies with fun ensemble casts, and the subject of local government could make this the next Parks and Recreation, if Leslie Knope wasn’t so nice.

WandaVision

Premieres January 15 on Disney+
It’s been over a year since Disney+ launched in November 2019, and we’re only getting our first Marvel Cinematic Universe series at the beginning of 2021. But it looks like it will be worth the wait. Set after Avengers: Endgame and markedly different from everything else you’re used to in the MCU, WandaVision follows Wanda/Scarlet Witch (Elizabeth Olsen) and Vision (Paul Bettany) as they live their ideal life in suburbia, their life like a classic TV sitcom. But when things seem to be too much like a TV show, they begin to suspect something is up. This is going to be a big year for Marvel on Disney+, with fellow MCU shows The Falcon and the Winter Soldier (March 19), Loki (May 2021), Hawkeye (late 2021), and Ms. Marvel (late 2021) all scheduled to be released in 2021. [Everything we know about WandaVision]

Shadow and Bone

Premieres April 2021 on Netflix
You know the drill: If someone is making a TV adaptation of one of our favorite fantasy novels, we’re going to be jazzed for it. Shadow and Bone takes two of author Leigh Bardugo’s book series — Shadow and Bone and Six of Crows — and smashes them together for a new series that melds both storylines of a world at war with itself and the flesh-eating creatures that inhabit it. The heroine is a young orphan named Alina Starkov who discovers she’s in possession of a great power, which she uses to save her best friend. And because this is YA fantasy, you know there’s going to be some romance thrown in there. The cast is mostly made up of little-known actors, but Westworld‘s Ben Barnes has signed on to play General Kirigan, aka The Darkling.

Foundation

Series premiere 2021 (unconfirmed) on Apple TV+
If you like your science fiction as hard and dense as dark matter, Foundation, based on the seminal book series by Isaac Asimov, looks like it will do the trick. The series comes from genre masters David S. Goyer and Josh Friedman, and follows a mathematician (Jared Harris) whose models predict the fall of the Galactic Empire and the efforts that go into correcting the demise from total devastation to just sucking a lot. This looks like Apple TV+’s answer to Amazon’s The Expanse, complete with an out-of-this-world budget to make things look as good as they can. Plus, did we mention Jared Harris?

Halo

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We\u2019re back on the #Halo set and #MakingMasterChief. \ud83d\udcf8: @schreiber_pablo pic.twitter.com\/dFYKWRrwQR— Halo on Showtime (@SHO_Halo) November 10, 2020\n","provider_name":"Twitter","provider_url":"https:\/\/twitter.com","type":"rich","url":"https:\/\/twitter.com\/SHO_Halo\/status\/1326223828628987905","version":"1.0","width":550}” data-url=”https://twitter.com/SHO_Halo/status/1326223828628987905?ref_src=twsrc^tfw” data-conversation=”true”>

The TV Shows We Can’t Wait to Watch in 2021

Mr. Mayor

WandaVision

Shadow and Bone

Foundation

Halo

The Lord of the Rings

The Old Man

Only Murders in This Building

Station Eleven

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