The Best New TV Shows of January 2025

January should be a great month for television, as brutal cold makes captive, couch-potato audiences of us all. Sadly, in practice, a long holiday hangover tends to limit new releases; platforms’ reticence to compete for attention with an inevitable regime-change media frenzy could also be a factor this year. Happily, February looks a bit more promising (for the culture sphere, at least). In the meantime, here are a few January standouts you might have missed. 

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Asura (Netflix)

The great Japanese filmmaker Hirokazu Kore-eda is best known in the U.S. for his 2018 feature Shoplifters, a Cannes Palme d’Or winner about a poor family that subsists on equal parts love and theft. He brings the same keen understanding of familial dynamics—and the same delicate balance of warmth, poignance, and grit—to this lovely Netflix series, released with little stateside fanfare. Set in 1979 and based on a novel by Kuniko Mukôda, Asura follows four adult sisters who discover that their elderly father (Jun Kunimura, recently seen in Sunny and Pachinko) has been cheating on their mother. The news coincides with major developments in the women’s own lives around romance and fidelity. Eldest sister Tsunako (Rie Miyazawa) is sleeping with her married employer. A housewife and mother, Makiko (Machiko Ono) suspects her husband (Masahiro Motoki) of straying. Pretty Sakiko (Suzu Hirose), who’s dating a feckless wrestler, shrugs off men’s betrayals. It was her foil, prim, bookish Takiko (Yû Aoi), who hired a detective (Ryûhei Matsuda) to prove their dad had a mistress; now, Takiko may be falling for the sleuth.

Television tends to fixate on the salacious aspects of infidelity, treating it as a juicy twist or an excuse for a steamy sex scene. But Kore-eda takes a refreshingly humanistic approach. Through the sisters’ relationships with one another—which are at least as important to Asura as their romantic ties—we see the far-reaching effects of men deceiving the women they love. Yet Kore-eda would rather observe than vilify. The adulterers aren’t written off as bad people; their sins are legible within the context of their lives. And by sharing their struggles, the sisters learn to do what Asura itself does: show compassion toward others whose decisions might differ from their own. (Also, as in so many Japanese shows, the food scenes are scrumptious.)

Great Migrations: A People on the Move (PBS)

Harvard professor, public intellectual, and PBS stalwart Henry Louis Gates, Jr. returns to the platform with this four-part documentary on Black migration in the U.S. since the 1910s. The first half of the series is, unsurprisingly, devoted to the two waves of the Great Migration proper, in which descendants of the enslaved moved north and west to escape the Jim Crow South in the early and mid-20th century. A final pair of episodes traces immigration from Africa and the Caribbean, as well as many Black Americans’ return to the South post-civil rights. 

While Great Migrations is sure to be a useful teaching tool, it’s no audiovisual textbook. Gates recruited an engaging cast of experts to guide viewers through deep dives into Black enclaves from Harlem to South Central, cultural luminaries like Berry Gordy and Jacob Lawrence, and topics like the rise of the Black press. Nor does the series shy away from the darkest aspects of its subject, noting how fears of lynching drove many families north and acknowledging the more insidious forms of racism they encountered when they gor there. With DEI in crisis, the doc is a crucial reminder of how, in the past, the absence of proactive inclusion has yielded segregation. And as a panic over critical race theory continues to roil our education system, it makes an all-too-timely argument that Black history is both integral to and distinct within American history. 

The Pitt (Max)

For ER fans, the news that Noah Wyle had reunited with two of that show’s writer-producers, R. Scott Gemmill and John Wells, for another series set in an emergency room was all they needed to mark their calendars. I’m a harder sell on medical dramas. There are way too many these days, most of them mediocre, and if I have to look at human guts, I’d rather it be in a cartoonish slasher romp than on a realistic operating table. But The Pitt won me over. In fact, it might’ve been the only decent English-language scripted show to premiere this fallow January.

Set amid the pandemonium of an overcrowded, under-resourced Pittsburgh ER, the series, like 24 and Hijack, plays out in near-real time; the season splits a single shift into 15 hourlong episodes. This may be a gimmick to differentiate the show from its predecessor (it didn’t stop ER creator Michael Crichton’s estate from suing), but it makes narrative sense. Wyle’s capable attending physician treats (and charms) patients, orients new interns, and resists the meddling of admins, all while struggling to conceal his unresolved grief on the anniversary of a mentor’s death. The 1990s network-TV vibe is strong. Yet The Pitt‘s purpose is not primarily to celebrate doctorly heroism. The show is at its best when it illuminates the dire realities of frontline medical work, revealing the ER as a crucible where not just the health-care system, but also criminal justice, policy, the privatization of public goods, and a tattered social safety net ignite—daily—in all manner of emergencies.

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