The Best British Shows Coming to America in 2025

We're ringing in the new year as 2024 finally sees itself out. We're halfway through the future's take on the Roaring 20s and a quarter of the way through the 21st century, making 2025 feel like a year of deep import. Whether the new year will live up to expectations remains to be seen, but, like death and taxes, there is one thing we can rely on: Television. Whether you digitally watch over the air, still have a cable line, or sift through a morass of apps on whichever device is handy, there's more TV than ever, wherever and whenever viewers want it. 

It's a great time to be a lover of British TV, which is, arguably, one of the big winners of the streaming wars in America, with its high-end, A-list casts who make shows in English. The 2023 dual strike of the WGA and SAG-AFTRA left holes in the late 2024 and early 2025 schedule, causing streaming services to import and produce more U.K. shows than ever in the last year or so. Moreover, though the streaming wars are clearly divided into winning and losing sides, there's still a plethora of places bringing British shows to America.

The end result is that 2024 and 2025 are bringing some seriously buzzy series to TVs across the U.K., and we in America will have unprecedented access to them across a variety of platforms. Of course, with so many platforms running on different schedules, it many be hard to find them all. So we're running down the top ten British series heading our way and where they'll stream in 2025.

It is an utter travesty that no one in America knows about SAS Rogue Heroes, which airs in the States under the title Rogue Heroes. The World War II period piece, which stars a bevy of hot British dudes playing the real-life men who outwitted the Nazis with creative and daring missions, is one of the BBC's biggest hits of the last five years. However, Season 1 premiered in the States on the almost entirely unknown streaming platform Epix just weeks before Amazon closed the deal to buy out its parent company, which promptly changed its name to MGM+.

That was the end of 2022, and while many hoped Amazon would raise MGM+'s profile, it's been one long string of failures to launch, and as we roll into 2025, most people still have no idea the platform exists, let alone the series. Starring Connor Swindells (Sex Education) as Lieutenant Archibald David Stirling, Jack O’Connell (Skins) as Lieutenant Robert Blair Mayne, and Dominic West (The Crown) as Lieutenant Colonel Dudley Clarke, the real-life mastermind behind some of the British Army’s crazier World War II stunts, the series returns for Season 2 and the spring of 1943, as the SAS continues to prove itself essential to the Allied fight.

Rogue Heroes Season 2 debuts on Sunday, January 12, 2025, on MGM+ and will stream weekly.

For the first thirty years of its existence, television was a free, ad-supported, over-the-air service. You didn't have to pay for it; you just needed a television device and antenna in your home. It wasn't until the rise of cable in the late 1980s that people became accustomed to paying monthly for what had been a free service; streaming services relied on that conditioning as a critical factor in launching their subscriptions. However, the most successful streamers are the ones who took advantage of the new technology to return to the original idea of TV as a free, ad-supported medium, calling themselves FAST channels.

The most successful FAST streamer is Tubi, which provides free programming to all households and caters to Black and Latinx audiences, the most underserved American populations on streaming. That focus has caused Tubi to bring over shows other services ignore because they are aimed at a more diverse British viewership: Big Mood, Dead Hot, and The Diplomat (not the Netflix-produced Keri Russell drama series, the BBC-produced Sophie Rundle limited series). But its most successful so far is Boarders, about four inner-city London teens selected to attend one of the country's toniest exclusive academies as a form of good PR, only to have them challenge the status quo simply by being themselves.

Boarders Season 2 will debut on the BBC in early 2025 and then cross the pond to Tubi sometime mid-year.

Adaptations of Agatha Christie novels for television have become one of the U.K.'s most popular cultural exports, much like William Shakespeare's plays once dominated the global theatrical landscape. From the initial Miss Marple series with Christie's hand-selected lead Joan Hickson in the early 1980s to David Suchet's two-decade run as the definitive Hercule Poirot in Poirot (which was later renamed to Agatha Christie's Poirot), Christie mysteries have been the BBC and ITV's bread and butter stories. Naturally, Netflix has recently turned its attention to disrupting British TV since it is nearly done wrecking American broadcasts and is coming for the BBC's Christie success.

Netflix has not confirmed that the Chris Chibnall-penned The Seven Dials Mystery is the beginning of a Christie Cinematic Universe for the service; however, scuttlebutt from the U.K. division says that if the ratings are solid enough, more will be forthcoming. It's also notable that Netflix is choosing to adapt a Christie novel that fits within the current BBC Christie milieu, which has been taking stories that star Christie's least-known detective, Superintendant Battle, and replacing Battle with one of the other leads. Recipe for success? Either way, it's worth tuning in to see how Netflix does.

The Seven Dials Mystery is expected to debut on Netflix sometime in 2025.

Starz is one of the last independent American streaming services standing and probably won't survive the decade. One reason for its inability to thrive has been the service's inability to pick a lane and stick to it. For a while, it tried to be the Peak TV version of Lifetime with Outlander, Black Sails, and the Phillippa Gregory adaptations. However, at this point, all that's left is the final season of Outlander (which it will drag out over two years), and an Outlander spinoff, Blood of my Blood. That's why it's such a relief to see the platform attempt to push past it with The Couple Next Door, the only English-language remake from the Walter Presents team that isn't on PBS or BritBox.

Already greenlit as an anthology series with Season 2 filming in the U.K., The Couple Next Door is a series about middle-class couple Evie and Pete (Eleanor Tomlinson and Alfred Enoch) who move into a suburban cul de sac next door to working-class couple Danny and Becka (Sam Heughan and Jessica De Gouw) and proceed to seduce and swap partners. The series is far too racy for PBS, but it's perfect for Starz, and everyone should tune in to encourage the network to keep looking beyond Outlander.

The Couple Next Door Season 1 debuts on Friday, January 17, 2025, on Starz, and will air/stream weekly.

There have been rumbles of a sequel to The Night Manager since the 2016 adaptation of the John Le Carre novel was a massive hit for the BBC and AMC Networks. However, star Tom Hiddleston, who led the series as Jonathan Pine, was at the height of his first round of Marvel fame and super busy, and AMC Networks's struggles led it to drop the rights to the series altogether after a couple of years. However, with Disney+'s Loki finished, Hiddleston decided he was ready to return to the role, and Amazon Studios was all too happy to swoop in and join the co-production, guaranteeing two new seasons with will debut on both sides of the pond.

Hiddleston will reprise his role as former British soldier turned hotel night manager Pine and will be joined by Olivia Colman, returning as MI6's Angela Burr. The two will be joined by Indira Varma, Paul Chahidi, and Hayley Squires, who replace Season 1 stars Hugh Laurie, Tom Hollander, and Elizabeth Debicki. There's still no plot, but the series will follow the trend of acknowledging the passage of time, picking up in 2024, eight years after the first season.

The Night Manager Season 2 will premiere on Amazon's Prime Video sometime in 2025 and, unlike Rogue Heroes, will almost certainly receive actual marketing in the U.S. Season 3 is expected to follow in 2026.

Here are the facts: Apple is the world's richest company. It can absolutely afford to write off every penny spent on shows made for Apple TV+ as a loss leader in selling iPhones, iPads, Apple TVs, laptops, desktops, etc. For five years, it's done just that, and the train of British series it has in production has reached the point where it can string them back to back to back and have an episode of a solid British television every single week of the year. However, the amount of money it's lost is bordering on obscene, and the rest of Hollywood is a little agog in horror at how few people stream the service relative to the money spent.

That reaction has embarrassed Apple to the point that budgets are tightening, projects are being shelved, and it won't be long before Apple's current stream of British programming dries up. We're just here to ride the Apple TV+ train as long as it goes for most of 2025, including the debut of Slow Horses companion series Down Cemetery Road. The series is based on Slow Horses author Mick Herron's other hit series of novels and will star Emma Thompson as Oxford private eye Zoë Boehm and Ruth Wilson as the woman who brings her the series' first case. It may not last six seasons like Slow Horses, but we can hope.

Down Cemetery Road will debut sometime in 2025 on Apple TV+.

Steven Knight's Rogue Heroes may be lost on MGM+, but his other major 2025 debut, A Thousand Blows, will be on Disney+ (or Hulu if you're in America). This is the rare Knight project that wound up under the Disney+ banner without being on the American network FX, which had, before this, been the leading importer of Knight series, including A Christmas Carol, Great Expectations, and The Veil. 

It feels almost like Hulu grabbed an FX series for its own, as everything about A Thousand Blows is part and parcel with Knight's type of show, a period piece about Victorian boxing that intersects with the first wave of immigration of Black Britons from other parts of the Empire, but is also about the longest-lived London gang in history, the 40 Elephants, an all-women posse of thieves and shoplifters which operated as an organized crime syndicate from sometime in the early 1800s (or late 1700s) until the 1950s. Erin Doherty stars as gang member Mary Carr, Malachi Kirby as aspiring boxer Hezekiah Moskow, and Stephen Graham as Sugar Goodson.

A Thousand Blows will premiere with all episodes on Friday, February 21, 2025, on Hulu (and under the Hulu Tile on Disney+) in the U.S. and on Disney+ everywhere else.

Now that BritBox is under the BBC's auspices, it will attempt to go mainstream with an absolute smorgasbord of British programming for 2025. I am not joking when I say I could have done a "Top Ten Shows Coming to BritBox in 2025" list. But suffice it to say that BritBox will earn those subscription dollars with returning favorites Vera, Father Brown, Sister Boniface Mysteries, Death in Paradise, Beyond Paradise, Karen Pirie, Silent Witness, Blue Lights, and The Cleaner. New titles include Lost Boys & Fairies, Douglas is Cancelled, Travels with Agatha Christie & David Suchet, Ludwig, Agatha Christie's Towards Zero, I Jack Wright, Riot Women, Code of Silence, Death Valley, and Lynley.

The creme de la creme of BritBox's planned year, however, is Outrageous, a series based on the real-life Mitford sisters, who were the 1920s equivalent of reality show stars, with their antics filling the gossip rags of the day, and their fame mainly earned for being famous. The eldest, Nancy, was a writer and novelist, but her sisters were renowned for things like "marrying a Guinness and then dumping him for the head of the British Fascist Party" or "being Hilter's muse." (The Kardashians could never.) The series also marks the first significant lead role for Bessie Carter (daughter of Jim Carter and Imelda Staunton), making this a generational passing of the torch as well.

Outrageous is expected out in the summer of 2025 on BritBox.

In 2020, Netflix made a hit series out of the German drama Babylon Berlin, primarily due to an accident of timing after scooping it up from the U.K.'s Sky One. Technically a police procedural (because nearly everything on German TV is a cop show), the family drama-musical-historical fiction series set in the final days of the Weimar Republic traces how the Nazis slowly slid into power as Berlin burned the midnight oil. The first three seasons were one of Netflix's most-watched shows of the year. It also upended the Sky Deutschland-ARD co-production, with Sky foolishly walking away over money squabbles instead of making a Season 4.

However, ARD (Germany's version of the BBC or PBS) didn't give up, even after Netflix dropped the show and let it roll to the barely known streaming service MHz Choice, a niche foreign language streamer. The result is that once ARD managed to make Season 4 and greenlit Season 5, both became exclusive to a streamer no one knows exists, and one of the conclusions to the best show of the last ten years will stream someplace no one will find it.

MHz Choice exists, y'all! Babylon Berlin Seasons 1-4 are streaming on it now, and Season 5 will arrive in 2025.

Listen, I know we already did a "Best Shows Coming to PBS in 2025," but in point of fact, PBS's Masterpiece has managed to score one of the biggest coups of the year, leveraging its 50-year relationship with the BBC to co-produce the sequel to 2015's Wolf Hall, Wolf Hall: The Mirror & The Light. The almost 10-years-in-the-making sequel was the BBC's biggest show of 2024, beating out ITV's Mr Bates vs the Post Office and helping propel the British Broadcaster to a dominating fourth-quarter performance, one it sorely needed going into the negotiations for a new 99-year charter.

PBS is doing its best to make sure Wolf Hall's sequel gets maximum attention, debuting it on Sundays starting in Mid-March, the prime spring Emmys placement, that guarantees all six episodes will be out by the end of April, which will avoid the show being trampled by the rush of series on HBO, Netflix, and Disney/Hulu as the three release all their last-minute Emmy debuts in May. For Anglophiles, it will be six weeks of appointment television (or six hours of binging if one is a PBS Passport member), and the show we're all looking forward to in 2025.

Wolf Hall: The Mirror and the Light will premiere on Sunday, March 23, at 9 pm ET on most local PBS stations, the PBS app, and the PBS Masterpiece Prime Video Channel. All six episodes will be available as a binge for PBS Passport members on premiere day.