Everything British for PBS Viewers to Stream in December 2023

The holidays are officially here, with Black Friday, Small Business Saturday, Cyber Monday, and Giving Tuesday all inundating our inboxes. With the significant holidays spread across the December landscape, it's the time of year when everyone gets into the Very Special Episode action. Marathons of Christmas-themed editions of TV shows (and a few Hannukah and Kwanzaa ones tossed in for good measure) are all over the dial and the streaming landscape, and PBS is no exception, with holiday-timed releases coming to PBS Passport, the PBS app, and the Masterpiece Channel, as well as your local stations.

December at most local PBS stations means pledge drive time, and as Telly Visions is a product of one of them (Washington DC's WETA), we here will be doing the same. While the PBS App contains lots of free content for everyone, PBS Passport is an additional member benefit that comes with pledging at the $5/month level (or $60/year), a streaming extra that you'll get along with the standard mug-and-tote bag. While this list will highlight the significant arrivals of the month, starting with all the Call The Midwife Holiday Specials dating back to 2020, it's not the only stuff you'll find to stream on PBS Passport. It has everything from old favorites like Downton Abbey to new hotness like Annika, plus tons of foreign language series from Walter Presents.

So do yourself and us a solid, donate today, keep Telly Visions going so we can keep making all this great content for your eyes and ears, and check out what's new on streaming this month.

One of the few times a foreign language series comes to PBS is not via Walter Presents. L'Opera, the hit 2021 series set in the shrine of French dance, the Garnier Opera house that's currently awaiting a third-season renewal, hits PBS streaming with the show's award-winning first season. At the world-renowned Paris Opera, the dazzling career of aging prima ballerina Zoé has recently faltered—too many parties, lovers, anxieties, and injuries. In danger of being laid off, she must come to terms with the institution, her peers, and especially her demons to earn herself a second chance. Meanwhile, ambitious young Black dancer Flora has just joined the company, and the new director of dance Sébastien is under pressure to revive the Paris Opera Ballet and maintain their reputation in the international dance world. 

All eight episodes of L'Opera Season 1 premiere on select PBS Passports and the Masterpiece Channel on Amazon on Friday, December 1, 2023, with airdates determined by local stations. This is a "check your local listings and streaming" series.

Meanwhile, Walter Presents kicks off with the first season of the Finnish series Lakeside Murders (Koskinen). Based on the book series by Seppo Jokinen, the series follows Inspector Sakari Koskinen (Eero Aho) and his team in the Violent Crimes Unit as they try to solve murders in the Finnish lakeside city of Tampere. The series has so far run three seasons on Ruutu+, but the rights to the novels (and adaptations thereof) changed hands between filming the third season and its airing, so it's unclear whether it will be renewed for a fourth season or be rebooted. Either way, there will be at least a couple more rounds of episodes for fans to enjoy heading to PBS in the future.

All ten episodes of Lakeside Murders (Koskinen) Season 1 debut on Friday, December 1, 2023, on PBS Passport and the Masterpiece Channel.

It's been a few months since the last installment of The Paris Murders (Profilage), which debuted Season 6 back in July 2023. Finally, PBS Passport is getting around to adding Season 7 to the collection. To be fair, Season 7 is when original series lead Odile Vuillemin, who played Chloé Saint-Laurent, left the show. (She still appears in Season 7, but only in a guest star role.) Her exit officially promoted actor Juliette Roudet, who had been in a recurring role since Season 5, into the series lead spot as Adèle Delettre, but these final seasons were definitely rocky ones as the series never really recovered.

All ten episodes of The Paris Murders (Profilage) Season 7 arrive on PBS Passport and the Masterpiece Channel on Friday, December 1, 2023.

Lucy Worsley is back! The little historian best known in the U.S. for doing British history specials for American audiences has a brand new three-part series about one of the U.K.’s most famous residents, just in time for the holidays. This time, she’s taking on Agatha Christie. How did this seemingly conventional British matron write so convincingly about the dark art of murder? As in the best of Christie’s novels, clues are hiding in plain sight, and Lucy uncovers surprising new evidence and
some carefully concealed secrets that illuminate the life of a writer whose work continues to delight readers worldwide. 

(Fun fact: Did you know that if you live in the U.K., Lucy Worsley is the little historian best known for doing American history specials for British audiences? Strange but true!)

Agatha Christie: Lucy Worsley on the Mystery Queen premieres on the PBS App and the Masterpiece Channel on Sunday, December 3, 2023, and will follow on PBS Passport on New Year’s Day 2024.

Not to be confused with Hotel Europa, the 2020 modern-day set miniseries about a Berlin hostel coping with the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, Hotel Europa (Das Weiße Haus am Rhein) is a 2021 period piece set miniseries about a Berlin hotel coping with the outbreak of World War II. Told from the perspective of Emil Dreesen (Jonathan Berlin), this series is based on the real-life family of Jewish hoteliers who were thriving in the interwar Weimar Republic, with rich and famous guests from a young Konrad Adenauer, Gustav Gründgens and Charlie Chaplin... until an ambitious Adolf Hitler and his National Socialists chose the noble house as one of their preferred spots in the German Reich, and conflict within the Dreesen family escalates.

The two-episode miniseries Hotel Europa (Das Weiße Haus am Rhein) arrives in full on both PBS Passport and the Masterpiece Channel on Friday, December 8, 2023.

Like Hotel Europa, the 2019 German miniseries Berlin Wall, originally titled The Wall, should not be confused with the French Canadian series The Wall, which is already streaming on PBS Passport, nor should it be mistaken for the six-part 2022 German mini-series The Wall (Mauern der Welt), which is a docuseries about the fall of the Berlin Wall. Berlin Wall (The Wall) is a fictionalized drama that originally aired as three feature-length episodes in Germany, each spanning one year from 1987-1990 and the fall of the Wall. It was recut as six forty-five minute installments for Walter Presents. The story of three sisters born in East Germany, one in the Stasi, one in the opposition, and one believed dead but living on the far side in West Germany, this series explores the changing times through the eyes of one family. 

All six episodes of Berlin Wall (The Wall) arrive on Friday, December 8, 2023. 

Miss Friman’s War (Fröken Frimans Krig) was initially supposed to be a holiday special that aired in three parts over the Christmas and New Year’s weekends of 2013. Starring Sissela Kyle as Dagmar Friman (a fictitious version of real-life suffragette and politician Anna Whitlock), it was adapted from Svenska Hem – En Passionerad Affär, and covered the founding of the consumer cooperative Svenska hem in 1905. However, the show became a regular holiday tradition, running for three more seasons, covering 1906, 1907, and 1908 respectively. Initially, it looked like PBS would get all 12 episodes at once in July 2023, but only six arrived. These are the other six installments that constitute Seasons 3 and 4.

All six episodes of Miss Friman’s War (Fröken Frimans Krig) Season 2 (actually Seasons 3 and 4, which conclude the series) arrive on PBS Passport and the Masterpiece Channel on Friday, December 15, 2023.

Another German series from ZDF, the same company that made Berlin Wall, Unbroken feels almost like it was tailor-made for Walter Presents. A suspenseful thriller series, it features a police detective on a tireless search to find her newborn baby after she is kidnapped while pregnant and wakes up alone. Heavily pregnant Chief Inspector Alex Enders (Aylin Tezel) goes on maternity leave and suddenly disappears. She wakes up a week later, is bloodied, her baby is gone, and she has no memory of the birth. When her colleagues make no headway in investigating the kidnapping, Alex takes over. She gets entangled in a web of suspicions and lies and risks everything to get her child back: her job, her relationship, and her own life. The six-part series has not been renewed for a second season yet, but it also seems tailor-made for that, too.

All six episodes of Unbroken debut on Friday, December 15, 2023.

PBS may have lost The Great British Baking Show to Netflix (through no fault of its own, mind you!*), but it will never give up Mary Berry. In 2022, PBS brought over Mary Berry’s Ultimate Christmas from the BBC; this year, it’s bringing her trip to Scotland with Mary Berry’s Highland Christmas. Berry heads home to the place where her mother grew up, and where the recipes she considers her traditions were formed. Berry is known in the U.K. for making Scottish dishes around the Holidays, and this special is partly an excuse to bring all those recipes together in one place.

The hour-long Mary Berry’s Highland Christmas special premieres on most PBS stations and the Masterpiece Channel on Monday, December 18, 2023, and arrives on most PBS Passports to follow. As always, check your local listings. 

*And one day, PBS will get The Great British Sewing Bee if I literally have any say in anything it does. (Spoiler alert: I have zero say in anything that happens at PBS. Please stop emailing us assuming I have control over anything. I am but a humble blogger.)

It's been almost a year since The Wagner Method (César Wagner) Season 1 arrived on PBS Passport in March 2023, along with The Paris Murders Season 4. The French series is a bit of a cross between Professor T and The Nordic Murders, with Gil Alma as the titular DCI César Wagner. He's an anxious and hypochondriac police captain whose genius at solving crimes has kept him in the big city for far longer than he probably would have lasted, but finally, his superiors have found a reason to transfer him out to Strasbourg, his hometown. Only, when he arrives there, it turns out the mayor is none other than his own mother. Like many French series, the show took a couple of years to be renewed for a second season, which only just concluded in early 2023. It remains to be seen if there will be a third.

Season 2 of The Wagner Method (César Wagner) only ran two installments; both join Season 1's five-episode run for a total of seven on Friday, December 22, 2023.

As noted above, the Call The Midwife holiday specials stretching back to 2020's Season 9 are all currently on PBS Passport for members to stream and will remain so until Christmas day, when the newest arrival turns up for viewers. As always, the Call The Midwife holiday special is technically the prelude to the forthcoming season of the series since it airs all of two weeks before the show's premiere on the BBC. For us, it's an amuse bouche for the new season (in this case, Season 13), which arrives in the spring (in this case, Sunday, March 17, 2023). Either way, it's an annual holiday staple for babies to be born, midwives to cry with joy, and at least one nun to remember the joy of the season.

The Call The Midwife 2023 holiday special will air on most PBS stations on Monday, December 25, 2023, and stream on both PBS Passport and the Masterpiece Channel starting the same day.

The third and last series that is getting its first update in six months after last debuting episodes in July 2023, Walter Presents is finally bringing One Step From Heaven (Un Passo dal Cielo) Season 2 to PBS. An "odd couple solves crimes, but make it Italian" series, Terence Hill is a commander of the State Forestry Corps in the Italian village of San Candido; Enrico Ianniello is the local State Police commissioner. This is the second of three seasons to star Hill, who was replaced with Daniele Liotti starting in Season 4. The show is still running, with Season 8 confirmed for 2024, so there's a lot more where this came from.

Season 1 took the first season's 12 episodes and condensed them to ten. Season 2 is also listed as ten episodes, though it originally ran 14 on RAI. Whether or not that's condensing or cutting remains to be seen. Either way, fans will find out when One Step From Heaven (Un Passo dal Cielo) Season 2 arrives on Friday, December 29, 2023.