Everything British for PBS Viewers to Stream in December 2024

We have reached the final round-up of 2024, a year I think many of us will be happy to see the back of. But the year is not over yet; there's still an entire December to get through. Luckily, PBS (and its various streaming services) has plenty of holiday programming on the way, one major early release for PBS Passport members and another show officially streaming for free ahead of the new season.

The series getting an early binge release for PBS Passport members won't be a big surprise; it's Miss Scarlet (now sans Duke), which will arrive on PBS Passport before the holiday season. This is the second time the series has premiered a month early for members (Season 3 did the same in 2022). While we here at Telly Visions will treat it the same as we did then (recapping with the linear broadcasts in January), we expect many of you will have seen all six episodes well before January 2025.

The Miss Scarlet news may not surprise, but the other announcement will probably be for fans. All Creatures Great & Small Seasons 1 through 4, available to stream for PBS Passport members, has moved from behind the paywall to the PBS app starting Thanksgiving Day, November 28, 2024. Enjoy all seasons for free, either as a re-watch or to get caught up ahead of Season 5, until December 23, 2024.

Let's run through everything else British streaming on PBS in the last weeks of the year.

After a quarter century, Midsomer Murders has developed an odd track in the last few years, debuting first on Acorn, then a year later in the U.K., and then a year after that on PBS. That makes this year's arrival Season 23, which debuted in December 2022. DCI Barnaby (Neil Dudgeon) and his trusty sidekick, DS Jamie Winter (Nick Hendrix), tackle everything from doomsday prepping and police retirement villages to artisan bakeries and drag shows, where lurking beneath the surface of these chocolate box villages lie eccentric characters and peculiar murders. As ever, Midsomer Murders runs as eight one-hour installments on PBS rather than the original four feature length ones. 

Midsomer Murders Season 23 arrives with all episodes on Sunday, December 1, 2024, on select PBS stations and PBS Passports; check your local listings/streamer.

One of the reasons networks go all in on the holidays is that the programming is timing-specific; you don't watch a tree lighting in January! However, holiday specials from other countries are more fungible, especially if they are done within a reasonable time frame. Hence, Christmas at Longleat, a behind-the-scenes special of the grand old manor prepping for the holidays. It aired in the U.K. in December 2023 and is recent and relevant enough that most PBS viewers won't even notice.

Christmas at Longleat arrives with all episodes on Sunday, December 1, 2024, on select PBS stations and PBS Passports; check your local listings/streamer.

A Christmas Carol is Dickins' timeless classic about scaring a crappy CEO into paying his worker a living wage without resorting to unionizing. This year, PBS brings a slightly different version, Christmas Carole, from December 2022, with Suranne Jones as Carole McKay, a wealthy entrepreneur who must be taught that minimum wage is currently neither. Once again, instead of sitting with a union organizer, McKay takes meetings with Ghosts Past, Present, and Future.

Christmas Carole arrives with all episodes on Sunday, December 1, 2024, on select PBS stations and PBS Passports; check your local listings/streamer.

One of the few current Christmas offerings to arrive on December's opening weekend, Ready for London 2025 is the companion runup to the London’s New Year’s Day Parade, which PBS has been streaming to great success on January 1 for the past couple of years. Ready For London follows the 20 American marching bands selected to go to London and march in this year's New Year's Parade.

Ready for London 2025 arrives with all episodes on Sunday, December 1, 2024, on select PBS stations and PBS Passports; check your local listings/streamer.

The Sketch Artist (Portrait-Robot) Seasons 1 and 2 arrived in 2024, Season 1 in May (February for Canadians), and Season 2 in July for everybody. Season 3 is Walter Presents' first title for the month; Rachel Graton returns as Eve Garance, a sketch artist with a gift for reading people, and five more two-part cases of the French-Canadian police procedural set in Montreal. This is the last season that was formally greenlit. It aired in Canada in December 2023; there's been no news of another season since. All three seasons showing up this close together in the same calendar year suggest there won't be more.

All ten episodes of The Sketch Artist (Portrait-Robot) Season 3 arrive on PBS Passport and the PBS Masterpiece Prime Video Channel on Friday, December 6, 2024.

For those deeply anxious to see what Miss Scarlet is like sans Duke, you're in luck. As noted above, the series is having an early binge release on PBS Passport five weeks before its official linear premiere. Eliza’s agency is thriving in the new season, and her professional life is on a successful path. Meanwhile, a new Detective Inspector comes to Scotland Yard, and Eliza must navigate building a relationship with him if she will continue to have access to police resources. All these changes and decisions beg the question: Can Eliza Scarlet have it all?

Miss Scarlet Season 5 will arrive with all episodes as an early binge on PBS Passport starting Sunday, December 8, 2024. The series will also be on an early release schedule for PBS Masterpiece Prime Video Channel viewers, but as a weekly release, with the premiere arriving on December 8 and episodes streaming once a week straight through to the official season premiere on Sunday, January 12, 2025. January 12 is when the series will start airing/streaming on a weekly schedule on most PBS stations and the PBS app. Check your local listings.

Lucy is back, and she's got some 'splainin' to do; and by that, I mean Lucy Worsley has a new show where she dives into the history of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and his most famous creation, Sherlock Holmes in her new three-episode special Lucy Worsley's Holmes vs. Doyle. Doyle famously hated Sherlock by the time all was said and done, blaming the detective for failing to be seen as a highbrow fiction writer. But who really won that fight?

Lucy Worsley's Holmes vs. Doyle premieres Sunday, December 8, 2024, at 8 p.m. ET on most PBS stations, the PBS app, and the PBS Documentary Prime Video Channel, and will stream one episode a week through mid-December. All three episodes land on PBS Passport in January.

The Dutch series Black Tulip (Zwarte Tulp) first hit PBS Passport in April 2024. At the time, I noted that the series (the first Dutch program to be broadcast via streaming before it aired on linear) was from 2015, and the second and final season was streaming in 2016. So it's not that big a surprise Walter Presents is closing out this tale of a feud between the two most prominent, longtime flower-growing families, the Vonks and the Kesters, and their race to cultivate the rare black tulip. 

All 12 episodes of Black Tulip Season 2 arrive on Friday, December 13, 2024, on PBS Passport and the PBS Masterpiece Prime Video Channel.

After 18 months of no news, Paradise (Il Paradiso Delle Signore, also called The Ladies Paradise) finally turned up with "Season 5" in October 2024. Two months later, the Italian soap (very) loosely based on 1883's Au Bonheur des Dames by Émile Zola is back with another ten episodes under the banner of "Season 6," pulled from 2018-2019's Seasons 3, which ran 180 episodes. Because the show was running basically daily in Italy there's no synopsis to check against, but the characters listed definitely come from that first season where the series switched formats.

The series is still going; slightly reduced to 160 episodes a year and is up to Season 9, which is currently airing in Italy. If Walter Presents plans to keep bringing episodes over, ten at a time, this series will run forever.

All ten episodes of Paradise Season 6 arrive on Friday, December 20, 2024, on PBS Passport and the PBS Masterpiece Prime Video Channel. 

The Call The Midwife 2024 Christmas Special will have a double helping of Christmas babies, arriving on Christmas Day with a two-part double installment. These episodes will close out both Season 14's 1969 and the 1960s, as Season 15 (coming in 2025) will jump into 1970 with both feet. This is the third decade the show will cover (Season 1 was set in 1957), so perhaps series creator/writer Helen Thomas has earned the right to get a little self-indulgent as her little show about birthing babies hits decades she never imagined the series would get to portray.

The Call The Midwife 2024 Christmas Special will air on most PBS stations and stream on the PBS app and the PBS Masterpiece Channel on Christmas Day, Wednesday, December 25, 2024, from 8 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET.

Walter Presents initially debuted the French series The Intern (La Stagiaire) in August 2024, starting with Season 1's six episodes, which aired on France 3 in 2014. It returns with Season 2 (from 2015) and another six installments starring French actress Michèle Bernier. Bernier plays Constance Meyer, a former farmer and village mayor who accidentally gets wrongly convicted and decides to restart her life and become a law student and intern. 

The series has run eight seasons and counting. However, the first two are currently the only ones available for the global market, so this may be the last of the show, or at least another 18-month wait while someone figures out the rights issues for Season 3.

All six episodes of The Intern Season 2 arrive on Friday, December 27, 2024, on PBS Passport and the PBS Masterpiece Prime Video Channel.

Ok, strap in because the final debut for December is a bit of a doozy. It's the series Blinded: Those Who Kill (Den Som Dræber - Fanget af Mørket), which you may recognize as another Acorn TV refugee finally making out from behind their paywall. If you know Danish, you'll immediately catch the title translates to Darkness: Those Who Kill, which was the title for the series' first season. The Those Who Kill series, as it's known in its home country, has different titles per season: Blinded: Those Who Kill was Season 2, Season 3 was Lost: Those Who Kill, and Season 4, which debuted in the U.K. in October 2024, is Justice: Those Who Kill. 

Darkness: Those Who Kill is on the PBS Masterpiece Prime Video Channel, but not PBS Passport. Blinded: Those Who Kill will arrive on both platforms on Friday, December 27, 2024 with all episodes.