Everything British for PBS Viewers to Stream in May 2025

The end of the spring is just around the corner, and the  PBS Sunday series lineup, which premiered in early spring, is starting to wrap up. The Wolf Hall sequel, Wolf Hall: The Mirror & the Light, concludes in the final week of April, though viewers should expect local stations to be heavy on the reruns over the next few weeks as public broadcasting pushes for Emmy nominations. Meanwhile, Marie Antoinette's second season, which started the same week as Wolf Hall, still has two more episodes to go in May, and Call the Midwife has only just passed the halfway point.

The timing of these series is deliberate, as there is still one more spring debut slated for 2025. This year marks the 250th birthday of the late author Jane Austen. While the actual celebration isn't until much later in 2025 (Austen's birthday is December 16, 1775), Masterpiece is getting a jump on it, releasing the first ever TV adaptation of Miss Austen, the 2020 Gill Hornby best seller that fictionalizes the real-life mystery of why her sister, Cassandra Austen, burned a massive trove of Jane's personal letters.

May is, in general, a smorgasbord of British shows, as Great Performances tends to schedule its yearly Shakespeare broadcast for this part of the calendar. This year also features an extra episode, starring David Attenborough, as part of Nature's current season, marking the naturalist's 99th birthday on May 8, 2025. All this, plus more Walter Presents titles are on the way.

Let's run down everything headed to PBS on streaming for May 2025.

Our first entry is a bit awkward, as it's one of the most anticipated titles from Acorn TV to debut on PBS Passport. However, due to the way the fiscal calendar works for most local stations, it is unlikely to debut beyond a very few PBS Passports until July or August. That being said, Bertie Carvel's Dagliesh is considered on par (if not slightly superior) to the Adam Marsden/Martin Shaw versions of the series that ran on Masterpiece back in the days before streaming, and it's pretty much a given that (had the streaming revolution not happened) this one would have been a PBS Sunday night series. Most local stations will be eager to air and stream it once the fiscal year turns over this summer.

All six episodes of Dalgliesh Season 1 will be available to stream on select PBS Passports beginning Thursday, May 1, 2025. However, they will likely not be available on most stations until July 1 or August 1, 2025. Please keep an eye on your local listings for updates.

Thank The Traitors for making Alan Cumming super relevant again, and not just because he'll be reprising his X-Men character for Disney's Marvel-verse. Since his revival in the States, PBS has been all over reminding the universe that Cumming has technically been hosting Masterpiece Mystery since 2008, and picked up his travelogue series, Alan Cumming's Most Luxurious Train Journeys: Scotland. The four-episode series showcases the finest first-class trains in Europe and the breathtaking landscapes Scotland has to offer.

Alan Cumming's Most Luxurious Train Journeys: Scotland will be available on select PBS Passports beginning Thursday, May 1, 2025, but as with Dalgliesh, many may wait until July to pick this up, so please keep your eye on local listings.

I suppose one could argue that a special on the Egyptian Pyramids would be an Egyptian series. However, those people don't understand how deeply embedded the British Empire became there over the last couple of centuries, or how much British TV is dedicated to specials about it. Mysteries of the Pyramids with Dara Ó Briain is just one of many docuseries where a U.K. resident of various educational levels (in this case, Irish comedian Dara Ó Briain) travels to the desert and talks to people who actually know something about the subject.

The two-episode series Mysteries of the Pyramids with Dara Ó Briain will be available on select PBS Passports beginning Thursday, May 1, 2025. Again, please check your local listings for details.

Walter Presents opens May with the 2023 Italian miniseries, Cold Summer (originally titled Il Metodo Fenoglio - L'estate Fredda when it aired on Rai 1). Adapted from the bestselling novel by former anti-Mafia prosecutor Gianrico Carofiglio, and based on the real-life events of 1991-1992 in southern Italy when the uneasy alliance between the small-time Mafia enforcers and local police broke down into an all-out war. The series broke viewership records in Italy during its 2023 run, and Walter Presents' acquisition of it for the U.K. and U.S. markets was considered a huge coup when it was announced last month.

All eight episodes of Cold Summer will debut on PBS Passport and the PBS Masterpiece Channel on Friday, May 2, 2025.

Nature originally aired Season 43's episode, "Museum Alive with David Attenborough," in February but held it until May to debut on PBS Passport. After all, placing the episode on an off-night will catch viewers' attention, and considering this episode is being streamed in part due to the celebration of Attenborough's 99th birthday, which occurs less than a week later, it deserves all the attention it can get.

Nature Season 43, Episode 9, "Museum Alive with David Attenborough" arrives on PBS Passport on Friday, May 2, 2025.

The final debut for Masterpiece of the 2024-2025 TV season is the highly anticipated adaptation of Gill Hornby’s Miss Austen, which takes the real-life literary mystery of why Cassandra Austen burned her famous sister Jane’s letters in the years after her passing, and reimagines it as a heart-breaking story of sisters who love each other, even if they don’t always understand one another. Future Dame Keeley Hawes stars as Cassandra, a character as captivating as any Austen heroine, with Rose Leslie co-starring.

Miss Austen will premiere on most local PBS stations, the PBS app, and the PBS Masterpiece Prime Video Channel on Sunday, May 4, 2025, at 9 p.m. ET, in between new episodes of Call the Midwife and Marie Antoinette. All four episodes will be available on PBS Passport on premiere day for members as a binge. As always, check your local listings. 

For the first time since returning to Great Performances five years ago, Shakespeare in the Park will not be presented this season due to the Delacorte Theater being closed for much-needed renovations for a significant portion of 2024. Instead, the anthology series will feature two British stage productions to compensate. The first, Next to Normal, the story of Diana Goodman, a suburban wife and mother living with bipolar disorder, was initially staged in the U.S. in 2008; this production, from 2024, marked the first time the show has played the West End, and stars Caissie Levy as Diana and Jamie Parker as her husband.

Great Performances Season 51, Episode 12, "Next to Normal," will debut on most PBS stations, the PBS app, and most PBS Prime Video FAST channels on Friday, May 9, at 9 p.m. ET. The episode will be available behind the PBS Passport paywall in July.

In one of Walter Presents' most recent acquisitions, the Italian series Pale Mountains (Brennero) will debut as part of the May lineup. The title refers to the Dolomites mountain range in Northern Italy, where the city of Bolzano, South Tyrol, is located, near the German border, and features an Italian cop and his German-speaking assistant tracking down a serial killer who takes advantage of the space between the two cultures. The RAI 1 series only debuted in October 2024; the network has not yet announced whether it will be renewed for a second season. However, all the press surrounding it on Rai and elsewhere refers to this as "Season 1," suggesting that there will be more to come.

All eight episodes of Pale Mountains Season 1 will debut on PBS Passport and the PBS Masterpiece Channel on Friday, May 9, 2025.

Walter Presents brings over the rare Portuguese series, Cuba Libre, a miniseries from 2022. Called one of the country's most ambitious TV projects when it was initially announced, the six-episode series traces the rise and fall of real-life Che Guevara follower Ana Maria Silva Pais. Set against the backdrop of the Cold War, Pais was the only daughter of the Director General of Portugal who escaped the dictator-run country to Havana with her Swiss diplomat husband. She eventually abandoned her marriage after falling in love with Guevara and joined the Cuban Revolution.

All six episodes of Cuba Libre debut on PBS Passport and the PBS Masterpiece Channel on Friday, May 16, 2025.

The Danish show The Legacy (Arvingerne) premiered its ten-episode first season as one of Walter Presents' new series for 2025 in February, despite originally debuting over a decade ago on Denmark's DR1 in 2014. Season 1 began with the death of artist Veronika Gronnegaard, whose dysfunctional family went to pieces without her. Season 2 sees her heirs struggling with their choices on how to squander her fortune, with the centerpiece being a heist to exploit her artwork for financial gain. The series ran for three seasons, the final one of which aired in 2017, and is expected to follow later in 2025.

All seven episodes of The Legacy Season 2 arrive on PBS Passport and the PBS Masterpiece Prime Video Channel on Friday, May 23, 2025.

A new title from 2024, Walter Presents initially debuted the 2014 French series The Intern (La Stagiaire) in August, followed by Season 2 in December. The series, which debuted Season 9 on France 3 a few days after Season 1 premiered in the States, stars French actress Michèle Bernier as Constance Meyer, a former farmer and village mayor who is wrongly convicted and decides to restart her life, becoming a law student and intern. Initially, only the first two seasons were available for Walter Presents to pick up; however, the show is clearly a success for PBS, as the wait for Season 3 didn't even take six months.

Season 3 expanded The Intern from six to eight episodes, all arrive on PBS Passport and the PBS Masterpiece Prime Video Channel on Friday, May 23, 2025.

Great Performances will close out Season 51 with Kiss Me Kate, which, while not technically William Shakespeare since it's a musical by Cole Porter, is still treated as such; think of Kiss Me Kate as being to Taming of the Shrew as West Side Story is to Romeo & Juliet. This production was staged in early 2024 in London's West End; National Theatre Live ran it in cinemas in the U.K. in November of that year, so if you feel like you've seen it, you may well have.

Great Performances Season 51, Episode 14, "Kiss Me Kate" will debut on most PBS stations, the PBS app, and most PBS Prime Video FAST channels on Friday, May 30, at 9 p.m. ET. The episode will be available behind the PBS Passport paywall in July. 

Walter Presents closes out May with the debut of the 2023 French miniseries Bardot. The six-episode stand-alone series is a dramatization of the life of the woman behind the iconic French superstar, Brigitte Bardot. Introducing newcomer Julia de Nunez, who landed the role after a nationwide search, the results of which were kept under wraps until the trailer's debut, the series focuses on the early years of Bardot's life, from the launch of her career in 1949 to the birth of her son in 1960. The dozen years in between saw Bardot change Western society and inadvertently spark a global sexual revolution.

All six episodes of Bardot arrive on PBS Passport and the PBS Masterpiece Prime Video Channel on Friday, May 30, 2025.