Everything British for PBS Viewers to Stream in October 2025

It's a dark time for your local PBS stations, as the full force of the Federal Government's defunding of public broadcasting, referred to as "rescission," will hit starting October 1, 2025. Already, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting has announced it will shutter its operations, the main PBS headquarters has been forced into drastic layoffs, and the first PBS and NPR station shutdowns have already been confirmed.

They're not the only ones affected, either. Regular readers have probably noticed the erratic posting recently; that's because we here at Telly Visions are also being cut loose. We're luckier than most; our overlords have been surprisingly gracious, allowing the site to continue up to Thanksgiving 2025 before it is temporarily mothballed, and allowing us to take the Telly Visions brand (and 15 years of writing) with us, hoping that we can somehow make a success of it elsewhere.

But as we exit our current situation and figure out what Telly Visions will look like in 2026, there's still a fall TV season to cover, including multiple new Masterpiece series and a lengthy list of Walter Presents arrivals, with both new seasons of old favorites and new titles for fans of foreign language shows from Europe to check out. So let's run down everything arriving on PBS streaming in October 2025.

It wouldn't be a PBS list of Walter Presents shows if I didn't spend at least 15 minutes struggling to find out what the real name of one of the shows debuting this month actually was, and this month's list hit a doozy right off the bat. Not to be confused with the six-season Tyler Perry series of the same name, For Better or Worse (originally titled Attraction) is a six-part miniseries from Canal+ that initially aired in France in January 2023. Laura Sepul stars as Agathe, whose illusion of a perfect life with her husband Fed is turned upside down when murder strikes.

All six episodes of For Better or Worse will debut on PBS Passport and the PBS Masterpiece Prime Video Channel on Friday, October 3, 2025.

American viewers will get a double premiere on October 3; however, our Canadian friends up north will have to wait an extra week for The Intern (La Stagiaire) Season 4. French actress Michèle Bernier returns as Constance Meyer, the former village mayor who restarted her life after being wrongfully convicted and winding up as a 40-something-year-old law school intern. Season 4 will find Constance with an ever-challenging caseload as she adapts to Barth’s new role on the Council and the continued capriciousness of her children. Season 10 of the series debuted on France 3 in August 2025, so the show won’t be ending anytime soon either.

All eight episodes of The Intern Season 4 will debut on PBS Passport and the PBS Masterpiece Prime Video Channel in the U.S. on Friday, October 3, and on the PBS Masterpiece Prime Video Channel in Canada one week later, on Friday, October 10, 2025.

There is something deeply satisfying when, after two years of emailing around to PBS asking if anyone is picking a show you've been obsessively following since it was announced, finally, FINALLY, someone says yes. In this case, the series in question is Brian & Maggie (formerly Brian and Margaret), which debuted on Channel 4 in the spring of 2025, starring Steve Coogan as legendary BBC anchor Brian Walden and Dame Harriet Walter as Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher in a dramatization of the 1989 live interview that ended her career. Tories across the U.K. were very put out by this series, so I'm taking that as a sign it's better than I'd hoped.

Brian & Maggie will debut on Sunday, October 5, 2025, at 8 p.m. ET on most local PBS stations, the PBS app, and the PBS Masterpiece Channel, with Part 2 arriving on Sunday, October 12, 2025. Both episodes will be available as a binge on PBS Passport for members on premiere day. 

(Please note: since the series is only two episodes long, Masterpiece will rerun the four-episode Miss Austen in the 8 p.m. slot after Brian & Maggie concludes, beginning Sunday, October 19, 2025.)

Masterpiece attempted to make ITV's Van der Valk a hit, but despite a strong ensemble, the show never truly took off, and the cast shakeups in Seasons 3 and 4 only made things more awkward. This time, Masterpiece is going to create its own mystery series starring a well-known British blonde actor full of man-pain, by rebooting the storied Maigret franchise. Starring Benjamin Wainwright, who they've blessedly declined to saddle with middle-aged paunch, overcoats, bowler hats, or pipes, this ain't Your Mama's Maigret is what I'm saying. (Sorry, not sorry, Michael Gambon.) No word on Season 2 yet, but hopefully, it will hit big enough to escape the rescission axe.

Maigret will debut on Sunday, October 5, 2025, at 9 p.m. ET on most local PBS stations, the PBS app, and the PBS Masterpiece Channel, with new episodes released weekly. All six episodes will be available as a binge on PBS Passport for members on premiere day.

You are not experiencing deja vu: The Gold initially debuted two years ago on Paramount+ with little marketing, less fanfare, and zero viewers. At this time, we yelled that Paramount+ was the wrong place for this; with a murder's row of British talent (Hugh Bonneville, Charlotte Spencer, Emun Elliot, Jack Lowden, Dominic Cooper), the proper network for this dramatization of the famous 1980s Brink's-Mat robbery was PBS. Thankfully, Paramount+ passed on Season 2, and Masterpiece swooped in to pick up the slack, starting with a re-airing of Season 1, so we'll get a chance to see if we were right and whether where a U.K. show streams in the U.S. really does matter.

The Gold Season 1 will premiere on Sunday, October 5, 2025, at 10 p.m. ET on most local PBS stations, the PBS app, and the PBS Masterpiece Channel. All six episodes will arrive as a binge on PBS Passport for members on premiere day. Season 2 (which already aired in the U.K.) is expected to debut on PBS in the 2026-2027 TV season.

Canada has to wait an extra week for The Intern, but that means it gets double Walter Presents one week later than Americans, as both countries will premiere a new season of One Step From Heaven (Un Passo dal Cielo) on the second Friday in October. However, don't be fooled by the "Season 4" moniker. As we noted in June 2025, Season 3 was when the series expanded from ~12 episodes to 19, whereas PBS's Season 3 consisted of only ten installments. That means "Season 4" is actually the back half of Season 3, which are the final episodes starring Terence Hill as the commander of the State Forestry Corps in the Italian village of San Candido before Daniele Liotti took over as the show's lead through Season 6. 

One Step From Heaven Season 4 is listed as consisting of 10 episodes, all of which debut on PBS Passport and the PBS Masterpiece Prime Video Channel on Friday, October 3, 2025. Season 8 (now led by show stalwarts Enrico Ianniello as Vincenzo Nappi and Gianmarco Pozzoli as Huber Fabricetti) aired on RAI from January to March 2025, and Season 9 is expected to be announced for 2026, so there's plenty more where this came from.

A somewhat unusual choice for Walter Presents, Promethea (Prométhée) is a supernatural series that initially aired on France's TF1 network in December 2022. The six-part series starts like any other French "dark and gritty" murder mystery, starring two faces PBS viewers will recognize: Thomas Jouannet (Mademoiselle Holmes) and Marie-Josée Croze (Agatha Christie's Poirot) as Charles and Caroline, who happen upon a naked teenage girl on the side of the road, the sole survivor of a car wreck. However, her unharmed state seems questionable after she begins having supernatural visions of murder victims from unsolved cases. 

All six episodes of Promethea will debut on PBS Passport and the PBS Masterpiece Prime Video Channel on Friday, October 17, 2025.

Most of the German shows Walter Presents picks up come from Germany's public broadcaster, ZDF, which in recent years has started producing shows that are clearly designed to appeal to the Channel 4/PBS anthology series. However, Hellground (Höllgrund) is the rare organic hit, originally airing on Südwestrundfunk (Southwest German Broadcasting, referred to as SWR) in 2022. The eight-part series, which German reviewers agreed was far better than it had any right to be, stars Lou Strenger as DI Tanja Hartholz, whose investigation into a local doctor's apparent suicide starts uncovering clues to a string of cold cases from the 1990s, and had the bonus of switching to old-style 4:3 ratio for the 1990s flashbacks.

All eight episodes of Hellground will debut on PBS Passport and the PBS Masterpiece Prime Video Channel on Friday, October 24, 2025.

Finally, October will see the end of one of Walter Presents' most popular shows to date, the Spanish series Velvet (Galerías Velvet), as the fourth and final season debuts with all episodes on Halloween 2025. Like the show's first three seasons, Season 4 will receive direct-to-linear debuts on local stations when new seasons are released on PBS Passport. However, the final season debuting at the end of the month means that most non-PBS Passport members will be able to watch it weekly on their local stations starting in November. 

All 11 episodes of Velvet Season 4, the show's conclusion, will stream starting on Friday, October 31, 2025, on PBS Passport and the PBS Masterpiece Prime Video Channel.