27 Highly Anticipated New Shows to Watch in 2018

Updated on 1/12/2018 at 12:05 PM

Now that the holiday decorations have been packed away and the last of the New Year's confetti is swept up, it's time for the midseason TV schedule to begin. There are dozens of returning shows coming back within the first three months of 2018, plus a whole slew of new shows to feast your eyes on.

Will you get sucked into Dakota Fanning's period mystery thriller The Alienist on TNT? Or join in The Terror of finding the Northwest Passage on AMC? Or perhaps you can't wait to see Fox's new music competition series now that the network lost American Idol to ABC. Freeform also has a few options, including Yara Shahidi's highly anticipated Black-ish spinoff, Grown-ish.

Ellen's Game of Games

Network: NBC
Who's starring: Ellen DeGeneres
What it's about: This new game show is based on the popular game segments of DeGeneres's talk show.
Premiere date: Jan. 2

LA to Vegas

Network: Fox
Who's starring: Dylan McDermott, Ed Weeks, and Peter Stormare
What it's about: Follow the flight crew and their passengers on the puddle-jumper getaway weekend flight that takes Los Angelenos to Las Vegas and back.
Premiere date: Jan. 2

Grown-ish

Network: Freeform
Who's starring: Yara Shahidi, Trevor Jackson, and Chris Parnell
What it's about: This Black-ish spinoff follows eldest Johnson child Zoey (Shahidi) as she goes off to college.
Premiere date: Jan. 3

9-1-1

Network: Fox
Who's starring: Angela Bassett, Connie Britton, and Peter Krause
What it's about: Ryan Murphy's new drama follows different first responders in Los Angeles — including cops, paramedics, firefighters, and dispatchers.
Premiere date: Jan. 3

The Four: Battle For Stardom

Network: Fox
Who's starring: THe four judges are Sean Combs, DJ Khaled, Meghan Trainor, and Charlie Walk; Fergie is the host.
What it's about: With American Idol jumping to ABC, this is Fox's answer to the long-running music competition series.
Premiere date: Jan. 4

Child Support

Network: ABC
Who's starring: Fred Savage and Ricky Gervais
What it's about: A game show hosted by Savage where contestants answer a series of 10 questions. If they get one wrong, they can only be saved if someone in a room can answer the question. The room is filled with five children and Gervais.
Premiere date: Jan. 5

The Chi

Network: Showtime
Who's starring: Jason Mitchell, Ntare Guma Mbaho Mwine, and Alex Hibbert
What it's about: A coming-of-age drama set in Chicago's South Side, a rough area where the simplest decisions can have huge consequences.
Premiere date: Jan. 7

Alone Together

Network: Freeform
Who's starring: Esther Povitsky and Benji Aflalo
What it's about: Two oddball 20-somethings strike up a platonic friendship to try to navigate the status-obsessed world of Los Angeles.
Premiere date: Jan. 10

Philip K. Dick's Electric Dreams

Network: Amazon
Who's starring: Steve Buscemi, Greg Kinnear, Mireille Enos, Anna Paquin, Terrence Howard, Vera Farmiga, Richard Madden, Holliday Grainger, Janelle Monáe, Juno Temple, and Maura Tierney, among many others.
What it's about: This sci-fi anthology series consists of 10 standalone episodes based on the famed works of Philip K. Dick, author behind The Man in the High Castle, A Scanner Darkly, and Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, the book upon which Blade Runner is based.
Premiere date: Jan. 12

Black Lightning

Network: The CW
Who's starring: Cress Williams, China Anne McClain, and Nafessa Williams
What it's about: Jefferson Pierce (Williams), a retired superhero, is forced to don the cape and cowl again when a local gang starts terrorizing his community.
Premiere date: Jan. 16

The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story

Network: FX
Who's starring: Penélope Cruz, Edgar Ramirez, and Darren Criss
What it's about: A dramatization of serial killer Andrew Cunanan's murder spree, which began in April 1997 and ended in July 1997 with the murder of fashion designer Gianni Versace.
Premiere date: Jan. 17

Counterpart

Network: Starz
Who's starring: J.K. Simmons, Olivia Williams, and Harry Lloyd
What it's about: This sci-fi thriller follows a low-level UN worker (Simmons) who discovers the agency he works for is covering up an interdimensional portal, which leads him to meet his "counterpart" on the other side.
Premiere date: Jan. 21

The Resident

Network: Fox
Who's starring: Matt Czuchry, Bruce Greenwood, and Emily VanCamp
What it's about: A new medical drama about residents (graduate medical students receiving additional training, usually in a certain specialty) learning the ropes at their new hospital.
Premiere date: Jan. 21

The Alienist

Network: TNT
Who's starring: Dakota Fanning, Luke Evans, and Daniel Bruhl
What it's about: Set in 1896, this drama is about a psychologist, a newspaper illustrator, and a police secretary who investigate a series of gruesome murders of young male prostitutes.
Premiere date: Jan. 22

Mosaic

Network: HBO
Who's starring: Sharon Stone, Garrett Hedlund, and Beau Bridges
What it's about: This is the six-episode TV version of a murder mystery mobile app by Steven Soderbergh, Casey Silver, and Ed Solomon. The app is like an interactive movie, letting users investigate on their own time and choose which perspectives they view the plot from. The TV show will not be interactive, but will contain basically the same story as the app.
Premiere date: Jan. 22

Bellevue

Network: WGN America
Who's starring: Anna Paquin, Shawn Doyle, and Billy MacLellan
What it's about: A police officer (Paquin) investigates the murder of a transgender teen while dealing with the return of someone from her past.
Premiere date: Jan. 23

Altered Carbon

Network: Netflix
Who's starring: Joel Kinnaman, Renee Elise Goldsberry, and James Purefoy
What it's about: Set 300 years in the future, humans are now digitized and downloaded from body to body.
Premiere date: Feb. 2

Good Girls

Network: NBC
Who's starring: Christina Hendricks, Mae Whitman, and Retta
What it's about: Three suburban women rob a grocery store for a little extra cash and get a little more than they bargained for.
Premiere date: Feb. 26

Living Biblically

Network: CBS
Who's starring: Jay Ferguson, Lindsey Kraft, and David Krumholtz
What it's about: After the death of his best friend, a married film critic and expectant father decides to become a born-again Christian and begin living his life according to the BIble.
Premiere date: Feb. 26

The Looming Tower

Network: Hulu
Who's starring: Alec Baldwin, Jeff Daniels, and Peter Sarsgaard
What it's about: Based on the 2006 book of the same name, this limited series will examine the people involved in the Sept. 11 attacks.
Premiere date: Feb. 28

Heathers

Network: Paramount Network
Who's starring: Grace Victoria Cox, James Scully, and Selma Blair
What it's about: The rebranded Spike network is bringing this very dark comedy to the small screen in anthology form, with a modern-day Veronica Sawyer (Cox) dealing with a modern-day set of Heathers.
Premiere date: March 2018

Hard Sun

Network: Hulu
Who's starring: Agyness Deyn and Jim Sturgess
What it's about: Two London cops discover via the investigation of a hacker's death that the world is facing an apocalypse in five years.
Premiere date: March 7

Instinct

Network: CBS
Who's starring: Alan Cumming, Naveen Andrews, and Whoopi Goldberg
What it's about: A former CIA agent (Cumming) who now works as a professor and author is asked to help the NYPD stop a serial killer. It's based on James Patterson's popular Murder Games novel.
Premiere date: March 11

Rise

Network: NBC
Who's starring: Josh Radnor, Rosie Perez, and Auli'i Cravalho
What it's about: Based on the true story of teacher Lou Volpe (Radnor), it's about the renowned theater program at a Pennsylvania high school.
Premiere date: March 13

The Terror

Network: AMC
Who's starring: Tobias Menzies, Jared Harris, and Ciaran Hinds
What it's about: The first season of this anthology series is based on a novel that fictionalizes Captain Sir John Franklin's lost expedition that was looking for the Northwest Passage. This horror version incorporates a monster stalking the crew of the HMS Terror.
Premiere date: March 26

Siren

Network: Freeform
Who's starring: Eline Powell, Alex Roe, and Ian Verdun
What it's about: A young girl arrives in a small coastal town and proves that the mythical sea creatures known as sirens really do exist — and it starts a war for the ocean.
Premiere date: March 29

Reverie

Network: NBC
Who's starring: Sarah Shahi, Dennis Haysbert, and Jessica Lu
What it's about: A retired hostage negotiator is brought in to save people who have lost themselves inside a highly advanced virtual-reality program called Reverie.
Premiere date: March 2018