Best new TV shows to stream this week on Netflix, Peacock, and more

It’s Super Bowl weekend, but if you’re not interested in catching the NFL championship game, there are still plenty of new TV shows to watch. We have a drama reboot of a classic sitcom, a show about the true story of a high society con artist, a show about a very creepy landlord, a new reality game show about celebrity couples, and new seasons for two established shows. Let’s look at the best new TV shows to binge-watch this week.

Best new streaming TV shows this week

The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air was one of the most popular TV sitcoms of the 1990s and turned rapper Will Smith into a major acting superstar. Now, the series is being reimagined as a serious teen drama for Peacock. The basic premise of both shows is the same. A teenager from Pennsylvania gets into some trouble, so his mother sends him away to live with relatives in the rich city of Bel-Air, California. Now he has to deal with issues of race, class, and more while trying to fit in his new home and school.

The series was created by Morgan Cooper, who wrote and directed a mock trailer for a serious look at The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air that went viral on YouTube in 2019. Will Smith saw the trailer and worked with Cooper to pitch a real show based on the trailer’s premise. Peacock has a two-season commitment to Bel-Air, and you can watch the first three episodes of the series on February 13.

Julia Gardner, who has won an Emmy for her work on another Netflix series, Ozark, is the star of this new limited series from Gray’s Anatomy creator Shonda Rhimes. Gardner plays Anna Sorkin, a real Russia-born woman who came to New York City in 2013, and who posed as a wealthy German heiress who called herself Anna Delvey. Over the next few years, she infiltrated New York City’s high society circuit and managed to steal and defraud many of the people in that lifestyle of millions of dollars.

The series is told through the eyes of a magazine journalist, played by Anna Chlumsky, who finds out about Anna’s story and digs deeper to find out more about her and the people she fooled into giving her money, clothes, and more.

One of the best new TV shows this week is this UK import. Gugu Mbatha-Raw plays a young professional woman in this four-episode limited series on HBO Max who is just looking for the right place to live. She thinks she has found such a place, but the man who actually designed and owns the home, played by David Oyelowo, insists that anyone who lives there abide by his strict rules. As she starts to live in this house, she soon discovers that she is not the only woman who has lived in this house before, and that sets up the chain of events in this thriller.

WandaVision’s Kat Dennings is back for the second season of this Hulu exclusive comedy series where she also serves as an executive producer. As with the previous season, Dennings plays Jules, a young woman that’s still figuring out her life while living and working in Los Angeles, but who has some help from her three best friends. It’s definitely one of the best new TV shows this week.

Matt Groening, the creator behind two of the most successful adult animated TV series of all time (The Simpsons and Futurama) is back with the fourth part of his fantasy-themed series for Netflix. In case you haven’t seen this series, it takes place in a fantasy kingdom called Dreamland. The main character is Bean, a young princess who has a tendency to get into some interesting adventures, with the help of her elf friend Elfo, and her “personal demon” Luci.

Celebrity couples and marriages are the center of this new reality competition show on HBO Max. NBA star Stephen Curry and his wife Ayesha host this show. Each episode pits three pairs of celebrity couples against each other in some very uncensored party games, with the victorious couple in each game winning $ 25,000 for their charity.

Check out our last week’s picks

In case you missed last week’s column, here’s another look at the best new streaming TV shows that we picked for you to binge-watch.

Pam & Tommy Season 1 (Hulu)

Pamela Anderson was the star of one of the biggest TV shows of the 1990s, and Tommy Lee was the drummer for one of the biggest rock bands of the 1990s. The two met, fell in love, and got married in just four days in 1995. After that, they also made an infamous videotape during their honeymoon that was just supposed to be for their own private use. Unfortunately, it was stolen and later uploaded onto the internet.

This limited series on Hulu shows us the story of Anderson and Lee’s battle with the people who stole the tape and uploaded it online. It also tells how powerful the internet was becoming in everyday life, even in the 90s when most people could only go online with 56k phone modems on their PCs. It has great performances from Lily James as Anderson and Sebastian Stan as Lee. Seth Rogan, a producer on this limited series, also appears as Rand Gauthier, who stole the tape and tried to sell it around Hollywood. By the way, this show holds almost nothing back in terms of its content, so keep the kids far away.

Lee Child’s best-selling book series about Jack Reacher comes to life in this new Amazon Prime Video exclusive show. This first season adapts the first Jack Reacher novel, Killing Floor, as the ex-US Army police officer wanders into a small Georgia town, and gets arrested and charged with murder. He soon teams up with local law enforcement to find who the real killer is and quickly discovers not everything is what it seems in this town.

Alan Ritchson (Titans) plays Reacher, and his physical looks make him much closer to the character in the novels than what people may have seen in the two Jack Reacher feature films starring Tom Cruise.

Read more: Movies and shows like Reacher

It’s been a long wait, but the second season of this acclaimed sci-fi series is finally here on HBO Max. As with the first season, we see the androids known as Mother (Amanda Collin) and Father (Abubakar Salim) trying to keep a group of human children safe on a planet called Kepler-22B after a future war has made Earth uninhabitable.

The second season sees this group team up with another colony of humans on the planet, but there are still many dangers and secrets to deal with.

Apple TV Plus has a new series to binge-watch. It stars Uma Thurman as a US businesswoman living in England whose son is kidnapped. A group of five people are accused of the crime, and are now trying to prove their innocence and find the boy. But perhaps one or more of them is actually the criminal in this case.

Here’s a Netflix six-episode series with a very unusual, but hopefully cool, format. Will Arnett plays a police detective named Terry Seattle. In each episode, he teams up with a different celebrity, including Sharon Stone, Ken Jeong, and Conan O’Brian, who are just being themselves. They work together to solve a murder, and in the end, the celebrity has to try to solve the case.

It’s a series that mashes up scripted comedy with improv by the celebrity in each episode, and it promises to be a lot of fun.

Raising Dion became a surprise hit for Netflix in 2019, but it’s been over two years since its first season dropped. Finally, we are getting a second season of this series, about a young boy who discovers he has superpowers. The second season sees Dion training to better control his abilities at the company Biona, while still going to school. However, there’s a new superpowered threat that Dion will have to face.

Here’s another Netflix series that was a big hit in its first season, but its fans have had to wait for the second installment for close to two years. The second season of the series, based once again on the Sweet Magnolias novels by Sherryl Woods, follows the lives of three lifelong friends as they and their families and friends deal with events in their small South Carolina town.

It’s time to spend over two weeks watching some of the greatest athletes in the world compete in the Winter Olympics. The 2022 edition is being held in Beijing, China, and Peacock is your one-stop streaming service to watch everything about the games. It will have thousands of hours of live on-demand coverage. You can also catch regular news shows, documentaries, coverage of the opening and closing ceremonies, and much more from now until February 20.