Not a week goes by without the launch of at least one “Netflix Original.” Usually, it’s many more than that. Series, movies, documentaries, comedy specials, and even shows that aren’t actually Netflix-produced but licensed to the company in specific countries all fall under the “Netflix Original” banner. Where traditional TV stations are often wise to aim for quality over quantity, Netflix has the means to invest in such an immense quantity of programming that they can truly make something for everyone. A lot of their programming is frankly junk food, but it’s junk food people watch. Many others are well above the “junk food” level and earn your full attention during the weekend binge, even if you don’t ponder them much afterward. If you’re lucky, you get a Bojack Horseman or an Orange is the New Black or a Roma, the truly original works that make an impact.
Given just how much programming Netflix produces and acquires, we can’t list out every new series and movie coming to the streaming platform in 2019. Nor, given how little gets scheduled far in advance, do we know if all the Netflix Originals on this list will even launch in 2019. Some of the entries on this list with “to be determined” release dates seem somewhat unlikely to come out this year, but we’re including them because they instill a stronger “can’t wait” or “ready to hate” response than other Originals we know are coming sooner but also know less about. For 2019 and possibly beyond, here are 20 Netflix Originals (both series and movies) we can’t wait for, and 10 we’re already prepared to hate.
CAN’T WAIT: TUCA & BERTIE
To ease the wait until the next season of Bojack Horseman (and hopefully give us a new favorite to look forward to when Bojack inevitably ends,) Netflix is premiering Tuca & Bertie on May 3. Created by Bojack character designer Lisa Hanawalt, this adult animated comedy stars Tiffany Hadish as Tuca, an outgoing Tucan, and Ali Wong as her anxious songbird roommate Bertie.
At the very least, we expect this show to be hilarious, with fun animation and a great voice cast. Will it also plumb the depths of painful emotion that Bojack did or does this show have different goals? Either way, cartoon fans should be excited for this.
CAN’T WAIT: THE DARK CRYSTAL: AGE OF RESISTANCE
Some sort of Dark Crystal sequel or prequel or whatever has been in the works for decades now. Sometime this year, fans of Jim Henson’s dark puppetry epic will finally get to enjoy the full ten-episode prequel series on Netflix, titled The Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance.
From the previews, the puppetry looks absolutely gorgeous. Will the story be any good? We hope so, but frankly the bar’s already kind of low (outstanding artistry aside, the original movie’s kind of boring.) At the very least, this show should equal the original movie, and we wouldn’t be surprised if it surpasses it.
READY TO HATE: GOOP
Remember all the controversy that occurred when Jerry Media, the company responsible for the Fyre Fest scam, had final say on Netflix’s Fyre documentary and tried to make themselves look innocent of the scam? When the Goop docu-series comes out, imagine all that all over again but way worse, because not only is a scammer company making this series, but unlike Jerry Media, they don’t even acknowledge the scam exists.
Yes, Goop, Gwyneth Paltrow’s “wellness” company, is getting its own series. The company that has made over 50 false health claims according to consumer group Truth in Advertising and had to pay out a $145,000 settlement over faulty products is getting to advertise its pseudioscientific nonsense on Netflix.
CAN’T WAIT: OUR PLANET
Our Planet is the entry on this list with the shortest wait to see as of this publication. The eight part nature documentary series from David Attenborough and the rest of the team behind BBC’s Planet Earth will be available to stream worldwide on April 5.
If you like Planet Earth and similar nature shows, this should definitely be on your radar. Netflix has been seriously promoting Our Planet, even getting an ad on the Super Bowl. Four years in the making and shot on all seven continents, the cinematography looks gorgeous, and the series hopes to spark conversations about global conservation.
CAN’T WAIT: WHEN THEY SEE US
Even if A Wrinkle in Time was something of a misfire, Ava Duvernay has earned enough goodwill from films like Selma and 13th to get us excited for anything she’s attached to. Her next project with Netflix looks like an especially powerful one, a four episode limited series about the Central Park Five case titled When They See Us.
The series follows the true story of five Harlem teenagers falsely convicted of a horrible crime in 1989 up to their exoneration in 2014. DuVernay is directing and co-writing every episode. The trailer alone might make you cry. Ready yourself emotionally for when the series finally drops on May 31.
READY TO HATE: GREEN EGGS AND HAM
How do you make this TV show? Does anybody want to know? The book is great, but it’s one note. A series would get truly rote, unless, of course, they pad it out and change what it is all about. But why on Earth would you pad Seuss? The simple genius you would lose. Even with staff who went to Yale, this Netflix show seems sure to fail. Seuss hasn’t worked at feature-length. A series? What else could we think?
We would not stream this on our phone. We would not stream this show alone. We would not stream it on TV, though Netflix will stream globally. We doubt we’ll like Green Eggs and Ham. We doubt we’ll like it, Sam I Am.
CAN’T WAIT: RILAKKUMA AND KAORU
Netflix surprised everyone last April with Aggretsuko, an advertisement for cutesy Sanrio merchandise that also happened to be a biting commentary on life as a twentysomething woman working an office job. We’ll see if Netflix can recapture that “cute mascots + short episodes + adult woman concerns” magic with Rilakkuma and Kaoru, premiering on April 19.
It certainly looks good. Unusual for Japanese anime, the animation is done in stop motion. It’s adorable, with the extra marketing bonus that the bear characters actually look like the physical toys. The trailer sells the show as “10 minutes to just relax,” and it seems like it’s well suited to succeed at that goal.
CAN’T WAIT: CAROL & TUESDAY
Pretty much all you need to know about Carol & Tuesday is that it’s the new show from Shinichiro Watanabe, the director of Cowboy Bebop. Carol & Tuesday finds him returning to outer space, but it seems the most relevant comparison in his filmography isn’t Bebop but Kids on the Slope, as this is another music-themed coming of age drama.
READY TO HATE: ONE HUNDRED YEARS OF SOLITUDE
Like Green Eggs & Ham, One Hundred Years of Solitude is a wonderful book that seems like a bad choice for a TV adaptation. It’s that way, of course, for opposite reasons. Where Green Eggs & Ham is too simple to imagine working as an ongoing series, Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude is too complicated and detailed and weird to imagine anyone adapting it properly.
To be fair, Netflix just announced this series in February and we don’t even know any of the directors or writers yet (this is one of those list entries that’s here more for the emotional reaction than any likelihood of seeing it this year.) We’d love it if this was a masterpiece, but our expectations are low.
CAN’T WAIT: THE IRISHMAN
Netflix failed to win a Best Picture Oscar with Roma, but they’re trying for the gold again this year. Barring one of the other films on this list being a surprise phenomenon, it seems their Oscar hopes are riding on Martin Scorcese’s The Irishman, which Netflix wants to give an actual wide theatrical release before it hits the streaming service.
Starring Robert DeNiro as Frank Sheeran and Al Pacino as Jimmy Hoffa, The Irishman has been in development for years. With a budget of $200 million, it’s the most expensive film Scorcese’s ever made. Much of that money is going into de-aging effects to make the stars look 30 years younger in flashbacks.
CAN’T WAIT: THE LAUNDROMAT
Steven Soderbergh, the prolific director who just can’t stop working after his brief “retirement,” already has a new film streaming on Netflix this year: the acclaimed sports drama High Flying Bird. Come awards season, he has yet another Netflix movie coming out: the Panama Papers drama The Laundromat.
Just a couple years after she earned her 21st Oscar nomination for another “papers”-based true journalism story in The Post, Meryl Streep is headlining The Laundromat’s all-star cast. Should we expect nomination number 22 for Hollywood’s most celebrated actress? Gary Oldman, Antonio Banderas and, uh, Alex Pettyfer and David Schwimmer are also starring.
READY TO HATE: MURDER MYSTERY
If not for the need to fill up word counts, we could easily just write the words “Happy Madison” and leave it at that for our explanation of why Murder Mystery, hitting Netflix on June 12, is probably not going to be very good. Adam Sandler has acted in good movies, but movies from his production company Happy Madison are almost never worth watching.
Sandler seems like a nice enough guy, and you can’t blame him for wanting to take fancy vacations with his friends. That’s what most Happy Madison films are: excuses for vacations (Murder Mystery’s plot hinges on a trip through Europe.) That doesn’t make them fun to watch, however. There’s at least three more Happy Madison Netflix films after this.
CAN’T WAIT: THE WITCHER
Yeah, Henry Cavill’s wig is bad in the first publicity still for The Witcher. That, combined with the bad track record for video game adaptations, is enough that it’s understandable why for some this is already in the “ready to hate” pile.
Still, we want to be optimistic. One early publicity photo doesn’t represent a show’s whole production value. Those worried about the video game adaptation curse should note that A) Netflix was able to break said curse with Castlevania, and B) The Witcher isn’t technically based on the video game series, but on Andrzej Sapkowski’s original novels. Best case scenario: this ends up a worthy way to fill the hole left by Game of Thrones.
CAN’T WAIT: THE POLITICIAN
This is another show we’re not certain will be great but is probably worth giving a chance. Ryan Murphy’s TV series, including Glee, American Horror Story, American Crime Story, and Pose, vary wildly in quality, but even when his stuff’s bad, it’s interestingly bad, and when it’s good, we love it. The Politician is his first show for Netflix.
The series stars Dear Evan Hansen’s Ben Platt as Payton Hobart, an ambitious political candidate who will face a different election each season. The supporting cast includes Jessica Lange, Gwyneth Paltrow, Zoe Deutch, and guest appearances by Bette Midler and Judith Light.
READY TO HATE: SIX UNDERGROUND
Here’s one positive thing we can say about the next Michael Bay movie: at least it’s not Transformers 6. Also, Ryan Reynolds is reuniting with his Deadpool screenwriters Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick, so maybe it will have a better sense of humor than most Michael Bay films.
That said, Six Underground is still a Michael Bay film, and by now we all know what that means: impressive technical acumen wasted on weak storytelling with an unpleasant misanthropic worldview. It’s also kind of weird seeing a Bay film going to Netflix when one of Bay’s greater strengths is his sense of true big screen scale.
CAN’T WAIT: RAISING DION
Raising Dion, about an African-American single mother dealing with her son developing superpowers, started as a comic by Dennis Liu. At the same time he released the comic in 2015, Liu also made a live-action trailer. That trailer went viral, and soon Netflix came calling with a straight-to-series 10 episode order.
Superhero shows are a dime a dozen, but this seems like a fresh take on the genre. Michael B. Jordan is executive producing the series, the second TV show for his Outlier Society production company after the animated gen:LOCK. He’ll also play Mark Reese the deceased scientist husband of Nicole and father of Dion.
CAN’T WAIT: LEILA
Hulu might dominate dystopian television with The Handmaid’s Tale, but if you want more horrifying visions of the near-future, you might want to check out Leila, a new series coming to Netflix on June 14. The source novel by Prayaag Akbar was highly acclaimed, winning India’s Crossword Book Award and shortlisted for the Hindu Literary Prize.
Taking place in a segregated future India, Leila is about a Hindu woman who falls in love with a Muslim man and has to risk everything to rescue her missing daughter. Comparisons to other dystopian stories are easy to make, but distinctive culture perspective should make it stand out.
READY TO HATE: ELI
When major studios sell a film to Netflix, that’s usually not a good sign. It typically means the film’s a mediocrity akin to The Cloverfield Paradox, Mowgli: Legend of the Jungle, or Extinction. The big exception to the rule, the brilliant Annihilation, was only sold in international territories and still got a theatrical release in the US.
Given that precedent, we’re worried about Eli, a horror movie which Paramount Pictures sold off to Netflix for a 2019 release. Supposedly the film has gotten positive test screening scores and is only given to Netflix because Paramount isn’t sure how to sell a film without big name stars. Given horror is the easiest genre to sell without famous actors, however, forgive our suspicions something else is up.
CAN’T WAIT: CANNON BUSTERS
Anime fans have been waiting for Cannon Busters for a long time now. LeSean Thomas, an American animator for The Boondocks and Legend of Korra, and Japanese studio Satellite crowdfunded the post-apocalyptic adventure pilot on Kickstarter in 2014. Backers got to see the pilot in 2016 but there was no release to the public.
In 2017, Netflix ordered a full 12 episode series of Cannon Busters, and in 2018, announced a March 1, 2019 release. That date has come and gone, with no news on how the series is progressing. Hopefully, it doesn’t take forever to enjoy this gorgeous-looking international collaboration.
CAN’T WAIT: KLAUS
Netflix has a ton of exciting animated movies in the coming years. We can’t wait for Guillermo Del Toro’s Pinocchio and Henry Selick’s Wendell and Wild in 2021, and are curious if Taika Waititi’s Bubbles can still be made to work in a post-Leaving Neverland world. First up from Netflix Animation is Klaus, coming out this holiday season.
This comedic Santa origin story comes from Sergio Pablos, a former Disney designer who’s gone on to create the characters for Despicable Me and Smallfoot. Showing confidence in the film’s quality, Netflix is going to give Klaus a theatrical release to qualify it for the Best Animated Feature Oscar.
