Dustin Rowles

The best new show of 2026 is Widow’s Bay. That should not be in dispute. It’s new, inventive, and twisty, and it combines horror with a very specific brand of small-town comedy in a way that’s never really been done on television. Maximum Pleasure Guaranteed is also very good. It is not, as Stephen King recently suggested, better than Widow’s Bay. That’s particularly high praise coming from King, given his own fingerprints on Widow’s Bay.

I have watched my fair share of true-crime for whatever reason it is that our ghoulish curiosity compels us to do so. I genuinely thought I’d seen it all, that nothing could surprise or shock me anymore. Hell, I watched a series a couple of weeks ago about a woman who intentionally drove a car into a brick wall in order to kill her boyfriend. But this? I was left absolutely gobsmacked. GOBSMACKED. Jaw-on-the-floor, what-the-absolute-hell-did-I-just-watch gobsmacked. Remember Dear Zachary?

If you found yourself deeply disappointed by the most recent season of For All Mankind (join the club; we had jackets made, even if the finale mostly managed to stick the landing), there is a very good reason for it. It turns out creator Ronald D. Moore was busy pouring all his creative ideas into Star City, a morally complex spin-off that reminds us why we fell in love with his brand of sci-fi in the first place (see also Battlestar Galactica).