JANUARY — MARCH 2026

Everything Worth Watching from the First Quarter — TV Shows and Films, Ranked and Reviewed!

The first quarter of 2026 turned out to be considerably richer than most people expected. January and February were quiet in the way that early quarters usually are, awards holdovers, mid-season TV premieres, the occasional streamer gamble. Then March arrived and delivered a run of things worth talking about: Bait, Jury Duty‘s second incarnation, the continuation of The Pitt, and a handful of films that ranged from deeply personal documentary work to genre comedies with more going on beneath the surface than their trailers suggested.

What follows is everything worth your time from the first three months of the year — television and film together, ranked and reviewed.

📺  Television  📺

1. Bait [TV]  – Prime Video — March 25

★★★★★   Riz Ahmed as a Pakistani-British actor auditioning to be the next James Bond.

The TV highlight of the quarter and one of the best things anyone has made this year. Ahmed wrote, created and stars in this six-episode comedy about Shah Latif, a broke British actor whose life implodes when he’s rumoured to be in the running for James Bond. What begins as a gleeful industry satire — richer than Hacks, stranger than The Franchise, gradually reveals itself as something much more personal: a film about belonging, about what it costs to want recognition from a country that has never fully claimed you. The family scenes, set around Eid, are the finest representation of British South Asian life on television. Ahmed’s performance is profoundly open. Guz Khan steals every scene he’s in. 96% on Rotten Tomatoes. The year’s best new show so far.

2. Jury Duty Presents: Company Retreat – Prime Video — March 20

★★★★★   The prank comedy returns with an unwitting temp worker at a fake hot sauce company.

Nobody thought it was possible to replicate what the first Jury Duty did — take one unsuspecting non-actor and surround them with improv performers in an elaborately staged scenario and produce something genuinely moving. They were wrong. Company Retreat follows Anthony Norman, a real temporary employee at a fictional family-owned hot sauce brand called Rockin’ Grandma’s, where he discovers the founder is stepping down and corporate vultures are circling. The show manages the near-impossible: it’s funnier than Season 1 in places, and its emotional core — whether Anthony will step up and do the right thing when no one is making him — lands as cleanly as anything in scripted television. 93% on Rotten Tomatoes. Anthony is the summer hero we needed in March.

3. The Pitt – HBO Max — Season 2, from January 7

★★★★★   Noah Wyle’s real-time ER drama continues its second 15-episode season.

The Pitt continues to do something that almost no other drama on television does: it trusts time. Each episode is one hour of a 15-hour emergency room shift, and the cumulative weight of that structure — the way exhaustion and grief and small victories build across a season — creates a viewing experience unlike anything else currently running. Season 2 jumps forward in time, introduces new tensions around Dr. Robby and his temporary replacement, and as of episode 12 has just landed a cliffhanger that has viewers counting the days to the finale. It is the most consistent drama on television and one of the most human shows ever made about medicine.

4. The Fall and Rise of Reggie Dinkins – NBC / Peacock — from January 18

★★★★☆   Tracy Morgan and Daniel Radcliffe in a mockumentary about a disgraced NFL star seeking the Hall of Fame.

The show that brought network TV comedy back to the conversation. Created by Robert Carlock and Sam Means — the minds behind 30 Rock and Kimmy Schmidt, executive produced by Tina Fey — this mockumentary follows Reggie Dinkins (Morgan), a former Jets running back booted from the NFL for gambling, who hires documentary filmmaker Arthur Tobin (Radcliffe) to rehabilitate his image. Morgan is funnier than he has been in years, playing a man who may not be the sharpest but who becomes impossible not to root for. Radcliffe nails Tobin’s intellectual anxiety. The show gets better every episode. Esquire called it the best new show of 2026. 100% on Rotten Tomatoes.

5. Sunny Nights – Disney + – from March 11

★★★☆☆ Australian crime-tinged dramedy about an American brother-sister duo trying to build a spray-tan business in Sydney while getting tangled with the wrong crowd.

A sun-soaked setup that promises chaos but plays it safer than expected. There’s a fun contrast between the glossy beachside aesthetic and the underlying desperation, though the tone never fully commits to either comedy or danger. The sibling dynamic gives it some spark, especially in its more absurd moments, but the series often settles into familiar beats. Easy to watch, occasionally sharp, but rarely as wild as it thinks it is.

6. Free Bert – Netflix – from January 22

★★★☆☆ Comedy series following Bert Kreischer trying to fit into elite Beverly Hills society as his daughters attend a private school.

A familiar culture-clash setup elevated slightly by Kreischer’s chaotic, self-aware persona. The humor leans heavily on his larger-than-life image (loud, shameless, and often out of place) which works in short bursts but can feel repetitive over a full episode. There are moments where the show hints at something sharper beneath the surface, particularly around class and belonging, but it rarely pushes far enough. Not bad, perfectly watchable, but never quite as bold or memorable as it could be.

🎬  Film  🎬

1. Fukushima: A Nuclear Nightmare

★★★★★   A documentary reckoning with the 2011 Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster and its human cost.

The best documentary of the quarter and one of the most important films of the year. Taking the Fukushima disaster of 2011 as its subject, the film moves between the immediate catastrophe, the years of coverup, the ongoing displacement of communities, and the long-term health consequences that are still being denied or minimised by authorities. What separates it from previous Fukushima films is its insistence on staying with the people most affected — not experts or politicians, but the families who cannot go home, the workers who were lied to, the children who grew up in the shadow of what happened. A necessary film made with genuine moral seriousness.

2. Send Help

★★★★★ A survival thriller that turns a simple premise into something sharp, funny, and unexpectedly human.

Send Help takes a familiar setup and executes it with confidence and precision. What begins as a survival story becomes something more layered, gradually revealing shifting power dynamics and emotional truths between its two leads. The film balances tension with dark humor, never losing control of its tone. Performances carry it, but the writing is what makes it land — every turn feels earned. Tight, entertaining, and smarter than it looks. One of the most enjoyable films of the year so far.

3. Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die

★★★★☆   Gore Verbinski returns with a bonkers dark comedy about AI, a man from the future, and a Los Angeles diner.

Verbinski has been away nine years. He comes back swinging. Sam Rockwell plays a man who has watched the world end 116 times and needs to try again — recruiting a specific combination of diner patrons to stop a rogue AI that has consumed a generation of children. It is loud, preachy, occasionally too on-the-nose about its targets (social media, tech billionaires, the death of attention), and genuinely impossible to forget. Rockwell gives one of the best performances of his career. The R-rating creates visible tension — the film wants to be harder than it sometimes allows itself to be. But it is the most energetic, most genuinely angry mainstream comedy in years. 83% on Rotten Tomatoes. $8 million at the box office. It deserved far more of both.

4. Midwinter Break

★★★★☆   A couple travel to Amsterdam for what appears to be a winter break — but something is quietly ending.

The smallest and finest film of the quarter. Two people — married for decades, clearly loving each other, clearly not fine — travel to Bruges for a short holiday. What is actually happening between them emerges slowly and without melodrama. The film is almost entirely behavioural: you understand what is wrong between these two people not from what they say but from what they don’t say, from the way they move around each other, from small moments of tenderness that are also moments of distance. It is the kind of film that a large portion of the audience will find too quiet and that another portion will find devastating. Both responses are correct.

5. Wild London

★★★★☆   A nature documentary in the vein of Planet Earth but set entirely within London.

Wild London applies the grammar and production values of a major nature documentary — drone photography, intimate close-up work, Attenborough-esque patience — to the urban ecosystem of London. The results are genuinely surprising: the wildlife that exists in the gaps between the city’s human life, the adaptations that have occurred over generations of urban cohabitation, the strange beauty of a fox moving through an empty market at 3 AM. The narration of sir David Attenborough makes everything better. A beautiful piece of filmmaking.

6. How to Make a Killing

★★★★☆ A dark comedy about small time criminals whose “perfect” plan collapses almost immediately.

How to Make a Killing knows exactly what it is — a messy, ironic spiral of bad decisions. The setup is sharp and the tone clicks early, leaning into that familiar idea that the more control these characters think they have, the worse things get. It is funniest when it stays simple and lets the situation unravel on its own. Where it stumbles is in trying to add weight to something that works better as pure cynicism. Still, there is enough wit and momentum to carry it through. An entertaining, if uneven, genre piece.

7. Mercy

★★★☆☆ Sci fi thriller about a detective accused of killing his wife who has 90 minutes to prove his innocence.

A slick, high concept thriller that leworks familiar sci fi ideas into a tense race against time. Mercy does not reinvent the genre, but it moves with enough urgency and conviction to keep you watching. The future world is sketched efficiently, the central premise is strong, and the film gets solid mileage from its moral questions about justice, technology, and punishment. It can feel a little schematic at times, and some of its ideas are more intriguing than the drama built around them, but it stays engaging. A decent, watchable studio thriller of the kind we do not get often enough anymore.

The Quarter in Short

Q1 2026 was better than it had any right to be. Bait arrived with 96% on Rotten Tomatoes and gave Riz Ahmed his best vehicle in years. Jury Duty did the impossible twice. The Pitt kept being The Pitt, which is one of the best things on television. Reggie Dinkins reminded everyone that broadcast comedy can still compete. On the film side, Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die was the year’s most genuinely angry studio comedy. Fukushima: A Nuclear Nightmare was essential. Midwinter Break was devastating. And a handful of other films — Mercy, Send Help, Wild London — made a case for the kind of mid-budget, mid-ambition filmmaking that the industry keeps pretending doesn’t have an audience.

The second quarter begins with Project Hail Mary in cinemas, Bait still being discussed on social media, and The Pitt heading toward its Season 2 finale. Q1 set a high bar. It will be worth seeing whether the rest of the year clears it!