The Best New TV Shows of April 2025
#1 Happy Family USA (Amazon)
On Sept. 10, 2001, Rumi Hussein is just a regular Egyptian American kid—living in the suburbs, grieving his grandfather, making horny mix CDs for the teacher he's hoping to woo into becoming the next Mary Kay Letourneau. Then comes 9/11. Suddenly, neighbors urged to 'say something' when they 'see something' are treating the Husseins like terrorists. Rumi's dad responds with a frantic performance of patriotism to prove they're the safest, most secular family in town. His mom veers in the opposite direction, embracing her given name, Sharia; donning a hijab; and trying to connect with fellow Muslims at a local mosque. Meanwhile, Rumi's older sister Mona is struggling to come out as queer. Then an FBI agent moves in across the street.
This is some heavy material for adult animation. But if anyone can be trusted to make a light but not glib show about post-9/11 Islamophobia work, it's Ramy Youssef, the creator behind two great dramedies that capture the experience of being Muslim in 21st century America: Hulu's Ramy and Netflix's Mo. A collaboration with South Park vet Pam Brady, #1 Happy Family USA is a funny and insightful kid's eye view of growing up in a society that forces you to choose between constantly code-switching to appease bigots and being openly hated for who you are. Led by Youssef, who plays Rumi as well as his dad, the voice cast also features Alia Shawkat, Mandy Moore, Chris Redd, Kieran Culkin, and Timothy Olyphant. The lively animation was designed by Pulitzer-winning illustrator and journalist Mona Chalabi, also an executive producer.
Agatha Christie's Towards Zero (BritBox)
Sometimes a project adds up to precisely the sum of its parts—and there's absolutely nothing wrong with that if those parts are all solid. Here we've got a three-episode BBC miniseries adapted from an undersung Agatha Christie novel, set in 1930s England, at the seaside mansion of the imperious, housebound Lady Tressilian (Anjelica Huston). Her beloved nephew Nevile Strange (Oliver Jackson-Cohen), a dashing tennis player, and his gorgeous new wife, Kay (Mimi Keene), are visiting the estate on their honeymoon. Also there for an extended stay: Nevile's first wife, Audrey (Ella Lily Hyland), with whom he's obviously not yet finished, even after a messy public divorce. The holiday household is rounded out by a fractious assemblage of relatives, employees, and lovers played by great actors like Clarke Peters, Jack Farthing, and Anjana Vasan. So there's plenty of interpersonal friction happening long before the murder takes place.
About that murder: the conceit of Towards Zero is that it doesn't happen until more than halfway through the series, allowing us to get to know the cast of characters before they're split into victims and suspects. The premiere opens with Peters' Mr. Treves, a lawyer, giving a dinner-table speech about how a murder is the end of a story that begins much earlier. This isn't as groundbreaking as it might've been in Christie's time; the result is just a more chronological version of the archetypal whodunit, with less need for flashbacks. The show's real draw is its cast, which expands to include Matthew Rhys as a troubled detective, and a skillful adaptation that highlights the glossiest, cleverest elements of classic Christie—and adds a pinch of eros.
Dying for Sex (FX)
The title Dying for Sex evokes trashy reality series like Sex Sent Me to the ER, but the show takes its name from the acclaimed podcast that the real Molly Kochan recorded with her best friend, Nikki Boyer (an executive producer of the adaptation), about Kochan's radical response to her Stage IV diagnosis. Rather than resign herself to a chaste marriage with a husband who treated her as a patient more than a lover, she left him and embarked upon a sexual odyssey. By the time she died, in 2019, she had explored her desires with more partners than most people would rack up in 10 lifetimes. [ Read the full review.]
Étoile (Amazon)
You know you're living in tumultuous times when even the biggest names in comfort TV feel compelled to get topical. Étoile is the latest project from Gilmore Girls and The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel creator Amy Sherman-Palladino and her husband and frequent collaborator, Daniel Palladino. Sherman-Palladino is known for making chatty, witty, compulsively referential, female-focused shows that take a special interest in the arts; she previously spotlighted ballet in her short-lived but beloved series Bunheads. The voice behind all of the above titles is certainly recognizable in Étoile. But the show also represents a novel attempt to marry escapism with engagement. It's just one of the many ambitious juxtapositions that make this vindication of high art in a world on fire as fascinating—and fun—as it is messy. [ Read the full review.]
North of North (Netflix)
What is it about Canadian comedies? From Schitt's Creek to Sort Of, the CBC never stops cranking out funny shows that feel gentle, wholesome, and family-oriented but also contemporary. Fans of those imports—and, really, anyone who could use a pick-me-up—should add another title from the public broadcaster to their Netflix queue: North of North. Created by Stacey Aglok-MacDonald and Alethea Arnaquq-Baril, both Arctic locals and members of the Inuit community, the sitcom is set among the mostly Indigenous residents of a fictional town in the country's extreme north.
Anna Lambe gives a wonderfully charismatic performance as Siaja, a 26-year-old Inuk wife and mother who has come to realize she doesn't want to spend her life with Ting (Kelly William), the self-absorbed heartthrob she married after high school. The rest of the cast is delightful as well, from Maika Harper as Siaja's spitfire mom to comedy stalwart Mary Lynn Rajskub (It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia, The Larry Sanders Show) as Siaja's exacting boss, the town manager. Bonus: the region's sunlit snowscapes make a gorgeous backdrop.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
USA Today
a few seconds ago
- USA Today
'King of the Hill' reboot: Season 14 premiere date, cast, how to watch
A decade and a half has passed since audiences dropped in on the fictional town of Arlen, Texas, but the hearts of its beer-sipping residents have stayed much the same. Animated comedy "King of the Hill" is returning for a reboot after 15 years off the air, bringing viewers back into the lives of Hank, Peggy and Bobby Hill, along with their friends Dale, Bill, Boomhauer and beyond. The revival is spearheaded by original co-creators Greg Daniels and Mike Judge, who also voices protagonist Hank Hill. The rest of the original voices return as well, though Johnny Hardwick, the voice of Dale Gribble, was only able to record part of the season before dying in 2023 and being replaced by Toby Huss. The original cast also suffered the loss of John Redcorn's voice actor, Jonathan Joss, who was shot and killed at the age of 59 in June. Joss completed recording for the season before his death. Here's how to catch the new season. When does 'King of the Hill' Season 14 premiere? Season 14 will premiere on Monday, Aug. 4. All 10 episodes in the season will drop at the same time. How to watch 'King of the Hill' Season 14 "King of the Hill" Season 14 will stream exclusively on Hulu and Hulu on Disney+. Cast of 'King of the Hill' Season 14 cast According to Disney+, the cast of the reboot includes: 'King of the Hill' reboot trailer
New York Times
2 minutes ago
- New York Times
‘King of the Hill' Review: Still a Man's World, but a Different One
One attraction of animated shows is that while we get older, they stay frozen in time. On the Peanuts specials seen on Apple TV+, Charlie Brown continues to lose baseball games a quarter-century after Charles Schulz's death. There is no reason that age or mortality need intrude on the Springfield of 'The Simpsons' or the Jersey Shore of 'Bob's Burgers.' Nor, for that matter, the Arlen, Texas, of 'King of the Hill.' Which is why — while a revival of a show that had an excellent 13-season run and a pitch-perfect ending may not have been urgent — the new season, which begins on Aug. 4 on Hulu, deserves some credit. Time did not need to pass in Arlen, but it did. Hank Hill (Mike Judge), propane salesman and exacting home craftsman, and his wife, Peggy (Kathy Najimy), are returning home to retire after a stint in Saudi Arabia, where Hank worked for Aramco. Their son, Bobby (Pamela Adlon), once an awkward tween who developed such a love for chopped liver that he contracted gout, is now 21 and running a restaurant in Dallas that fuses Japanese food with German American Texas Hill Country flavors. Meanwhile, curious things have happened in and around Hank's beer-drinking alley. Dale Gribble, Hank's conspiracist neighbor, served briefly as mayor during the pandemic. (Johnny Hardwick, who died in 2023, voices Dale in some episodes and is then replaced by Toby Huss.) The local sad sack Bill Dauterive (Stephen Root) has been a shut-in since Covid. It is as if Hank represented some sort of social glue, a spirit of by-the-rulebook decency in whose absence everything went haywire. (So now you know whom to blame.) 'Hank,' Peggy asks, 'have things changed here more than we thought?' Hank is used to being chagrined. It is his destiny, his set point. From 1997 to 2009, 'King of the Hill' was a minutely observed comedy about a traditionalist man in a changing world. What distinguished the show from similar comedies, like 'All in the Family,' is that Hank is both distressed by change and willing to grow. (In the new season, he has come to love soccer, which he once said was 'invented by European ladies to keep them busy while their husbands did the cooking.') Hank's father, Cotton (Huss), who died late in the series's run, was a meanspirited tyrant who berated Hank well into adulthood. Hank sought to be a different kind of father, but he struggled to understand Bobby, who preferred prop comedy to football. 'King of the Hill' was a show about the crisis of masculinity, long before Joe Rogan stepped into his podcast studio. The revival brings back the original creators, Judge and Greg Daniels, along with Saladin K. Patterson, who rebooted a sweetly rethought 'The Wonder Years' for ABC. Time hangs over the new episodes in sad real-life ways, with several cast members' — Hardwick, Jonathan Joss, Brittany Murphy, Tom Petty — having died. There are other personnel changes: The alley gang now includes a Black member, Brian Robinson (Keith David), and Ronny Chieng replaces Huss as Hank's materialistic Laotian neighbor Kahn Souphanousinphone. Line by line, the laughs are still there, starting with the opening scene, in which Peggy over shares with the passengers of a transoceanic flight about Hank's famed narrow urethra. The show still deeply understands Hank's voice and character, particularly how retirement fits uncomfortably on a man who always defined himself by productivity. 'I didn't retire to sleep my life away like some [barest pause] nepo baby,' he tells Peggy. The bigger change is in Bobby's story, where the revival has most thoroughly rethought itself. Having skipped college to run a restaurant that serves a lot of privileged Southern Methodist University students, he is in some ways now the true heart of the show's comic populism. He's all grown up — you may see and hear more of his romantic experiences than you are ready for — but as a result, his and his parents' stories often run in parallel, sapping the intergenerational dynamic of the original series. Then there's how the world has changed. 'King of the Hill' was rarely explicitly political. (The conservative Hank was shocked to learn that George W. Bush had a weak handshake.) But it was deeply incisive about social politics and culture clashes, set in a Texas exurb that was old-school about its meat and football but also casually multicultural in a way most '90s sitcoms were not. The revival has fun with Hank's horror at finding Arlen filled with poke shops and e-scooters. But the America Hank has returned to is not transformed simply because it has bike lanes. Many of its big recent changes have been changes backward; traditionalist men have become kings of the hill again. And a lot of Hank Hills have either embraced a less respectful, Cotton-esque form of politics, found themselves turning against those views, or just quietly learned to live with cognitive dissonance. The new season wants to engage with that only so deeply. It tells us that Hank watched Fox News in Saudi Arabia (and CNN during the commercials) and that he did not vote for Barack Obama. But as for any more recent political events, the series is mum. This is a welcome choice, to a point — straining to have a take on the current administration undermined sitcom revivals like 'Murphy Brown' and 'Roseanne.' But 'King of the Hill' has always been a show about the way we live now, and we don't live the way we did in 2009. This is probably why Hank has been a popular subject in the parlor game of 'Who would this TV character have voted for?' At heart, this exercise is a way of engaging, secondhand, with how our own hometowns and old friends have changed. I don't blame 'King of the Hill' for wanting to avoid that. But to the extent that Arlen is an island of comity now, it feels less like Everytown, U.S.A., and more like Brigadoon. The season takes a sidelong approach to current events in the third episode. Hank and Peggy visit the presidential library of the younger Bush, only to find that their tour companions in a White House simulation exercise are interested only in conspiracy theories. Meanwhile at his restaurant, Bobby is accused of cultural appropriation. The clashes are right in the show's wheelhouse, and funny in execution, but they also show the limits of comic both-sidesism. On the one hand, the breakdown of social trust and of a shared sense of reality make reasoned governance impossible. On the other, someone might make you feel bad about cooking fusion cuisine. One of these is not exactly as egregious as the other. One of the season's best new episodes combines the series's ear for the moment with its character roots. Hank finds himself briefly hosting 'Good Hank' — his teenage half brother from a later marriage of Cotton's — and ends up accompanying him to a 'boot camp' run by a manosphere personality. If you watched Hank's attempts to introduce Bobby to his idea of manly pursuits in the original run, you can probably guess how this goes. Hank is delighted that Good Hank wants to step up and become a man, then horrified at the sleazy influencer — who runs the meeting holding a pair of golden balls called 'The 'Nads of Truth' — and the whiny attendees who blame all their problems on women. The episode unfolds with the chaos and slapstick you would expect of a show that built a plot around Bobby's education in the self-defense tactic of kicking people in the groin. It also has the bittersweet overtones of 'King of the Hill' at its best. What Hank is really confronting here is the abusive legacy of Cotton, for whom he was never good enough, never man enough. The 10-episode season has its moments like this — even if, as with many TV revivals, they are only moments. 'King of the Hill' could just as well have stayed in a restful retirement. But for Hank, there are still odd jobs to do, and plenty of things that need fixing.
UPI
2 minutes ago
- UPI
'King of the Hill' voice cast adapted to older characters
1 of 7 | Bobby learns that Connie and Chane practice ethical nonmonogomy in "King of the Hill," on Hulu Monday, but he is not ready for it. Photo courtesy of Disney Aug. 4 (UPI) -- While it has been 15 years since new episodes of King of the Hill aired on Fox, only nine years have passed for the characters in Season 14, premiering Monday on Hulu. Bobby Hill (voice of Pamela Adlon) is now 21 years old and his parents, Hank (Mike Judge) and Peggy (Kathy Najimy) are retired. In a recent Zoom interview with UPI, ensemble cast members Lauren Tom and Toby Huss said it was easy to adjust to their characters' ages. Tom plays Connie, Bobby's neighbor and classmate in the original series, and a lingering potential love interest. Tom, 63, shared how Connie is closer in age to her own voice now that the character is in her 20s. "It was actually harder for me in the beginning to play someone 12," Tom said. "King of the Hill was my first voiceover job so I did a lot of learning as I went." Huss, 58, previously voiced supporting roles like Hank's father, Cotton. When voice cast member Johnny Hardwick died in 2023, Huss took over Hardwick's character, conspiracy theorist neighbor Dale Gribble. Hardwick recorded seven episodes before his death, and the seventh is dedicated to him in the new season. Huss had to add sporadic lines to some of those episodes and aimed for them to blend in seamlessly. "I didn't want to change Dale," Huss said. "I think Johnny and I smoked about the same amount of cigarettes over our lifetime so we both have a good gravelly thing." Huss said he focused on specific sounds Hardwick made -- as long he could mimic those, he could sound like Dale. "If you hear it, you'll go, 'Okay, that's the tone of Dale. That's close enough,'" Hardwick said. Beyond the voice cast, the show's animators had to capture the older characters, too. Showrunner Saladin K. Patterson, who executive produces with creators Mike Judge and Greg Daniels, teased that one character has let himself go in the ensuing years, though reverts closer to his original appearance in later episodes. Otherwise, the changes are subtle. Hank's hair is grayer. Boomhauer (also Judge) has an extra line in his face. "We didn't want it to be a shock," Patterson said. "We still wanted people to feel like they're watching people that they always knew and loved." Tom also voices Connie's mother, Minh. A highly competitive socialite who rubs her victories in the Hills' faces, Minh has lost some of her subtlety in Tom's new portrayal. "I like to say that Minh used to be passive-aggressive but now she's just aggressive," Tom said. "I think it's okay that my voice has gotten a little bit lower if you compared this season to the pilot from the '90s." Patterson said the team briefly considered leaving the characters the same as they were in the original series. Judge brought back Beavis and Butt-Head both still as teenagers, and as middle-aged men, thanks to a multiverse story, but King of the Hill could not send the Hills into space to preserve them. Ultimately, Patterson said, Judge and Daniels decided the passage of time was what justified a revival. "Why bring it back?" Patterson asked. "Aging the characters up to give them a new chapter and new phase of life that they're exploring that the fans can experience with them, I think, is a very smart way to answer that 'why now' question." Dale was always the resident conspiracy theorist, but now finds himself in a present day where everyone has a forum to vent theories. Dale writes a substack but that can hardly compete with TikTok and other platforms. "Dale is on uneven ground," Huss said. "His move to the right has been usurped." Bobby and Connie's relationship is complicated by Connie practicing polyamory. She is in a relationship with another character, but both Connie and her boyfriend practice Ethical Nonmonogamy. "I actually had to ask my kids what ENM stood for," Tom said. "That's so progressive and cool for her. It just gives it more conflict rather than just have them get back together easily." Modern social phenomena give King of the Hill a lot more episodic stories. Hank may be confused by all gender bathrooms but he is ultimately sensitive to them. He also acknowledges he does not want to get canceled, though the show avoids using terms like "woke." "We have Hank reference cancel culture for sure, but things like wokeness, that term in and of itself has been appropriated and usurped by the political factions that want to weaponize it so much," Patterson said. "We wanted to stay away from letting our show be weaponized as well." Patterson clarified that King of the Hill was never overtly political. Rather, he distinguished, it was "a show that talked about cultural things. There's a difference." Therefore, an episode of the revival addresses cultural appropriation in a King of the Hill way. Bobby is criticized for operating a Japanese fusion restaurant when he is not Japanese, but Patterson defends Bobby's intentions. "When people have their own agenda, people project that agenda onto good intentions," Patterson said. "The comedy comes from Bobby being stuck in the middle in the way that Hank in the original was often stuck in the middle. And Bobby's trying to say, 'This is about a celebration of things, not about excluding or appropriating or anything.' It felt like that was good cultural social commentary."
