12 of the very best TV exhibits to look at this March

The Comeback premieres 22 March on HBO and Max in the US

Amazon Prime Video

11. Bait

Riz Ahmed has made his name in dramas, earning an Oscar nomination for The Sound of Metal, but he reveals his comic side in this series he wrote and stars in. He plays a struggling actor named Shah Latif, who gets an audition to play the next James Bond. Word leaks to the public and everyone around him, especially his large Anglo-Pakistani family, goes wild with expectations and advice, throwing his life into chaos. “It’s almost like his life starts to resemble the spy thriller that he’s auditioning for,” Ahmed told Collider when the show premiered at Sundance. “He’s in a long chase sequence in a way.” He got the approval of Bond producer Barbara Broccoli, he told Deadline, by explaining that the show isn’t really about 007. It’s about Shah and “that crazy distance between our public and our private selves,” he said. But come to think of it, Ahmed could be James Bond.

Bait premieres 25 March on Prime Video internationally

Netflix

12. Something Very Bad is Going to Happen

The Duffer Brothers of Stranger Things are the executive producers of this series, which stars Camila Morrone, last seen running for her life as Roxana, the duplicitous girlfriend of an arms dealer, in The Night Manager. Here she plays Rachel, a bride who is seen in the trailer taking a slow-motion walk down the aisle with horror-movie sound effects in the background, never a good omen for the marriage. The series takes place during the week before the wedding of Rachel and Nicky (Adam DiMarco), and among the signs she should probably pay attention to is an actual hand-written placard in blood-red ink reading “Don’t marry him”. The show’s creator, Haley Z Boston, has compared its tone to a mixture of Carrie and Rosemary’s Baby. “My natural approach is from a place of character and dialogue and humour and then infusing that with unsettling horror,” she said. That doesn’t mean the story is unrelatable. “The show is about the fear of marrying the wrong person,” she added.

Something Very Bad is Going to Happen premieres 26 March on Netflix internationally

— 

If you liked this story, sign up for the Essential List newsletter – a handpicked selection of features, videos and can’t-miss news, delivered to your inbox twice a week.

For more Culture stories from the BBC, follow us on Facebook and Instagram.