10 Must-Watch Upcoming Fantasy TV Shows

Fantasy fans have been eating good for the past few weeks, thanks to A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms revitalizing the Game of Thrones franchise, and the genre isn’t slowing down. There are a ton of exciting fantasy shows in the pipeline for the coming months.

There are returning shows, like House of the Dragon season 3 and the second season of the live-action version of One Piece. But there are plenty of new shows on the way, like a Green Lantern detective noir and a Norse-era God of War series.

Maul: Shadow Lord

Set after the events of Star Wars: The Clone Wars, Maul: Shadow Lord will follow the enduring Sith Lord from The Phantom Menace during the rule of the Galactic Empire. It’ll be fascinating to see Maul navigating a ruthless dictatorship led by his former master. In addition to veteran Maul actor Sam Witwer, the show’s stacked voice cast also features Gideon Adlon, Richard Ayoade, and recent Oscar nominee Wagner Moura.

The series will consist of 10 episodes. Disney+ will stream two new episodes a week from April 6 to May 4 (a.k.a. Star Wars Day).

The Vampire Lestat

In its third season, Interview with the Vampire is being rebranded as The Vampire Lestat. This is the next step in AMC’s grand plan to Walking Dead-ify the 18 Anne Rice novels they acquired in 2020. This adaptation has embraced the queer elements of Rice’s stories, and it’s made for rollicking television so far. The show will return for season 3 this summer.

Spider-Noir

If you liked Nicolas Cage’s P.I. Spidey in Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, then boy, are you in for a treat. Cage is reprising his role from the animated movies — not that exact variant, but that portrayal of a grizzled, trenchcoat-clad, Bogartesque webslinger — in a live-action series on Prime Video. And based on what we’ve seen, he seems to be going full Cage.

As its title would suggest, Spider-Noir is planting your friendly neighborhood Spider-Man in a pulpy, hard-boiled detective story. It takes place in the dark, moody, rain-soaked criminal underbelly of 1930s New York. Prime will release each episode in two formats: grainy black-and-white and lavish Golden Age color — so pick your poison.

Human Vapor

Train to Busan director Yeon Sang-ho is adapting the 1960 Japanese film The Human Vapor into a Netflix series. The movie revolves around a man who gets transformed into a gaseous being and becomes a vaporous antihero using his powers for crime and personal gain. Yeon’s reboot promises to be a fresh, grounded take on the superhero genre.

Stranger Things: Tales From '85

Stranger Things has finally ended after five seasons across an entire decade, but we won’t be out of Hawkins for long. Netflix’s spinoff plans will be kicking off soon enough with the release of the franchise’s first animated series, Stranger Things: Tales from ’85.

Taking on the style of a Saturday-morning cartoon from the ’80s, Tales from ’85 will wedge a new story in between the events of seasons 2 and 3. The main roles have been recast, but we’ll see all our favorite characters as they fight new monsters and tackle a new supernatural mystery.

VisionQuest

So far, the most successful shows in Marvel Studios’ shaky transition into the wide world of streaming television have been WandaVision, a refreshingly small, low-stakes, sitcom-inspired TV masterpiece, and Agatha All Along, its bold, boundary-pushing spinoff. Marvel is currently working on the third and final chapter in this trilogy of shows: VisionQuest.

VisionQuest will star Paul Bettany as Vision and James Spader as Ultron. It has the potential to be Marvel’s exploration of the threat posed by artificial intelligence. It also has the potential to be the next Secret Invasion, but so far, this trio of shows has just one thing in common: they seemed like a bad idea until they turned out to be great.

Daemons Of The Shadow Realm

Hiromu Arakawa’s manga series Daemons of the Shadow Realm is being turned into an anime show. The comics take place in a world where certain people can control supernatural beings known as Daemons, and the story follows two twins who have been separated and have to find a way back to each other. The anime adaptation is set to premiere on Crunchyroll on April 4.

Carrie

After Gerald’s Game, Doctor Sleep, and The Life of Chuck, Mike Flanagan is tackling a fourth Stephen King story (and he’s already got a fifth lined up: The Mist). Flanagan is hard at work on a miniseries based on King’s debut novel, Carrie.

Carrie is a relatively short novel, padded out with unfilmable epistolary material. It’s tailor-made to be adapted into a feature film, and it was already adapted into one of the greatest, most timeless horror movies of the ‘70s: Brian De Palma’s Carrie, the first and arguably still the best King adaptation.

Flanagan’s Carrie series doesn’t seem 100% necessary, or even feasible in a limited series format. But I fully expect to be proven wrong when Carrie premieres on Prime Video, because he’s three for three on great King adaptations, and he’s one of the most sought-after creatives in Hollywood right now. He could do whatever he wants, so if he’s committing that much time to Carrie, he must have a pretty special vision.

God Of War

Amazon’s TV adaptation of the God of War games is currently in production, and the first images are starting to be released from the set. It looks like they’re doing it old-school, with practical effects. The photo of Ryan Hurst as Kratos and Callum Vinson as Atreus doesn’t seem to have any CG enhancements; it’s two human beings, in costumes and makeup, acting on a real set at a real filming location.

The writers might be getting ahead of themselves, adapting the Norse-era God of War games first, but it’ll have the same universal appeal as HBO’s The Last of Us: anchoring the video game spectacle in a moving parent-child story. Star Trek veteran/Battlestar Galactica creator Ronald D. Moore is the showrunner on God of War, so it’ll probably be pretty awesome.

Lanterns

One of the many upcoming projects coming out of James Gunn’s DC Universe is Lanterns, a Green Lantern show in the style of a gritty, grounded, True Detective-style police procedural. In the comics, the Green Lantern Corps is an intergalactic police force sending all kinds of colorful characters across the cosmos. So, adapting them into a murder mystery in Nebraska seems like it’s missing the point.

But Gunn has made nary a false step with the DCU so far. He understands the world of DC Comics as well as anyone, so if he greenlights a project and champions it to the finish line, it’s probably an interesting take on the source material. And HBO, home of The Sopranos and The Wire, is one of the most reliable brands for quality television.