It was touch-and-go for a bit there, with Paramount+ (initially “CBS All Access”) feeling a bit like a desperate afterthought in the streaming wars—a dumping ground for ViacomCBS’s vast library of shows. It’s still relatively early days for the streamer, but on the strength of Christine Baranski and Sonequa Martin-Green (a winning combo if ever there was one), Paramount’s begun to build itself into a small powerhouse.
Star Trek, in particular, is celebrating its 55th anniversary this week. After a fallow period, particularly on TV, that franchise’s future has perhaps never looked brighter. Its original programs haven’t all been triumphs, and some of their biggest successes are carryovers from other networks in the CBS family, but they’ve managed a few buzzy projects and some high-end prestige programming that have built Paramount+ into something that people are actually paying for.
1923 (2022– , renewed for a second season)
Count me among the small handful of people not thoroughly enamored of the Yellowstone franchise—even still, it’s hard to ignore the casting here: There’s certainly some TV work in the CVs of both Helen Mirren and Harrison Ford, but getting these two legends together for this spin-off series certainly represents some kind of coup. In this mid-quel, set between the prime Yellowstone show and the more western-themed 1883 (also a Paramount+ original), the show sees the Dutton family of the era take on Prohibition, with the Great Depression looming in the background. Mirren and Ford are, quite simply, the TV pairing that you never knew you needed. At the moment the plan is to stop after a planned second season, but the first episode was the streamer’s highest-rated debut ever, so we’ll see. Next up in the Yellowstone-verse is a miniseries: Lawmen: Bass Reeves, starring David Oyelowo—another blatant, likely-to-succeed attempt to draw me in to all of this.
Evil (2021– , renewed for a fourth season)
Two skeptics (Katja Herbers and Aasif Mandvi) and a man studying to be a priest with a hallucinogen habit (Mike Colter) investigate reports of supernatural activity on behalf of the Catholic church. If it sounds quite a bit like X-Files to you...well, you’re not far wrong, but that’s not such a bad thing. Evil leans much more strongly into supernatural horror elements than did its spiritual predecessor, and has been renewed for a fourth season.
School Spirits (2023– , renewed for a second season)
There’s a lot of pep in this teen drama set in the afterlife—it’s not a comedy, and the subject matter is fairly dark, but the show balances its more somber elements with a sense of humor rather well. Peyton List stars as Maddie, a teenager in small-town Wisconsin for whom death is just the beginning. Stuck in a high school in the afterlife (because hell is definitely for children), she goes on a journey to solve her own murder while uncovering secrets and lies in both worlds.
The Good Fight (2017–2022, six seasons)
Paramount+ (well, OK, “CBS AllAccess” back then) kicked things off with a nearly sure-fire winner: a spin-off/sequel to the popular The Good Wife starring Christine Baranski, joined by the likes of Erica Tazel, Mandy Patinkin, John Larroquette, Audra McDonald, Delroy Lindo, and more, finding the liberal firebrand having lost her fortune and dealing with legal and social issues in the age of Trump, while still retaining the earlier show’s blend of soapy drama. The sixth and final season introduced Alan Cumming in a recurring role, one that ended on a dramatic and timely note, bringing a satisfying conclusion to Baranski’s thirteen years playing Diane Lockhart.
RuPaul’s Drag Race All Stars (2012– , eight seasons)
Drag Race All Stars is on its third network as of the start of the sixth season, but they’re all in the same ViacomCBS family, so the moves aren’t so much about finding an audience for the show as they are about bringing an existing audience somewhere new. Taking the spin-off (and its after-show, Untucked) exclusively to Paramount+ was probably a smart move for the streamer, especially given that it involves established Queens with built-in fanbases. That sets it apart from the main series, as do the endlessly twisty rules and turnabouts that make All Stars a bit goofier (not in a bad way) than the original.
The Stand (2020, miniseries)
Despite two efforts at it (this being the second), I’m not sure that Stephen King’s seminal dystopian fantasy novel is entirely filmable, but this miniseries is always watchable, and occasionally great. It’s got a great cast (James Marsden, Whoopi Goldberg, Alexander Skarsgård, J. K. Simmons, etc.), and gets a rewrite from King himself who dropped in to provide a new ending, ensuring that even fans who know the book and have seen the prior version have something to stick around for.
iCarly (2021– , three seasons)
In the very hit-or-miss (but largely miss) world of TV revivals, iCarly has been a rare success in its short life (having just premiered a couple of months ago). Perhaps that makes sense: the original Nickelodeon show was a bit ahead of its time in starring teens involved in a viral web series. The revival reunites most of the original cast and manages to maintain a similar tone to the original, while allowing its characters to grow up and enter a world in which the competition for clicks is far more intense.
Wolf Pack (2023– , one season)
Wolf Pack (not a Teen Wolf spin-off, even if it’s from some of the same people), struggles with its own mythology in the early going, but only because it tries to take the whole werewolf thing in different directions. The game cast of teens gets some direction from Sarah Michelle Gellar, playing an arson investigator who sniffs out the teen wolves who may or may not have had something to do with a forest fire that’s ravaging California. TBD on a season two renewal. it doesn’t always work, but I’d like to see more of the show’s neat take on its title shapeshifters.
Criminal Minds: Evolution (2022– , renewed for another season)
This one’s a little confusing: It’s a spin-off, kinda, but more technically it’s just a revival of the Criminal Minds series that ended after 15 seasons in 2020. Much of the cast of that series (including Joe Mantegna) returns here, and they really haven’t missed a beat. The big difference here is that streaming offers a bit more leeway for darker themes and grittier content, as well as a more serialized format, with a season-long story arc involving a single mystery. The series has been renewed for another season, whether you want to call it the second, or the 17th.
Star Trek: Discovery (2017– , four seasons)
Just as Paramount+ is the house that rebuilt Star Trek (on TV, anyway), Trek also formed the core of the streamer’s early programming (way back when it was CBS All Access). The failure of one almost certainly would have brought down the other. But here we are: Paramount is growing, and Star Trek now has a couple of live-action shows running, one that just wrapped, as well as animated shows and a Michelle Yeoh-starring streaming movie on the way (over a dozen new Trek seasons and counting). Aside from more thoroughly serialized storytelling, Discovery brings a new level of diversity to a franchise that seemed stuck in level of representation that was progressive in the 60s, but that had come to feel retrograde—especially given the complete lack of queer representation prior to this show. The fifth and final season is coming next year.
Star Trek: Picard (2020–2023, three seasons)
As we learned with Star Wars, there’s a dark side when our favorite characters return: the rules of story and drama insist that we not revisit an old face without a reason. What once seemed like a happy ending is no longer an ending at all, just a pause on the way to something more. We wanted Jean-Luc Picard to live happily ever after, but happily-ever-afters don’t make for very compelling TV. So Picard, at the outset, was quite a bit darker and more deliberately paced than fans might have expected, but ultimately represented an engaging new way to tackle some of Trek’s biggest questions over its first two seasons. The concluding season, while still quite a bit edgier than The Next Generation, brought back that entire crew for one last adventure, and an impressively satisfying conclusion.
Star Trek: Lower Decks (2020– , renewed for a fifth season)
It’s Star Trek as a sitcom. But, you know ... not The Orville. This one’s animated, and is legit Star Trek, in spite of the silliness. Instead of focusing on the upper ranks of the ship, Star Trek: Lower Decks focuses on the, well, lower decks—the crew behind the scenes that keeps everything going. Over the show’s three seasons (and counting), it’s developed an impressive balance between cartoon silliness and genuine character work, with the show’s two-dimensional crew feeling as real as that of any other Trek.
Star Trek: Strange New Worlds (2022– , renewed for a third season)
OK, last Star Trek, I promise: Strange New Worlds is a spin-off from Discovery, set on the original Enterprise in the years leading up to the original series. Featuring Anson Mount, Ethan Peck, and Rebecca Romijn (with the great Carol Kane having joined the cast), it’s less serialized than the other shows, having an awful lot of fun shifting its tones and styles with each new story. Recent episodes have included a very dark war story, a musical, a partly animated crossover with Lower Decks, and a Vulcan rom-com.
Mayor of Kingstown (2021– , two seasons)
Jeremy Renner plays Mike McLusky, burgeoning head of a family that’s been keeping the peace, more or less, in the title company town for decades. The business of the corrupt town is incarceration, and the McLuskys thrive when business is up, even if Mike has slightly different ideas. The show deals with systemic racism and inequality with relation to the prison system and, if it’s not always up to dealing with the big issues that it introduces, it’s consistently entertaining, and improves in the second season. TBD on a third season renewal.
Joe Pickett (2021– , two seasons)
Michael Dorman stars as Joe Pickett, a Wyoming game warden with a violent past and, well, a violent present, as well. The show is very much meant to appeal to fans of of other new-westerns like Yellowstone and Ozark, but Dorman plays Pickett as less of a tough action hero, and more as a likable everyday guy...who just happens to be wrapped up in a murder early on in his new job.It’s not a comedy, but there’s some interestingly surreal moments (emu wrestling, anyone?) amid the personal drama and stunning vistas.
Texas 6 (2020– , one season)
The first season of the docuseries alone spans two and a half years in the lives of the young men who play championship football in the town of Strawn, Texas, with a population of 676 and a typical high school graduating class of just over a dozen. It hits all the buttons of the typical underdog sports show, but the setting adds more than enough flavor to make it pretty fascinating. The second season continues following the team and its coach, with a third season renewal TBD.
Cecilia (2023, miniseries)
The smart Spanish-language dramedy stars Mariana Treviño as the titular Cecilia, the rock holding her family together. She’s saved—and now runs—the family bakery, and her talent and audaciousness are at the core of her identity. Everyone depends upon her...until she has a stroke that threatens to destroy everything, but that also gives her the chance to find out who she is without being in charge of everything, and her family and friends the chance to step into the gap and discover their own talents.
Transformers: EarthSpark (2022– , renewed for a second season)
There’s a lot of Transformers stuff out there, and I totally understand if you just can’t deal. Still, this latest iteration is lighter and quite a bit more fun than recent movie versions, with a focus on younger viewers and a move away from the traditional Autobots/Decepticons war. Here, the two sides have made peace (with the exception of a few holdouts), and all of the Transformers are working with Earth authorities to keep the peace. When the Malto family movies to a small town, they discover a new breed of robots, born on Earth, and who quickly bond with the young humans who’ve discovered them. The show made headlines and took some heat from the usual suspects for acknowledging at one point that there are non-binary people in the world...if that’s the kind of thing that’ll have you frothing at the mouth, probably best to avoid this one.
Younger (2015–2021, seven seasons)
There’s a little bit of a theme here: shows getting shuffled around the vast ViacomCBS multiverse before landing on Paramount+, as though they were waiting to see if it was going to take off. That’s the story of Younger, which ran for a solid six seasons on TVLand before wrapping up its run in the streaming world. The show comes from Darren Star (Beverly Hills, 90210, Melrose Place, Sex and the City) and stars Susan Foster as a divorced 40-something woman who attempts to restart her publishing career by passing herself off as an up-and-coming woman in her 20s.
Strange Angel (2018–2019, two seasons)
It’s the true story of an American rocketry pioneer, one of the main founders of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), who also became a disciple to esoteric magician Aleister Crowley, eventually leading a group devoted to ritual sex magic. Sold. 100%.
Why Women Kill (2019–2021, two seasons)
Marc Cherry (Desperate Housewives) created this very dark comedy series with a title that makes the premise entirely clear: it’s the story of women with reasons to kill. The first season took place in three time periods with three main characters linked by a single home, while the stronger second season sticks to 1949 in Los Angeles. It’s a gorgeously photographed and deliciously soapy series with murder on its mind.