Autumn schedules for TV and streaming are now in full swing, and next week is one of the busiest of the season. Two of the BBC’s biggest hits return, ITV launches a new crime franchise, and the streamers answer with a Florence Pugh epic, a Catherine Zeta-Jones revenge thriller and a star-studded Sky legal drama. Here is our pick of what is arriving across the BBC, ITV, Channel 4, Channel 5, Netflix, Prime Video, Disney+, Sky/NOW and Paramount+.

Terrestrial television

Blue Lights (Series 4)

BBC One & BBC iPlayer · Tuesday 29 September, 9pm (full boxset on iPlayer from 6am)

Belfast’s finest police drama returns, and the time jump is significant: the story picks up three years on, with Constables Grace Ellis (Siân Brooke), Tommy Foster (Nathan Braniff) and Annie Conlon (Katherine Devlin) now seasoned response officers rather than nervous probationers. A dangerous new threat is emerging on the streets, while the murder trial connected to the death of Gerry Cliff threatens to drag a long-buried secret into the light – one with consequences for both the police service and the city’s criminal underworld.

Richard Dormer returns as Gerry for a special one-off episode, and Michael Smiley, Cathy Tyson and Joanne Crawford round out the cast. Created by Declan Lawn and Adam Patterson, Blue Lights has built its reputation on grounded, humane storytelling, and with all six episodes landing on iPlayer at once, it is a prime candidate for a TV and streaming midweek binge.

Winter

ITV1 & ITVX · Wednesday 30 September, 9pm (full boxset on ITVX)

ITV’s big new crime drama stars Richard Armitage as Dr Ethan Winter, an unconventional forensic pathologist whose brilliance and rule-breaking methods help Bristol police crack their most baffling murders. He is partnered with Annabel Scholey’s no-nonsense DI Lauren Bell, and their spiky working relationship drives the case-of-the-week format.

Beneath the procedural surface runs a more personal mystery: Winter is quietly investigating the unsolved death of someone close to him, a loss that haunts his every move. Adapted by David Allison and Mark Greig from the hit French series Balthazar, the six-part drama looks set to fill the slot left by ITV’s autumn thrillers with a lead character built for a long run.

The Celebrity Traitors (Series 2)

BBC One & BBC iPlayer · Thursday 1 October, 8pm, then Thursdays and Fridays

The biggest entertainment launch of the week. Claudia Winkleman returns to the Scottish Highlands – this time Ardross Castle – with 21 famous faces including Bella Ramsey, Michael Sheen, Richard E. Grant, Jerry Hall, James Blunt and James Acaster. As before, the Faithful work together on missions to build a prize fund of up to £100,000 for their chosen charities, while a secret group of Traitors picks them off one by one.

The extended opening episode introduces the whole line-up and reveals who Claudia has chosen to deceive their fellow players. This year the show moves to a twice-weekly slot on Thursdays and Fridays, and Ed Gamble hosts the companion show, The Celebrity Traitors: Uncloaked, straight afterwards. One of the biggest TV and streaming shows of the moment.

Break Clause

Channel 4 · Thursday 1 October, 10pm (all six episodes on Channel 4 streaming)

Channel 4’s new romantic comedy starts with a problem many young renters will recognise. Ben and Lil (Samuel Bottomley and Lara Ricote) have broken up – but their tenancy agreement hasn’t. Unable to afford to move out, the former couple must untangle their lives and get over their first love while still sharing a flat.

Written by Jess Bray, directed by Alice Snedden and produced by BBC Studios Comedy, the six-part series has a strong supporting cast including John Thomson, Jessica Knappett, Charly Clive and Hammed Animashaun. It is, as the channel puts it, a very modern romcom: breaking up is hard enough without the UK rental market making it harder.

Michael Palin in the Philippines

Channel 5 · Monday 28 September, 9pm

Sir Michael Palin’s latest travelogue for 5 is billed by its makers as the most ambitious shoot they have ever done with him. Across three hour-long episodes, Palin crosses the Philippine archipelago, from the crowded streets of Manila to idyllic spots such as El Nido and Moalboal.

It is far from a simple holiday film. Palin examines a nation at a political crossroads, where the son of Ferdinand and Imelda Marcos is now president, visits Pagasa island amid coastguard tensions with China in the South China Sea, and travels under military escort through Mindanao, an area the UK Foreign Office rates as high-risk. Expect paradise one day and something much darker the next.

Streaming services

East of Eden

Netflix · Thursday 1 October (all seven episodes)

One of the year’s most anticipated literary adaptations for TV and streaming. Zoe Kazan has adapted John Steinbeck’s 1952 classic as a seven-part limited series, with Florence Pugh as the fiercely independent and dangerous Cathy Ames. Spanning the years from the American Civil War to the First World War, the story follows Cathy as she becomes entangled with two generations of the Trask family in California.

Christopher Abbott and Mike Faist play brothers Adam and Charles Trask, with Ciarán Hinds, Martha Plimpton and Hoon Lee in support. At its heart is Steinbeck’s great theme: how family history shapes individual destiny, and the choice every person faces between good and evil.

Kill Jackie

Prime Video · Friday 2 October (all eight episodes)

Catherine Zeta-Jones leads this stylish revenge thriller as Jackie Price, a former international drug smuggler turned respectable art dealer. When she discovers that the Seven Demons – a squad of the world’s most terrifying hitmen – have been hired to kill her, Jackie decides the best defence is attack, and sets out to hunt them down one by one.

Based on Nick Harkaway’s novel The Price You Pay (written as Aidan Truhen) and created by Tom Butterworth, the series also stars Sidse Babett Knudsen, Ron Perlman, Bill Paterson, Daniel Ings and Julian Barratt. As Jackie closes in on her pursuers, the secrets from her own past prove more dangerous than any assassin.

WAR

Sky Atlantic & NOW · Friday 2 October, 9pm

From George Kay, the writer behind Lupin and Hijack, comes a glossy legal drama set in the cut-throat world of London’s top law firms. Rival practices Cathcarts & Sons and Taylor & Byrne go head-to-head over the explosive divorce of a tech entrepreneur and an international film star.

The cast is stacked: Dominic West, Sienna Miller, Archie Renaux, Phoebe Fox, James McArdle and Nina Sosanya lead, with Celia Imrie, Nick Mohammed and Archie Panjabi among the supporting players. The eight-part first season is available to NOW subscribers as well as Sky customers, and a second season is already in production.

Coven Academy

Disney+ · Friday 2 October (full season)

For younger viewers and fans of supernatural drama, Disney+ drops the whole of Coven Academy at once. Created by Tim Federle, it follows three teenage witches and their dangerously charming warlock classmates at an elite magic boarding school in New Orleans, where spells, rivalries and forbidden romance collide.

Malina Pauli Weissman, Malachi Barton and Jordan Leftwich star, with Tiffani Thiessen as the formidable Miss Graves and Devon Sawa in a guest role. The show is told in fast-paced chapters designed for bingeing.

Paramount+

Paramount+ has no major new series launching next week, but its biggest current TV and streaming show continues. MobLand Season 2, starring Tom Hardy, Pierce Brosnan and Helen Mirren, adds a new episode every Friday as the Harrigan crime family struggles to present a united front while rivals circle its fractured empire. Looking a little further ahead, the service’s lavish new Treasure Island, with Hayley Atwell and David Oyelowo as Long John Silver, arrives on Monday 12 October.

Also worth a look

Channel 5’s revived Play for Today anthology continues on Friday 2 October at 9pm with Village Idiots, in which a stubborn grandmother chains herself to her cottage to stop a high-speed rail development – only to discover that the company man sent to remove her is her estranged grandson. Elsewhere on 5, the new birdwatching series Sam & Ade Go Birding starts on Thursday at 7pm, while Have I Got News For You returns to BBC One on Friday night.

Our pick of the week

If you only make time for one new TV and streaming show, make it Blue Lights: all six episodes arrive on iPlayer on Tuesday morning, and few British dramas are as consistently gripping. For something lighter, The Celebrity Traitors is the event television of the autumn, while East of Eden looks like the streaming highlight of the month.