The second quarter of 2024 is kicking off on Monday with a fairly decent lineup of Netflix new releases to check out — everything from new K-dramas to documentary series, star-studded new TV shows and movies, and much more.
April has some pretty major releases teed up, including the second part of Zach Snyder’s Rebel Moon, as well as a new season of The Circle plus newly arrived third-party titles like The Matrix movies and all six seasons of Sex and the City. As for the biggest and best Netflix originals, that’s what we’re going to take a look at in this post. Specifically, the best Netflix originals coming over the next seven days.
If you need more ideas for what to watch next, don’t forget to also check out our weekly snapshot of the streamer’s global Top 10 TV show list, as well as our regularly updated guide walking through what’s new on the streamer over the entirety of each month. Here, meanwhile, are all of this week’s new titles that we’ll be spotlighting below:
- Files of the Unexplained (April 3)
- Ripley (April 4)
- The Antisocial Network: Memes to Mayhem (April 5)
- Parasyte: The Grey (April 5)
- Scoop (April 5)
Netflix new releases: A scoop, and online mayhem
Among the Netflix releases I’m most looking forward to over the next several days are Scoop, a film drama that revisits Prince Andrew’s disastrous BBC Newsnight interview, and The Antisocial Network: Memes to Mayhem. The latter is a documentary that explores how bored teenagers essentially built an online community out of their shared loneliness — a community that gave rise to QAnon and which also led to the January 6th riots at the US Capitol complex in 2021.
On a related note: There seems to be an uptick in streaming interest right now for stories both about and adjacent to the topic of online misinformation. HBO, for example, recently debuted a documentary in the same ballpark — The Truth vs. Alex Jones, which is all about the conspiracy-spewing InfoWars founder. The timing of Scoop’s Netflix debut, meanwhile, is also fortuitous, given the recent surge in drama and negative press surrounding the British Royal Family, and it will likely capture significant viewership on that basis alone.
The best of the rest
Now, let’s take a look at three other big new Netflix releases coming over the next several days. You can check out the complete list of each day’s releases here, but some of the most interesting new titles, in our opinion, include:
Files of the Unexplained: Some of you have a thing for strange encounters, bizarre disappearances, and haunting encounters — basically, unexplained phenomena of all kinds. That’s what this Vox-produced investigative docuseries is all about. Per Netflix, “Each episode explores seemingly inexplicable tales told by those who experienced them — from apparitions witnessed by guests at a plantation to a series of drownings in Georgia.
“The episodes review an alien abduction in Mississippi, the U.S. government’s investigation of more than 650 unidentified objects and lights, severed feet washing ashore on the West Coast, and more.”
Ripley: Here comes another splashy prestige drama that I’m sure the critics will love but will probably come and go pretty quickly on Netflix. Or maybe I’m just being too cynical and remembering how quickly a title like Maestro seemed to fade away. At any rate, Andrew Scott stars in this eight-episode limited series as the rakish protagonist Tom Ripley.
Ripley is a grifter, just scraping by in 1960s-era New York. A wealthy industrialist hires him to travel to Italy to convince that man’s playboy son to come back home. Accepting that job brings Ripley into a tangled web of fraud, lies, and eventually murder.
Parasyte: The Grey: Finally, this new Korean sci-fi horror series comes from Yeon Sang-ho, the director of some previous top-quality Korean fare on Netflix like Hellbound and Jung_E (in addition to the fantastic Train to Busan).
The story in Parasyte: The Grey (based on the Japanese manga Parasyte) involves a mysterious spore falling out of the sky, bouncing onto the ground, and then a disgusting tentacle slithering out from it. The tentacle jams itself into the brain of the nearest person and creates a fearsome creature, putting everyone around it in danger. A team called “the Grey” works to eradicate the threat from all the larvae that are threatening to take over Earth, while one woman tries to coexist with the parasite living inside her.
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