5 Biggest New TV Shows Of March 2024 – Dick, Hunts & Bodies

March's takes on human history range from irreverent to alien.

the regime kate winslet march

March of 2024’s television seems to be a display of the ‘great man’ theory, where the key to understanding events is singular notables: big, bold individuals around whom everything else turns, and who despite the name don’t necessarily have to be men. There’s highwaymen! Dictators! Great emancipators and their assassins! Exiled Russian nobles! In fact, in our five picks for March’s top new shows, the only apparent exception to this theme has a pair of not-so-great men involved behind the scenes.

If you’re trying to fill up your watchlist as we make our way through the first quarter of the year, here are the biggest new TV shows of March 2024.

1. The Completely Made-up Adventures Of Dick Turpin | March 1st, 2024

Following in the successful groove of the Horrible Histories squad, but presumably without even their vague educational value, this is a comic take on OG highwayman Dick Turpin. Thanks to the way language marches on, these days even the guy’s name is ripe for a bit of smutty sniggering, and of course it’s not hard to find the comic potential in robbing people at gunpoint.

Noel Fielding is of course a natural choice for a cartoon Adam Ant figure, and indeed I believe his agent still promotes him in similar terms. His presence in the main role also hints at an irreverence towards the actual history that comedy does sort of require – keep it in the rough area of reality, fine, but when you start getting hung up on specific dates, or, ugh, ‘accuracy’, you just end up with a subpar Doctor Who.

2. The Regime | March 3rd, 2024

You just don’t get proper tinpot dictatorships like we used to, do you? There’s no more real characters like Idi Amin or Pol Pot – who’ve we got now, a chubby Korean nepotism-hire and a washed-up Russian tough-guy? It’s not what it once was, so for the fun of a proper despotism, like we had in the ‘70s, we’ve got to go reaching into the realm of fiction.

The Regime follows a year inside the authoritarian government of an unnamed (but vaguely Eastern-European) country, whose iron chancellor Kate Winslet unexpectedly finds love with a war criminal. Think The Death Of Stalin before Stalin actually dies, where it’s a matter of everyone having to tiptoe around the mad whims of someone with absolute power and a lot of neuroses. In this case, Andrea Riseborough, Matthias Schoenaerts, Hugh Grant, and Martha Plimpton are among the poor suckers having to nervously placate Winslet.

3. Manhunt | March 15th, 2024

Lenin once noted that “there are decades when nothing happens, and there are weeks when decades happen”. Abraham Lincoln seemed to attract the latter like moths to a flame, and even when the man was publicly and dramatically shot in the head it didn’t put a stop to this, with the hunt for his killer being just as dramatic as any of the railsplitting or great-emancipating.

The subject of the title and obvious villain of the piece John Wilkes Booth (played here by Anthony Boyle) is up there with the most infamous three-named presidential assassins, and was himself no stranger to drama – quite literally, he was one of the wealthiest and best-regarded actors of the time, only to become legendary for a different reason. Tobias Menzies plays the man hunting him down.

4. 3 Body Problem | March 21st, 2024

David Benioff and D.B. Weiss – remember those guys? – return to television, after their much-publicised not directing any Star Wars films, hopefully a little humbled. Although 3 Body Problem is, like their notorious previous work, an adaptation of a sprawling, grand-scale book series, so it’s possible that they’ll run out of material or get off track and put their four feet squarely in it again.

Based on Cixin Liu’s Remembrance Of Earth’s Past, 3 Body Problem is essentially an alternate history, tracking the history of mankind after our first contact with alien life in the 1960s. If the aliens pop out of the flying saucer saying they ‘need the bad pussy’ or talking about how ‘themes are for 8th-grade book reports’, in all probability that’s the showrunners’ thumbs on the scales rather than Liu’s fault.

5. A Gentleman In Moscow | March 9th, 2024

Count Alexander Rostov (Ewan McGregor) gets off from the events of the Russian revolution incredibly lightly, not being summarily executed by a firing squad who are all using live rounds, but rather being sentenced to – record scratch – live in a top-class hotel? Alright, it’s basically house arrest, but it still beats being bulldozed into an unmarked grave.

Based on the novel by Amor Towles, A Gentleman In Moscow takes as its mission statement ‘if a man does not master his circumstances then he is bound to be mastered by them’ – in this case, the circumstances of the same four walls. If you’ll think back to the lockdown days, you’ll know that while it isn’t exactly Devil’s Island it’s no picnic either. So McGregor must build a new life, in a hotel, with only a supporting cast of Mary Elizabeth Winstead, Alexa Goodall, and Johnny Harris.

READ NEXT: 10 Hardest PS1 Games of All Time

Some of the coverage you find on Cultured Vultures contains affiliate links, which provide us with small commissions based on purchases made from visiting our site.