5 Biggest New TV Shows Of May 2022

For fans of two star-based franchises, the long wait is over.

may obi-wan kenobi ewan macgregor

Two massive great sci-fi franchises see their latest outings this May, but if we’re looking at this month’s TV in terms of parallels like that, what’s more interesting is that at the back of the month we have two shows named for their lead characters, both of whom are modern icons of masculinity – yet couldn’t be more different. They even come out on the same day, too, so that evening’s TV-watching will be a very heady cocktail.

Here are the biggest new TV shows of May 2022.

 

What’s New On TV In May 2022

1. Star Trek: Strange New Worlds | May 5th

For a good twenty years, the Star Trek narrative universe was on pause as the franchise delivered prequel after prequel after prequel. Then came the rather limply received Star Trek: Picard, and suddenly everyone was all ‘oh, prequels aren’t so bad after all, what other past events do we have to play around with?’

In this case it’s the pre-Captain Kirk Enterprise, under Captain Pike – better known to the fans as the remains of the man he once was, going around in a 25th-century wheelchair and beeping. These worlds aren’t too strange and new, though, with old friends like Spock and Uhura front and centre.

Star Trek: Strange New Worlds has already had a second run greenlit, which should be a sign that they’re dead certain they’re onto a winner here – but, history has taught us time and time again, is little more than a sign the studio making it has a certain amount of clout. Who knows, though? Maybe this time they’ve remembered how to do absurdly camp adventures-of-the-week instead of throwing money at the CG department and hoping for the best.

 

2. The Time Traveler’s Wife | May 15th

Steven Moffat is probably best known for running Sherlock and Doctor Who into the ground with his fat-headed delusions that people tune into those shows for character dynamics, instead of mysteries and time-travel shenanigans respectively. However, this probably does make him a suitable candidate to adapt The Time Traveler’s Wife, which does have time-travel shenanigans but is ultimately about character dynamics.

It’s one of those annoyingly literal titles you get – Theo James plays the time traveller, Rose Leslie plays his wife. Fine, we know where we stand there. But it’s not some case of her being bored and frustrated as he tinkers with his time machine, and eventually having an affair with the gardener. In fact, there’s no actual machine to it, for our lead here time travel is just one of those things that happens occasionally, like hayfever or a dead leg.

 

3. Night Sky | May 20th

Sissy Spacek and J.K. Simmons play a retired couple who have a portal to another planet under their garden shed. In a way, this may be the most self-awareness Amazon Prime has ever shown – they fork out the mizoola to create a bunch of marvellous CGI spacescapes, which is their strength, then get the hell out of the way and let two acting heavyweights like Spacek and Simmons do their job.

In pure small-town fashion, there’s all manner of rumours floating around about just what the Spamonses are getting up to out in their shed. In this case, fine, we know they’re right to suspect, but 99% of the time this would be a pair of ordinary private citizens under 24-hour surveillance by their curtain-twitching neighbours, not a dynamic I suspect Amazon would be wise to start drawing attention to.

This equilibrium, of them being the local couple with a not-so-dark secret, is shattered when they take a trip over to their little off-world holiday home and find a guy there. Is he an alien? Well, if he isn’t, that’s some coincidence, isn’t it?

 

4. Obi-Wan Kenobi | May 27th

Yes, well, we all knew this was coming. It’s the reason Ewan MacGregor will never, ever go hungry. Also providing continuity with the Lucas era are Joel Edgerton and Bonnie Piesse as Uncle Owen and Aunt Beru, and Hayden Christensen as Darth Vader.

It’s taking place between the prequels and the originals, so there’s no way its title character can be in genuine mortal danger – but let’s be realistic, he’s the title character and if this goes well Disney will keep it going past even the point of MacGregor’s actual death, in no universe would they actually kill off Obi-Wan.

The core of it, apparently, is Obi-Wan looking after the infant Luke Skywalker, as clear an indication as could be needed that Disney’s chasing the success of The Mandalorian’s find-the-baby faux-fatherhood action. One wonders, though, how Luke’s real father will fit into this – most likely shaking his fist impotently as they escape in the nick of time and declaring “blah, I’ll get you next week”.

 

5. Shorsey | May 27th

A spinoff from the marvellous Letterkenny, focusing on the seldom-seen Shoresy, a character who exists purely to provide the most vulgar responses possible to hapless hockey-playing life partners Reilly and Jonesy.

Usually I would be first in line to say that’s a character who cannot possibly sustain a spinoff of their own, but the thing is, Letterkenny makes vulgarity an art. It’s not like they’re going to have baby’s first writing staff try to recreate that, either – it’s Letterkenny creator and leading man Jared Keeso who’s always played Shoresy, formerly by leaving the man’s face unseen and putting on a silly voice.

Shoresy being a hockey player, this seems to be a way to focus purely on an area that was a bit of a lodestone for Letterkenny anyway. The original show was full of profoundly crude meditations on masculinity from various different angles anyway, but the hockey players were one of the purest manifestations of it – and that was just talking smack in the locker room, never mind what they got up to out on the rink.

READ MORE: How The Mandalorian’s Second Season Brought Balance to Star Wars

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