If you’re wondering why your watchlist has been flooded with very important, must-see television programs, it’s just that time of year. The end of March and beginning of April brought a perfect storm of prestige TV premieres: The timing of the Emmy eligibility window (which closes in June) and the absence of former spring powerhouse Game of Thrones left room for a tsunami of shows, both new and returning, to make their mark on viewers. In other words, you have choices beyond Westworld’s Reddit-baiting robot Armageddon and Roseanne’s unsettling mash-up of Fox News and 1990s sitcom!
The best new show is Killing Eve (Sundays, BBC America), which is probably the most fun hour of television right now. Sandra Oh plays Eve, an American-born British agent on the trail of an ingenious and bloodthirsty assassin, Villanelle (an astonishingly good Jodie Comer), who’s leaving a trail of corpses across Europe. It’s refreshing to see the typically male-dominated cop-and-killer formula chucked aside in favor of the type of strong female characterizations that writer/creator Phoebe Waller-Bridge similarly exhibited in her acclaimed Fleabag. Only four episodes in, the show has already gleefully torn through entire seasons’ worth of plot—but more importantly, Killing Eve is hilarious and truthful, even as it moves within a tried-and-true TV formula.