If the first two months of 2022 felt like a manageable on-ramp to the year’s streaming offerings, well get ready: the floodgates are about to open. With March comes major releases from nearly every streaming service—from Bridgerton on Netflix to Atlanta on Hulu, from Winning Time on HBO Max to Moon Knight on Disney+. There’s a lot to pick through, so take a deep breath and check out what’s coming this month.
What’s New to Streaming in March
A selected list of movies and TV shows coming this month that The Ringer is very excited about.
Better Things, Season 5 (March 1, Hulu)
Dan Devine: When we finished High Maintenance, I asked my Ringer culture-writing colleagues for recommendations of other, similarly warm-hearted comedies from recent years. That led us to Pamela Adlon’s incredible and hilarious Better Things, a deeply human depiction of what it is to be a human person in the world while also raising daughters who sometimes straight-up hate you and who you sometimes come this close to hating yourself, and then getting over all of that so you can make dinner, drive them to things, and resume loving them unconditionally. Having that kind of sympathetic mirror to, and comedic pressure release valve for, some of the inherent challenges and attendant fury of parenting felt … well, let’s call it useful.
Drive My Car (March 2, HBO Max)
Sean Fennessey: This is an audacious three-hour movie that is by turns restrained and remote, until an explosive finale that shifts the emotional turmoil from Hidetoshi Nishijima’s theater director to his driver and companion, played with a coiled power by Toko Miura. Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s movie is beyond deliberate—it’s a study in pace and unknowable truths.
West Side Story (March 2, Disney+)
Mani Lazic: Romeo and Juliet, Shakespeare’s critique of the oppressive power of an unequal society, has often been simplified into the story of two impossibly wide-eyed lovers destroyed by fate, but with their West Side Story, Steven Spielberg and Tony Kushner return it to its original shape. In the process, they amplify the tale’s continued relevance and timeliness. The film’s willingness to be blunt about racism, misogyny, and economic disparity makes its more elevating moments all the more tragic and justified, and the music matches the energy by being more produced, more direct, and somehow better fitted to those sinister themes. Rather than an abstract interpretation of racial violence, Spielberg’s West Side Story uses all the tools of filmmaking to better bring together the classic story and songs into a unified piece of cinema, like a strong fist in which each finger is as determined as the others to revolt.
The Dropout (March 3, Hulu)
Alison Herman: Elizabeth Holmes is a bizarre, almost inhuman figure of her own invention. The voice! The green juice! The dancing! In their reporting, both Rebecca Jarvis and John Carreyrou largely stick to the facts, letting extraordinary events speak for themselves and shying away from unknowable truths like what Holmes was thinking. But as Inventing Anna learned the hard way, a TV show doesn’t have that option, or else it’s simply a more expensive retread of what’s already been done. The Dropout… also works as a companion—and corrective—to another story about a sensational scammer. Inventing Anna never presents a cohesive theory of con woman Anna Delvey. The Dropout, and Amanda Seyfried’s performance, portray Holmes as brilliant but impatient, and under enormous, self-imposed pressure to succeed.
Winning Time: The Rise of the Lakers Dynasty (March 6, HBO Max)
Formula 1: Drive to Survive, Season 4 (March 11, Netflix)
Kevin Clark: Drive to Survive is based on the personalities of the drivers and the team principals, the people in charge of the drivers’ teams who function as a sort of general manager/coach. The show revolves around type-A alphas staring directly into the camera like Jim Halpert from The Office and bluntly saying whatever they mean about their boss or coworker. The team principals are walking, talking Tom Wolfe novels; the drivers are all rich, look like models, and still have a lot to complain about. These are the pillars of the show: The principals try to outflex each other as masters of the universe while the drivers navigate HR dramas and try to race as fast as they can. It is the most chaotic possible mashup of Hard Knocks, Gossip Girl, James Bond, and Game of Thrones. It is perfect television.
WeCrashed (March 18, Apple TV+)
Herman: Nothing already published about WeWork “dug into what we saw as the heart of the story,” says Drew Crevello, who cocreated WeCrashed with The Office executive producer Lee Eisenberg. “There is no WeWork without Rebekah Neumann, and there is no WeWork without the very specific alchemy of these two personalities coming together.” Both Adam and Rebekah Neumann are presented as comedic characters, but it’s Rebekah who carries the emotional weight. Some pleas for our sympathy are more effective than others.
Atlanta, Season 3 (March 25, Hulu)
Chris Ryan: Many shows try to keep up with culture; Atlanta feels like it’s creating it… While the second season’s episodes were somewhat disconnected on a narrative level, the cumulative effect was immense. For a show that breaks so many rules, its themes are as old as capitalism. Every melancholy entry of “Robbin’ Season” was tough losses and hard-fought gains. If you imagine Atlanta as a wintery ghost town, this was a season about what happens the day after a dream comes true but you find yourself in the same old bed, in the same old house, in the same old city, with a bunch of new problems that feel eerily like your old ones.
Bridgerton, Season 2 (March 25, Netflix)
Herman: The Bridgerton choice most likely to make headlines is the sex. Here lies the most immediate distinction between Shonda Rhimes’s ABC and Netflix eras: What if McSteamy could actually get … steamy? Bridgerton takes a while to warm up, but once it gets going, it’s more explicit than a CW show like Gossip Girl could ever dream. Beware of starting as a comfort watch with your mom only to end up avoiding eye contact on opposite sides of the couch.
Moon Knight (March 30, Disney+)
Daniel Chin: Stewarded by head writer Jeremy Slater and a directing team composed of Egyptian moviemaker Mohamed Diab and the collaborative duo of Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead, Moon Knight is set to be the first MCU project of 2022 when it premieres on Disney+ on March 30. After Marvel Studios ended a busy 2021 with the releases of Spider-Man: No Way Home and the season finale of Hawkeye, two projects that relied on the nostalgic returns of beloved heroes and villains alike, the studio begins a new year with a new hero. In Moon Knight’s first trailer, our hero doesn’t even know who he is—and he doesn’t look like much of a hero yet, either.
Some New-ish Things You Might’ve Missed
Because it’s hard to keep up with everything, here are a few things that have premiered somewhat recently that may be worth catching up on.
Severance (Apple TV+)
Herman: Created by Dan Erickson and largely directed by Ben Stiller, Severance stars Adam Scott as Mark S., a soft-spoken middle manager at a company called Lumon Industries. Or rather, part of him is: In the procedure that gives Severance its name, Mark’s primary self has been “severed” from his work self, with one half of his personality retaining no knowledge or memory of the other. Mark’s “innie,” Lumon’s infantilizing term for its on-the-clock employees, has no idea what his life is like the other 16 hours a day; Mark’s “outie” has no idea what he actually does in exchange for his paychecks.
Inventing Anna (Netflix)
Reacher (Amazon Prime)
Jodi Walker: Based on a series of novels by Lee Child following fictional analyst Jack Reacher, the new series on Amazon Prime is singularly focused on getting you invested in its mysterious titular character. Is Reacher ex-military? You know that he is. Does he arrive in a tiny Georgia town via bus with nothing but the shoes on his feet, the clothes on his back, and a mysterious World War II medal in his pocket? He sure does. Does Reacher have his own moral code that you—or the law—might not agree with but that he follows no matter the cost? You bet your ass.
Jeen-yuhs: A Kanye Trilogy (Netflix)
Love Is Blind, Season 2 (Netflix)
The Righteous Gemstones, Season 2 (HBO Max)
Alan Siegel: The Righteous Gemstones is a comedy that used the premise of an over-the-top family of televangelists as an entry point and then spent its first season delving into family drama that’d make any prestige series blush—debauchery, blackmail, endless in-fighting. With a cast that includes Walton Goggins, Adam Devine, and a scene-stealing Edi Patterson in addition to John Goodman and Danny McBride, Season 1 painted a picture of a family so busy lining their own pockets that they lost their way. Now, Season 2 plans to go even deeper, exploring Eli Gemstone’s past and how it led him to becoming a megachurch mogul.
