The 5 New TV Shows You Can’t Miss This Month

Ah, February. Love is in the air. And you have so many TV shows to cuddle up with.

Paste will be all over the returns of Lifetime’s UnREAL on February 26 (can this show be saved?) and Showtime’s Homeland on February 11. We’ll be covering Retta’s starring role in the new NBC dramedy Good Girls (Feb. 26) and Veena Sud’s (The Killing) next mystery, Seven Seconds (February 23 on Netflix). And there’s no way we’d miss The Looming Tower premiering on Hulu on February 28. Our own Shannon M. Houston is a writer on the series.

Yes, there’s lots to cover in this already shortened month. So let’s get to it. Here are the five new shows you can’t miss this February.

1. Absentia
Executive Producers: Stana Katic, Oded Ruskin, Matt Cirulnick, Julie Glucksman, and Maria Feldman
Stars: Stana Katic, Patrick Heusinger, Cara Theobold, Neil Jackson and Bruno Birchir
Premiere Date: February 2 on Amazon Prime Video

Stana Katic, the beloved star of Castle, returns to TV in a very different role. This time, instead of solving the crime, she is the crime. Six years ago, FBI agent Emily Byrne (Katic) disappeared while searching for a notorious serial killer. Her husband (Heusinger) moved on and remarried. Now she’s been found but has no memory of what has happened to her while she was gone. Did she stage her own disappearance? Did she commit crimes while she was missing? Thank goodness the 10 episodes will be available all at once so we don’t have to wait too long for answers to at least some of the mysteries.

2. Queer Eye
Executive Producers: David Collins, Michael Williams and Rob Eric
Stars: Antoni Porowski, Bobby Berk, Karamo Brown, Jonathan Van Ness and Tan France
Premiere Date: February 7 on Netflix

Fifteen years after the breakout Bravo series premiered, Netflix is rebooting the series with five new experts and moving the location from New York to Atlanta. The world is a much different place now than it was a decade and a half ago, but we still want to look good, eat right and have a lovely home. The original forged great relationships and was eye opening to many straight men who may have never interacted with a gay man before the series. Given how fractured our country is right now, we need this understanding more than ever. With original producer David Collins back, one hopes the show works the same magic again.

3. Private Eyes
Executive Producers: Tim Kilby and Shelley Eriksen
Stars: Jason Priestley and Cindy Sampson
Premiere Date: February 11 at 9 p.m. on Ion

Look, no former cast member of Beverly Hills 90210 goes unrecognized on my watch. This Canadian series, now in its second season up north, follows former professional hockey player Matt Shade (Priestley), who in his post-skating days becomes a private investigator once he meets Angie Everett (Cindy Sampson). His first case? Investigating why an up-and-coming hockey player had a heart attack. We’ve seen this pairing of professional with amateur to solve crimes many times before—think Moonlighting or Castle—but it’s a fun formula that works.

4. This Close
Executive Producers: Andrew Ahn
Stars: Shoshannah Stern, Josh Feldman, Zach Gilford, Cheryl Hines, and Marlee Matlin
Premiere Date: February 14 on Sundance Now

Created, written by and starring Shoshannah Stern and Josh Feldman, this six-episode series follows Kate (Stern) and Michael (Feldman), best friends who are deaf. Kate’s fiancé, Danny (Zach Gilford), embraces Kate’s friendship with Michael, but also struggles with how hard it is to get Kate’s undivided attention. While the series explores what it’s like for these characters to live in a hearing world, it’s much more than that, as Kate and Michael’s main point is that they should not be defined by their disabilities. We should get to know them.

5. McMafia
Executive Producers: Hossein Amini and James Watkins
Stars:James Norton, David Strathairn, Juliet Rylance, Aleksey Serebryakov,
Premiere Date: February 26 at 10 p.m. on AMC

Don’t let the fast food-ish title fool you. This is a dark drama. The eight-episode series follows Alex Goodman (James Norton) as he becomes increasingly involved in organized crime. The son of Russian exiles who had mafia connections, Alex has tried to escape that particular aspect of his heritage. But you know how it goes. Every time Alex thinks he’s out, they pull him back in. AMC is also using the series to promote its new paid platform AMC Premiere—all eight episodes will be available on AMC Premiere immediately following the series’ debut.