There’s an intentional gravity to HBO Max’s January 2026 slate, a sense that this isn’t just content filling a calendar but a set of works in conversation with one another. They assume a viewer willing to sit still, to notice the emotional wear accumulating in small moments, to resist the urge for easy catharsis. It’s hard not to admire that confidence. These are stories that don’t rush to reassure you and in doing so, they remind you why cinema and television, at their best, can feel less like escape and more like recognition.
The Pitt – Season 2
Premieres January 8, 2026
If you remember the first season of The Pitt, you probably remember the exhaustion before you remember the plot. That wasn’t an accident. The show’s central conceit each episode unfolding across a single hour of a grueling 15-hour shift inside the fictional Pittsburgh Trauma Medical Center was never just a gimmick. It was a thesis. Season 2 returns to that same real-time structure, and once again drops us into the fluorescent-lit pressure cooker alongside Dr. Robby, played by Noah Wyle with a weariness that feels lived-in rather than performed.
Wyle’s Emmy-winning turn one of five trophies the series claimed at the 2025 ceremony, including Best Drama Series anchors the show with quiet authority. His Robby is not a television doctor who delivers monologues in pristine hallways. He’s a man constantly triaging not just patients, but moral compromises, staffing shortages, and the creeping realization that competence doesn’t protect you from burnout. You can feel the clock ticking in every scene. Conversations get cut short. Decisions linger too long. The show understands something essential about emergency medicine: time isn’t dramatic because it’s scarce, but because it’s relentless.
Season 2 doesn’t attempt to reinvent the series so much as deepen its bruises. Returning almost exactly one year after its debut, the show resumes with the confidence of a drama that knows its rhythms and trusts its audience to endure the strain alongside its characters. Watching The Pitt isn’t comforting television but it is bracing, immersive, and quietly humane in ways few medical procedurals even attempt.
A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms – Season 1
Debuts January 18, 2026
Set nearly a century before the events of Game of Thrones, A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms feels less like a prequel than a tonal recalibration. Adapted from George R.R. Martin’s Tales of Dunk and Egg novellas, the series trades dynastic sprawl for something more intimate, even faintly wistful. The story follows Ser Duncan the Tall played by Peter Claffey with an earnest physicality and his young squire, Aegon Targaryen, portrayed by Dexter Sol Ansell.
This Aegon is not yet a king, and that distinction matters. Known to history as “Aegon the Unlikely,” he travels incognito, years away from the crown and decades removed from the familiar chaos of dragons and civil war. He is, incidentally, the great-grandfather of Daenerys Targaryen, though the series wisely resists leaning on that trivia as narrative shorthand. What matters here is the relationship: a hedge knight with more integrity than pedigree, and a boy whose destiny is heavy even before he understands it.
Highly Recommended: New on Netflix in January 2026: 10 Best Shows and Movies to Stream, Plus full Release List
With just six episodes each running between 30 and 42 minutes the series embraces a lighter, more deliberate pace. That brevity might surprise longtime HBO viewers, but it suits the source material beautifully. These are stories about travel, conversation, small moral choices, and the quiet shaping of character. Fans of Game of Thrones will recognize Ser Duncan as an ancestor of Brienne of Tarth, and there’s something quietly moving about watching ideals pass down generations, imperfectly but persistently.
The show premieres with a sense of confidence in its restraint. Season 2 has already been approved for a 2027 release, while House of the Dragon continues toward its third season later in 2026. It’s hard not to notice how expansive and surprisingly flexible the Westeros mythology has become. For once, less truly feels like more.
Industry – Season 4
Premiering January 11, 2026
By its fourth season, Industry has shed any lingering illusion that it’s merely a show about finance. It’s a character study disguised as a thriller, and Season 4 sharpens that blade. The story once again centers on Harper Stern (Myha’la Herrold) and Yasmin Kara-Hanani (Marisa Abela), two Pierpoint alumni whose professional rivalry has long since curdled into something far more personal and far more dangerous.
Their relationship, always volatile, begins to warp further as power dynamics shift. Yasmin’s romantic entanglement with tech founder Sir Henry Muck, played by Kit Harington, introduces a new axis of influence, while Harper’s mentorship under the coolly inscrutable executive Whitney Halberstram (Max Minghella) forces her to confront how much of herself she’s willing to trade for proximity to control.
The season is crowded in a good way with returning faces: Ken Leung, Miriam Petche, Sagar Radia, Toheeb Jimoh, Charlie Heaton, Amy James-Kelly, Roger Barclay, Andrew Havill, Kiernan Shipka, Kal Penn, Jack Farthing, Stephen Campbell Moore, Claire Forlani, and Edward Holcroft. Yet the show never loses sight of its emotional core. What Industry understands, perhaps better than any of its contemporaries, is that ambition isn’t corrosive on its own. It’s corrosive when paired with intimacy.
The Smashing Machine
Streaming January 23, 2026
Benny Safdie’s The Smashing Machine isn’t a sports biopic in the traditional sense. It’s a portrait of collision between body and will, fame and self-destruction. The film chronicles the life of Mark Kerr, a pioneering MMA fighter whose dominance in the ring masked a deeply unstable inner life. Safdie directs with an almost claustrophobic focus, refusing the clean redemption arcs that often sanitize athletic legends.
Dwayne Johnson’s performance, which earned him a Golden Globe nomination, is all brute force and fragility, sometimes in the same breath. You can see the cost of every victory etched into his posture. Emily Blunt, also Globe-nominated, brings emotional gravity to a role that might otherwise have been sidelined, grounding the film in consequence rather than spectacle.
The Smashing Machine doesn’t ask you to admire Kerr so much as to witness him. It’s uncomfortable, abrasive, and intentionally unresolved qualities that feel honest given the life it depicts.
If I Had Legs I’d Kick You
Arrives January 30, 2026
Mary Bronstein’s If I Had Legs I’d Kick You is a dark comedy only in the way life itself sometimes is funny because the alternative would be unbearable. The film tackles postpartum depression with an unsparing eye, weaving humor and psychological unease into something jagged and unsettling.
Rose Byrne, who received a Golden Globe nomination for her performance, delivers work of startling precision. This isn’t the kind of role that invites sympathy on cue. Byrne allows discomfort to linger. Her character’s thoughts spiral, collide, and contradict themselves, capturing a mental state that cinema too often simplifies or sentimentalizes.
There’s a strong sense that this film is finally catching up to Byrne’s long-underappreciated talent. Whether Oscar recognition follows remains to be seen, but it’s hard not to feel that If I Had Legs I’d Kick You represents the kind of performance that quietly recalibrates how we talk about mental health onscreen.
HBO Max January 2026: Full List of New Arrivals
Coming January 1
- A Most Violent Year (A24)
All This and Heaven Too
Almost Christmas
April in Paris
Baby Face
Batkid Begins: The Wish Heard Around the World
Blazing Saddles
Bodies Bodies Bodies (A24)
Catwoman (2004)
Constantine
Deception (1946)
Desire Me
Double Wedding
Ex Machina (A24)
Faithless
Fargo (1996)
Fifth Avenue Girl
Frankenstein 1970
Getaway
Glass
I am a journalist with 10+ years of experience, specializing in family-friendly film reviews.