This week, the TV schedules are not only playing host to two big sporting events – Super Bowl LIX and the 2025 Invictus Games – but they are also set to see the return of some major scripted shows.

Ad

Unforgotten, Yellowjackets, Waterloo Road, Cobra Kai, Superman and Lois and Big Boys are all back for new season, with the latter three shows ending out their runs with these batches of episodes.

Meanwhile, there's also a new crime drama on the way to BBC One, the Bradford-set Virdee, while James May is hosting a new travel/history documentary, Great Explorers.

Here, you'll find our top picks for this week – read on for our full choice of what to watch.

Invictus Games 2025

Prince Harry shaking hands with a Ukraine Invictus team
Invictus Games. Getty Images

Release date: Saturday 8th February, ITVX

This year is the seventh staging of an event co-founded in 2014 by Prince Harry – but the Invictus Games are slightly different this time, since the multi-sport festival for wounded or invalided military personnel takes place in Vancouver and Whistler, Canada, which means a new emphasis on winter sports. ITVX has a daily highlights show, starting with a programme including the best bits of the opening ceremony.

Jack Seale

Big Boys season 3

The cast of Big Boys season 3 gathered in a living room looking into camera
The cast of Big Boys season 3. Channel 4

Release date: Sunday 9th February, 10pm, Channel 4

Sharply funny, charmingly heartfelt and life affirming. There aren’t many comedies that manage all this and more, but writer Jack Rooke’s loosely autobiographical coming-of-age sitcom does. It’s a hoot. Now it’s growing up: the third — and, sadly, final — series begins in summer 2015 (“pre-Brexit, pre-Covid, pre-air fryers — it was a simpler, happier time”) and with the 21st birthday of Jack (Dylan Llewellyn). A win on the bingo means Cousin Shannon (Harriet Webb, terrifically riotous) is treating everyone to a holiday to Greece. There’s sun, booze and, for Jack, maybe even some sex.

Frances Taylor

Unforgotten season 6

Sinéad Keenan and Sanjeev Bhaskar as DCI Jess James and DI Sunil ‘Sunny’ Khan in Unforgotten season 6 standing against a moody backdrop
Sinéad Keenan and Sanjeev Bhaskar as DCI Jess James and DI Sunil ‘Sunny’ Khan in Unforgotten season 6. ITV

Release date: Sunday 9th February, 9pm, ITV1

We’re used to any series of the classy Unforgotten beginning with a grim find that then forms the metaphorical spine of a story, but here it’s the discovery of an actual human backbone in marshland that piques the interest of DCI Jess James (Sinéad Keenan) and DI Sunny Khan (Sanjeev Bhaskar). For this body part hasn’t become separated over time in the sludge; it was left at that spot relatively recently, already dismembered.

How it got there will no doubt be revealed at the climax to this new six-part tale (the second episode airs tomorrow at 9pm), but for the moment writer Chris Lang is concerned, as he always is at this early stage, with establishing his dramatis personae, all of whom we’re introduced to as living, breathing people as opposed to stock suspects.

Among them are a troubled history lecturer (Victoria Hamilton), an autistic man (Maximilian Fairley) living in squalor, and an outspoken news commentator (MyAnna Buring). Each offer a different aspect to Lang’s pertinent preoccupations this time around, which are the culture wars and the resulting coarsening of the political debate.

David Brown

Super Bowl LIX: Kansas City Chiefs v Philadelphia Eagles

General shot of the Super Bowl LIX logo
Super Bowl 2025. Getty Images

Release date: Sunday 9th February, 10:45pm, ITV1

Can the Kansas City Chiefs become the first team to win three Super Bowls in a row? The Chiefs count star players Patrick Mahomes and Travis Kelce, aka Mr Taylor Swift, among their number, but the Philadelphia Eagles have a big talent of their own in relentless running back Saquon Barkley. It should be a cracker but if not, Kendrick Lamar’s half-time show will help you stay awake.

Jack Seale

Superman and Lois season 4

Elizabeth Tulloch as Lois Lane and Tyler Hoechlin as Clark Kent in Superman and Lois
Elizabeth Tulloch as Lois Lane and Tyler Hoechlin as Clark Kent in Superman and Lois Warner Bros Entertainment

Release date: Sunday 9th February, 11:30pm, BBC One

This is the final season of the superhero drama, and it feels as if Tyler Hoechlin is being forced to hang up his cape so he doesn’t compete with David Corenswet, who will be starring as the Man of Steel in a big-screen movie later this year.

It’s a shame, as Superman and Lois has been an emotionally mature take on the mythos; tonight’s double bill, for instance, sees the Kent family face the very real possibility of Clark not surviving his epic battle with the monstrous Doomsday. But they will also need their wits about them to deal with the threat posed by Lex Luthor, played here by Michael Cudlitz as an emotionless thug rather than an urbane schemer.

David Brown

Virdee

Staz Nair as Harry Virdee in Virdee, walking down a street with lights going by him
Staz Nair as Harry Virdee in Virdee. BBC / Magical Society

Release date: Monday 10th February, 9pm, BBC One

British-Asian detective Harry Virdee (Game of Thrones' Staz Nair) isn’t having an easy time of it in this gritty thriller set in Bradford and adapted from A A Dhand’s novel. A teenage boy has gone missing, probably snatched by
one of the two rival crime gangs who rule the city, but Harry’s boss DS Conway (Elizabeth Berrington) is losing interest in the case. Not Harry though and he’s the kind of cop who gets results — even if it means bending the rules.

“You’re more like me than you care to admit,” his brother-in-law Riaz (Vikash Bhai) tells him after a discussion about ethics and the rules of the criminal world. Riaz, you see, is head of one of the drug cartels, which makes upholding the law a little tricky for Harry.

Like many TV cops, Harry has a troubled personal life, not PTSD or alcohol abuse, but because his Sikh family have ostracised him for marrying Saima (Aysha Kala), a Muslim. It adds a fascinating layer to his character and an interesting counterbalance to all the violence.

Jane Rackham

Waterloo Road season 15

Lindsey Coulson poses in red suit as Dame Stella Drake for Waterloo Road.
Lindsey Coulson. BBC

Release date: Tuesday 11th February, 9pm, BBC One

There are four gradings issued by Ofsted, the lowest of which – Inadequate (Grade 4) – doesn’t really do justice to recent events at Waterloo Road. If you’ll recall, last term ended with the head and his son both being arrested on suspicion of murder – news that’s hardly going to make into the pages of the prospectus.

So, you’d think that whoever is now lined up for the gig of headteacher would be thinking of it as a poisoned chalice, but that certainly isn’t the case with Dame Stella Drake (the always splendid Lyndsey Coulson). She has a take-no-nonsense approach, having already gone viral for blaming a decline in educational standards on parental incompetence. But those words may well prove to be too facile an explanation when it comes to one disruptive new starter.

The student in question is Ashton Stone (Cory McClane), a one-man crimewave who manages to break more school rules in this single hour than Tucker Jenkins did during his five years at Grange Hill. Good luck to one and all when it comes to getting to grips with him.

David Brown

Cobra Kai season 6 part 3

(L-R) William Zabka as Johnny Lawrence, Ralph Macchio as Daniel LaRusso in Cobra Kai
(L-R) William Zabka as Johnny Lawrence, Ralph Macchio as Daniel LaRusso in Cobra Kai. Curtis Bonds Baker/Netflix

Release date: Thursday 13th February, Netflix

Five episodes form the conclusion to a saga that has, if you go back to the original Karate Kid film, been running on and off for more than 40 years. Last we saw them, all the rival Californian karate dojos were embroiled in a lengthy, unconvincingly staged brawl that broke the normal rules of the show: someone died. So now it's time for the teenaged fighters and adult senseis to take stock and make some life decisions – which you can bet will be done in a way that veers merrily between po-faced homilies and dizzy humour.

Jack Seale

James May's Great Explorers

James May in James May's Great Explorers, leaning on a table with a globe and a world map on it
James May in James May's Great Explorers. Channel 5

Release date: Thursday 13th February, 9pm, Channel 5

James May begins this promising new series with Christopher Columbus, the deeply contentious adventurer whom he portrays as profoundly inept. Despite miscalculating distance, based on an idea of the world being 58 per cent smaller than it is and getting hopelessly lost, Columbus was still happy to proclaim himself a hero until his eventual fall from grace.

Using relatively homespun science, May demonstrates everything from the physics of the trade winds to the unpalatable reality of ships’ biscuits. Thoroughly entertaining it all is, too, although May doesn’t lose sight of the human element, pithily describing the voyage as “a death cruise on a rickety tub, sleeping on a sack with a bunch of stinking murderers”.

Still, the crews’ travails were as nothing compared with the carnage wrought on the indigenous peoples of the Caribbean; once gold was discovered, they were subjected to more or less every depravity. One historian posits that the enslaved peoples worked to death were so numerous that it smoothed the path for numbers to be replenished via the transatlantic crossings: a necessarily sober postscript to a rip-roaring yarn.

Gabriel Tate

Yellowjackets season 3

Christina Ricci as Misty in Yellowjackets season 3, burning a piece of paper
Christina Ricci as Misty in Yellowjackets season 3 Colin Bentley/Paramount+

Release date: Friday 14th February, Paramount Plus

It's one of the more startling dramatic premises on TV: we follow a teen girls' football team as they survive a plane crash and live together while stranded in a forest wilderness, and the adult versions of the same people as they try to live normal lives despite their shocking and shameful past. Season 2 was a bit bumpy, with the Lady-of-the-Flies timeline much more fun, more shocking and more narratively coherent than the rest of it, but there's always something to make your jaw fall open. Let the hormonal cannibalism continue!

Jack Seale

Ad

Visit our TV Guide and Streaming Guide to see what's on tonight. For more from the biggest stars in TV, listen to The Radio Times Podcast.

Authors

James HibbsDrama Writer

James Hibbs is a Drama Writer for Radio Times, covering programmes across both streaming platforms and linear channels. He previously worked in PR, first for a B2B agency and subsequently for international TV production company Fremantle. He possesses a BA in English and Theatre Studies and an NCTJ Level 5 Diploma in Journalism.

Ad
Ad
Ad