Scarpetta to Rooster: 12 of the best TV shows to watch this March

From Nicole Kidman's latest crime thriller to a new sitcom from Ted Lasso creator Bill Lawrence, starring Steve Carell, and the return of The Comeback.

Sex and murder drive the narrative of this show, but the tone leans toward deadpan comedy as much as drama. Jason Bateman is Clark, a television weatherman in St Louis, and David Harbour is the bumbling Floyd, who does ASL signing for the weather. Both men are bored in their marriages. Capturing the show's absurdist tone, Floyd's wife, Carol (Linda Cardellini) works part-time as a baseball umpire, and seeing her in uniform has permanently turned him off. Things start to unravel when Clark discovers a website called DTF: St Louis, short for local people "down to" – to put it politely – have sex. The show's writer and director, Steven Conrad, told Vanity Fair about the setting, "People who don't live in the Midwest make these suppositions that the people who live there are a little more normal. St Louis became a way to surprise the audience." Besides, he added, "Other people's kinks are funny."

DTF: St Louis premieres 1 March on HBO and Max in the US  

Guy Ritchie, who directed two entertaining Sherlock Holmes films starring Jude Law more than a decade ago, is the executive producer and a director of this series, which adopts a similar irreverent, action-fuelled style. The story – inspired by Andrew Lane's series of YA books about Sherlock's youth – springs from the idea that he had to start detecting somewhere, and in this version it's the University of Oxford. That's where the 19-year-old stumbles across a murder and meets another student who introduces himself as John Moriarty, better known to us as the archvillain of Arthur Conan Doyle's stories. Hero Fiennes Tiffin plays the young Sherlock and Donal Finn is Moriarty, with a cast that includes Tiffin's real-life uncle Joseph Fiennes as his father, Natascha McElhone as his mother and Max Irons as his older brother, Mycroft. Colin Firth, with a huge Victorian moustache and a face full of whiskers, plays a professor, Sir Bucephalus Hodge. That character is not in the Lane novels or in Conan Doyle, so for now he's just one more tantalizing mystery to us.

Young Sherlock premiere 4 March on Prime Video internationally

Rachel Weisz plays the unnamed character at the centre of this darkly comic story of erotic obsession. She is a college professor with a long-standing writing block and a problematic husband, also a professor, played by John Slattery. He has been accused of sexual assault because of affairs with students years before, which he insists were consensual, and might be fired. That crisis sends Weisz's character spiralling into fantasies about her new young colleague, Vladimir, played by Leo Woodall. The show is written by Julia May Jones, based on her sly 2022 novel, and throughout the protagonist breaks the fourth wall to talk to the audience. "What she wants you to think is a little distant from the total truth," Weisz has said of her character, a conspicuously unreliable narrator. But Vladimir does become her muse, jump-starting her writing again, so at least there's a silver lining to her tumultuous inner life.

Vladimir premieres 5 March on Netflix internationally

In this sitcom set on a college campus (not nearly as fraught as the campus in Vladimir), Steve Carell plays Greg Russo, author of best-selling novels about a hero named Rooster, books even he calls "beach reads". But when he visits his daughter, Katie (Charly Clive), an art history professor who is going through a humiliating divorce from her cheating husband, he is roped into staying around to teach. Bill Lawrence, a creator of some of the best recent comedies including Ted Lasso and Shrinking, is the co-creator here, so it's no surprise that the writing is sharp, and the cast even sharper. Phil Dunster – Jamie on Ted Lasso – plays Katie's estranged husband, a scholar of Russian, who has been sleeping with a grad student. Like Jamie he's a narcissist, but an educated narcissist. Danielle Deadwyler is wry as a poetry professor and Greg's neighbour, and John C McGinley is the scene-stealing, gossiping college president. None of it is remotely believable, but it is very amusing.

Rooster premieres 8........

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