The 12 essential titles of an October loaded with series

BarcelonaOctober will be a month with plenty of series to choose from. After running at half speed during the summer, platforms are hitting the accelerator and taking advantage of these weeks to launch some of their most ambitious proposals. This month will be marked by new versions of titles that have already had a previous life on screen, as well as various British productions. Catalan fiction will also carve out a space for itself.

John Steinbeck's monumental novel lands on Netflix as a miniseries, brought by Zoe Kazan, granddaughter of Elia Kazan, who had already brought the story to the cinema with James Dean as the lead in 1955. The film only covered a part of the immense (and brutal) tale about the vicissitudes of two families settled in California, specifically in the Salinas Valley, at the end of the 19th century. The Netflix version will give more weight to the novel's female character, Cathy Ames, who defies the social conception of how a woman should be. Florence Pugh, who plays her, shares the cast with Christopher Abbott and Mike Faist, who embody Adam and Charles, Cathy's husband and brother-in-law.

Cathy Ames is not the only powerful female character that can be seen this month on the platforms. After her stint in Wednesday, Catherine Zeta-Jones premieres a vehicle for her own spotlight with Kill Jackie, where she plays a drug trafficker turned gallery owner who is forced to flee when a group of hitmen receives the order to kill her. An action series with a Zeta-Jones who, in the original version, recovers her native Welsh accent, which as she herself has explained she has almost always had to suppress in her film and television roles. Kill Jackie has been partially filmed in the Basque Country and features the participation of Óscar Jaenada.

Nicola Coughlan is world-famous for Bridgerton, but her career goes beyond the Netflix period series. Movistar Plus+ brings back the two seasons of the dramedy Big Mood, centered on the friendship between Maggie (Coughlan), a playwright with bipolar disorder, and Eddie (Lydia West), the owner of a pub that belonged to her father. Their bond of over a decade is at a turning point: the worsening of Maggie's illness and the pressure of their respective careers have weakened the relationship, and both wonder if they will be able to overcome the bumps they are experiencing.

In the infinite loop of new versions of stories already told, this month it is the turn of Stephen King and Carrie. As in the case of East of Eden, the remake has a certain pedigree: the person in charge of revising the story is Mike Flanagan, one of the current totems of horror thanks to the various productions he has made for Netflix, such as Midnight Mass and The Haunting of Hill House. The screenwriter takes King's story and moves it to the present day, introducing the variable of social media into the bullying that Carrie suffers at high school.

This British production, which has the same team behind it as Line of duty, is quite unknown to the general public, even though it is already in its third season. The protagonist is Detective Amy Silva (Suranne Jones), who investigates a different case each season. While in the first installment she tries to solve a death inside a nuclear submarine and in the second the death of several soldiers due to a drone attack, in the third, she and her romantic and professional partner travel to the Arctic to solve the death of a British soldier stationed at a research station on a covert mission.

Lovers of cozy mystery will be happy this October because the second season of Ludwig, one of the best examples of this low-intensity mystery subgenre. The BBC series, the most-watched fiction in the United Kingdom so far in 2026, focuses on John Taylor (David Mitchell), a puzzle creator who poses as his twin brother, James, a police detective who has mysteriously disappeared. In the second season, the brother remains missing, but John is now working under his real identity at the police station.

Little by little and without making much noise, The Diplomat has become one of Netflix's prestige series: in the last edition of the Emmys it achieved ten nominations –one for best drama– and, finally, it took home an award, that of best supporting actress for Allison Janney. The fiction adds its fourth season, an installment in which the diplomat Kate Wyler, played by Keri Russell, will have to overcome new obstacles and political conspiracies, some with the mark of her husband, played by Rufus Sewell.

Jennifer Garner owes part of her popularity to a series, Alias, which turned her into an action heroine. After some other not very successful television project, she returns with a fiction of marked female character. In The five star weekend, she plays a famous food influencer who has just lost her husband. Still in the grieving process, she decides to organize a meeting with four friends –each from a different stage of her life– at the luxurious house she has on the beach. Besides Garner, the cast includes Chloë Sevigny and Gemma Chan, among others.

Catalan fiction is also premiering with In vitro, a dramedy created by Marc Crehuet and Alejandra Guimerà and set in the world of fertility clinics. Bruna Cusí plays Blanca, an embryologist who starts working at a fertility clinic while struggling with personal and professional dilemmas. At the clinic, the protagonist works alongside Héctor, a biologist with a much more rational outlook on life than hers. Each episode will explore various cases linked to fertility problems. The series will be the fiction that inaugurates this year's edition of the Serielizados Fest.

One of Netflix's superhits premieres a new season, the fourth, which has taken three years to arrive. Omar Sy returns to step into the shoes of the seductive thief Assane Diop. Four years after the events of the third season, Assane is in prison and is determined to leave his criminal life behind. His goal is to serve his sentence and travel to Senegal to meet his family, just as he promised his son. His plans go awry when several museum robberies occur and the clues point to him as the culprit.

Hudson Williams, famous thanks to Más que rivales, is one of the main attractions of this Canadian paranormal mystery series that is inspired by the Slavic legend of Baba Yaga. In a small coastal town, private detective Rapp investigates the disappearance of Henry Park (Williams), the heir to a fishing company. In his search, he has the help of a local detective and a university professor brought to life by Carrie-Anne Moss.

The Autodefensa team returns with a new proposal that, despite being titled Segunda temporada, should not be understood as a continuation of that first fiction. Berta Prieto, co-author of the series together with Miguel Ángel Blanca and Víctor Diago, is Blanca, a writer who wrote a highly successful novel that turned her into "the voice of a generation". As time passed, she is a failed writer who dedicates herself to writing for others. In this context, she receives the commission to write a biography of Lil Rogelio, a trap legend who has just left prison and is looking to redeem himself.