Celebrity Traitors, Stranger Things Season 5, and the incomprehensibly camp but brilliant new reality series The Inheritance are all exciting TV shows still to come in 2025 — but none have piqued my interest quite like one series announced at this year’s Edinburgh TV Festival.
Handcuffed is peak Channel 4. Presented by Jonathan Ross, it’s a new reality challenge series that’s confrontational, absurd, and poses a vital question for 2025: can two people from opposing ends of the political spectrum find enough common ground to win £100,000?
Competing couples are literally cuffed to each other — handpicked for being radically different in various ways.
Think: an Extinction Rebellion protestor chained to a proud Reform UK voter, or a stuffy housewife tied to a burly, tattooed giant whose biggest concern going into the process was not being able to ‘have a w**k.’
Whichever couple stays handcuffed to each other the longest walks away with the money.
At the beginning of this summer, I was fortunate enough to witness the moment five couples were paired together in a London theatre.
It was Blind Date meets Prison Break. One half of each couple nervously walked out on stage, one side of a dividing wall, as Ross grilled them about their nightmare pairing.
Unsurprisingly, moments later, that very nightmare emerged on the other side of the wall, and Ross gave them a similarly probing interrogation.
Three more new Channel 4 shows to get excited for
Falling - Adolescence writer Jack Thorne returns to Channel 4 for the first time since the unbearably painful but brilliant Help, with Falling — a new six-part series starring Keeley Hawes as a devoted nun who falls in love with a Catholic priest (Paapa Essiedu).
Worlds – Apart Channel 4’s bid to find “the next Race Across the World” arrives in Worlds Apart, a high-stakes reality adventure contest exploring the generational divide. Six Gen Z rookie travellers and six pensioners team up in pairs, racing across Japan to see who can take in their surroundings the most. The winning pair could fly home to the UK £50,000 richer.
The Inheritance - From Studio Lambert — the mastermind production company behind The Traitors — comes a new reality series that’s somehow camper than Diane Carson being buried on national television for not resisting a glass of fizzy rosé. Elizabeth Hurley stars as “The Deceased,” who has left her fortune to 13 strangers competing for their fair share. But what is a fair share? That’s for the players to decide.
In a post-Traitors world, reality television is in panic mode. What could possibly rival the unexpected success of Claudia Winkleman’s cloak-and-dagger triumph — a show so popular even Sir Stephen Fry has signed up for its first-ever celebrity edition, airing this autumn?
Since then, every major channel has scrambled to find ‘the next Traitors’ — but four years later, none have come close.
Channel 4, however, seems to have pivoted. Instead of chasing the same formula, they’re focusing on truly innovative new formats that spark curiosity.
The Inheritance, which sees Elizabeth Hurley star as ‘The Deceased’ — an enigmatic dead millionaire — and Rob Rinder as her executor, is another stroke of genius landing later this month. It absolutely deserves your attention.
Months after watching the awkward brilliance of Handcuffed unfold before my eyes, Channel 4 has finally released a trailer at the 2025 Edinburgh TV Festival — and it confirms the show will live up to the promise it showed during filming.
Couples are seen frantically legging it across London — some bickering, others collapsing with laughter — all of them hysterical in one way or another.
As it stands, Handcuffed doesn’t yet have a release date, but it already feels like a
Channel 4 blinder — with two, three, four, or even ten series ahead of it.
Handcuffed airs on Channel 4 later this year.
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