May doesn't have one monster everyone agrees to watch. It has six of them, all shouting at once.
Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi do Wuthering Heights. Nicolas Cage finally does television, as a Depression-era Spider-Man, in Spider-Noir. The Yellowstone machine keeps printing money with Dutton Ranch. Jon Bernthal gives the Punisher one more send-off. Sally Field befriends an octopus in Remarkably Bright Creatures, which opened at number one and crossed a billion minutes watched in its first week. The Four Seasons comes back for a second round. None of these needs your help finding an audience.
So this is the other list. Five things landing in May that are good and will get buried anyway, mostly because they had the bad luck to release the same month as a talking octopus.
Twenty Twenty Six (Tubi / BritBox, May 1)
John Morton has been writing the same joke for fourteen years, and it keeps getting funnier. Twenty Twelve skewered the London Olympics committee. W1A turned the camera on the BBC itself. Now Twenty Twenty Six drops Hugh Bonneville's Ian Fletcher into FIFA as "Director of Integrity" for this summer's World Cup, which tells you the entire premise before the first scene starts. Morton described what he writes as the gap between a grand public mission statement and the Monday-morning panic of actually pulling it off. The whole six-episode run hit BBC iPlayer back in April, and the American press mostly shrugged. It's on Tubi for free in the US and on BritBox, and it arrives right before the actual tournament, which is either perfect timing or the cruelest possible timing for FIFA. Either way, the two Hughs are still a delight, and David Tennant narrates.
The House of the Spirits (Prime Video, finale May 13)
Isabel Allende's novel has sold more than 70 million copies and waited decades for an adaptation that wasn't the miscast 1993 film with Meryl Streep and a confused pile of accents. This is it. Eight episodes, in Spanish, covering three generations of Trueba women through love, class war, and the slow march toward a coup. It started April 29 and runs weekly, with the last three episodes landing May 13, so May is when you can watch the back half of the story break your heart on schedule. The team behind it is serious: FilmNation, which made Anora and Conclave, plus Chile's Fabula. Variety called it long overdue, and they're right. A Spanish-language prestige drama on a major platform is exactly the kind of thing that gets lost between two English-language tentpoles. Don't let it.
Maximum Pleasure Guaranteed (Apple TV, May 20)
Tatiana Maslany plays a newly divorced fact-checker named Paula whose quiet life of PTA duties and peewee soccer collapses when one of her private video calls with a cam boy is interrupted by what looks like an abduction. Or so she thinks. From there it's blackmail, a possible murder, a custody fight, and youth soccer, all at once. David J. Rosen created it, and the closest comparison anyone keeps reaching for is The Flight Attendant, which is the right energy: a comedy that keeps tripping its own protagonist on the way out the door. Maslany is the reason to show up. Even when the plotting wobbles, she makes you want Paula to make it. Apple drops two episodes on May 20, then one a week. This is the show most likely to vanish under the Wuthering Heights press cycle, and the one I'd least want you to miss.
Sheep in the Box (Cannes, May 16)
Hirokazu Kore-eda made Shoplifters and Monster. His new one premiered in competition at Cannes on May 16, and it's a quiet science-fiction film about grief: a couple loses their young son and brings him back as a humanoid robot built from his data and memories. Kore-eda said the project started from a simple, uncomfortable question, whether it's acceptable for the living to manipulate the dead however they please. The reviews out of Cannes were mixed, which I'd treat as a recommendation rather than a warning, since "mixed at Cannes" usually means a film is doing something people haven't sorted out how to feel about yet. Neon has the US, UK, and Australia rights, so a wider release is coming later in the year. This is the one to file away now and seek out when it surfaces, the way you would've with Drive My Car.
Off Campus, honorable mention
A quick note, because someone will ask. The hockey romance Off Campus also dropped in May, and it's genuinely fun. It is not on this list, because it reached 36 million viewers and got renewed before it even premiered. It found its audience. That's the whole point of this column: the goal isn't to praise the quiet thing for being quiet, it's to point you at the good thing the noise is about to swallow.
May belongs to the spectacle, the franchise, and the octopus. The rest of it is waiting for you to look slightly to the left.
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