Paramount+ Picks Up It Gets Worse, Major Players, and The Ministry of Time
Paramount+ today announced it has picked up U.S. and select regional rights for three new original series produced by A24. The series include the upcoming comedy It Gets Worse, the coming-of-age drama Major Players, and the TV adaptation of the award-winning, New York Times-bestselling novel The Ministry of Time.
It Gets Worse, created and executive produced by star Leo Reich, is a show about three young people who are starting to look around themselves — at their humiliating jobs, their non-existent love lives and their rapidly dwindling will to live — and think: “wait. Wait WAIT. Surely it gets better than this? It has to get better than this. Right? Spoiler alert! It doesn’t.”
Emily Fairn (House of Guinness, The Responder), Olive Gray (Save Me, Halo), Sean Delaney (Killing Eve, Life After Life), Dane Williams (What It Feels Like for A Girl, House of David), India Mullen (Normal People, Brassic), and Edinburgh Comedy Award 2025 nominee, writer, actor and comedian John Tothill round out the main cast.
The guest stars include Andrew Scott (All of Us Strangers, Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery), Lena Dunham, writer, producer and host Amelia Dimoldenberg, and more. The SHOWTIME original series will premiere on Paramount+ in early November.
Major Players is an original drama co-written by Molly Manning Walker (How to Have Sex) and Yasmin Joseph (A Thousand Blows) about two girls on the brink of adulthood and their mission to start a women’s soccer team.
Inspired by Molly’s own experiences at high school where crowd control was more urgent than education, the series is a love letter to soccer and a funny, wild exploration of young people in London today.
The Ministry of Time is adapted by Alice Birch (Succession, Normal People) from Kaliane Bradley’s international and New York Times-bestselling novel. Our heroine Sophy achieves a hard-fought promotion in the civil service, only to learn that her role is to help a time traveler acclimatize to the modern world as part of a top-secret Ministry program.
Commander Graham Gore is a Victorian polar explorer and one of several expats from history who are now part of the Ministry’s extraordinary experiment. The professional friendship between Sophy and Graham develops into an intense forbidden romance just as the sinister nature of the Ministry’s true intentions increasingly puts them in danger.
Aneil Karia (The Long Goodbye, Top Boy) serves as lead director, in addition to serving as an executive producer. The series stars Aoife Hinds (Normal People, Dune: Prophecy) as Sophy and Billy Howle (The Perfect Couple, Under the Banner of Heaven) as Commander Graham Gore.
Academy Award nominee Hong Chau (The Whale, Wuthering Heights) is Adela, the Vice-Secretary of Expatriation, Adeel Akhtar (Down Cemetery Road, Sherwood) is Quentin Ackerly, Sophy’s ‘handler’ at The Ministry, and Tamara Lawrance (Get Millie Black, Mr Loverman) is Simellia, a ‘bridge’ alongside Sophy.
Starring as Commander Graham Gore’s fellow ‘expats’ are Emily Fairn (The Responder, House of Guinness) as Margaret Kemble, Josh Finan (Say Nothing, Waiting For the Out) as Captain Arthur Reginald-Smyth and Aisling Loftus (Sherwood, War & Peace) as Anne Spencer.
Tawfeek Barhom (Cairo Conspiracy, The Way of the Wind) and Nahuel Pérez Biscayart (120 Beats Per Minute, Persian Lessons) star as the elusive Brigadier and Salese. Sophy’s parents, Peter and Channary, will be played by Ciarán Hinds (Belfast, Munich) and Hélène Patarot (Paris, Je T’aime, Whitetail).
“For over a decade, A24 has produced some of the most exhilarating and thought-provoking independent series and films,” said Jane Wiseman, Head of Originals at Paramount+.
“As we continue to bolster the service’s original content offering, both through internal productions and external partnerships, we immediately knew these three A24 series from across the pond would strengthen Paramount+’s reputation as the leading destination for inventive, compelling stories.”
