‘Cheer’

Starts streaming: Jan. 8

Fans of the addictive junior-college football series “Last Chance U” can expect a similar approach to this six-episode documentary series from the same creator, Greg Whiteley, about the unusually dominant competitive cheerleading squad at Navarro College in Corsicana, Tex. The Navarro cheerleaders have won 14 national championships since 2000, so expectations are high that they will win another in the year “Cheer” follows them around, but the pressure to win, along with injuries and other setbacks, makes it a stressful run. As with “Last Chance U,” Whiteley tries to bear down on the particulars of the sport while getting to know these athletes off the field, too.

‘AJ and the Queen’

Starts streaming: Jan. 10

Despite some bit appearances in movies and fictional shows over the years, the drag queen icon RuPaul is best known for appearing on television shows like the reality-TV hit “RuPaul’s Drag Race.” The new series “AJ and the Queen,” which he conceived with the frequent “Sex and the City” writer/director Michael Patrick King, gives him a chance to play off his irreverent persona while honing his dramatic chops. He stars here as Ruby Red, a cash-poor drag queen who travels across the country in a beat-up R.V., accompanied by an 11-year-old orphan stowaway (Izzy G.). The pair get more than a few looks as they make their way through the heartland.

‘Giri/Haji’

Starts streaming: Jan. 10

After debuting to strong reviews on the BBC, this eight-part cross-cultural British mini-series comes to Netflix to fill a seemingly endless appetite for crime stories among subscribers. Set between London and Tokyo, “Giri/Haji” (translated as Duty/Shame) starts with a Japanese detective (Takehiro Hira) who travels to London to search for his missing brother, who’s a member of the Yakuza. Once he arrives in the U.K., he gets help from a detective constable (Kelly Macdonald) and a half-Japanese prostitute (Will Sharpe), but these unlikely allies face a much thicker plot than they might have imagined.

‘Medical Police’

Starts streaming: Jan. 10

The creators of “Childrens Hospital” parody international espionage thrillers with this extended goof about doctors-turned-government agents who try to find the source of a virus that threatens to wipe out civilization. Erinn Hayes and Rob Huebel star as American physicians in a São Paulo hospital who discover the virus and get recruited by a secret spy organization to find the cure while unmasking the conspiracy responsible. Other “Childrens Hospital” regulars are cast here, too — including Rob Corddry, Malin Åkerman, Ken Marino and Lake Bell — so it’s reasonable to expect the tongue-in-cheek absurdity of that show to carry over into this one.

‘Kipo and the Age of Wonderbeasts’

Starts streaming: Jan. 14

Though heavily influenced by the sharp angles, vibrant colors and exaggerated character design of Japanese animation, “Kipo and the Age of Wonderbeasts” was created through DreamWorks by one of its artisans, Radford Sechrist, and includes Sterling K. Brown, Dan Stevens, Joan Jett, John Hodgman and RZA among its eclectic voice talents. Karen Fukuhara voices Kipo, a young girl who is among the human survivors of an apocalyptic event that has turned other living things into enormous and intelligent creatures, pushing people far down the evolutionary chain. She and a handful of humans and friendly surface-dwellers band together to find her father and others missing from her underground city.

‘Next in Fashion’

Starts streaming: Jan. 29

The venerable “Project Runway” is currently on its 18th season and counting, but without Heidi Klum as host and Tim Gunn as mentor, there must be enough blood in the water for another fashion competition show to seize the spotlight. The “Queer Eye” favorite Tan France and the designer/model Alexa Chung are co-hosting “Next in Fashion,” which puts 18 designers through various challenges to determine a winner, but the tight 10-episode run will ramp up the hourly casualties. The winner gets $250,000 and a collection showcased by the retailer Net-a-Porter, which is a larger-than-usual carrot at the end of the stick.

‘The Stranger’

Starts streaming: Jan. 30

The team behind the Netflix crime drama “Safe” from 2018 — the novelist Harlan Coben and Red Production Company — returns with an eight-episode adaptation of Coben’s novel “The Stranger.” Richard Armitage stars as a normal guy with a healthy marriage and two sons whose life turns to shambles when a stranger sits next to him at a bar and tells him a secret that sets him on a destabilizing course. How this stranger’s words could upend the lives of anyone who hears them is a mystery the series will explore, leading its hero to a sinister conspiracy that threatens harm to himself and others.