From the return of Netflix’s hit rom-com with Kristen Bell and Adam Brody to a prequel series to Stephen King’s It and a five-part documentary about Martin Scorsese.
1. Monster: The Ed Gein Story
The third instalment in Ryan Murphy and Ian Brennan’s killer-focused Monsters franchise – following series about Jeffrey Dahmer and the Menendez brothers – examines the inspiration for Norman Bates in Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho. The show is based on the true story of Ed Gein, a serial killer with a fondness for corpses, who preyed on victims in Wisconsin in the 1950s. Charlie Hunnam lost almost 30lb (13kg) to play the scarily emaciated Gein, who, among other depravities, was unhealthily obsessed with his mother. Gein inspired a flood of fictional killers in films, a prominent theme in the show. It leans so heavily into his influence on Psycho that Laurie Metcalf plays Gein’s mother with her hair in a Mother Bates bun, and Tom Hollander appears as Hitchcock himself, with Olivia Williams as his wife and collaborator, Alma Reville. Vicky Krieps and Lesley Manville are other major names in the cast. Don’t let the pop culture references fool you. Hunnam looks truly terrifying.
Monster: The Ed Gein Story premieres 3 October on Netflix internationally
2. One Day in October and Red Alert
Two years after the Hamas attacks on Israel, the first fictionalised versions of those horrific events are starting to appear. One Day in October, on HBO Max, unfolds in real time, as it weaves together seven stories of victims, survivors and their families, based on actual accounts. Similarly, Red Alert, on Paramount+, was made in Israel and inspired by first-hand accounts, as it tells the story of five strangers who come together during the attack. Fernando Szew, the president of Fox Entertainment Studios, which co-produced One Day in October, has said: “We approached this series with the utmost care, sensitivity and urgency.” David Ellison, chairman and CEO of Paramount, commented: “Red Alert highlights Paramount’s continued commitment to storytelling through artistic excellence and accuracy.” But both series are bound to raise questions about how soon is too soon to dramatise real-life terror.
One Day in October premieres 7 October on HBO Max in the US and Red Alert premieres 7 October on Paramount+ internationally
3. The Last Frontier
Jason Clarke plays a US Marshal, Frank Remnick, in this action drama set in a remote area of Alaska. When a plane full of convicts crashes in the wilderness, 50 prisoners are set free. As Remnick investigates and tries to capture the survivors, he begins to suspect that the plane was deliberately brought down, and is determined to find out what happened and why the CIA is involved. The cast includes Haley Bennett as a CIA agent, along with Dominic Cooper, Alfre Woodard, and Simone Kessell as Remick’s wife. (Kessell, who played the grown-up Lottie in Yellowjackets, seems to be specializing in plane-crash series.) Setting a manhunt in the tundra is a near foolproof way to make the chase more difficult and the scenery more dramatic. And this series clearly isn’t going for originality. One of its creators, Jon Bokenkamp, told Esquire, “The show is Con Air meets The Fugitive.”
The Last Frontier premieres 10 October on Apple TV+ internationally
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4. The Chair Company
Tim Robinson’s characters, like the too-clingy Craig Waterman in the recent film Friendship, are usually meant to be annoyingly offbeat, which makes some viewers love him and others want to flee. Robinson plays a deliberately less annoying but still offbeat character here as Ron Trosper, a placid family man who works for an office furniture company. “I actually don’t think Ron is as tough of a hang as Craig Waterman is,” Robinson told Vulture. True enough, but the comic premise is just as wacky, as Ron makes a mind-blowing discovery at work. “I’m uncovering a vast criminal conspiracy,” he says in the trailer. What if he’s right? And who’s going to believe this guy? Lake Bell also stars as Ron’s wife, Barb, who seems to be in the dark about his investigations and knows he’s hiding something. And Lou Diamond Phillips plays a company executive. The show was created by Robinson and Zach Kanin, who were also behind the Netflix sketch comedy series I Think You Should Leave With Tim Robinson, a good sign for his fans.
The Chair Company premieres 12 October on HBO and HBO Max in the US
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5. The Diplomat
In this show’s dynamic third season, the wily Grace Penn (Allison Janney) has become US President, the equally wily Nicol Trowbridge (Rory Kinnear) is still the British Prime Minister, and it’s a race to see which world leader can be more vile. In the middle of it all once more is Kate Wyler (Keri Russell), the US Ambassador to the UK, who to the series’ benefit has always acted more like the CIA agent she used to be. Will she become vice president, a job she was manoeuvring for but didn’t really want? That question leads to a jaw-dropping twist. Russell and the show’s writers deftly explore the tensions between Kate’s professional and private lives. And Rufus Sewell is more central than ever as her husband Hal. Sewell makes him perfectly frustrating and also irresistible. Bradley Whitford (Janney’s co-star in The West Wing) plays Penn’s husband, and Aidan Turner joins the cast as an entrepreneur with connections in the British government and far beyond.
The Diplomat premieres 16 October on Netflix internationally
6. Mr Scorsese
Martin Scorsese wasn’t going to let just anyone make a documentary about his life and work. The director Rebecca Miller (Personal Velocity, Maggie’s Plan) was given great access in putting together this five-part series about one of the most important film-makers of our time. In addition to on-camera conversations with Scorsese, Miller had access to his private archives, and interviewed many of his most important collaborators, including Robert De Niro, Leonardo DiCaprio, and Scorsese’s Oscar-winning editor, Thelma Schoonmaker. As revealed in the trailer, interviews with his contemporaries will include Steven Spielberg‘s amusing account of how a suggested tweak from him saved Taxi Driver from some serious cuts the studio wanted to make. If Scorsese had made only Taxi Driver or Raging Bull or Goodfellas, that would have been enough to put him in the pantheon of directors, but his career, with moral questions always at the centre of his films, encompasses so much more. This series is unmissable for any film lover.
Mr Scorsese premieres 17 October on Apple TV+ internationally
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7. Lazarus
Harlan Coben’s novels have been the source of many hit series, but not this time. Coben and Danny Brocklehurst (who has written a number of Coben screen adaptations, including Fool Me Once and Stay Close) have created this new show from scratch, with no novel to let you know where the plot might be going. Bill Nighy plays Dr Lazarus and Sam Claflin (Daisy Jones and the Six) is his son, known as Laz, a forensic psychologist who investigates cold case murders. Laz’s sister was killed 25 years earlier, and when his father dies (let’s hope for more Nighy in flashbacks) he has so many eerie experiences that he begins to question his own sanity. It’s safe to assume that the Lazarus family doesn’t have that name for nothing. Whether Coben has veered into the supernatural or created a perfectly logical solution for all this is one of the series’ mysteries.
Lazarus premieres 22 October on Prime Video in the US and UK
8. Riot Women
Sally Wainwright has created a long list of acclaimed hit shows, as different as the brilliant and caustic detective series Happy Valley, the gentle Last Tango in Halifax and the 19th-Century lesbian romance Gentleman Jack. Her latest offers yet another twist: five menopausal women start a punk rock band called Riot Women. Like Happy Valley, Riot Women is set and was shot in Hebden Bridge in West Yorkshire. Among the band members, Joanna Scanlan (After Love) plays Beth, a teacher, along with other familiar actresses including Tamsin Greig (Episodes) and Lorraine Ashbourne (Sherwood). The show has commissioned original songs from the alt-rock band ARXX for the Riot Women to play. As Beth tells a young man who works in a music store, “We sing songs about being middle-aged and menopausal and more or less invisible. And you thought The Clash were angry.” Scanlan’s delivery makes the lines both light-handed and very convincing.
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Riot Women premieres 22 October on Britbox in the US and in October on BBC1 in the UK
9. It: Welcome to Derry
Only in Stephen King’s world could a welcome message sound so menacing. Pennywise, the evil clown played by Bill Skarsgård in the films It (2017) and It: Chapter Two (2019) had to start somewhere, and Skarsgård returns in this prequel series, based on the “interlude” chapters in the 1986 King novel that inspired the films. The show is set in 1962 in Derry, Maine (far from the Ireland of Derry Girls) where a couple with a young son has just moved to town. They soon learn that another boy has recently disappeared, and we know who to suspect is behind it. Andy Muschietti, who directed both It films, directed several episodes of the series and is one of its creators. He has said he hopes for three seasons, going backwards in time to 1935 next and then 1908. Pennywise is eons old, so there’s no telling where this all ends.
It: Welcome to Derry premieres 26 October on HBO Max in the US and 27 October on Sky Atlantic and NOW in the UK
10. Down Cemetery Road
Emma Thompson and Ruth Wilson team up in this suspense series based on one of Mick Herron’s non-Slow Horses novels, the first of his four Zoë Boehm books. Thompson plays Zoë, in a leather jacket and with punk-white hair, who with her meek husband is partner in a struggling detective agency. Wilson plays Sarah Tucker, an Oxford-based art restorer. When an explosion destroys a house in Sarah’s suburban neighbourhood, she becomes obsessed with finding a little girl who was injured in the blast and then disappeared from the hospital, and enlists Zoë’s agency to help. As violent acts start piling up, we know much sooner than Zoë and Sarah that MI5 is somehow involved. “It’s a road movie and it’s an odyssey for these two characters,” Wilson told TV Insider. “It is in the same world and [has] the same humour and wit as Slow Horses, but actually structurally it’s quite different.” Any Slow Horses echoes are a bonus. For plenty of viewers, Emma Thompson and/or Ruth Wilson are enough.
Down Cemetery Road premieres 29 October on Apple TV+ internationally
11. Nobody Wants This
It was a bold move to call a show Nobody Wants This, a title that would have boomeranged if no one had. But this romantic comedy about Joanne, an agnostic with a sex and dating podcast, and Noah, a rabbi, became a hit, largely due to the easy-going appeal of its stars, Kristen Bell and Adam Brody. At the end of last season, Noah was offered a job as head rabbi of a congregation, an offer that would vanish if he had a non-Jewish wife. Joanne was not ready to convert, and how their choices play out should shape the comic drama this season. Justine Lupe, as Joanne’s sister and podcast co-host, and Timothy Simons as Noah’s brother, will have relationship plots of their own. Seth Rogen and Brody’s wife Leighton Meester are among the guest stars. And the show has brought on two new showrunners who know something about comically complicated relationships – Jenni Konner and Bruce Eric Kaplan, who worked together on Lena Dunham’s Girls.
Nobody Wants This premieres 23 October on Netflix internationally
Credit: BBC
