24 days ago   6

There was a time when TV was just as much a part of the autumn changeover as pumpkin spice, crunchy leaves, and back-to-school sales. Now, like seasonal weather, the TV schedule is a bit more amorphous and odd. The good news is, that means we’ve got new fall TV coming all season long — and it’s going to be quite a season. Whether you’re into mysterious horror offerings (like Peacock’s Teacup), animated adventures (see Lara Croft’s new Tomb Raider series on Netflix, or just the bouncy exploits of The Legend of Vox Machina), or just a massive bounty of legacy sci-fi (including, but not limited to, things like Dune: Prophecy, Silo season 2, and the final season of Lower Decks), it’s hard to go wrong here. Here’s Polygon’s roundup of our most-anticipated TV shows of the fall. Slow Horses season 4 Release date: Sept. 4Platform: Apple TV Plus If you’ve been watching Slow Horses, then you know what you’re in for: high intrigue among MI5 agents, punctured by equal parts ineptitude and competence from the Slough House. If you haven’t been watching Slow Horses, then you should know three things: Slough House is a dysfunctional team of agents one step away from being fired. Gary Oldman plays their cantankerous boss to assholish perfection. You can technically just drop in on season 4 because each spy arc is contained. Either way: Slow Horses fans unite. —Zosha Millman Officer Black Belt Release date: Sept. 13Platform: Netflix The premise for this one seems pretty straightforward — a talented martial artist with a heart of gold joins the police force to try to stop crime. I am a sucker for martial arts-based entertainment, but the real draw for me is star Kim Woo-bin, who is terrific in the blockbuster sci-fi Alienoid franchise. The idea of watching him play this kind of role is too good to pass up, even if the police procedural elements don’t strike me as particularly compelling. —Pete Volk Agatha All Along Release date: Sept. 18Platform: Disney Plus In 2021, Kathryn Hahn’s Agatha Harkness was the breakout character of Marvel Studios’ WandaVision. She returns this fall for her own nine-episode miniseries, featuring a stacked cast of other witches played by Aubrey Plaza, Patti LuPone, Debra Jo Rupp, and Sasheer Zamata. Heartstopper’s Joe Locke plays a teenage witch-admirer (who may or may not secretly be Billy Kaplan, known in Marvel Comics as the reincarnated son of the Scarlet Witch herself) as the whole crew goes on a quest to recover the magical powers Agatha lost to the Scarlet Witch. —Susana Polo The Penguin Release date: Sept. 19Platform: HBO, Max It would be enough for The Penguin to simply bring back an unrecognizable Colin Farrell as Batman villain Oswald Cobblepot, aka The Penguin. Farrell is a riot to watch in anything he’s in, but even as a brief antagonist in The Batman, he held promise for something more. But to also feature a murderers’ row of actors across the board — Cristin Milioti, Clancy Brown, Carmen Ejogo, and the Shohreh Aghdashloo — well, that’s just absolutely killer. —ZM The Franchise Release date: OctoberPlatform: HBO, Max A new TV series from Armando Iannucci, the creator of Veep, is always cause for celebration, and that’s exactly what’s on the way later this year. The Franchise is about a group of people attempting to create a new franchise of superhero movies, and dealing with the existential dread of whether they’re helping cinema or killing it forever. It may not be quite as high-stakes as Washington, D.C., politics, but a world as ridiculous as Hollywood blockbusters is sure to give Iannucci plenty of room for his usual hilarious and sharp writing. —AG The Legend of Vox Machina season 3 Release date: Oct. 3Platform: Prime Video In season 3, the unlikely heroes of Vox Machina face the Chroma Conclave — a group of dragons bent on wreaking destruction across all of Exandria. The stakes have never been higher. The animated fantasy series is based on hit actual-play series Critical Role, with all of the players reprising their characters. —Petrana Radulovic Abbott Elementary season 4 Release date: Oct. 9Platform: ABC, Hulu, Disney Plus After three seasons of will-they-won’t-they, Janine (Quinta Brunson) and Gregory (Tyler James Williams) are finally together — but will their workplace relationship survive? The teachers and staff of Abbott Elementary are back in the fourth season of the hilarious workplace comedy. And to make things even more exciting, Brunson teased that a very special crossover would be happening this season. —PR Tomb Raider: The Legend of Lara Croft Release date: Oct. 10Platform: Netflix Lara Croft’s journey from survivor, as seen in the video game trilogy that kicked off with 2013’s Tomb Raider, to full-on global adventurer will be explored in this new animated series. Tomb Raider: The Legend of Lara Croft will lead into a new series of games still yet to be revealed, but promises to be an exciting new era for the heroine. Powerhouse Animation, the studio behind Netflix’s Castlevania and Masters of the Universe: Revelation, is behind The Legend of Lara Croft. Hayley Atwell will voice Lara Croft in the new series, and she’ll be joined by Earl Baylon, who reprises his role as Jonah Maiava from the Tomb Raider video games. —Michael McWhertor Teacup Release date: Oct. 10Platform: Peacock This sci-fi horror series is based on the novel Stinger by Robert McCammon, and to give away the premise would be to spoil part of the early fun and mystery of the series. Instead, what you need to know is that a small town in rural Georgia finds itself threatened by an unexplained and unexpected presence that they’ll have to fight back against if they want any hope of survival. The series itself should be pretty thrilling, and with horror great James Wan (The Conjuring, Malignant) on board as an executive producer, it’s sure to be exciting. —AG Gastronauts Release date: Oct. 11Platform: Dropout Dropout may just be the most reliable streaming service on the planet, consistently serving out quality and hilarious shows, and now it’s adding one of TV’s most reliable formats: the cooking competition.  This being Dropout, it’s not just any cooking competition: Gastronauts looks like an uproariously fun time, as comedians come up with outrageous challenges for chefs to execute on. It would have been very easy for a Dropout cooking show to be about comedians attempting to cook, but instead bringing in real chefs to cook the comedians’ ridiculous ideas is a stroke of genius. I can’t wait. —PV What We Do in the Shadows season 6 Release date: Oct. 21Platform: FX The most devious vampires in all of Staten Island (that is to say, the only vampires in Staten Island) return for one last season. Guillermo’s trying to figure out what to do after his brief stint as a kinda vampire, while the vampires themselves are realizing that maybe it’s time to get their shit together. —PR Star Trek: Lower Decks season 5 Release date: Oct. 24Platform: Paramount Plus As Star Trek: Lower Decks returns for a fifth and final season, it has outlasted not only the original 1973 Star Trek: The Animated Series, but even a couple live-action Star Trek shows, including Star Trek: The Original Series itself. Lower Decks goes out as a beloved star in the Star Trek constellation, proving wrong all the cynics who thought that a half-hour animated adult comedy series couldn’t be funny, heartfelt, and stay true to the philosophy of Trek at the same time. We’re sorry to see Boimler, Mariner, Tendi, Rutherford, and the rest of the USS Cerritos crew go, but we’re excited to give them a proper sendoff. —SP The Diplomat season 2 Release date: Oct. 31Platform: Netflix One of the best TV surprises of 2023, The Diplomat brought “Keri Russell political thriller” back to the small screen, and how! Russell plays Kate Wyler, set to head to Afghanistan on a new assignment before suddenly being named the U.S.’s new ambassador to the United Kingdom after a supposed terrorist attack. The first season followed Wyler navigating her new environment, role, and her busybody husband Hal Wyler, (Rufus Sewell), who is constantly scheming. The first season ended on quite the cliffhanger, and I can’t wait to see what comes next. —PV Silo season 2 Release date: Nov. 15Platform: Apple TV Plus Silo ended its first season with a stellar sci-fi promise, a taste of a new world, a tantalizing expansion of the world as we knew it. Now that we know the surface isn’t what it seems and the silo that Juliette (Rebecca Ferguson) knew was just one of many, everything seems hopeful and impossible all at once. Will the wider world be enough to combat the big problems in her hometown silo? Only Silo season 2 knows the answers (that and anyone who read Wool). —ZM Dune: Prophecy Release date: NovemberPlatform: HBO, Max It seems a little far-fetched to think that a Dune prequel TV show could possibly be good. But just a quick look at the trailers for HBO’s upcoming Dune: Prophecy will tell you that there’s more than just empty hope for this show: It actually looks pretty great. Taking inspiration from the look of Denis Villeneuve’s excellent Dune movies and the gorgeous, big-budget, but very talky fantasy of House of the Dragon, Prophecy will tell a story around the early days of the Bene Gesserit and show just a brief look at how they came to be one of the most powerful forces in the universe. —AG Very Important People season 2 Release date: Nov. 7Platform: Dropout Perhaps the best recent addition to Dropout’s suite of shows, the hilarious Very Important People returns for a second season this November. Host Vic Michaelis is absolutely killer in the show, playing a fictional version of themselves as the host of an interview show that seems like it would best fit on public television… if not for the extremely ridiculous guests. Dropout mines its pool of talent for great fits to play across from Michaelis, each of whom doesn’t know what character they’ll be playing in the interview until they see their ostentatious outfit designed by the excellent costuming team. —PV Star Wars: Skeleton Crew Release date: Dec. 3Platform: Disney Plus Lucasfilm and Disney are bringing something new to the Star Wars universe: wide-eyed, kid-friendly optimism in the style of Amblin Entertainment films of the 1980s like E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial and The Goonies. Star Wars: Skeleton Crew sends a group of kids on a grown-up-sized adventure as they journey from the verdant suburbs(!) of a galaxy far, far away to destinations frightening and unknown in an abandoned spaceship named the Onyx Cinder. While four young, mostly unknown kids will be at the heart of Star Wars: Skeleton Crew’s coming-of-age story, the throwback adventure also has a major star in Jude Law. He plays Jod Na Nawood, a Force-user who may (or may not) be a Jedi. Kerry Condon also stars, with Nick Frost as the voice of SM-33, a droid. We’ve got a good feeling about this one. —MM Devil May Cry Release date: TBA 2024Platform: Netflix We don’t know too much about Netflix’s Devil May Cry animated series, but the streamer has a good track record so far of turning video games into TV shows. Created by Capcom and Studio Mir (Dota: Dragon’s Blood, The Witcher: Nightmare of the Wolf), the driving force behind the Devil May Cry series is producer Adi Shankar, who helped bring Castlevania and Captain Laserhawk to Netflix. Shankar and Devil May Cry’s Dante feel like a natural pairing, and what little we’ve seen of the series so far indicates they’re both having a good time. Expect a bloody, campy, and dark romp through the world of Devil May Cry, which will hopefully bring an all-new audience to Capcom’s shoot-and-slash-’em-up franchise. —MM