Ten TV Shows to Binge-watch this Fall

The familiar names are doing some of the heavy lifting. American Horror Story reaches its supposedly lucky thirteenth chapter, Yellowjackets prepares for one final reckoning, and the Blade Runner universe jumps fifty years beyond 2049. But the most interesting prospects may be the ones that complicate material we think we already know: Zoe Kazan centres Florence Pugh’s Cathy Ames in East of Eden, while Mike Flanagan gives Carrie eight episodes in which to survive the cruelties of a permanently online high school. Elsewhere, Pablo Larraín enters Mariana Enriquez’s haunted Argentina, and A24 returns us to Crystal Lake before Jason Voorhees became a mask, a machete and an immortal franchise.

Some arrive all at once; others will demand the old-fashioned discipline of waiting a week. Either way, these are ten series worth keeping on your radar between late September and November — because if autumn is going to take away the sun, it can at least give us Michelle Yeoh hunting replicants.

Matthew McConaughey and Woody Harrelson have spent years joking that they may be biological brothers; Apple TV has now turned that rumour into an eight-episode comedy. The actors play fictionalised versions of themselves whose friendship is destabilised when a family secret suggests the joke might be true. After Woody’s daughter’s wedding collapses, his clan decamps to Matthew’s Texas ranch, where Holland Taylor’s Ma Mac lets the possibility slip just as Matthew considers a run for governor. Lee Eisenberg serves as showrunner, with Natalie Martinez and Brittany Ishibashi among the cast. The first two episodes premiere globally on Apple TV on 23 September, followed by weekly instalments through 4 November. It’s half family sitcom, half celebrity hall of mirrors, and perhaps the most elaborate paternity test ever commissioned by a streaming service.

Lucky number thirteen was never going to pass quietly in Ryan Murphy and Brad Falchuk’s horror anthology. The new instalment premieres on FX and Hulu in the United States on 24 September with three half-hour episodes, beginning a thirteen-part run that concludes before Halloween. Plot details remain deliberately cryptic, but the season is being framed as a return of familiar nightmares — and familiar faces. Jessica Lange, Sarah Paulson, Evan Peters, Kathy Bates, Angela Bassett, Gabourey Sidibe and Emma Roberts are among the franchise veterans announced for the ensemble, alongside John Waters. After more than a decade of witches, hotels, cults and latex suits, the real hook isn’t simply what the series will reference, but whether it can make its own mythology feel dangerous again.

Mariana Enriquez’s ghosts rarely arrive to offer comfort, and Pablo Larraín seems an appropriately uneasy guide into their world. His four-part Netflix miniseries, premiering globally on 24 September after its presentation in competition at the San Sebastián Film Festival, draws on Enriquez’s title story as well as characters and passages from Julie and A Sunny Place for Shady People. Mercedes Morán plays Ema, a recently retired doctor who can see the dead. The arrival of her niece, combined with the murder of three teenagers in the working-class neighbourhood of Piedrabuena, disturbs the boundary between the living and those who refuse to leave. Dolores Fonzi, Alejandra Flechner and Carolina Alvarez co-star. This is social horror in which abandonment, grief and class violence may prove more frightening than any apparition.

John Steinbeck’s multigenerational epic returns to the screen on 1 October, when all seven episodes land on Netflix. Written and executive-produced by Zoe Kazan — whose grandfather Elia Kazan directed the 1955 film starring James Dean — this adaptation widens the frame beyond that film’s final section and places Cathy Ames at its centre. Florence Pugh plays Steinbeck’s fiercely independent, morally elusive antihero, whose arrival drives a rift between brothers Adam and Charles Trask, played by Christopher Abbott and Mike Faist. Ciarán Hinds also appears in the saga of the Trask and Hamilton families as they settle in California’s Salinas Valley. Inherited damage, the darker side of the American dream and a character too often reduced to an archetype: Kazan has plenty to excavate, and Pugh is rarely more compelling than when a role refuses easy sympathy.

Carrie White has been invited to the prom before, but Mike Flanagan’s eight-part adaptation has time to look beyond the bucket of blood. All episodes arrive globally on Prime Video on 7 October, with Summer H. Howell playing the isolated teenager and Samantha Sloyan as her fanatically protective mother, Margaret. Amber Midthunder, Matthew Lillard, Siena Agudong and Alison Thornton complete the principal cast. Flanagan writes, directs and serves as showrunner, updating Stephen King’s 1974 debut for a high-school ecosystem shaped by viral humiliation and social media without losing the telekinetic rage at its core. The question is not whether we know where Carrie’s story ends — Brian De Palma made that image culturally inescapable fifty years ago — but whether a longer format can make every small act of cruelty on the way there hurt anew.

If Jaws made us suspicious of the beach, Below would prefer that we avoid the entire North Atlantic. Netflix’s six-episode thriller surfaces on 8 October in a remote Newfoundland fishing town whose residents are being terrorised by something in the water. Josh Hartnett stars as Calvin, a fisherman trying to protect both his family and a community built around a disappearing way of life. When his son Wade, played by Charlie Heaton, begins exhibiting disturbing symptoms, Calvin joins forces with Mackenzie Davis’s marine biologist to investigate. Created by Jesse McKeown, the series also features Ruby Stokes, Rohan Campbell, Natasha Henstridge and Mary Walsh. The creature is the obvious attraction, but the more promising tension lies between ecological dread and economic precarity: what happens when the sea that sustains a town also turns against it?

Before Jason Voorhees became horror’s least persuadable camper, there was Pamela. A24 and Peacock’s Friday the 13th prequel arrives in the United States on 15 October, with Linda Cardellini playing the grieving mother whose young son drowned at the notorious summer camp. Callum Vinson plays Jason, while William Catlett, Devin Kessler, Cameron Scoggins and Gwendolyn Sundstrom round out the announced cast. Creator, writer and showrunner Brad Caleb Kane approaches the material as a paranoid 1970s psychological thriller with slasher DNA, tracing how two strangers digging into Pamela’s past set a violent chain of events in motion. That period lens could give a very familiar franchise something it hasn’t always had: a reason to look beyond the mask.

Catholic guilt, queer adolescence, Y2K teen cinema and prophetic visions meet in The Body, an eight-episode Netflix dramedy premiering on 11 November. Created and showrun by Quinn Shephard, who directs the opening episode and several others, the series follows a group of badly behaved Catholic-school girls after a dance-team initiation goes wrong and triggers mass hysteria in their town. Kristina Bogic, Sara Boustany and Geena Meszaros lead the young ensemble, joined by Nnamdi Asomugha, Louisa Krause, Shirley Chen, Jackson Kelly and Sofia Wylie. Shephard has described the project as a love letter to the teen films and erotic thrillers of the 1990s and early 2000s, with Carrie, Jennifer’s Body and The Crucible in its bloodstream. The ingredients sound deliciously excessive; the personal perspective may be what keeps them grounded.

The wilderness is finally ready to release its secrets — or bury them properly. Yellowjackets returns for its fourth and final season on 20 November, bringing its dual-timeline survival story towards an ending. Ashley Lyle and Bart Nickerson remain creators and showrunners as the teenage survivors race to conceal their sins before rescue arrives, while an old flame disrupts the women’s present-day lives. Melanie Lynskey, Christina Ricci, Tawny Cypress, Sophie Nélisse, Jasmin Savoy Brown, Sophie Thatcher, Samantha Hanratty, Courtney Eaton and Liv Hewson return, with Hilary Swank also in the ensemble. Few series have made female rage, adolescent loyalty and cannibalistic ritual feel so entangled. After three seasons of symbols, antlers and unreliable memories, the finale now has to decide which mysteries deserve an answer, and which are better left in the snow.

Los Angeles has been reinvented again, and humanity is no longer in charge. Set fifty years after Blade Runner 2049, Prime Video’s eight-episode limited series premieres globally on 25 November. Hunter Schafer plays Cora, a fugitive who assumes one final identity — that of a Blade Runner — and is forced to work with Olwen, a Replicant nearing the end of her life, played by Michelle Yeoh. Together they hunt a runaway who holds information capable of destabilising the city. Silka Luisa serves as showrunner, Ridley Scott is an executive producer, and Jonathan van Tulleken directs the opening episodes; the wider cast includes Sheila Atim, Matthew Needham and Tom Burke. Expanding one of cinema’s most visually protected universes for television is a dangerous assignment. Yeoh and Schafer, however, are persuasive reasons to step back into the rain.