We are in peak TV watching season.
Sometimes people think the best time to catch up on TV is in the summer when they have some time off. Or the dead of winter when it’s too cold to go outside. No. The time is now. It’s that liminal part of the year when you feel energized to do so many things, but also it feels so cozy to do nothing. The weather is good enough that you feel like you could go do a speed walking loop around the park in your light jacket, but it’s crisp enough that you can’t imagine ever leaving life underneath your comforter.
There are few things as snug as gratifying as knowing you’re going to do something productive, but procrastinating it an hour or two because it feels oh-so-nice to just pull up the blanket to your chin and press “play next episode” on whatever you’re watching. Whatever “fall TV season” used to mean on a corporate and advertising level, this is what it now means to me on a “making life as comfy as possible” level.
To mark the shift to this ideal TV-watching season, I wanted to recommend some recent series to watch, some of which have just premiered, some that have a full season available to binge, and some that are starting new seasons. Happy curling up and watching TV time to one and all!
Shrinking: Season 2 of Shrinking launched this week, and there’s something about it that is exceptionally fall-coded. It’s created by Bill Lawrence, the man behind Ted Lasso, Scrubs, and Cougar Town, so it hits that sweet spot of quirky characters doing very human things that make you laugh and cry simultaneously. Jason Segel, Harrison Ford, and Michael Urie are doing some of the best work of their careers in this.
Found: I am Paul Revere galloping around screaming about this show. It has the satisfying procedural format: an investigator who specializes in finding missing people and…finds said missing people each week. But the serialized element is so juicy: she was kidnapped and held hostage when she was younger, and now she has kidnapped her kidnapper.
English Teacher: The finale of this just aired, so the full season is available on Hulu. It’s a perfect season of TV. About a gay high school teacher in Austin trying to figure out how to interact with a new generation of students while also figuring out what he wants from his life in a changing world, it’s funny with just the right amount of thought-provoking.
Agatha All Along: I vowed to never care about Marvel again, and then they made Kathryn Hahn, Aubrey Plaza, and Patti LuPone witches and sent them on an adventure together, so now I’m obsessed. If you’ve been watching, you’ll probably share my opinion that Hahn and Joe Locke have the most fascinating dynamic of any two characters on TV. I swear this makes sense when you watch the show, but I feel like they’re very much a gay teen and his favorite aunt.
The Real Housewives of Orange County: This is reality TV at its best. So much of the cast has been doing this for so long that they can’t be bothered to orchestrate and fake things the way that ruins so many reality shows that feature students of the genre. They are just authentically, beautifully absolute disasters, and it is riveting.
Elsbeth: As much as I miss The Good Fight and its predecessor, The Good Wife, things are so traumatizing right now that I don’t think I could handle their (brilliant) ripped-from-the-headlines distillation of society’s madness. Instead having one of that franchise’s best, kookiest characters basically doing her version of Murder, She Wrote is exactly what I need.
Matlock: I spent a lot of time on set with Kathy Bates, the cast, and the creative team of this show, which is one of the strongest and most surprising reboots in an era where we would otherwise be exhausted of reboots. The twist that sets the whole series in motion is so good!
