This September is a month of spies, politicians, criminals, and deuces. Try to guess which show corresponds to each of these categories! I think you’ll be pleasantly surprised.
1. The Spy | September 6
Rather than a wacky prank-show comedy where he baits talking heads into doing something silly, The Spy is a based-on-a-true-story drama. This is a departure from form for Cohen, but doesn’t necessarily mean it won’t be wacky. The Mossad are as secretive as any intelligence service, but the stories that have emerged very often veer into the farcical. By all accounts, Eli Cohen (the basis of Sacha Baron Cohen’s character) spent a good deal of his time undercover in Syria hosting orgies.
The miniseries is co-written by Gideon Raff, creator of Homeland – which, while relentlessly bleak and unpleasant, covered the same kind of espionage-flavoured subject matter. And maybe it’s just me, but that special kind of incredibly serious drama, full of people in a hostile world all looking po-faced, can swing right the way round into comedy really very easily.
2. The Deuce | September 9
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H3dRarfihaw
It always feels like cheating when the entries on here are new iterations of existing shows – so including this, the final season of The Deuce, feels like a bigger cheat still. However, it’s not nearly so big a cheat as it would be to scant David Simon, creator of The Wire, which is when all is said and done still TV’s own GOAT.
Simon’s speculative Civil War project never seemed to materialise – sad news, but perhaps the karmic sacrifice we needed to ensure David Benioff and D.B. Weiss’s planned ‘Confederate’ wouldn’t make it to air. In the absence of that, The Deuce has Simon on familiar footing on the mean streets of 1970s New York.
3. Undone | September 13
You know BoJack Horseman? How many times have you been watching it and thought ‘this is great, but if only it was even bleaker and more uncomfortably real’? Possibly none, but it’s not as if anyone’s surprised to see Raphael Bob-Waksberg going in that direction.
In a striking depature from BoJack and its aborted oh-so-random cousin Tuca & Bertie, Undone is done in a rotoscoped, far less cartoony style of animation. After Alma (Rosa Salazar) is nearly killed in a car accident, she starts perceiving time differently, The Dead Zone-style, and uses this to investigate the death of her father (Bob Odenkirk, the Saul from Better Call Saul). All suitably cheery stuff, and material that wouldn’t be wholly out of place in the most recent season of BoJack, which did get very surreal towards the end.
Despite BoJack being one of the major feathers in Netflix’s cap – not quite a blockbuster like Stranger Things, but still a critical darling – Undone will be finding itself on one of Netflix’s main rivals, repurposed evil robot Amazon Prime. Is this, and this is entirely speculative, because Netflix ditched Tuca & Bertie to punish the animation studio for unionising? Who knows.
4. Criminal | September 20
Even as TV waves around movie-scale budgets and production values, the same principles hold true – all the CGI and explosions in the world can’t compare to genuinely good actors sitting opposite each other in an empty room. This is something we touched on in our recent review of Mindhunter, the central pillar of which was reenacted interviews with serial killers. Next to meaty stuff like that, the rest could have been filler.
Netflix – for it was they behind Mindhunter – have clearly taken the obvious lesson from this, and put together a series that’s nothing but the meat. Each episode will be entirely comprised of an interview between the police and (in spite of the title) a suspected criminal. Beyond that central format, it’s as much of an anthology as they come. The episodes will move between different countries, and feature different writers and directors for each setting, in much the same way that Channel 4’s Red Riding gave each installment a distinctly different feel.
Never mind behind the cameras, though: projects like this live and die on the kind of talent they can plonk in front of the cameras. For the British plotline, they’ve wrangled up no less than David Tennant, whose Doctor Who was so well-received he basically reprised the character in Good Omens. While the non-Anglophone cast aren’t as recognisable as names, they’re no small fry, and most have racked up any number of awards in their home countries.
5. The Politician | September 9
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6-kdBlzCG7w
Political comedies are very often the kind of dark humour that’s like food: not everybody gets it. What even the politically illiterate can get, though, is the desire to be President of the United States. The benefits of being the most powerful man or woman (but probably man) in the world need no explanation. As such, pretty much any viewer can appreciate an unscrupulous cad’s quest for power.
The unscrupulous cad here is Ben Platt’s snotty, go-getting Santa Barbaran, trundling his way along any number of campaign trails. He starts off running for student body president in high school, and as the series goes on gradually builds up to – well, put it this way, he’s probably not ultimately aiming to become Pope.
The Politician is the brainchild of Ryan Murphy, best known as the creator of Glee. True to form, some early press releases claimed that The Politician would feature regular musical numbers. You might think that the bubbly teen-pop show couldn’t be more different from a black comedy about the democratic process, and you’d be right. But if the past couple of years have taught us anything, it’s that politics is more wedded to showmanship than most actual stage shows.
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