5 Biggest New TV Shows Of September 2021

Usually I try to give these lists a bit of a balance, weighing what looks most promising against the whole gamut of what TV has to offer. And typically, that’s not so hard to do, since it’s rare that any given month will see five competent sci-fi thrillers or nail-biting horrors up against a load of tosh. But when in the second year of a global pandemic a month throws up three shows about awful disasters, it can seem as if someone’s trying to tell you something. Here are the biggest new TV shows of September 2021.

 

What’s New On TV In September 2021

1.  Y: The Last Man | September 13th

It’s rare enough that any title is quite so direct and accurate as Y: The Last Man, an adaptation of a Vertigo comic where every man on earth bar one is wiped out by a very gender-specific catastrophe, leaving a planet inhabited (almost) entirely by women. Diane Lane, Amber Tamblyn, Olivia Thirlby, Ashley Romans, and Marin Ireland star. Ben Schnetzer plays the man.

This sort of setup tends to lead in one direction – the knotty problem of, shall we say, continuing the species. And from the trailer it does seem as that’s a major factor, although it doesn’t appear to be going too soft-focus about it, given the overriding post-apocalyptic aesthetic.

Y: The Last Man has been through a particularly tortured production. Schnetzer replaces original last man Barry Keoghan, and original showrunners Michael Green and Aida Mashaka Croal left the project in 2019, with Eliza Clark now filling their shoes.

 

2.  The Premise | September 16th

From Alfred Hitchcock Presents through to Black Mirror, the anthology series has always had a firm place within the broader garden of television. The Premise bills itself as a show that will address “the biggest questions of our modern era”, which has always been a tendency of TV anthologies. The Twilight Zone aired more than one episode which was an analogy for McCarthy-era witchhunts.

With its contemporary setting, The Premise is definitely more Black Mirror than The Twilight Zone, but that’s down to how much technology marches on. Examples of some of the plots include a woman who becomes obsessed with an anonymous online comment, and a sex tape that captures a controversial police incident in the background – the technology isn’t key to it, it’s simply a device which presents more of the funny little incidents on which an anthology can really thrive.

The cast includes Jon Bernthal, Amy Landecker, Beau Bridges, Ed Asner, Ben Platt, Jermaine Fowler, Daniel Dae Kim, Lucas Kedges, Kaitlyn Dever, O’Shea Jackson Jr., and George Wallace, among others. The show’s created by B. J. Novak, best known as that guy from The Office but an experienced writer and director in his own right.

 

3.  Star Wars: Visions | September 22nd

That’s right, another anthology! Though this time it’s another entry in the Star Wars franchise, which Disney appears to be milking even harder and more vigorously than even the MCU. Seven different Japanese anime studios – Kamikaze Douga, Geno Studio, Studio Colorido, Trigger, Kinema Citrus, Science Saru, and Production IG – have been invited to turn out short films set in the Star Wars Universe.

Star Wars has always had heavy Eastern influences, with the one-on-one lightsaber duels straight out of Akira Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai – and Genndy Tartakovsky’s animated show Clone Wars was hailed as a rare highlight of the prequel era. In other words, making it a work of anime seems like a natural conclusion of the way the franchise has been trending already.

The voice cast of the English dub includes Lucy Liu, Neil Patrick Harris, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Bobby Moynihan, David Harbour, and Alison Brie.

 

4.  Foundation | September 24th

It’s a bold choice to try and adapt Isaac Asimov’s Foundation trilogy for any medium, spanning as they do hundreds of years through the infinity of space. When you talk about bringing a grand-in-scope novel series to television, most people will think of Game Of Thrones, and we know how that went – there again, when you look at the success of The Expanse, the sci-fi genre clearly has a better track record.

(Of course, it’s Apple TV behind this, who are clearly hedging their bets by doing adaptations of both Foundation and Lord Of The Rings.)

Jared Harris plays a genius mathematician saddled with the awkward knowledge that the galactic empire is about to hit a cataclysm, and seeks to preserve as much human knowledge as possible before a dark age arrives. Unfortunately the news that their way of life is coming to an end prompts a bit of a panic. Here Harris appears to be reprising his role from Chernobyl, that of the doomsaying scientist who’s obviously right about everything.

 

5.  La Brea | September 28th

To hear the media tell it, Los Angeles is hit by a catastrophic natural disaster every two weeks or so – not to mention the regular terrorist attacks, gang wars, and supervillains trying to destroy the world. So having a sinkhole open up in a part of the world which is, factually, prone to earthquakes seems almost quaint.

So, it’s another work of fiction that covers a disaster and its aftermath – but the difference is that in La Brea, the victims don’t die. Instead, down the sinkhole, they find themselves in a strange, primeval world. Questions abound, like ‘how did this happen?’ and ‘why’d they call it La Brea and not Journey To The Centre Of The Earth?’

NBC has billed this as sci-fi, although if it is, it’s definitely toward the softer end of that genre. Depending on what exactly the characters encounter down that sinkhole, and there’s a certain Jurassic Park vibe in the trailer, it may end up leaning more towards a straight-out fantasy.

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