This will be an unusual fall, television-wise. All signs point to Peak TV — this long moment we’ve lived through in which more and better television programs have been made than ever before — nearing its end. Orders for new shows have fallen, many existing shows have been canceled, and because strikes by Hollywood actors and entertainment writers are still in full swing, many networks have reduced their fall offerings or postponed premieres. ABC’s fall lineup made news for including no new scripted programming whatsoever. Despite this grim prognosis, there’s a lot of interesting stuff coming our way. Below are 10 of the most buzzy, interesting or simply notorious shows that will air in the next few months.
The Changeling
LaKeith Stanfield stars in this mind-bending adaptation of Victor LaValle’s 2017 novel of the same name. The series — about a half Ugandan rare-book dealer named Apollo Kagwa (Stanfield) trying to make it in New York — starts off as a relatively straightforward, grounded drama about Apollo’s family, carefully rooted in history and covering the circumstances that drove his mother (played at different ages by Adina Porter and Alexis Louder) from Uganda and how his parents met during the garbage strike in New York. Apollo meets and marries a librarian named Emma Valentine (Clark Backo), but it’s when they have a child that the series radically transforms into horror fantasy — becoming a disorienting, magical fable about motherhood through the perspective of fatherhood.
