11 of the best TV shows to watch this September

From Marvel’s witchy new series Agatha All Along to the return of Slow Horses and a new Nicole Kidman domestic thriller on Netflix.

It was only a matter of time before the hit Abbott Elementary made shows about teachers seem like the next big workplace comedies. Brian Jordan Alvarez makes the leap from web star to mainstream sitcom creator with this series, which he created and stars in as Evan Marquez, a high school English teacher in Austin, Texas. The twist is that English Teacher plunges headlong into themes of social awareness and cancel culture. At the start, Evan is being investigated for kissing Malcolm, his ex-boyfriend and a former teacher at the school, in front of students. Television veteran Enrico Colantoni (Veronica Mars and Just Shoot Me) plays the school principal, but this show belongs to Alvarez, who has created so many characters on TikTok and YouTube that Vulture has tried to define “The BJA Extended Universe”. Indiewire ranked his Gay and Wondrous Life of Celeb Gallo the Best Web Series of 2016, ahead of runner-up Jerry Seinfeld’s Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee.

English Teacher premieres 2 September on FX and 3 September on Hulu in the US

What took the Emmys so long? Last year’s third season of this sly, endlessly enjoyable spy drama – full of action, heart and beguiling performances – has earned the show its first ever, richly-deserved nominations. They include best drama, as well as acting nods for Gary Oldman for his role as Jackson Lamb, the brilliant and self-destructive head of a team of MI5 reprobates derisively called the Slow Horses, Jack Lowden as the fearless agent River Cartwright, and Jonathan Pryce as River’s grandfather. The new, fourth season takes off with a terror attack in London at rush hour, and never slows down in intensity. Based on Spook Street, the fourth in Mick Herron’s series of Slough House novels, the series brings in Hugo Weaving as a criminal with a secret connection to the Slow Horses. Kristin Scott Thomas returns as the unflappable MI5 head Diana Taverner, and Pryce is better than ever at the centre of a heartbreaking plot that is sure to play out more in the fifth season, which is already being shot. 

Slow Horses premieres 4 September on Apple TV+ internationally

Murder and marriage were a potent combination for Nicole Kidman and director Susanne Bier in the enticing 2020 HBO series The Undoing. They team up again in this similarly themed Netflix series based on Elin Hilderbrand’s novel. Kidman plays a mystery novelist, Greer Garrison Winburg, and Liev Schreiber is her husband, Tag, who are hosting their son’s wedding on their Nantucket estate. Eve Hewson (Bad Sisters) plays the bride-to-be, Amelia, who might be having doubts even before a dead body is discovered on the beach, and Meghann Fahy (The White Lotus) plays Amelia’s best friend. The rest of the large cast of suspects includes Dakota Fanning, Sam Nivola, Jack Reynor and Billy Howle as the Winburg children and Isabelle Adjani as a family friend. Take it as a plot clue that the song played in the trailer, Can’t Take My Eyes Off You, includes the conspicuous line “You’re just too good to be true”. The great Bier (the series The Night Manager and the film In a Better World) directs all six episodes.

The Perfect Couple premieres 5 September on Netflix internationally

The Australian romcom, which landed on BBC Culture’s list of the best TV shows of  2023, returns with new complications for Ashley and Gordon, the on-off couple who met when she flashed him while he was driving and he hit the title character, the border terrier they agreed to co-parent. They broke up then reconciled at the end of the last series, and now have to try to get Colin back from the new owners who took him in. Real-life couple Harriet Dyer and Patrick Brammall, who play Ashley and Gordon, also created and write the show. “It doesn’t matter how close to the bone it is,” Brammall told EW about using their own experience. “If it’s awkward, and as long as it’s funny, we have to use it.” Awkward and funny is the very definition of the series’ droll, off-kilter humour, and a source of its ongoing appeal. 

Colin from Accounts premieres 3 September on BBC Two in the UK and 26 September on Paramount+ in the US

This deep dive into The Sopranos, one of the best series ever made, is built around a long interview with its creator, David Chase, but it is much more than a time capsule. Director Alex Gibney (whose penetrating documentaries include subjects as different as Paul Simon and the Enron scandal) talks to Chase on a set that duplicates Dr Melfi’s office from the show, with Gibney taking Melfi’s place and Chase in Tony’s chair. Chase recalls the genesis of the show and the surprises he encountered during the series’ run, backed by personal photos. Tony’s lethal mother, Livia, is famously based on Chase’s own mother, but here we see what she looked like and hear his surprise that others in the crew had similarly awful parents. The two-parter includes memories from cast members Edie Falco, Michael Imperioli, Steve Van Zandt and Lorraine Bracco. Among one of the more touching revelations, Chase says that he had planned to have Tony kill Livia in the first season, but the late Nancy Marchand, who played her, was suffering from cancer and said to him, “David, just keep me working.” So he did.

Wise Guy: David Chase and The Sopranos premieres 7 September on HBO and Max in the US

The characters in this adaptation of Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan novels have been called “the most magnetically sad Italians on television”. They have now reached the show’s last instalment, based on Ferrante’s fourth and final book in the series, The Story of the Lost Child. The story, which started with friends Elena and Lila as adolescents in the 1950s in their small town, has followed them through adulthood and motherhood, as their fraught, lifetime relationship has weathered jealousies and betrayals. The plot here picks up in the late 1980s. Alba Rohrwacher, who has always been the narrative voice of Elena, takes over the role on screen. A successful writer, Elena returns to her native town, leaving behind her husband and children, to be with her first and enduring love, the faithless Nino (Fabrizio Gifuni). Irene Maiorino plays Lila, now a tech entrepreneur, but still entangled with the Solaris crime family.

My Brilliant Friend premieres 9 September on HBO in the US

Even if Natasha Rothwell’s name doesn’t seem familiar, her face probably does. She was touching as Belinda, the spa technician in the first season of The White Lotus, and funny as Issa’s friend Kelli on Insecure. Now she has created and stars in her own show, a comedy that is pointedly about how not to die sad and lonely. She plays Mel, who drives a cart at JFK airport, and starts out as a sad sack who says of her own situation, “I’m broke, my love life is a joke, I work at an airport and I’m afraid to fly”. A near-death experience points her in a new direction, but the path isn’t straightforward – it’s more like that of a self-driving floor cleaner. “A Roomba has to hit walls in order to clean up the area,” Rothwell has said. “Mel is a human Roomba that has awakened.” Conrad Ricamora of How to Get Away With Murder (another familiar face if not name) plays Mel’s self-absorbed friend, Rory, and Jocko Sims is Alex, her boss and ex-boyfriend.

How to Die Alone premieres 13 September on Hulu in the US

Fans of the Disney+ series WandaVision and of Kathryn Hahn ­– two enthusiastic, overlapping groups – have been waiting for this spinoff. As WandaVision ended, Wanda Maximoff had stripped the witch Agatha Harkness (Hahn) of her powers, condemning her to live an ordinary life as Agnes, the annoying neighbour who had caused all the trouble in town. In her own show, with a tone of playful Halloween horror, Agatha is determined to win back her powers, with help from a new coven, which includes Patti LuPone as Lilia Calderu, a 450-year-old Sicilian witch, and Aubrey Plaza as the unfiltered Rio Vidal. Joe Locke (Netflix’s Heartstopper) plays a Goth teen who encourages Agatha. Locke told Empire he considers the show “an adventure series”, but few adventure stories also have musical numbers, with original songs by Frozen composers Robert Lopez and Kristen Anderson-Lopez, who also wrote the WandaVision song that gives Agatha All Along its title. 

Agatha All Along premieres 18 September on Disney+ internationally

In the recent film Scoop, with Gillian Anderson and Rufus Sewell, we’ve already seen one dramatised version of the story behind the famous 2019 BBC interview with Prince Andrew about his friendship with paedophile Jeffrey Epstein and alleged sexual encounters with the teenaged Virginia Giuffre. His answers were so disastrous they led to his retreating from public life and eventually losing his royal duties. This three-part Prime Video series has more room to go behind the scenes, this time with Michael Sheen as Andrew and Ruth Wilson as the journalist Emily Maitlis. The real Maitlis is an executive producer here, and we see her family life as well as her determination and jitters about the interview. Sheen may not look like the prince, but he creates a sharply-drawn, vivid character, a man so self-important and shielded by privilege that he is utterly clueless about how the public will react to him. The series veers into The Crown territory by imagining conversations behind closed royal doors, with a terrific cast that includes Joanna Scanlan as Andrew’s Private Secretary, Amanda Thirsk, Alex Jennings as the Queen’s Private Secretary, Claire Rushbrook as Sarah Ferguson and Honor Swinton Byrne as Princess Beatrice.

A Very Royal Scandal premieres 18 September on Amazon Prime Video internationally

We’ve had two years since the film The Batman to get used to the idea that Colin Farrell is buried under all those prosthetics and a heavy New York accent as The Penguin. But just in case, one trailer for his spin-off series has Farrell with his usual face introducing it. Matt Reeves, who directed the film, is an executive producer on the series, one of the season’s most anticipated. The story picks up soon after Gotham was flooded at the end of The Batman, and charts how Oswald Cobblepot, The Penguin, came to rule the crime world. Farrell’s character is darker and less cartoonish than any other Penguin, and the series’ showrunner, Lauren LeFranc, has compared the show to classic crime stories. She has said that Reeves created the concept, “this Scarface story – a rise to power”, and “I turned it into a psychological character study of this man.”

The Penguin premieres 19 September on HBO in the US and 20 September on Sky Atlantic in the UK

This show’s instant pop-culture lure might come from the acting debut, in a so-far secret role, of Travis Kelce, known for American football and even more for his appearances at girlfriend Taylor Swift’s side. Maybe lower your expectations, though; he is just a blip in the trailer for this series from Ryan Murphy. Almost any of Murphy’s shows, all those American Horror and American Crime stories, might qualify as grotesqueries. This one ­stars Niecy Nash-Betts as Detective Lois Tryon, who suspects she has a personal connection to a string of murders in her small town. The always-great Lesley Manville plays a character called Nurse Redd, which already sounds creepy. Courtney B Vance is Lois’s husband. And she is helped in her investigation by Sister Megan (Micaela Diamond), a nun who is also a journalist. Nun-journalist is not usually a thing, but then Murphy’s series revel in being over the top. They also revel in a theme that runs through this show: good v some especially weird, supernatural kind of evil. Good luck counting all the crosses in that trailer.

Grotesquerie premieres 25 September on FX in the US