17 Must-Watch TV Shows This Fall, Both New Series and Returning Favorites

Brian Jordan Alvarez is making the jump from social media comedian to television star with his very own series. Alvarez created and will star in English Teacher, a half-hour comedy about a close-knit high school in Austin, Texas. Alvarez plays Evan Marquez, a gay teacher at the center of workplace drama. When he’s placed under investigation for kissing his ex-boyfriend (Jordan Firstman) in front of students, Evan must navigate the blurry line between the personal and the political in the workplace.

In what might be Nicole Kidman’s best television vehicle since Big Little Lies, this cheeky mystery series skewers class lines and, as the title suggests, the false image of picture-perfect couples. Based on Elin Hilderbrand’s 2018 novel of the same name, The Perfect Couple follows Amelia (Bad Sisters’s Eve Hewson) as she prepares to marry into the wealthy Nantucket Winbury family, of which Kidman is the matriarch (and as a best-selling novelist, the breadwinner). But when a body is found on the beach the night before the wedding, dark family secrets come to light. Meghann Fahy, Liev Schreiber, and Dakota Fanning round out the ensemble cast.

Tradwives are trending, for better or for worse, and a new Hulu show investigates the messiness at the heart of one particular subgroup of online lifestyle creators: the self-proclaimed inventors of #MomTok. While you’d think The Real Housewives of Salt Lake City pretty much has Mormon mom culture covered, there’s apparently still plenty of ground to explore.

After fan-favorite breakout roles on Insecure and The White Lotus (to which she’s returning for season three), Natasha Rothwell has created her very own show. How to Die Alone follows Mel (Rothwell), a struggling JFK airport employee who’s never been in love and has pretty much given up on herself and her dreams. A near-death experience reawakens her drive, though, and Mel decides to grab life by the horns. “Pursuit of Happiness” and “Heartbeats” both being played in the trailer indicates this show was made for Millennials.

It seems like nearly every new drama series these days is based on a novel—and while Three Women does take its source material from a New York Times bestseller, in this case, it’s a nonfiction book by journalist Lisa Taddeo about the sexual and emotional lives of three American women, reported over the course of a decade. The limited series stars Shailene Woodley as Gia, a writer (and stand-in for Taddeo) who convinces the three titular women to share the most intimate aspects of their lives with her. There’s Lina (Betty Gilpin), a suburban Indiana mother who embarks on an affair, Sloane (DeWanda Wise), an entrepreneur whose open marriage is faltering, and Maggie (Gabrielle Creevy), a student in North Dakota who accuses her married English teacher of an inappropriate relationship. As the protagonists get to know one another, the experience changes all of them.

Kaitlin Olson is officially living Dee Reynold’s dream: the It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia actress and comedian is starring in her own show, an ABC police procedural, High Potential. Based on the popular French series Haut Potentiel Intellectuel, the series follows a single mom (Olson) with a wildly high IQ that makes her unusually good at solving crimes. Despite her distrust of the police, she teams with a by-the-book detective (Daniel Sunjata) to take down bad guys, one difficult case at a time. It’s not exactly a groundbreaking premise, but the show’s star and the team behind it (it’s written by The Martian and The Good Place’s Drew Goddard) gives it lots of, well, potential.

Marvel’s first foray into television, 2020’s Elizabeth Olsen-starring WandaVision, was a massive hit, so it’s not surprising (but still pleasing), then, that the series is getting a spinoff. Agatha All Along follows Kathryn Hahn’s breakout WandaVision character, Agatha Harkness, a powerful sorceress (and one of the original witches from the Salem Witch Trials) who trained Olsen’s Wanda in the art of witchcraft. As you can imagine, it’s set to be a spellbinding good time, with Patti LuPone playing 450-year-old Sicilian witch Lilia Calderu, Aubrey Plaza as the witch Rio Vidal, Joe Locke as familiar Billy Kaplan, and Sasheer Zamata as sorceress Jennifer Kale.

The Colin Farrell resurgence began with his Oscar-nominated role in 2022’s The Banshees of Inisherin, and it’s continuing with his next project, in HBO’s The Penguin. Set in the aftermath of 2022’s The Batman and the flooding of Gotham City, The Penguin focuses on Oswald “Oz” Cobblepot (Farrell) as he rises to power in Gotham’s gritty criminal underworld. In the trailer for the series, Farrell is nearly unrecognizable as a grizzled gangster, but it’s the diminutive Cristin Milioti’s turn as unhinged criminal Sofia Falcone that’s truly chilling.

Ryan Murphy is no stranger to the grotesque, and, at least based on the title, his latest project fully reflects that fact. The 10-episode Grotesquerie follows Detective Lois Tryon (Niecy Nash-Betts, who won an Emmy for her role in Murphy’s Jeffrey Dahmer series Monster) as she investigates a series of terrible crimes in a small community. At home, she’s dealing with a difficult relationship with her daughter and caring for her ailing husband. She teams up with Sister Megan, a nun and journalist played by Micaela Diamond, to figure out who—or what—is behind all the violence. The cast also includes Courtney B. Vance, Lesley Manville, Nicholas Alexander Chavez, Raven Goodwin, and Travis Kelce in his first acting role.

With La Maison, a French-language drama set within a Parisian high-fashion atelier, Apple TV+ is doubling down on the public’s appetite for behind-the-scenes looks into the world of couture. Within the last year, the streamer released both The New Look, chronicling the life of Christian Dior, and Becoming Karl Lagerfeld, about the iconic German designer. Now, audiences will be treated to a fully fictionalized, plot-heavy drama about the high-stakes competition between two rival families vying for sartorial dominance. Emily in Paris this is not—La Maison promises to be a moody, serious, and very French show about the wins, losses, and egos of the power players of the luxury industry.

Twenty-three years after starring in director Alfonso Cuarón’s cult-classic, hormone-fueled coming-of-age film Y Tu Mamá También, Diego Luna and Gael García Bernal are reuniting for Hulu’s first Spanish-language series, which the pair also produced. According to a synopsis, in La Máquina, Bernal plays an aging boxer whose manager and best friend (Luna) secures him one last shot at a title. To get to the fight, they must overcome a shady underworld organization and the boxer’s own ailing mind. Seeing these two back onscreen together again will surely be a treat.

Speaking of Cuarón, the Academy Award-winning filmmaker is making his television directorial debut with Disclaimer, a dark and surreal mystery starring Cate Blanchett, based on Renée Knight’s 2015 novel of the same name. In a role that vaguely recalls 2006’s Notes on a Scandal, Blanchett plays a respected documentarian, celebrated professionally for exposing the secrets of others. However, when she receives a novel from an anonymous author that appears to be about her darkest deeds, she must confront her own hidden past. The series is advertised as having seven “chapters,” rather than episodes, and Cuarón says he approached the project as a very long film. The rest of the cast includes Sacha Baron Cohen, Lesley Manville, Kodi Smit-McPhee, Louis Partridge, Leila George, and Jung Ho-yeon.

Ella Purnell’s star just keeps rising, and the Yellowjackets and Fallout actress will next lead her own series with Sweetpea. Purnell plays Rhiannon, an underappreciated young woman going through the motions of her disappointing life. Something happens, though, that pushes Rhiannon to go from wallflower to main character—even at the expense of everyone around her. Adapted from C.J. Skuse’s novel of the same name, Sweetpea has something else in common with Purnell’s last two television series—it’s bloody, violent, and thematically focused on the power of pent-up feminine rage.

Game of Thrones star Sophie Turner will trade dragons for diamonds in Joan, in which she’ll portray real-life jewel thief Joan Hannington. Based on Hannington’s memoir, the series follows her journey from being a young mother and wife of an unreliable, violent criminal to breaking out on her own and becoming an expert in diamond heists herself. A notorious figure in London’s 1980s underworld (she was apparently nicknamed “The Godmother”), Joan was also known for her glamorous, over-the-top style—which the first photos from Joan lean into.

Meanwhile, in Northern Ireland, FX series Say Nothing investigates one of the bleakest stories of The Troubles—the disappearance of Jean McConville, a single mother of ten who was abducted from her home in Belfast in 1972 and never seen again. While the beloved Derry Girls showed the lighter side of that chapter of history, Say Nothing, based on the critically acclaimed bestseller by Patrick Radden Keefe, delves into the dark extremes that armed conflict and community violence send people toward.

Comedian Jimmy O. Yang takes the lead in this adaptation of Charles Yu’s 2020 award-winning novel, which skewers the stereotypical roles Asian performers have historically been limited to throughout Hollywood’s history. The inventive novel was written from the perspective of a background character in a black-and-white police procedural who suddenly finds himself in the spotlight. With Yu as showrunner, it’ll be interesting to see how the story works in mini-series form.

The Dune universe just keeps expanding. As Denis Villeneuve works on the third and final installment of his Zendaya– and Timotheé Chalamet-starring Dune films, a new series is coming to television, set 10,000 years before Paul Atreides is even born. Dune: Prophecy follows two Harkonnen sisters as they battle forces threatening the very existence of mankind. Inspired by the novel Sisterhood of Dune, the series stars Emmy nominee Emily Watson and The Crown’s Olivia Williams in a female-focused story.