Meet your new TV obsessions: here to save autumn
IN FEBRUARY, Jennifer Aniston earned 16+ million likes for her Instagram confirmation that a Friends reunion was on. ‘It’s happening!’ she announced. Within a month, the pandemic started to cannibalise TV production schedules. Everything from Succession to Line Of Duty ground to a halt, as lockdown took hold. There was no perky Insta post announcing, ‘It’s not!’ from Aniston. That was just a given.
Yet the chaotic interruptions, postponements and closures of TV’S Covid casualties is not the whole pandemic entertainment story. If quarantine TV has taught us anything, it is that being holed up at home reignited some old viewing habits and astonishing statistics. By April, almost 10 million self-isolators tuned in to watch the first episode of Quiz, the sensational dramatisation of the early ’00s Who Wants To Be A Millionaire? scandal, making it ITV’S highest rated drama in a decade. Bucking all TV trends, it scored particularly highly with TV’S 16-34-year-old audience, a holy grail previously assumed lost. They hung around, too, turning both Normal People and I May Destroy You into genuine, sign-of-the-times phenomena.
The good news is that a brace of thrilling new shows for autumn 2020 had made it to edit prior to the March shutdown. The autumn schedule looks more dazzling than ever. With question marks still hanging over
Strictly and Bake-off, and I’m a Celeb… relocated to North Wales, television’s nana factor of cross-generational talking points looks like it will transfer wholesale to the quality TV drama market. Let’s keep this new, classy flame alight.
The high watermark of it all, Netflix’s The Crown, is shot in two-season cycles, with the Diana years poised to hit our screens on 15 November. Brace yourself: there’s a lot more to come. Billie Piper’s I Hate Suzie (left; compromised sex pic forces major life re-evaluation) and Channel 4’s Adult Material (porn star goes into meltdown after watching the treatment of a teen on set) will take the invisible baton passed on from I May Destroy You and run hard with it. Ryan Murphy’s hotly anticipated One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest origin series, Ratched,
with Sarah Paulson in the lead role, begins mid-september. Luca ‘Call Me By Your Name’ Guardanigno has his first TV series, We Are What We Are, starring a newcomer who looks disarmingly like he’s walked out of Justin Bieber’s socials, planted in an Italian army base for a smart, twisted coming-of-age yarn.
Another Hollywood heavy hitter, Steve Mcqueen, will add race to the hot-button scheduling subjects with five portmanteau films, Small Axe, starring this year’s BLM hero John Boyega, finally shedding the last of his cute Disney aspect. David Nicholls’ amazing Us, about a couple negotiating their conscious uncoupling across the aesthetic beauty of a European tour, will finally make it to screen. American Honey’s breakout star Sasha Lane is helming the US reboot of Channel 4’s fragrant psychochiller, Utopia. The showrunner is Gillian ‘Gone Girl’ Flynn. As if all of this could not be enough to dig out the blanket and hunker down for an entire sofa-bound autumn, Nicole Kidman rekindles the fires of Big Little Lies by joining series creator David E Kelley for The Undoing, a therapist’s tale of a missing husband and unravelling dreams.
For every cancellation the pandemic has thrown our way, a new excitement seems to emerge. It’s next year when the real trouble begins and the dearth of production will really start to hit the box. A second spike would be disastrous, pointing to a time of endless repeats when we really might run out of TV. But for now, the riches are starting to flow in. Happy viewing.