Contents
TV
The Journalist As Underdog
There is a partially despairing, partially self-congratulatory vibe running through journalism-focused TV and movies this fall. Is the for-profit model inherently doomed? What service should a community newspaper provide? Is the danger of an investigation worth it? And what about readers and viewers — what do they want? Peacock’s The Paper, Apple TV+’s The Morning Show, FX’s The Lowdown, and Netflix’s The Woman in Cabin 10 offer their own visions of who newspeople currently are and what the news should be. Their genres vary, as does the degree to which they actually assess current media culture and whether it’s under attack. But they all share a baseline amount of respect for and hero worship toward their protagonists, which feels sometimes comforting, sometimes naïve.
The Morning Show picks up two years after the events of its third season, which covered the January 6, 2021, attempted coup and the overturning of Roe v. Wade. Jennifer Aniston’s Alex Levy, Reese Witherspoon’s Bradley Jackson, and the other members of The Morning Show’s newsroom and its network are once again bickering and backstabbing. On the editorial calendar this season: dealing with the budget and staffing cuts caused by the merger with tech company Hyperion and the pressure of covering the upcoming Olympic Games and presidential election. While The Morning Show presents the news business as glossy and glamorous (and often a little pompous), The Paper takes the opposite view with the documentary crew from The Office now focusing on a dying newspaper in Ohio. The Toledo Truth Teller once occupied a bustling newsroom but now scrapes by with about a dozen people. When Domhnall Gleeson’s Ned Sampson gets hired as the new editor-in-chief, he butts heads with a mostly checked-out staff used to writing clickbait. As he teaches them reporting basics, he makes an enemy of the paper’s managing editor (Sabrina Impacciatore) but finds an ally in a veteran turned journalist (Chelsea Frei) who agrees with him that the Truth Teller could improve.
Both series examine the dynamics of a newsroom and how people within that collective can pursue their own power plays at the expense of their mission. The Lowdown and The Woman in Cabin 10 (10/10) are more individualistic. The former, Sterlin Harjo’s new neo-noir series, stars Ethan Hawke as a muckraking freelance journalist in Tulsa who stands up to the corrupt Washberg family. Also investigation-focused is The Woman in Cabin 10, a film adaptation of Ruth Ware’s 2016 novel about an unraveling travel writer, Lo (Keira Knightley), who becomes convinced that the woman in the cabin next to her on a superyacht was murdered despite no one believing her. In all four stories, journalists are presented as underdog heroes facing off against the rich and the unsympathetic. Whether these projects spend much time analyzing exactly which powerful forces sowed the doubt journalists now face in the first place, and how they achieved that degradation of general trust, remains to be seen. — Roxana Hadadi
Succession Successors
Following up one of the most Emmy-winning shows of the past decade is daunting, which might explain why Succession’s main cast has mostly stuck to film and theater since the series ended in May 2023. That will change this fall when Mr. and Mrs. Shiv Roy both return to TV in lead roles on the same day (11/6). Matthew Macfadyen steps back into period garb to play 19th-century presidential assassin Charles Guiteau opposite Michael Shannon’s James Garfield in the Netflix limited series Death by Lightning, based on the acclaimed nonfiction best seller Destiny of the Republic. And in Peacock’s All Her Fault, a modern suburban-thriller series based on the Andrea Mara novel, Sarah Snook plays a woman facing “every parent’s worst nightmare” when her young son mysteriously disappears. Arian Moayed also joins Nobody Wants This as a potential love interest for Justine Lupe’s Morgan. Stewy and Willa, together at last? — Genevieve Koski
Movies
Dads Go Bad
This autumn features an array of actors showing off their ability to let down their kids. Stellan Skarsgård already wowed Cannes with his turn in Sentimental Value (11/7) as a past-his-prime director who, after failing to reconcile with his actress daughter, hires a Hollywood celebrity to essentially play her in his new film. But we’ve also got George Clooney as the titular movie star in Jay Kelly (12/5), who is beloved by the public but deals with different degrees of distance from his two girls, as well as Woody Harrelson as a shambolic parent lurching back into his child’s life just as she becomes governor of her home state in Ella McCay (12/12). Hide your daughters—their dads are coming back for them, hats in hand, and they’re looking very emotional. — Alison Willmore
Moms Go Mad
“This isn’t supposed to be what it’s like,” Linda (Rose Byrne) wails in Mary Bronstein’s If I Had Legs I’d Kick You (10/10). “This isn’t it! This can’t be it!” She’s panicking in vague terms about motherhood and the stranglehold it has on her life. Linda is tasked with caring for her ambiguously ill child while her husband is out of town for work; their apartment ceiling collapses, forcing her and her daughter into a motel. The film’s descent into cosmic horror reflects a generational madness: Linda belongs to a cohort of women who were told they could have it all — kids, husband, job, house — only to find those things are driving them completely insane. If I Had Legs I’d Kick You is not the first entry in the canon of movie moms who divest from reality — last year’s Nightbitch saw Amy Adams turn into a dog — but it and others this fall are darker and stranger.
Jennifer Lawrence stunned Cannes as a young mother named Grace in Lynne Ramsay’s Die, My Love (11/7). Having moved to Montana with her husband, Jackson (Robert Pattinson), and their newborn, Grace becomes restless, her mental health deteriorating as she gives in to a more animalistic self after the birth of her first child. Meanwhile, Chloé Zhao’s adaptation of Maggie O’Farrell’s novel Hamnet (12/12) observes Agnes (Jessie Buckley) and her husband, William Shakespeare (Paul Mescal), mourning the death of their only son. Her pain is rooted less in the burdens of motherhood and more in the void that emerges in her grief. And in the latest Colleen Hoover adaptation, Regretting You (10/24), Allison Williams plays Morgan, the mother of a precocious and horny teenager, Clara (Mckenna Grace), who struggles to maintain her composure after the deaths of her husband and sister — who were having an affair. It’s a little more tied to reality, but Williams brings a frazzled mania to Morgan. Hoover’s work often strives for a happy ending and/or marriage plot, but that doesn’t mean it won’t be the craziest of this bunch. —Fran Hoepfner
Disillusioned Dissidents
The characters in It Was Just an Accident (10/15), the heartsick new Jafar Panahi film that won this year’s Palme d’Or, are a collection of political prisoners who may have ran afoul of the Iranian regime once but are now just trying, however brokenly, to settle into something resembling a normal life. In that sense, they’re part of a larger crowd of disillusioned or exhausted dissidents from around the world this season that includes a spectacular Wagner Moura in The Secret Agent (12/5), who plays a widowed man who goes on the run after clashing with an official during Brazil’s military dictatorship in the ’70s, and Leonardo DiCaprio in One Battle After Another (9/26), starring as a one-time hippie revolutionary. Uniting these characters is the upsetting truth that you don’t really need to mount a rebellion against a repressive government to anger it. — A.W.
Hopecore Is Back
Times are trending real dark, so it tracks that Hollywood would turn its hopes to saturated colors and whimsical sagas as an alternative to grim realities. The watery-eyed Stephen King adaptation The Life of Chuck may have failed to catch fire at the box office this summer, but it’s expected to be followed up by at least two movies offering similar sorts of expansive sentimentality this fall. A24’s Eternity (11/26) is a dazzling mid-century-tinged vision of Limbo, where a woman played by Elizabeth Olsen has to choose between the two men — Callum Turner and Miles Teller — she was married to over the course of her life. Meanwhile, A Big Bold Beautiful Journey pairs Margot Robbie with Colin Farrell for a magical-realist adventure that finds the pair traipsing through a series of mysterious stand-alone doors that take them through memories from their pasts (9/19). It all smacks a bit of Depression-era audiences seeking escapism in Busby Berkeley musicals, but, you know, whatever works! —A.W.
Music
Musicians Turned Actors
Like Barbra Streisand, Cher, and Lady Gaga before her, Charli XCX is an obvious multi-hyphenate. Few who have seen her in concert, cavorting wildly, commanding a massive audience while all alone onstage, would doubt she’d make a good actress. Now she’s starring in no fewer than seven films, including the historical fantasy 100 Nights of Hero (12/5), alongside Emma Corrin, and two at tiff this month: Erupcja, a knotty romance set in Poland, and Romain Gavras’s Sacrifice, co-starring John Malkovich. She’s not the only musician onscreen this fall, as another powerhouse, Teyana Taylor, stars along with Leonardo DiCaprio in Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another. That film, like Anderson’s Licorice Pizza, features Haim sister Alana as well as Justin Bieber whisperer Dijon. Elsewhere, A$AP Rocky puts his megawatt smile to good use in Spike Lee’s Highest 2 Lowest and with Rose Byrne in If I Had Legs I’d Kick You. Rappers seem to be in high demand: Queens’s Action Bronson appears in Darren Aronofsky’s New York crime thriller Caught Stealing; Philly rapper Tierra Whack is in football-horror film Him (9/19); Tyler, the Creator joins Timothée Chalamet in Josh Safdie’s Ping-Pong drama Marty Supreme; and Sweden’s Yung Lean joins Charli in Sacrifice. Broadway is sure to take notice soon enough; the EGOT countdown starts now. — Matthew Schnipper
Theater
More Dramas, Less IP
Last season brought a bumper crop of song and dance to Broadway, a rare year in which all five Best Musical contenders at the Tony Awards felt as if they’d earned their nominations. (Dead Outlaw, you deserved a longer run.) A regression to the mean was probably inevitable, and this fall, despite some productions with potential like The Queen of Versailles, the lineup is thinner. But that has coincided with a pleasant surprise: Smart straight plays, both new and revived, are occupying more Theater District mind space than usual. Yasmina Reza’s acclaimed Art returns after two decades with a starry cast. There’s a new Oedipus, adapted by Robert Icke. Bess Wohl’s encounter-group memory play Liberation, Samuel D. Hunter’s intergenerational family story Little Bear Ridge Road, Jordan Harrison’s Marjorie Prime — whether new or a decade old, none has made it to Broadway before. Maybe it’s economics driving this trend; plays are cheaper to stage than musicals and don’t take quite so long to develop. Maybe it’s a confluence of some available houses and well-timed Off Broadway productions that can transfer. Pleasingly, not one of them is based on movie IP — unless you want to count the Waiting for Godot revival that stars Keanu Reeves and Alex Winter rekindling their Bill & Ted bromance. Most righteous. — Christopher Bonanos
Books
First Memoirs
How is it that Margaret Atwood has never written an autobiography? Her Book of Lives: A Memoir of Sorts (November 4), which begins in “the wild forest of northern Quebec” where she spent most of her childhood, is one of several first memoirs by literary icons this year. Mother Mary Comes to Me (September 2), by The God of Small Things author Arundhati Roy, is a totally fascinating account of her escape from a complex, charismatic, and borderline abusive mother; Joyride, by Susan Orlean (October 14), is “a time machine to a bygone era of journalism,” in case you need more descriptions of ’90s-era magazine expense accounts. —Emma Alpern
Doorstoppers Are Back
A number of this fall’s biggest books are unusually long. They’re coming in at as many as 1,232 pages in the case of House of Leaves author Mark Z. Danielewski’s sweeping Tom’s Crossing (10/28), which is about two friends saving horses from slaughter in 1980s Utah. The translated novel Schattenfroh (9/9), by Michael Lentz, described by one German reviewer as “a genius, insane, dark or ridiculous book before which one can only helplessly surrender,” is just over 1,000. Adam Johnson’s Tongan historical novel The Wayfinder (10/14) and Kiran Desai’s continent-hopping saga The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny (9/23), her first book in almost 20 years, are both around 700. Begin relengthening your attention span now. — E.A.
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