Fall TV Season Is Looking Mel Gibson-Bleak, and It’ll Only Get Worse
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In an ordinary TV year, this would be the kind of column that writes itself: a rundown of somewhere between 10 and 20 of the new and returning shows we’re most excited to see this fall. But as you may have heard, this is not an ordinary TV year. The guilds representing both the writers and actors who make television and films are on strike over various existential threats to their professions, from the lack of adequate residual payments for streaming series to the possibility of being replaced by AI. So for the moment, scripted production is all but shut down, and actors aren’t going around promoting their latest projects.
As a result, the post-Labor Day TV landscape looks more than a bit post-apocalyptic. There’s not going to be a complete lack of original content the way there eventually was during the last writers’ strike in the late 2000s, but the available programming is going to be both sparser and stranger than we’ve seen since at least the summer of 2020, when the business was still trying to get back on its feet in that first pandemic year.
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When the WGA strike began back in May, many of the studios, networks, and streamers on the other side of the negotiating table made it known that they had built up a deep stockpile of movies and shows, and that viewers would not even notice any effects of the work stoppage for quite some time. We have apparently arrived at that time, with a wide range of ripple effects.
The 2023 Emmys, originally scheduled to air on Sept. 18, have been pushed back to Jan. 15 of 2024, in the hopes that by then, actors from Succession, The Bear, and Ted Lasso will be off the picket lines and available to accept their trophies in person.
Shows that were once planned to debut in late summer or early fall have already been bumped a few months, like FX’s A Murder at the End of the World, which was supposed to begin streaming on Hulu today and now won’t appear until Nov. 14. In general, it seems that November has become the unofficially agreed-upon point in time where everyone(*) believes/hopes the strikes will be over, and that stars and creators will be available to do interviews and other promotional activities. Among the series tentatively set for then are the fifth season of FX’s Fargo with Jon Hamm and Juno Temple, Netflix’s Scott Pilgrim Takes Off animé with the cast from the live-action movie, and Season Two of HBO’s historical soap opera The Gilded Age.
(*) Well, maybe not everyone. The movie studios are certainly acting like they expect the strikes to last a lot longer, as we saw last week when Warner Bros. bumped the Dune sequel from early November to March of next year.
The Gilded Age technically debuts on Oct. 29, which is notable less for it getting ahead of Halloween than the fact that it will be a month after the finale of HBO’s current Sunday night drama, Season Two of Winning Time. While there are occasionally brief gaps between HBO Sunday originals at slow points of the year, to essentially go dark on the pay cable giant’s signature night(*) in the middle of the fall seems like a sign of just how slim the pickings are everywhere.
(*) There’s also this: in its first season, Gilded Age debuted on Mondays, which has tended to be the place where HBO puts shows for which it has more modest commercial expectations. That the series is moving to Sundays seems partly a validation for how much people liked the first year, but also a sign that HBO is short on franchise material at the moment.
Things look a whole lot worse over at the broadcast networks like ABC, CBS, Fox, and NBC. Because their shows are produced much closer to when they’re expected to air, the broadcasters tend to get hit earliest, and often hardest, when strikes or other disruptions like Covid happen. There are a handful of broadcast originals that stayed in production long enough last spring to have new episodes this fall, like NBC’s Quantum Leap and Magnum, P.I. And Fox will at least have its Sunday animated shows, because they have to be made far in advance. Mostly, though, you’ll be getting a whole lot of reality TV, repeats, game shows, and programming recycled from other markets and/or corporate arms. Get used to dramas full of people with Canadian accents, particularly if you keep tuning back into what the CW has become under its new management. CBS, meanwhile, won’t have new episodes of Ghosts, but it will begin airing the original version from the U.K. that inspired the adventures of Rose McIver and friends. CBS will also be airing odds and ends from sister streamer Paramount+, including the new season of SEAL Team (which began as a CBS show, then was canceled and moved exclusively to Paramount+, and now will be back on both), and at least a few episodes of the Frasier revival with Kelsey Grammer.
The new Frasier, debuting Oct. 12, is one of a small number of notable series to ignore any worries about when the strikes will come to an end. In this case, perhaps Paramount management felt that the brand name sells the show, with or without Grammer going on Hot Ones. Extensions of familiar titles have tended to be the exceptions to the wariness about early fall premieres. AMC is still dropping The Walking Dead: Daryl Dixon on Sept. 10, FX has a new American Horror Story season on Sept. 20, and Prime Video has its The Boys spinoff Gen V on Sept. 29. (Even something like Netflix’s The Fall of the House of Usher, coming Oct. 12, feels like part of an unofficial franchise, as the streamer’s latest literary horror adaptation — after The Haunting of Hill House and The Haunting of Bly Manor — from director Mike Flanagan.)
There are also a few cases where the power of the brand is buttressed by the idea that some shows are better off without their stars doing press. When Loki Season Two hits Disney+ on Oct. 6, nobody is going to have to answer uncomfortable questions about the domestic abuse charges against co-star Jonathan Majors, nor about his murky future within the MCU. Similarly, whether or not there is an appetite for a prequel series like Peacock’s The Continental From The World of John Wick, nobody needs to hear from or about its anti-Semitic, misogynist co-star Mel Gibson.
But here’s the thing: as lean and strange as so many of the scripted offerings are likely to be over the next few months, things could be worse as we get into 2024.
We know some shows that were originally planned for 2023 have already shifted into the new year, like HBO’s True Detective season with Jodie Foster, or FX’s epic Shogun adaptation. But there’s a whole lot of stuff that wasn’t completed when the strike began, and in some cases had barely started. Speaking on background, a few showrunners who recall what it was like to ramp production back up after the early quarantine months estimated that if the strikes were to both be resolved by the end of September, TV schedules could start to look normal by February or March, if not January. But if the AMPTP continues to make bad-faith offers that don’t acknowledge the depth and realities of the writers’ and actors’ concerns, then we could enter some really desolate territory after the calendar turns over.
In other words, don’t look at fall TV of 2023 as some barren wasteland, but as a relative paradise compared to what may be coming if Hollywood can’t find labor peace in a hurry.
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