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    TV Shows and Movies Streaming in September 2023: ‘The Wheel of Time,’ ‘Gen V’ and More

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    Spinoffs and chillers abound in a month filled with tons of new television. Here’s the best of what’s coming to Amazon, Max, Apple TV+ and others. Every month, streaming services add movies and TV shows to its library. Here are our picks for some of September’s most promising new titles. (Note: Streaming services occasionally change schedules without giving notice. For more recommendations on what to stream, sign up for our Watching newsletter here.)New to Amazon Prime Video‘The Wheel of Time’ Season 2Started streaming: Sept. 1Season 1 of this handsome-looking fantasy series introduced some of the major characters and concepts from the first book of the novelist Robert Jordan’s hefty “The Wheel of Time” saga. Season 2 adapts parts of the second and third books — “The Great Hunt” and “The Dragon Reborn” — and continues moving the pieces into place for the grand apocalyptic battle prophesied at the start of the story. Rosamund Pike returns as the mystic Moiraine, who is helping a group of young people escape the shadowy forces pursuing them. Josha Stradowski plays Rand al’Thor, who may be his land’s last best hope to stand up against the Dark One and his minions — or may be the one to usher in a new age of chaos.‘Neighbours: A New Chapter’ Season 1Starts streaming: Sept. 18The original run of the soap opera “Neighbours” began in 1985 and concluded in 2022 after 38 seasons and nearly 9,000 22-minute episodes. During that time, the show’s melodramatic tales of suburban Melbourne life were seen around the world and introduced viewers to future stars like Natalie Imbruglia, Kylie Minogue, Radha Mitchell, Guy Pearce and Margot Robbie. Now Amazon Studios and Fremantle Australia are bringing the series back, along with some of the old cast (including Pearce), who join an array of new characters. Plans are to run 200 episodes a year for the next two years on Amazon’s ad-supported, free-to-stream Freevee service, where viewers can also watch the older episodes, giving Americans a chance to immerse themselves in these Australians’ love affairs and personal crises.‘Gen V’ Season 1Starts streaming: Sept. 29A spinoff of the adults-only superhero satire “The Boys,” this action-dramedy series is set at a special school for young crime fighters, where the students engage in the same kinds of cliques, rivalries and romances that happen in any normal school but with the constant threat that super powers make every conflict more dangerous. A few of the adult characters from “The Boys” will drop in on the new show (which has a creative team drawn from some of that show’s writers and producers); but the focus here is on the kids, who have a lot in common with classic comic book super teams like the X-Men and the Teen Titans. Expect plenty of irreverence and dark humor, along with some sly takedowns of familiar superhero mythology.Also arriving:Sept. 1“God. Family. Football.”Sept. 5“One Shot: Overtime Elite”Sept. 8“Sitting in Bars with Cake”Sept. 12“Kelce”Sept. 15“A Million Miles Away”“Wilderness” Season 1“Written in the Stars” Season 1Sept. 22“Cassandro”Sept. 22“The Fake Sheikh”Norman Reedus in the latest “Walking Dead” spinoff, “The Walking Dead: Daryl Dixon.”Emmanuel Guimier/AMCNew to AMC+‘The Walking Dead: Daryl Dixon’ Season 1Starts streaming: Sept. 10Like “The Walking Dead: Dead City” earlier this year, the latest entry in the long-running, ever-expanding “Walking Dead” franchise takes one of the most popular characters from the show’s original run and plops him in another part of the world. Norman Reedus reprises his role as Daryl Dixon, a talented marksman and tracker who had to overcome his loner tendencies to become a vital part of an embattled postapocalyptic community in the American southeast. In this new series, Daryl takes his talents to France, where he allies with a tough nun (Clémence Poésy) who shows him the unique ways that continental Europe handled the zombie outbreak and helps him to figure out who he can trust.Also arriving:Sept. 1“Perpetrator”Sept. 8“Blood Flower”Sept. 10“Ride With Norman Reedus” Season 6Sept. 15“Elevator Game”Sept. 20“Thick Skin”Sept. 22“The Angry Black Girl and Her Mother”Sept. 29“Nightmare”LaKeith Stanfield in a scene from “The Changeling,” based on the Victor LaValle novel.Apple TV+New to Apple TV+‘The Changeling’Starts streaming: Sept. 8Like the Victor LaValle novel that inspired it, the supernatural horror series “The Changeling” combines everyday drama with terrifying nightmares, in a story that sprawls across multiple generations. LaKeith Stanfield plays Apollo, a shy book dealer who is haunted by memories of the father he barely knew. He is also attracted to a vibrant but eccentric woman named Emmy (Clark Backo), whom he eventually marries. The show’s creator and writer, Kelly Marcel, shifts the narrative focus freely among different characters and different eras, as a crisis with Emmy and their newborn child drives Apollo to confront his troubled family history. In doing so, he finds that his past is shrouded in the kind of wondrous darkness common to fairy tales, and he is challenged to untangle fantasy from fact in an enchanted version of New York City.‘The Morning Show’ Season 3Starts streaming: Sept. 13One of Apple TV+’s flagship series returns for a third season of punchy boardroom drama, set in the modern TV news business. The show is still powered by its two charismatic leads: Jennifer Aniston as the veteran morning show anchor Alex Levy and Reese Witherspoon as Bradley Jackson, a feisty hard news reporter who has become Alex’s co-host. Billy Crudup and Mark Duplass play two of the behind-the-camera bosses who sometimes make morally questionable choices. This season they are joined by Jon Hamm as a cocky tech billionaire who might be able improve their network’s cash-flow. Although “The Morning Show” started as a ripped-from-the-headlines look at how the #MeToo era has upended the male-dominated media, the series has since opened to encompass other hot-button contemporary issues, which in Season 3 include cyberattacks and corporate blackmail.Also arriving:Sept. 20“The Super Models”Sept. 22“Still Up”Sept. 29“Flora and Son”Sinclair Daniel, left, and Ashleigh Murray in a scene from “The Other Black Girl.”HuluNew to Hulu‘The Other Black Girl’ Season 1Starts streaming: Sept. 13Part wry social commentary and part intense mystery-thriller, “The Other Black Girl” examines the racial and gender dynamics of the New York publishing industry. Sinclair Daniel plays Nella, an aspiring assistant editor who befriends Hazel (Ashleigh Murray), her publishing house’s latest hire and the only other Black person in her department. When Hazel’s collegial advice starts derailing Nella’s career — around the same time that Nella starts experiencing some unnerving paranormal activity around the office — she begins looking into her new friend’s past and the history of their employers. Adapted from a best-selling Zakiya Dalila Harris novel, this show finds the humor and the anxiety inherent in the life of a woman who is struggling to stand out in a tough business without losing her identity.Also arriving:Sept. 6“Never Let Him Go”Sept. 13“Welcome to Wrexham” Season 2Sept. 14“Dragons: The Nine Realms” Season 7Sept. 20“American Horror Story: Delicate” Part 1Sept. 22“No One Will Save You”Sept. 27“Love in Fairhope” Season 1Nikesh Patel and Rose Matafeo in scene from Season 3 of the Max series “Starstruck.”Mark Johnson/MaxNew to Max‘Starstruck’ Season 3Starts streaming: Sept. 28This charming romantic comedy is one of the streaming era’s hidden gems, and it is ripe for discovery now that the fall TV schedule has been thinned out by the actors’ and writers’ strikes. Through its first two seasons, “Starstruck” followed the unlikely on-again/off-again love affair between Jessie (Rose Matafeo), a young New Zealander struggling to make ends meet in London, and Tom (Nikesh Patel), an A-list movie star who is smitten with her. Season 3 has the couple going their separate ways but still frequently and awkwardly crossing paths. The show’s short, breezy episodes capture how the “getting to know you” phase of romance can be equal parts exciting and difficult, especially when one of the people involved is rich and famous.Also arriving:Sept. 2“The Venture Bros.: Radiant Is the Blood of the Baboon Heart”Sept. 13“Donyale Luna: Supermodel”Sept. 21“Young Love” Season 1A scene from the Season 4 premiere of “Star Trek: Lower Decks,” which centers on the underlings of a starship.Paramount+New to Paramount+ With Showtime‘Star Trek: Lower Decks’ Season 4Starts streaming: Sept. 7“Star Trek” fans who are still buzzing from the excellent, recently completed second season of “Strange New Worlds” should roll those warm feelings over to the fourth season of the animated “Lower Decks,” which has established its place as one of the best of the modern “Star Trek” shows. Like “Strange New Worlds,” “Lower Decks” balances old-fashioned “interstellar adventure of the week” stories with involved subplots and rich character development. This cute-looking cartoon is fundamentally comic — following the goofy mishaps of a bunch of Starfleet’s least vital employees — but its writers and animators respect the franchise’s lore enough to deliver cleverly plotted, action-packed episodes, season after season.Also arriving:Sept. 8“Dreaming Whilst Black”Sept. 12“Football Must Go On”Sept. 17“The Gold”Sept. 18“Superpower”Sept. 22“Deadlocked: How America Shaped the Supreme Court”Sept. 26“72 Seconds”Colin Woodell as Winston Scott in a scene from “The Continental: From the World of John Wick.”Katalin Vermes/Starz EntertainmentNew to Peacock‘The Continental: From the World of John Wick’Starts streaming: Sept. 22Fans of the first “John Wick” movie will always remember the moment when its weary hit man hero walked into a strange, assassin-friendly hotel called the Continental and was reminded of its arcane codes of behavior. Suddenly a movie that had previously seemed like a low-stakes underworld revenge thriller opened up into something more fantastical and globe spanning, with a dense mythology. The TV mini-series “The Continental: From the World of John Wick” is set in the 1970s and stars Mel Gibson as Cormac, the hotel’s New York manager at that time. Colin Woodell plays a young version of the franchise’s Winston Scott, who is tasked by Cormac to solve a family problem that may threaten the viability of this super secret criminal hideaway.Also arriving:Sept. 4“Chucky” Season 2Sept. 28“Dino Pops” Season 1 More

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      ‘Jury Duty’ Becomes a Surprise Hit

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      “Jury Duty,” a unique comedy on the Amazon streaming platform Freevee, became a surprise hit thanks to word-of-mouth social media buzz.On the night of April 6, the creators of “Jury Duty,” a hybrid documentary-sitcom in which an ordinary man unwittingly participates in a staged trial among actors, came together in Culver City, Calif., for a cast and crew screening of the series.The atmosphere was muted. Early reviews had been unflattering — The Hollywood Reporter, earlier that day, had called it “a bad show for benign reasons.” And with it premiering the next day on Amazon Freevee, an ad-supported streaming platform few were familiar with, expectations for the show’s success were modest, if not outright low.“The vibe at the screening I would describe as very much like, ‘We made a show, we should be proud of that,’” Todd Schulman, an executive producer, said in a recent video interview. “I believed in what we had made. But there’s so much content out there, and this is on a platform that’s not as well-known as the other ones, so let’s be realistic about what’s going to happen.”“Then the next three weeks unfolded,” he continued. “And it felt insane.”After a slow start, “Jury Duty” rapidly found an audience, building ecstatic word-of-mouth buzz to become a bona fide social media sensation, with clips of the show racking up hundreds of millions of views on TikTok.Broader interest in the show spiked accordingly, more than doubling in the month after premiere, according to research by Parrot Analytics. (The company assesses the popularity of shows by analyzing audience demand — a combination of streaming, social media, search and other online behaviors.) Interest in “Jury Duty” remains higher now than it was during the show’s initial run, in April, suggesting that plenty of viewers are still discovering it, Parrot said.Like most streamers, Amazon declines to give viewing numbers, but it confirmed that “Jury Duty” has been Freevee’s most watched show since it premiered. Last week, seeking to capitalize and build on the popularity, Amazon released a line of “Jury Duty” merchandise as well as new versions of the episodes that include cast commentary.All of which has prompted a lot of people to ask the same question: How did this happen?“Jury Duty” feels like a minor miracle. The premise is fraught with peril: The nominal star, a contractor named Ronald Gladden, has no idea that he is in a sitcom — he had been told that some parts of the trial were being recorded as a documentary — and one of the thrilling things about watching is the constant sense that at any moment it could all implode. Ronald could have discovered the ruse; the actors playing the other jurors could have broken character or flubbed lines. But all involved managed to pull it off.Gladden, center, was the only non-actor in the series, and viewers were charmed by his agreeable demeanor.Amazon FreeveeSchulman and his team weren’t even sure that they could. When they were pitching the concept around Hollywood, they received little interest, with most networks passing on the grounds that it posed too much of a creative risk. It was ultimately Freevee and its head of originals, Lauren Anderson, who was eager to take that chance.“Usually when you say ‘They took a chance on us,’ it means they took a chance because the show could have been bad,” Schulman said. “But they could give us millions of dollars and not get a show — that’s a different scale of chance-taking.”In an interview, Anderson said that when she first heard the pitch, at the start of the pandemic, Freevee — which was known at the time as IMDb TV — hadn’t released any original content and was looking for “noisy, buzzy and unique” programming to set its slate apart. “I got the feeling that this could be really special,” she said.James Marsden was less confident. The star of “Westworld” and “Sonic the Hedgehog” has a recurring role in “Jury Duty,” playing an exaggeratedly arrogant, pretentious version of himself who is ordered to be a backup juror for the trial. While Marsden was initially intrigued by the idea, he said in a phone interview that his doubts set in once the production began.“I started thinking, ‘Oh my God, what have I gotten myself into? Can we even do this? Can we pull this off?” he said. Even if it worked, he didn’t think it would land: “I thought this would either be the end of my career or something that maybe a handful of people would see.”Even Gladden didn’t expect much to come from it once the production had wrapped. (That he was on a TV show was revealed to him in the final episode, but he had to wait months for it to make it to air.)“It was on a brand-new streaming platform that no one had ever heard of, so I didn’t really think it was going to go anywhere,” Gladden said over the phone from Los Angeles. “I truthfully didn’t think anything was going to come from it.”Leading up to the premiere, the buzz was virtually nonexistent, but there were signs the show could resonate. A trailer put out by Freevee didn’t cause much of a splash, but then one of the show’s writers, Kerry O’Neill, shared the trailer to her Twitter account with the caption, “We truman showed a man,” and the tweet blew up. The idea that someone had recreated “The Truman Show,” the Jim Carrey movie about a man unknowingly living life on TV, “really contextualized everything for people,” said Nicholas Hatton, one of the show’s executive producers. The trailer embedded in O’Neill’s tweet received 1.3 million views.While middling reviews dampened expectations, show clips put out by Freevee found an immediate foothold on TikTok. “I’m a 44-year-old man; I’m not on TikTok,” Schulman said dryly. “I couldn’t believe how many people my age or older were telling me that they heard about the show from their teenage kids. It was working its way generationally upward.”The fan TikTok videos — which Freevee had no part in creating, though it also posted clips to its own TikTok account — were like short, self-contained advertisements for the series. Users shared scenes out of context with a line or two of explanation, and it proved more than enough for people to understand the conceit and get hyped.Marsden felt the impact immediately after the first episode aired. “I started getting texts from friends and random people I hadn’t heard from in years,” he said. “What I kept hearing was, ‘You’re blowing up on TikTok.’ I didn’t even know what that meant.” The excitement spilled over into real life: “I walked out of my hotel room in New York to get a coffee and literally every other person under 30 was stopping me to talk about ‘Jury Duty.’”James Marsden, right, played an arrogant version of himself in the series. “I thought this would either be the end of my career or something that maybe a handful of people would see,” he said.Amazon FreeveeAt the same time, Gladden — who returned to contracting work after the show and had a minimal online presence — was thrust into social media stardom. “I figured that on Instagram that I might gain a few thousand followers out of it,” he said. “But when I very quickly gained over 10,000, I realized it was actually becoming a thing.”Essential to the show’s appeal, especially on TikTok, has been Gladden’s warmth and positivity as the unwitting lead. Faced over and over again with oblique ethical quandaries engineered by the writers (such as whether to take the blame for an embarrassing bathroom accident caused by Marsden) and forced to endure the bizarre behavior of his fellow “jurors,” Gladden exuded an unflappable sweetness that viewers have found touching and inspiring.Not surprisingly, the more than 200,000 Instagram followers he now has have been flooding Gladden’s inbox with positive messages. “People have been telling me things like, ‘You’ve inspired me to be a better person,’ or ‘you make me want to be nicer to people,’” he said. “It’s the best reaction I could have gotten.”Every network hopes to cultivate this kind of grass-roots furor, and modern streaming content can feel as if it is actively courting viral success (consider the “Wednesday” dance). But no one involved with “Jury Duty” intended for it to be a TikTok hit.“This show took off in a way that you can’t buy,” Anderson said. “It took on a life of its own, in the way that you want to happen for every show you make but which you just can’t predict.”That it was a happy accident hasn’t stopped others in the industry from lusting after the recipe, of course. “I’ve had people who work at other platforms call me and say, ‘OK, what’s the secret? What did Freevee do to make this go viral?’” Schulman said. “It was completely organic.”As for what it was about “Jury Duty” in particular that resonated with audiences on TikTok, Marsden has a theory. “Young people go onto YouTube or their explore feed on TikTok or Instagram, and they watch people slipping on the ice or doing a silly dance,” he said. “They want to see what’s going on out there in all its absurdity or its hilariousness or its scariness. They want to watch something real, and not fake.”The centerpiece of “Jury Duty” is a real guy, and that edge of reality, Marsden feels, is what captures the imagination of the young. “Every 20-year-old can see themselves in that position and think, ‘What if that was me?’ There’s something kind of dangerous and exciting about that.” More