Fall TV 2017: everything you need to know about the best and worst shows

Marvel’s The Punisher will finally hit Netflix on November 17, 2017, the company announced on Thursday, following weeks of speculation over when — perhaps even if — the series would see the light of day.

The series, about a vigilante antihero who’s adept at firearms, has been shadowed by controversy since the mass shooting in Las Vegas on October 1. Though Marvel hadn’t announced a release date at that point, there were rumors that it was planning to release the show in October, on the heels of a trailer that dropped in mid-September. But then at New York Comic Con in early October, Marvel canceled the show’s panel, recognizing that promotion of the show, which features a lot of gun violence, could be seen as distasteful and disrespectful in light of the real-life gun violence that claimed the lives of more than 50 people in Nevada.

When Amazon announced it would be making an original series based on Lore, Aaron Mahnke’s hit podcast about folklore and its often terrifying role in history, the obvious question was: Just how would this work?

The result, also called Lore, debuted on Amazon on Friday, and it’s a compelling mix of the original elements of Mahnke’s podcast with the appeal of the classic reenactment show. The result is often chilling and always interesting — largely thanks to the sheer bizarreness of human history.

Making a good first episode of a TV show is tough enough, but making a good first episode of a comedy is harder still. You can count the number of truly great comedy pilots on one hand — the No. 1 example is almost always Cheers — because comedies depend so much on a show’s cast and writers coming together to figure out everyone’s respective rhythms. Throw in the fact that comedies have less time to impart story because they’re also cracking jokes and it’s no wonder their premiere episodes often feel rushed and overstuffed. Usually they’re somewhat frantic to make viewers laugh, even though it’s unlikely that their shows have truly figured their sense of humor.

Two new comedies offer particularly good examples of how tricky comedy pilots can be, especially if a show’s concept is anything more ambitious than “friends hang out.” First, there’s Ghosted, Fox’s workplace comedy about a former professor and a detective (played by Adam Scott and Craig Robinson, respectively) who stumble upon a high-stakes investigation into alien activity being conducted by some shadowy government agency. And then there’s The Mayor, ABC’s sitcom about a rapper (Brandon Micheal Hall) who tries to drum up publicity for his album by running for mayor of his hometown — and then has to do the job once he accidentally wins.

We’ve said it before, and we’ll say it once more with feeling: This is a bad fall for new television. A combination of otherwise-committed talent, shifting debut schedules, and plain old lackluster ideas has resulted in a blah crop of shows that will struggle in the coming weeks to keep audiences tuned in.

There are a couple of notable exceptions. HBO’s 1970s-era porn drama The Deuce — from The Wire creator David Simon — has broken through the pack as a worthy contender. Hulu’s adaptation of the popular Marvel comic series Runaways has promise, and ABC’s new comedy The Mayor is warm and funny. On the nonfiction side of things, Ken Burns’s newest series The Vietnam War may indeed be one of the documentarian’s greatest works to date.

Nineteen years ago, a gay man and his straight female friend moved in together and changed television for ... well, better or for worse, depending on who you ask.

NBC’s farcical sitcom Will & Grace debuted in 1998, at a time when gay characters were barely represented on TV. Its central couple wasn’t a will-they won’t-they romance, but a fiercely close friendship between gay lawyer Will (Eric McCormack) and his straight best friend Grace (Debra Messing). It even dared to include yet another gay man as a lead character in Sean Hayes’s melodramatic Jack (Sean Hayes). Meanwhile, Megan Mullally’s boozy Karen, the kept wife of an unseen husband, eventually revealed that she cared less about the gender of the people she slept with than what they could do for her — but her primary role on the show was to pop pills, make off color jokes, and keep things weird.

In the mid-’90s, there was a surprising rise of TV shows in the network syndication space, spurred by the success of Hercules: The Legendary Journeys and Xena: Warrior Princess (the latter of which, at least, is a genuinely fun show).

These shows — basically none of which you will remember, so I won’t make a big list of them — were cheap. They had to be produced quickly and at little expense because the companies creating them were primarily making money from selling them to local TV stations, which would stick them on the air in the middle of a Saturday afternoon and hope people would be too tired to change the channel. You’d watch some low-budget fantasy or sci-fi adventure and wonder how it ended up on the air.

There are a lot of great filmmakers, the old joke about Ken Burns goes, but only one has an Apple iMovie effect named after him.

The technique immortalized by Apple’s Ken Burns Effect — which will zoom in on photos and then pan across them — wasn’t invented by Burns; he has most frequently said he learned of it from his mentor, documentarian Jerome Liebling. But it’s nonetheless become heavily associated with Burns’s efforts to exhume America’s musty past and imbue it with the drama and grandeur it held when it was still the present.

“A Father’s Advice,” the season two premiere of This Is Us, was mostly dedicated to walking back the events of the season one finale.

Kate Pearson (Chrissy Metz) wants to be a singer? Too bad. She stinks. Randall Pearson (newly minted Emmy winner Sterling K. Brown) wants to adopt another child? Well, maybe he should have talked about it more with his wife. Kevin Pearson (Justin Hartley) is starring in a Ron Howard movie? Hey, look, there’s Ron Howard in a one-shot cameo!

By now, the ubiquitous advertising — a young boy in a bow tie — has surely made you aware of the arrival of Young Sheldon, a prequel to The Big Bang Theory debuting this season on CBS.

If you’ve seen the face of actor Iain Armitage gazing pompously at you from the side of a bus, you’d be forgiven for assuming you know exactly what this show is: Young Sheldon (the little boy version of Sheldon Cooper from The Big Bang Theory) will get one over on his family and friends in 1980s Texas, while the studio audience cheers his every witticism. Such an assumption would fit with the conventional wisdom around Young Sheldon’s parent show, which is often derided as one of TV’s worst. (It’s not — as NPR’s Linda Holmes ably points out here — but The Big Bang Theory’s extreme popularity makes a backlash to it inevitable.)

After losing its original showrunner and after being delayed two times, after stories indicating a troubled production and after seeming to avoid showing itself to critics, after being questioned for airing exclusively on a proprietary streaming service owned by its parent network and after assembling an all-star cast and then largely keeping fans in the dark as to who they were playing, Star Trek: Discovery — the first new Star Trek series since Enterprise left the air in 2005 — is finally here.

And, maybe miraculously, it’s good.

Again and again, the fourth season of Transparent returns to the music of Jesus Christ Superstar, especially the song “Everything’s Alright.”

The musical, first released as a concept album in 1970, tells the story of Jesus’s last week on Earth, but through the alternating perspectives of Judas Iscariot and Jesus himself.

Star Trek: Discovery, debuting this weekend on CBS and CBS All Access, marks the first bit of Star Trek television since Enterprise was canceled in 2005. It also marks a number of milestones for the legendary sci-fi franchise — from prominent firsts like casting a woman of color in the lead role and featuring the first openly gay character in Star Trek history to more subtle tweaks, like having two different captains on the show and a fresh-faced Starfleet cadet in the main cast.

With Sonequa Martin-Green (The Walking Dead) starring as First Officer Michael Burnham, a black woman Starfleet officer who’s poised to have her own command, and Anthony Rapp (the original cast of Rent on Broadway) playing Lt. Paul Stamets, an astromycologist and a gay man who is in a committed long-term relationship with another officer on the ship, Discovery is clearly making an effort to be the most representative Star Trek series in the franchise’s 50-year history. To discuss these landmark developments, Vox spoke to Discovery’s two showrunners, Gretchen Berg and Aaron Harberts, as well as Rapp, about what to expect.

There is no show I love unraveling quite like BoJack Horseman, Netflix’s animated show about a group of humans and anthropomorphic animals living in Los Angeles while wallowing in bourbon and existential despair. Despite its completely absurd premise, Raphael Bob-Waksberg’s show has smacked me in the face with capital-F Feelings more times than I can count, brought on by the show’s deft dive into the minds of characters facing their demons or — more likely — trying to ignore them completely, to catastrophic ends. When the show debuted in 2014, waves of critics (including me!) wrote ecstatically about how BoJack Horseman nailed tricky depictions of depression and found poignancy in the bleakest of places.

All of this is true; BoJack Horseman is one of the most reliably bleak shows airing right now. But did you know it’s also a comedy? And a really funny one at that?

There was no greater or more fun surprise on TV last year than The Good Place, NBC’s bizarre sitcom about a sour woman (Kristen Bell) who died and found herself having to fake her way through heaven without getting caught for the rampant sinner she truly was. The 13-episode first season blazed through plot points like wildfire — though its seemingly random story trajectory eventually proved to be anything but.

Under the guidance of creator Mike Schur (Parks and Recreation), The Good Place boasted sharp jokes and performances from Bell as Eleanor Shellstrop, the sinful interloper; Ted Danson as her earnest guide and heavenly city planner; William Jackson Harper as her stressed “soul mate” Chidi; and more. The show delighted in its own chaos and frequently turned itself inside out. By the time the first season was over, it had blown up the show’s original premise entirely. So before the first two episodes of season two aired back to back on September 20, the inevitable question about The Good Place was: Where the hell does — or can — the series go from here?

Fall means an onslaught of new TV to watch, and navigating the crush of shows can be tough. But this week brings three comedies — two returning for their second seasons and one brand new — that are worth checking out. Here are some quick thoughts on FX’s Better Things, HBO’s Vice Principals, and Netflix’s American Vandal.

As I watched the first seven episodes of Better Things season two, I found myself relaxing, in the way I often do when I realize I’m watching a TV series that truly knows what it’s doing. Every choice the Pamela Adlon series made — in performance, in direction, in writing — just felt right, like part of a complete vision I was more than willing to surrender to.

The projects of Ken Burns are designed to illuminate the past and, thereby, illuminate the present. You can’t watch, say, The Civil War and not see the barely papered-over fault lines that still exist in American politics, and a miniseries like Baseball could present a different prism through which to consider what America cares about.

Many Ken Burns projects are easy to leave in their space — earnest, occasionally dusty chronicles of the past. They reflect the present, but in ways that usually allow us to say, “Well, things have certainly changed since then.” You might find them intensely moving or graceful, but you may not return to them much after you’re done watching. You’ll think of them fondly when you stumble upon them on Netflix or a DVD shelf.

The first thing I wanted to do after finishing BoJack Horseman’s fourth season was go back and start it all over again.

A combination of intricate jokes, meticulous background detail, and sly emotional twists have always made Netflix’s animated show one of the most rewarding to revisit. I’ve seen every episode upward of three times, and each time I watch one, I find something new to hold onto, whether it’s a hidden punchline or a new depth of meaning gained through time. I could say BoJack Horseman is incredibly deft and powerful for a show ostensibly about snarky animals living in Hollywoo(d), but the truth fans have known since the end of the first season is that the show is just incredibly deft and powerful, period.

The Orville sure looks amazing. Set on a sleek spaceship in a galaxy far, far away, the new Fox show spares no expense on its sweeping space vistas, the prosthetics of its alien crew members, the sleek weaponry, the gorgeous foreign planets teeming with otherworldly life. But examining The Orville a bit closer quickly reveals a show that might as well be about a band of enthusiastic cosplayers — including creator and star Seth MacFarlane as the ship’s cad captain, and Adrianne Palicki as his second-in-command and ex-wife — shooting through the cosmos and yelling “pew pew!” as they brandish imaginary space lasers.

Lest that sound like good wholesome fun, let me stop you right there: The Orville is not, as it turns out, the Galaxy Quest-style spoof Fox has been selling in its ads. In fact, The Orville isn’t particularly funny at all, both by design and accidental ineptitude. Instead, it’s a bizarrely straight-up homage to Star Trek that can’t seem to admit as much.

After months of the traditional speculation over what American Horror Story’s next season will entail, AHS: Cult has finally released its first real look at its new mystery — and the words “Donald Trump” are uttered within the first 10 seconds.

Making good on Ryan Murphy’s promise that Cult will somehow, probably, maybe involve the 2016 presidential election, the teaser opens with a couple (played by Sarah Paulson and Allison Pill) and their son watching the election results come in from their beautiful home in Michigan. (The premiere episode, which debuts September 5, is fittingly titled “Election Night.”) As the news anchor announces that Trump will be the country’s next president, Paulson’s character screams in devastation.

Will & Grace is coming back to NBC this fall, and NBC sure hopes it’s so close to the original that you might forget it ever went away in the first place.

The upcoming revival — which premieres September 28 — came up several times throughout NBC’s day of panels at the Television Critics Association summer press tour, as thrilled executives salivated over the prospect of having it back on the network’s Thursday schedule. For some context on why, NBC executives Bob Greenblatt and Jennifer Salke acknowledged that NBC’s comedy record has been spotty as of late, with The Carmichael Show holding the title of the network’s longest-running sitcom at a whole three seasons (it was also abruptly canceled this summer).

Stranger Things season two is really happening, and we now have a premiere date — October 27 — and all the trailers to prove it.

The ’80s-set Netflix thriller was one of the most talked-about TV shows of last summer, in part due to its nostalgic appeal and heavy reliance on references and homages to classic ’80s horror and sci-fi. And from the looks of the two trailers for the second season, the show’s homage-heavy feel will continue apace. As my colleague Todd VanDerWerff wrote, “If you were wondering where the show will be going, the answer seems clear: Close Encounters of the Third Kind, by way of H.P. Lovecraft.”

Stranger Things graced fans at Comic-Con’s massive Hall H on Saturday evening with the reveal of its full trailer for season two.

The trailer centers on Will Byers (Noah Schnapp) and the odd things that have been happening to him since he was returned to his family and the town of Hawkins, Indiana. We already knew Will was going to have a major role to play in the second season, but the new full trailer gives us an idea of just how important he’ll be as he deals with a series of visions of monsters and Lovecraftian cosmic horrors. Meanwhile Mike (Finn Wolfhard) is still trying to find Eleven (Millie Bobby Brown), who seems to be calling to him from within the Upside Down.

AMC unveiled its trailer for season 8 of The Walking Dead at its Friday Comic-Con panel, and while it shows Rick, Daryl, and the rest of our Alexandria heroes united with their groups of allies and determined to fight against Negan and the Saviors, it doesn’t do much to allay fears that the show has become mired in a swamp of inaction with no way out.

The season 8 trailer is … weird. It’s nearly five minutes long, and while there are some good moments — namely Daryl shooting things, Carol wearing body armor, and a newly badass Tara pointing her gun at something just offscreen and whispering “bang” — most of the trailer is just everyone standing around talking about fighting. In case you need a refresher, this is basically what they did for all of season 7.

Netflix is officially making a bid to take over your Halloween weekend, as it announced today that the second season of Stranger Things will premiere October 27.

Netflix unveiled its first look at Stranger Things season two during the Super Bowl, and if you were wondering where the show will be going, the answer seems clear: Close Encounters of the Third Kind, by way of H.P. Lovecraft.

Every May, all the bigwigs from the broadcast TV networks travel to New York for the upfronts, where they put on a whole song-and-dance routine (sometimes literally) to showcase their biggest stars and shows, unveil their fall schedules, and convince ad buyers to invest in them. And in the process, they release a glut of previews and trailers for their upcoming new programming, designed to impress those ad buyers with what to expect (and air commercials during) once September rolls around.

This year’s spoils tease a 2017-’18 TV season that’s rife with sci-fi series, a streak of new military dramas, and of course, reboots (welcome to 2017, Will & Grace!). But to help you wade through the almost 40 new trailers that are now available to peruse, we’ve conveniently sorted some of the more noteworthy examples into three manageable categories: the good, the bad, and our personal favorites, the LOL.