Heading into September, there’s good news for those who somehow missed Black Panther during its historic box office run in early 2018: The movie will soon be streaming on Netflix. That’s just one of several exciting things hitting the streamer this month, from the premiere of the second season of American Vandal (poop replaces dick drawings!), to the fifth season of the existential equine ennui of BoJack Horseman, to the debut of Ava DuVernay’s A Wrinkle in Time.
For all that — plus some other streaming favorites available on Hulu and Amazon Prime — check out The Ringer’s complete breakdown of our top streaming picks for September, along with some random recommendations of shows that staffers have recently become invested in.
What’s New to Streaming in September
A selected list of movies and TV shows coming this month that The Ringer is very excited about.
BoJack Horseman Season 5 (coming to Netflix on September 14)
Alison Herman: BoJack Horseman, the character, might be an incurable cynic. BoJack Horseman, however, has an emotional spectrum wide enough to accommodate sweetness and vulnerability alongside skepticism and despair.
Black Panther (Netflix, September 4)
K. Austin Collins: What makes Black Panther feel different from other Marvel movies is that the world it imagines, the fights it insists must be fought, are grounded in real questions with immediate analogues that harken back to an entire discourse of black activism and thought. Other superhero movies could take a page from Black Panther’s book.
American Vandal Season 2 (Netflix, September 14)
Mark Titus: American Vandal has found that holy grail. In fact, I’m tempted to go so far as to declare that it is the greatest execution of a dick joke ever. And while I don’t want to give the show’s story away, just know that it’s a masterpiece. American Vandal is everything the trailer promises and so much more, starting with the fact that it’s absolutely hilarious.
Trust Season 1 (Amazon Prime, September 1)
Herman: Animated by the absurdity that such isolated wealth enables — swans flattened into roadkill! Lions flown in from Africa just to intimidate one’s harem! Harems! — Trust’s premiere is certainly entertaining. But it also comes off a bit like a super-sized version of the last 10 minutes of There Will Be Blood. “Obscenely wealthy titans of industry are deeply unhappy people whose fortunes exacerbate rather than alleviate said unhappiness” is not a new insight, no matter how cleverly presented or well-acted.
There Will Be Blood (Hulu and Amazon Prime, September 1)
Sean Fennessey: Ten years since its release, There Will Be Blood has taken on the reputation of a Great American Work, larded with all the anxiety and expectation that comes with it. [Director Paul Thomas] Anderson’s film, which tracks Plainview’s rise to great wealth and self-imposed isolation, is best remembered for the extraordinary performance of Daniel Day-Lewis, who won his second Oscar for his portrayal of the monomaniacal oilman. But the movie is more than a twisted man’s quest for power — it’s a comedy of manners, a psychological family drama, a silent film, an action movie, a spiritual saga, and, perhaps most especially, a horror flick.
A Wrinkle in Time (Netflix, September 25)
Collins: Ava DuVernay’s new Disney movie, A Wrinkle in Time, is an empowerment seminar in disguise, a sleepaway emotional retreat where the prize for convincing Oprah Winfrey that you love and believe in yourself is getting to call Chris Pine “Dad” for two hours. Sounds indisputably great, I know, but the movie isn’t “great,” not in the usual Disney sense. The requisite parts are all there and everything looks good under the hood, but DuVernay has given us a less familiarly satisfying ride than the norm.
Suburbicon (Hulu and Amazon Prime, September 28)
Collins: You sense [director George] Clooney wanting to become not only an adventurous director worthy of a thorny Coen brothers script but also a moral artist. In a way, he is. The moral of Suburbicon is: Quit making Suburbicons.
American Horror Story: Cult (Netflix and Hulu, September 18)
Herman: While election night and its fallout provide Cult’s overall structure, the season is less about Trump’s-victory-as-horror-premise and more about Trump’s America as a time of roiling chaos and uncertainty.
The Hurricane Heist (Netflix, September 26)
Miles Surrey: The Hurricane Heist has no chill, which isn’t too surprising, considering it’s directed by Rob Cohen, the mind behind the first Fast & Furious movie and xXx. The trailer for the film uses a cover of “Rock You Like a Hurricane” and shows the hurricane scooping up all manner of people and cars. The tagline for the poster is “Make It Rain.”
Atypical Season 2 (Netflix, September 7)
Rob Harvilla: If the Upside Down strikes you as too on the nose as a metaphor for struggle parenting, elsewhere on Netflix, there is Atypical, which premiered in [August 2017] with a black-diamond-difficulty premise (autistic teenager seeks girlfriend) that has skeeved out some viewers with firsthand experience on this topic. There is a tremendously off-putting Scrubs-like cutesiness to this show that mixes poorly with your likely unease about how it’s handling the accuracy issue. But it might be worth watching for Mom and Dad alone.
Some New-ish Things You Might’ve Missed
Because it’s hard to keep up with everything, here are a few things that have premiered somewhat recently that may be worth catching up on.
All or Nothing: Manchester City (Amazon Prime)
Shaker Samman: Narrated by Ben Kingsley, the series explores the peaks of City’s success (winning 18 consecutive league games), their victories and failures in the transfer market (looking at you, Laporte and Alexis Sánchez), and their lowest moments (losing to Liverpool in the Champions League). There’s not much self-examination or internal criticism to be found here, as it’s most definitely a celebration of City’s season. But there are still plenty of telling and entertaining moments throughout the almost seven hours of footage.
To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before (Netflix)
Kate Halliwell: Beyond introducing audiences to a savvy leading lady and a crushworthy love interest for the ages, To All the Boys perhaps marks the apex of the [fake relationship] trope, depicting a well-executed fake relationship that successfully operates via clearly set boundaries and open lines of communication.
Castle Rock (Hulu)
Surrey: Castle Rock spent the first six episodes of its inaugural season going big and broadening its scope; it’s now turned the corner by compressing, focusing in on the characters who inhabit the story, rather than the world in which the characters exist.
Disenchantment (Netflix)
Herman: Disenchantment may have [creator Matt] Groening looking backward in time for inspiration; his chosen medium, on the other hand, has only moved forward. I’d rather Disenchantment seem dated than have a world without the shows that make it come off that way.
Harlots (Hulu)
Kate Knibbs: I want all media properties to go fangirl for Harlots the way it seemed like all of a sudden every single person writing for every single entertainment vertical at every single media company started evangelizing for Succession like it was their pathway to salvation. This is no disrespect to Succession — Cousin Greg for life! — but Harlots deserves the same hype.
Bonus Watching
A random collection of movies and TV shows that are a little more off the beaten path, for when you’re in a certain kind of mood.
What to Watch If Stranger Things Isn’t Dark Enough: Despite the initial trappings that make it look like a mid-’90s version of Stranger Things, Super Dark Times doesn’t take long to get, well, super dark. The movie, streaming on Netflix, centers on four teen friends and the accidental killing of one of them — the death brings with it a mountain of trauma, but most disturbingly for one of the kids, a keen fascination in the machinations of what went down. While school crushes, desktop Minesweeper, and early-era video games abound, Super Dark Times slowly unfurls into a conventional, slasheresque horror movie with a chilling realism. It’ll make the Upside Down feel like a placid weekend getaway. — Surrey
What to Watch If You’re Trying to Wring Out the Last Drops of Summer and/or Timothée Chalamet: If you’re like me, you saw the splendidly cut trailer for Hot Summer Nights, starring everyone’s favorite actor, Timothée Chalamet, back in April, and you became unequivocally hyped for the Movie of the Summer. Not even four months later, it’s already coming to Amazon Prime. Our Golden Boy Timmy made absolutely zero attempt to promote the film. Neither did A24 even though, this being Timmy Season after all, you’d expect any studio to milk a Chalamet-led film like a cash cow. Needless to say, critics were aggressively lukewarm about Elijah Bynum’s pothead drug dealer coming-of-age story. But come September 22, you might find yourself desperately trying to relive the passion of your summer fling, or trying to experience a summer that never was. Or maybe you just need more Timothée Chalamet — who, by the way, is the main bright spot in this film — because seeing his five minutes in Interstellar just isn’t cutting it after the 10th rewatch. — Kenrick Cai
What to Watch If You Miss Your Crappy Hometown Minor League Baseball Team: From the first episode of Brockmire, IFC’s raunchy comedy about a baseball announcer (now streaming on Hulu), creator Joel Church-Cooper establishes a world that feels familiarly earnest to anyone who’s ever felt pride for their crappy hometown ballclub. Hank Azaria’s portrayal of Brockmire — a major league announcer banished to the minors after an on-air meltdown — manages to feel genuine in important moments, despite the role demanding near-constant shtick (Brock is sloshed for over 60 percent of the show). It has plenty of cringeworthy moments that give the viewer second-hand embarrassment, but it never lingers too long. It’s fatalist and surreal, and full of dark humor. In other words, it’s a lot like being a New York Mets fan. — Bobby Wagner
What to Watch When You Aren’t Sure Whether You’re Having Fun Yet: Before Adam Scott was the lovable Ben Wyatt on Parks and Recreation, he was on Party Down as Henry Pollard, a washed-up actor working as a caterer, forever stuck in the shadow of his one minor success. Party Down, which ran for two seasons on Starz in the late 2000s, follows Party Down catering and its crew of mostly notable faces. There’s pre-Glee Jane Lynch, pre-Silicon Valley Martin Starr, pre–Masters of Sex Lizzy Caplan, and post–Will & Grace Megan Mullally. Rounded out by recurring appearances by J.K. Simmons and Kristen Bell, and a guest performance by Peak Rick Fox, the cast is a who’s who of people you love from every other corner of the content globe. All 20 awkward yet excruciatingly funny episodes are streaming on Hulu. So kick back, relax, and recite the only question worth asking. — Samman
What to Watch If You Want a Stirring Documentary of a Soulful Icon: The home videos used in Asif Kapadia’s Amy, a 2015 documentary about Amy Winehouse’s life, streaming on Netflix, give a glimpse of the singer as a teenager, when her vocals were more raw than they were raspy. She’s fun-loving, high-spirited, and erratic in those videos, which Kapadia uses to tell her story alongside countless interviews from Winehouse’s inner circle. You keep expecting a point when the intimacy and rawness — of her honest songwriting, her unhealthy relationships, her life — will smooth out. The tragedy of Amy, of course, is that it never did; the tragedy of Kapadia’s Amy is showing, up close, that it could’ve. — Haley O’Shaughnessey
