Those still primarily watching network tv will be seeing a mix of reality series, game shows, and where those networks are connected to a streaming platform, one or more previously streaming-only series beginning to air those series as "new" content in prime time.
As my senior brain tends to mislay things already, I wanted to pause to at least start to collect announced dates for the shows I recall are still coming our way over the next few months. I'm generally not interested in most "reality" programs, much less ones that present themselves as competitions. In each case I've checked to see that these dates are currently still in place as of the latest updates. Personal time issues kept me from giving this the attention I'd wanted to this week, so even with the drastically reduced number of series that managed to get all their shooting done before the strikes, I know I've overlooked some. I may add some, accordingly, to these later in the day as they come to mind.
These are listed with scheduled release dates, with trailers where currently available:
I Am Groot "season" 2: Arrived this past Wednesday, with five additional shorts starring Baby Groot, the offspring/clipping from the earlier Groot, who had met his end in a sacrifice play in the first Guardians of the Galaxy movie back in 2014. While we saw the character around this stage during the second film, he'd moved on into an adolescent version by the time we saw him after that, and some of the filmmakers liked the idea of going back to spend more time on the early childhood moments of discovery and learning, leaning on the comedic, that had happened off-camera. It's as much a sign of the paucity of such new and returning items that it came to mind to include it here, but they do have their charm, and aren't much of an investment in time.
Welcome To Wrexham season two: Set to return to FX this upcoming Tuesday, September 12th, with each episode arriving on Hulu the next day. The documentary series continues, following the fortunes of a long-lived Scottish football club purchased by celebrities Rob McElhenny and Ryan Reynolds in 2021.
It's been an odd bit of serendipity that both this and the wholly fictional (and wonderfully charming) Apple tv+ series Ted Lasso arrived around the same time, each dealing with some American sports fans plumbing the realities of what the rest of the world knows as football. With Ted and his many friends now gone, that wonderful series concluded, some of the residual affection is in play for at least part of the audience here, and I'm hoping it doesn't burn off too quickly. Despite my neither being a sports fan nor one inclined to watch reality programming (though arguably this really is a documentary series, with the games being the games, so the fudging of reality is considerably more limited here) I've found myself invested in this.
Gen V: A spin-off series of The Boys, in a world where super-powered individuals exist, power does its corrupting thing to many, and corporations are up to the challenge of making money off it. This is set as concurrent to season four of The Boys, which currently still does not have a release date. (Filming for that fourth season wrapped back on April 12th.) It is to focus on a new set of heroes during their pre-graduation trials at Vought International's Godolkin University School of Crimefighting.
Gen V is set to begin on Amazon Prime September 29th. Eight episodes, the series will wrap November 3rd.
Loki is soon to return, picking up from the end of the first season, as the blossoming of a multiverse leads the key characters on both a quest for some missing players, and a mission to (re) define the soul of the Time Variance Authority, the time cops who had been created to police the timeline and previously charged with protecting a central timeline by preventing alternate timelines from branching out from it.
As it almost always the case, there was much grousing and fussing from many of the MCU followers, but I recall enjoying it all more than not, and am currently planning to give the first season a rewatch ahead of this new one.
Season two will begin October 6 on Disney+. As with the first season it will run six episodes.
Bosch: Legacy season two: Beginning October 20th on Freevee. Based on the novels by Michael Connelly. This series continues the story of "Harry" Bosch (Titus Welliver), former LA homicide detective, now a private investigator, and his daughter Madeline (Madison Lintz) who has begun to follow in his footsteps as a cop. Seven seasons of Harry as the homicide cop were produced by Amazon Studios, released on Prime between 2014 and 2021, as Bosch. Those 68 episodes are still there for any Amazon Prime members, and as I've noted a few times over the past four years of this Friday column, while I would almost certainly not get along long nor well with the lead character as an actual person, I enjoyed the series and am happy that the story continues.
Legacy is a direct continuation of the story, flowing directly out of those 7 seasons, making the first season and this upcoming second essentially Bosch seasons eight and nine.
Amazon had bought imdb years earlier, and had developed imdbtv as an ad-driven video streamer, which they eventually rebranded as Amazon Freevee - or simply Freevee, in 2022. Arguably, they were at or ahead of the curve in going this route, as we continue to see the push roughly in this direction by other streamers, though most of them are offering it as a lower-price subscription model. As a business model, it's essentially an online service recreating the broadcast tv model, where the viewers are subjected to blocks of commercials as the ongoing price of admission. So far Freevee is one of the friendly sides of this model, as it doesn't require any subscription fee, just Internet access.
Upload season three. Continuing a story set in a world where people's minds can be digitized and uploaded to a virtual reality on a vast server, complete with all the horrors of it being under a capitalistic system, along with being one in which the legal system hasn't caught up with the question of whether or not such sentient beings are actually sentient beings, with personal rights, as opposed to the property of the living. This third season is also beginning October 20th, though this is over on Amazon Prime. So far no official trailer, just a couple bloated promotional items put together by third parties. Currently listed as an 8-episode season, thus far there's no mention that this is intended to be a final season.
Echo: Originally announced for November 29 Disney+, now pushed off into 2024 as Disney did a massive revision of their plans in the face of falling revenues. Disney CEO Roger Iger's rich white man perspective on the losses and the general drop in audience acclaim was that we peasants weren't sufficiently grateful for what they'd produced, because they'd made the mistake of giving us too much. It had lost its "specialness" and we had been spoiled by the bounty. The current result - greatly compounded and somewhat obscured by the strikes since May - has been a drastically spread out production and release schedule.
Back to this series: This is the spin-off from 2021's Hawkeye limited series, centering on a deaf martial artist introduced as part of it. Six episodes, which we were initially told would all be released at one time, but which now seems less certain as they have to at least been rethinking spreading this out over six weeks as opposed to letting it all go in one splash. I imagine that, at least in part, it will depend upon when the writers' and actors' strikes are settled and production of everything resumes.
Agatha: Darkhold Diaries Originally part of a large slate of 2023 releases, pushed back into sometime late in 2024. This is a spin-off of WandaVision, and will star the always entertaining Kathryn Hahn reprising her role of witch Agatha Harkness from that first of the Disney+ MCU series.
Time's run out for me - at least for this - for this week. I am trying to take some time to consider next steps, as the Consortium of Seven's four year run is set to wrap just after the start of October, so my calendar's telling me I have three more of these installments to work with. I want to transition, rather than stop, and am trying to decide what is in the Venn overlap of available time, available energy, and my sustained personal interest. For now, stay cool, enjoy the weekend, and we can make it back here next Friday. - Mike
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