Returning series, game shows, documentaries and Trump: TV for every taste this fall
Though television brings out new shows any old time, we continue to think of it as a thing with seasons. We remain compelled by the promise of fall, when the broadcast networks bring in their harvest, as other platforms continue their year-round run of releases. We greet the fall season with an air of anticipation, of occasion, and we celebrate it with special issues of pop culture magazines and newspaper packages like this. It gives us of a sense of things in their place, of the regular, reliable rotation of the Earth. Heaven knows we need that.
This year, as in the first flush of the pandemic, that rotation is a little off its axis. The proximate cause is, of course, the writers' and actors' strikes — or the producers' recalcitrance, if you prefer — unsettled and unsettling as of this writing; but were they to end before you finished reading this sentence, the disruption will have been done.
And yet! Television goes on, with some pretense of normalcy. Broadcasters will find ways to fill their prime-time grids; streamers will spread out their wares to simulate abundance. There will be imports. As L.A. Times television critics Lorraine Ali and Robert Lloyd write, the near future will offer — or continue to
