September may spell the beginning of football season, but if you’re more like Rue than Nate—that’s a Euphoria reference, keep up—you’re going to need something else to binge watch for too many hours. Luckily, there’s plenty to pick from: This month’s newcomers include zombies, iconic selections from 1999, and the return of Ryan Murphy’s bonkers breakneck drama, 9-1-1.
Check out all of the goodies coming to Netflix, Hulu, and Amazon Prime below—as well as some random selections chosen by the Ringer staff. Just make sure you go to the bathroom in between all that streaming. (Another Euphoria reference.)
What’s New to Streaming in June
A selected list of movies and TV shows coming this month that The Ringer is very excited about.
The Walking Dead, Season 9 (coming to Netflix on September 1)
Miles Surrey: The [show’s new opening] sequence imbues a sense of rebirth and reinvigoration, which parallels what is happening on The Walking Dead in its ninth season. Instead of continuing to wallow in the fallout of a zombie apocalypse and changing locales that are destined to get destroyed, the show is (finally!) considering what it might look like to grow a long-term society in this new world, what that might entail, and the inherent struggles that come with building it from scratch.
Superbad (Netflix, September 1)
Andrew Gruttadaro: Superbad stands up as a defining movie of an era — the millennial generation’s Fast Times at Ridgemont High — not only because it’s unbelievably, consistently funny, or because it launched a generation of stars, from Jonah Hill to Michael Cera to Emma Stone, but because it also speaks to the group of people it’s about. Cloaked in dick jokes and drawings, binge drinking, and period blood, Superbad captures that universal moment when two people are wrested apart by the facts of growing up, and forced to fully acknowledge how much they love each other. Superbad holds up even a decade later because it feels like a real portrait of young friendship — and that’s because so much of it actually is.
The Matrix (Hulu, September 1)
Shea Serrano: These are some of the stories that come up when you search for articles about The Matrix on the internet: How The Matrix Changed Movies Forever; The Matrix Is the Movie That Changed Everything; How The Matrix Changed the Rules for Action Movies; Neo’s Stunt Guy Chad Stahelski on How The Matrix Changed Movie Action Forever; Six Ways The Matrix Changed Hollywood. There are more, of course, but the point is clear: The Matrix, a philosophy movie disguised as an action movie about a computer programmer who learns that machines run the world and everyone is asleep inside of a digital simulation, changed movie things irrevocably.
The Ocean’s Eleven Trilogy (Hulu, September 1)
Gruttadaro: More than 15 years later, Hollywood is jamming big-name stars into movies with more and more regularity, but they haven’t been able to recapture the magic of Ocean’s. Through Soderbergh’s lens, the caper movie about a guy who wants to rob the three most impregnable casinos in Las Vegas—mostly because the owner of those casinos is dating his ex-wife—is breezy, fast-paced fun with unbeatable banter. It’s The Avengers if The Avengers had better chemistry and a compelling villain. And it has a twist that actually lands and holds up. Plus, there’s nothing more enjoyable than watching a bunch of celebrities hang out and have fun together, which—when you strip away the bank vaults and poker chips—is what Ocean’s Eleven is all about. I’m going to go rewatch it for the thousandth time right now.
She’s All That (Hulu, September 1)
Juliet Litman: You know the drill: Freddie Prinze Jr. makes a bet with Paul Walker that he can turn Rachael Leigh Cook—who is hideous because she does art and wears glasses, of course—into prom queen. What ensues is a late-’90s teen movie classic. Also, Usher DJs.
Training Day (Hulu, September 1)
Serrano: Training Day is a movie about a rookie police officer (Jake, played by Ethan Hawke) who spends the day with a successful, talented police detective (Alonzo, played by Denzel Washington) who is revealed to actually be a corrupt, psychotic police detective. It’s a wonderful movie, one that is fat with nervous and uncomfortable energy as Alonzo slowly circles the noose around Jake’s neck without Jake realizing it.
Late Night (Amazon Prime, September 6)
Alison Herman: Written by, produced by, and costarring Mindy Kaling, Late Night is simultaneously an escapist fantasy and a hard-nosed reality check. On the one hand, the story takes place in a world where a middle-aged woman has rested comfortably at the top of her male-dominated industry for decades. On the other, she’s still the only one, because institutional sexism is very much a thing even in Late Night’s alternate universe—practiced, often enough, by Katherine herself. Katherine may be a woman, but her writers’ room is composed entirely of (white) men.
Shameless (Netflix, September 10)
Katie Baker: The show is set in Chicago’s steely South Side, but often feels like it’s taking place in some winsome criminal’s fever dream. Characters lie, cheat, and steal; they scheme and scam; they love and lose; they somehow live. (One side plot in Season 8 involved a horse, actually—a horse stolen from a frightened child as part of a botched human-and-drug-smuggling operation across the Canadian border. “You’re so tiny,” Frank remarked to the poor little girl after knocking her out with a panicked punch to the face.) Just like the sprawling, self-sabotaging Gallagher family, Shameless is by turns generous and murderous; tender and wild; often exasperating and occasionally brilliant.
Surviving R. Kelly (Netflix, September 15)
Rob Harvilla: Surviving R. Kelly is furious, punishing, and necessary, and its fury derives from how unnecessary it should be here in 2019, given “the 25 years of receipts we have against this person,” as Oronike Odeleye, a cofounder of the recently flourishing #MuteRKelly campaign, puts it. It is brutal and unyielding in depicting the pain Kelly has caused, and many of the 50-plus people interviewed on-camera—especially those who describe themselves as survivors, with the most personal and heartbreaking stories to tell—break down in tears, radiating a shattering intensity that for some critics has seemed exploitive.
9-1-1, Season 3 (Hulu, September 24)
Surrey: From the mind behind critically acclaimed projects like American Crime Story, American Horror Story, and Feud, Ryan Murphy has reached new heights with his latest series on Fox. Starring Connie Britton, Angela Bassett, and Peter Krause , 9-1-1 is about the brave men and women who respond to emergency situations in Los Angeles. These are far from your everyday emergencies, though, as 9-1-1 ups the stakes by presenting our heroes with collapsing dance floors, plane crashes, and babies getting stuck in pipes. It’s an undeniably terrible show, and that is why it is undeniably great.
The Good Doctor, Season 3 (Hulu, September 24)
Surrey: The fact that you don’t see Shaun Murphy perform surgery inside a hospital at any point is all you need to know about the first five episodes of ABC’s The Good Doctor. It’s a series that’s unrealistic yet predictable, and overly sentimental; it’s the This Is Us of medical shows, only it has a worse title.
Legally Blonde (Prime, September 30)
Hannah Giorgis: Legally Blonde is one of the best movies ever made, don’t @ me. Reese Witherspoon is perfect as Elle Woods, the “dumb” sorority girl who applies to Harvard in the hopes of winning back her law-school-bound jerk of a boyfriend. The movie subverts the same sexist tropes it traffics in, and Reese shines as the “surprisingly” smart Elle, a woman whom people regularly underestimate because of her love of all things stereotypically feminine. Elle’s motivation for attending Harvard is woefully misguided at first, but it makes her easier to root for: Who hasn’t done something a little outlandish for love?
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.
Mindhunter, Season 2 (on Netflix)
Surrey: For a show that deals with horrific murders and the serial killers who perpetrate them, the first season of Netflix’s Mindhunter makes for surprisingly effective competence porn. Counterintuitively: It helps that the series prefers to tell, rather than show. Where other serial killer dramas don’t hesitate to make grisly violence the main attraction, Mindhunter is all about the aftermath—asking, from the confines of an interrogation room, what compels someone to commit unspeakable acts of brutality and sadism, oftentimes against people they don’t even know.
GLOW, Season 3 (on Netflix)
Harvilla: A striking thing about Season 3 of GLOW, in which the Gorgeous Ladies of Wrestling descend upon the garish 24-hour buffet of 1986 Las Vegas, is how little wrestling transpires onscreen, or for that matter how few jokes about the garish 1980s the show feels compelled to crack amid all that not-wrestling. … What’s doubly striking is how GLOW only keeps getting better as it gets quieter and subtler and more insular. The fewer literal leaps off the top rope it takes, the harder it hits.
Four Weddings and a Funeral (on Hulu)
Herman: The adaptation of Four Weddings and a Funeral is an extremely loose one, borrowing the concept of a friend group experiencing the namesake life events but swapping out almost all the specifics. The run time is 10 hours rather than two, necessitating more side characters and subplots, and the cast is more diverse; including Ainsley’s fiancé, Kash (Nikesh Patel), the leads are majority nonwhite. (Though heterosexuality, for the most part, remains the order of the day.) And the story, while following a classic rom-com structure, also takes place in a world where rom-coms are a tangible presence, both onscreen and in the minds of its writers.
Jane the Virgin, Season 5 (on Netflix)
Herman: In a landscape that prizes novelty as a means to break through the noise, Jane exemplifies one of TV’s most underrated, and deceptively difficult, virtues: consistency. For half a decade, Jane has struck a balance between larger-than-life antics and human-scale storytelling, clever self-awareness and genuine sweetness, affable humor and deep feeling—all while avoiding traditional sources of drama.
Mission: Impossible—Fallout (on Prime and Hulu)
Adam Nayman: Look, I’m not made of stone: Pretty much everything in Mission: Impossible—Fallout is fun. The 150-minute running time, which felt like a death sentence in Avengers: Infinity War (in which I’m pretty sure Josh Brolin didn’t actually get impaled with a giant intergalactic ax), doesn’t get oppressive until the third final-act speech about what a swell guy Ethan is (poor Ving Rhames gets hype-man duty this time), and the main cast is used exceedingly well, each according to their abilities.
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 to Prepare for Scorsese Season: The Irishman finally has a release date (and, god bless him, a 210-minute runtime). That means it’s time to start rifling through the god Martin Scorsese’s back catalog, and Netflix has you covered there. Start with Mean Streets, the 1973 film that officially announced Scorsese to the world; move on to 1976’s Taxi Driver, the culmination of Scorsese’s fascination with the grime of ’70s New York City and the solidification of the legend of Robert de Niro; then skip ahead a few decades to 2002’s Gangs of New York—not the director’s best work by any means, but a testament to his increasing scale in the 21st century. This triumvirate ought to put you in the right frame of mind and refamiliarize yourself with one of the greatest directors in modern cinema. Also, if you still have some free time after this six-and-a-half-hour binge, Casino is streaming on Hulu. —Gruttadaro
What to Watch If You Want to Go to Law School, but Don’t Want to Pay for It: How to Get Away With Murder is an anchor of ABC’s TGIT programming, and with its sixth and final season set to premiere September 26, you need to catch up quick. Streaming on both Netflix and Hulu, the award-winning HTGAWM is a high-crime, high-drama series that’ll hook you within the first episode. Executive produced by Shonda Rhimes (Grey’s Anatomy, Scandal), the show stars hard-nose defense attorney Annalise Keating (Viola Davis) and her law-student interns as they continuously get into sticky situations that usually result in a high body count. Keating is the best in the biz. She uses her quick wit, brilliant mind, and not-so-legal practices to allow her clients to, well, get away with murder. Then, she turns around and teaches her students how she did it. It’s not too long before she begins to rub off on them and they begin practicing what she’s preached—committing devious crimes and sneakily side-stepping jail time. Make sure to take notes; class is in session. —Jordan Ligons
What to Watch to Remind Yourself About Our Collective Impending Doom: Netflix’s Our Planet is a shameless knockoff of BBC’s Planet Earth, but considering Planet Earth returns only slightly more often than the cicadas, imitators are more than welcome. Our Planet doesn’t have a decade of footage to work with (patience is not Netflix’s strong suit) but it makes up for it with money and guilt. Where the show differentiates itself is reminding you over and over that the cost of climate change is cute animals dying. Elephants dig for water in empty river beds. Walruses leap to their deaths from rocky cliffs. Baby flamingos are unable to walk. Our Planet makes it clear this isn’t your fault, but it also makes it clear it’s not not your fault. —Danny Heifetz
What to What If You’re in Your Feelings: Before it came to Netflix, Neon Genesis Evangelion was hard to find anywhere on the internet. If you wanted to watch, your only bet was trolling sketchy sites for bootlegged videos or eBay for old VHS tapes.
Luckily, one of the most acclaimed and beloved series in anime is now just a couple of clicks away from Friends and The Great British Baking Show. Evangelion is not exactly the easiest place to start if anime isn’t your thing: The series is based in a postapocalyptic 2015 in the city Tokyo-3, where giant, largely weapon-resistant aliens called “angels” periodically appear and can be defeated only by mechas that are piloted by, of course, because it’s anime, teenagers. Think Pacific Rim, but much more depressing. In the end, though, the story is just as much about giant robots fighting aliens as it is a singular look at being a person seeking approval from the world. And if things get confusing, don’t worry, we have a podcast that’ll help keep your synch rate up. —Chris Almeida