It’s that dreary time of year again—back to school, back to work. Thank God for the fall TV lineup. But, since exciting new shows are constantly slipping through the algorithmic cracks and getting cancelled before you even hear about them, it’s harder than ever to figure out what’s right for you. That’s why we asked some trusted sources for their entertainment suggestions. Grab a spot on the couch and enjoy your parents’ picks for what to watch this season.
“Liminal” (Season 1) on Apple TV
This sci-fi nail-biter stars that one actress (Zoe Saldaña), from that movie your parents liked (“Emilia Pérez”), as a physicist who discovers a “parallax dimension” that allows humans to travel between our universe and other realities. Season 3 of “Liminal” is about to première, but your parents are just now starting at the beginning, despite how enthusiastically you recommended the show when it débuted, in 2018. They don’t remember any of that, but they will recap every single episode to you over the phone. That’s actually going to be kind of helpful because there haven’t been new episodes of “Liminal” in five years, and you’ve forgotten most of what happened.
“North of South of the Border” on Paramount+
Welcome to El Paso, where men are men and women are cast mostly in nonspeaking roles. Taylor Sheridan’s latest drama stars Mel Gibson as a Border Patrol agent who feels conflicted about his work because his bosses won’t let him arbitrarily deport Jews and Greek people. Sheridan’s shows currently take up so much of Paramount’s programming that there isn’t enough time in the day to air “North of South of the Border” as its own hour-long drama. It appears exclusively in snippets on television sets that characters are watching within the show “Landman,” which your parents refer to as “Yellowstone.”
“Don’t Indict My Love: The True Story of Lou and Mabel Patterson” on Netflix
You may remember Lou and Mabel Patterson as Pitter Patter, the husband-and-wife R. & B. duo that topped the charts with such wholesome hits as “That Baby’s My Baby” and “Toodle-oo, Ladybug,” before abruptly receding from the public eye. This six-part documentary, that really could have been a two-part documentary, reveals what led to the couple’s disappearance, thanks to a trove of documents that the F.B.I. director, Kash Patel, accidentally left in a Ruth’s Chris Steak House in the greater Dallas area. Essentially, in 1970, the national-security apparatus became worried that, if Pitter Patter continued to churn out innocent and joyful music like “Press Two to Tango” and “She Kissed Me (Where the Sun Shines),” draftees would begin conscientiously objecting to the Vietnam War in droves. The Bureau invented the charge of “rocketeering”—conspiring to make and disseminate rock-and-roll music—and slammed the Pattersons with a hundred and seventeen counts. When rumors of an unfinished demo for the mildly political song “Civil Rights, That Sounds Nice” were confirmed by Elvis Presley, under oath, the Pattersons knew they were sunk. As part of a plea deal, the two agreed to retire from the music industry and sell their catalogue to the white businessman Stan Lundt, who buried the master recordings underneath a shed, next to his wife, for whose murder he had recently been exonerated.
