Old School. Biblically Independent.
By Samantha Strong | TV | September 13, 2026
Fall television is officially waking up, and apparently it woke up suspicious.
This week has CIA interrogations, amateur detectives, disgraced MI5 agents, private investigators seeking revenge, an axe-murder miniseries, ordinary Americans lying to each other in a Scottish castle, and Dancing With the Stars, which may actually contain the healthiest interpersonal dynamics of the group.
September is going well.
Here is what is arriving this week, sorted by how quickly you should become concerned when someone says, "I need you to trust me."
Sunday, September 13th starts with High Value Target: The Hunt for Saddam (TNT, limited-series premiere), starring Joel Kinnaman as CIA analyst John Nixon in a dramatization of the hunt for Saddam Hussein and the interrogation that followed his capture. The eight-episode thriller is adapted from Nixon's memoir Debriefing the President and begins with two episodes, because apparently TNT has decided one hour of intelligence operations, war, and geopolitical anxiety would leave everyone dangerously relaxed. Waleed Zuaiter plays Hussein, while Kinnaman gets the unenviable assignment of portraying the first CIA officer to extensively interrogate him.
Vibe: The world's highest-stakes exit interview.
Monday, September 14th hands television over to the 78th Primetime Emmy Awards (NBC/Peacock, live special), hosted by Mariska Hargitay. This means television will spend approximately three hours congratulating itself for television while actors attempt to look genuinely thrilled when a camera abruptly cuts to them losing an award. There will be speeches and obviously reunions. Someone will be played off by music while trying to thank their dialect coach. And several hundred extremely famous people will discover simultaneously that nobody knows what to do with their face when their category is announced.
Vibe: The industry's annual company meeting, except everyone is wearing couture and half the employees are pretending not to care about the promotion.
Tuesday, September 15th brings Agatha Christie's Tommy & Tuppence (BritBox, series premiere), with Antonia Thomas and Josh Dylan taking over as Christie's married amateur detectives and Imelda Staunton joining them, which already feels like an unreasonable concentration of British competence. The six-part adaptation follows Tommy and Tuppence through the sort of mysteries where everyone has an excellent coat, somebody's wealthy relative knows considerably more than they are admitting, and an apparently harmless conversation over tea will eventually turn out to contain four clues and a motive.
HGTV also premieres A Very Haunted Renovation, a competition in which designers attempt to renovate a notoriously haunted house. Contractors have therefore finally found a client worse than someone who changes the backsplash halfway through installation.
Vibe: Your charming married neighbors have hobbies. Unfortunately, the hobby is investigating homicide.
Wednesday, September 16th creates a genuinely irritating scheduling problem with Neagley (Prime Video, series premiere) and Slow Horses (Apple TV, season six premiere) arriving on the same day.
Neagley spins Maria Sten's Frances Neagley out of Reacher and into her own eight-episode series. Now working as a private investigator in Chicago, Neagley learns that someone from her past has died under suspicious circumstances and responds in the manner we have come to expect from anyone associated with Jack Reacher: by becoming personally invested in making the responsible parties regret several major life decisions. All eight episodes arrive at once.
Meanwhile, Slow Horses returns Gary Oldman's Jackson Lamb and the deeply unemployable employees of Slough House for Season 6. This time, Diana Taverner pulls the team into what Apple describes as a deadly game of retaliation and revenge, forcing the Slow Horses onto the run. The season adapts Mick Herron's Joe Country and Slough House, which means Britain's least polished intelligence officers have once again been asked to save the country despite the country's repeated attempts to hide them in an office and forget they exist.
Vibe: Two separate shows about highly competent people working for organizations that would really prefer they stop causing paperwork.
Thursday, September 17th belongs to Monster: The Lizzie Borden Story (Netflix, limited-series premiere), the fourth installment of Ryan Murphy and Ian Brennan's Monster anthology. Ella Beatty plays Lizzie Borden, the Massachusetts woman famously accused -- and acquitted -- of murdering her father and stepmother with an axe in 1892. Rebecca Hall, Vicky Krieps, and Charlie Hunnam also star, because apparently Netflix has looked at one of America's most enduring murder stories and concluded what it really needed was several extremely attractive people staring ominously across Victorian rooms.
And if historical axe murder feels too relaxing, NBC premieres The Traitors: New Blood (series premiere) the same night. Alan Cumming returns, but this version swaps Peacock's reality stars and celebrities for ordinary Americans competing for up to $250,000. At last, regular people will get the opportunity previously reserved for reality-TV professionals: entering a Scottish castle and immediately accusing a stranger named Brenda of treason because she blinked strangely at breakfast.
Vibe: One woman may have murdered her parents with an axe. Twenty-two other people are about to accuse each other of equally serious crimes based on breakfast behavior.
Friday, September 18th brings back Outlander: Blood of My Blood (Starz, season two premiere), returning to the parallel love stories of Jamie and Claire's parents. The Outlander universe has never encountered a historical period it couldn't improve by adding romance, political danger, family secrets, and at least one situation where loving someone becomes unnecessarily complicated by several hundred years of history. Season two continues the prequel after a first season that established, once again, that apparently nobody in either of these bloodlines has ever been permitted to fall in love under normal circumstances.
Paramount+ also brings back MobLand, while HGTV premieres a new season of Scariest House in America, which is an impressive title considering HGTV premiered a show about renovating a haunted house three days earlier. The network has apparently entered an arms race against its own programming department.
Vibe: Generational romance, political turmoil, and enough inherited emotional damage to survive several centuries.
Saturday, September 19th closes the week with Sole Survivor of Flight 119 (Lifetime, movie premiere), which follows Lifetime's recent run of ripped-from-the-headlines survival dramas. After six consecutive days of spies, killers, private investigators, traitors, and historical romantic catastrophe, Saturday therefore provides the traditional relaxing weekend option: catastrophic aviation trauma.
Lifetime continues to understand that nobody watching television on Saturday night wants anything uncomplicated to happen to a woman.
Vibe: Your fear of flying has received original programming.
Also this week:
60 Minutes (CBS, Sunday, September 13, season 59 premiere)
Gabby's Dollhouse (Netflix, Monday, September 14, season 14 premiere)
Dancing With the Stars (ABC, Tuesday, September 15, season 35 premiere)
R.J. Decker (ABC, Tuesday, September 15, season two premiere)
The Creep Tapes (Shudder/AMC+, Tuesday, September 15, season premiere)
The Real Housewives of Salt Lake City (Bravo, Wednesday, September 16, season premiere)
Route 187 (Paramount+, Wednesday, September 16, limited-series premiere)
South Park (Comedy Central, Wednesday, September 16, new episodes)
The Doll (Netflix, Wednesday, September 16, series premiere)
The Traitors: New Blood (NBC, Thursday, September 17, series premiere)
Plastic Beauty (Netflix, Thursday, September 17, series premiere)
Scariest House in America (HGTV, Friday, September 18, season premiere)
Goody Goody (Shudder, Friday, September 18, movie premiere)
Best of the Best (Netflix, Friday, September 18, movie premiere)
This Week's Hostage: Slow Horses
There are objectively louder choices this week.
Neagley has an entire season dropping at once and a protagonist who has spent years demonstrating that she is one of the few people in the Reacher universe who could watch Jack Reacher walk into a room full of armed men and think, I could probably handle that.
Monster has Lizzie Borden.
The Traitors has Alan Cumming wearing what I can only assume will be a coat visible from low Earth orbit.
But Jackson Lamb is back.
This is a man who runs an MI5 department populated almost entirely by people the British government has professionally placed in a drawer marked DO NOT USE.
And somehow they keep having to save Britain.
Season six has now escalated matters by putting the Slow Horses themselves on the run, which feels fundamentally unfair. These people already work in Slough House. Their desks are terrible. Their careers are ruined. Their boss appears to regard personal hygiene as an instrument of psychological warfare.
What else does the intelligence community want from them?
More importantly, Diana Taverner is involved.
This has historically been an excellent indication that everyone should immediately become extremely concerned.
There are private investigators seeking revenge this week.
There are Traitors in a castle.
There is an alleged axe murderer.
But Gary Oldman is about to enter a room looking like he slept in his clothes, insult every intelligence officer present, eat something horrifying, and nevertheless understand the conspiracy before anyone else.
You are watching.
I am watching.
Jackson Lamb would prefer that neither of us were there.
