Old School. Biblically Independent.
By Samantha Song | TV | September 27, 2026
We have reached the final days of September, which means television has stopped pretending it intends to ease us into fall.
This week brings the VMAs, The Simpsons, LEGO pirates, the return of Scrubs, people racing around the planet for a million dollars, and entrepreneurs being financially interrogated by Mark Cuban. October won’t even have been here forty-eight hours before things become completely unreasonable.
Here is what’s arriving this week, sorted by how rapidly the situation escalates beyond anything a normal person would tolerate.
Sunday, September 27th belongs to the 2026 MTV Video Music Awards (CBS/MTV, live special), broadcasting live from Los Angeles and once again gathering an enormous collection of famous musicians into one building under the optimistic assumption that everyone will behave normally for two hours. CBS is simulcasting the show with MTV this year, presumably because someone looked at the VMAs and decided what they really needed was the calming institutional presence of the network that airs 60 Minutes.
Fox also premieres a new season of The Simpsons (season 38), which means Bart Simpson has now been ten years old for roughly the length of a thirty-year mortgage. He started fourth grade during the first Bush administration and has since watched entire civilizations rise and fall from his desk at Springfield Elementary.
Vibe: America’s most chaotic music awards show has been placed on CBS. Somewhere, a 60 Minutes viewer is about to have an extraordinary evening.
Monday, September 28th is suspiciously quiet, which feels less like television taking a day off and more like television backing away slowly after what it did on Sunday. High Value Target: The Hunt for Saddam (TNT, limited series) continues, with Joel Kinnaman’s CIA analyst John Nixon sinking ever deeper into the interrogation of Saddam Hussein and the political machinery surrounding his capture.
Monday, then, is less about premieres and more about checking in on people whose jobs have rendered work-life balance functionally impossible.
Vibe: Everyone is back at work. Unfortunately, their work involves national security.
Tuesday, September 29th rebuilds the Grand Line one tiny plastic brick at a time with LEGO One Piece (Netflix, two-part animated special), which retells the first two seasons of Netflix’s live-action One Piece through LEGO animation. This means Luffy’s increasingly elaborate campaign to become King of the Pirates can finally confront its greatest threat: stepping barefoot on a piece of his own ship at three in the morning. One Piece has already gone from manga to anime to live-action television. LEGO was really the only stage left before somebody attempts to convey the entire East Blue saga through interpretive dance.
Vibe: The Grand Line, except every ship can be demolished and rebuilt with the instruction booklet.
Wednesday, September 30th has apparently decided subtlety is for other days.
Scrubs (ABC, season two premiere) returns with Zach Braff and Donald Faison as J.D. and Turk, once again working together at Sacred Heart in a medical world that has changed considerably since they first began spending an alarming percentage of their shifts discussing their friendship. The revival has new interns, old faces, modern medicine, and the same central relationship between two men who would probably list each other as emergency contacts before remembering they have families. ABC premieres two episodes back-to-back.
But Wednesday is absurdly crowded. The Amazing Race kicks off season 39 on CBS, sending another batch of contestants around the world to discover that the person they love most becomes an entirely different human being when asked to read a map under time pressure. ABC also launches season 18 of Shark Tank with two episodes, while Investigation Discovery premieres Unmasking a Monster: Aileen Wuornos. Netflix, meanwhile, releases the finale of Wonka’s The Golden Ticket, wrapping up its reality competition inside Willy Wonka’s factory.
Vibe: Doctors, entrepreneurs, globetrotters, serial killers, and Willy Wonka. Wednesday has declined to select a target demographic.
Thursday, October 1st brings East of Eden (Netflix, seven-episode limited series), Zoe Kazan’s adaptation of John Steinbeck’s 1952 masterpiece about generational conflict and the eternal struggle between good and evil. Florence Pugh plays Cathy Ames, one of literature’s most complex villains, with Christopher Abbott, Mike Faist, and Ciarán Hinds rounding out the cast. Netflix is betting audiences are ready to go from Shark Tank pitches to the existential weight of Steinbeck in a single commercial break.
Vibe: A seven-hour meditation on sin, redemption, and the terrible things families do to one another.
Friday, October 2nd brings us Kill Jackie (Prime Video), starring Catherine Zeta-Jones as Jackie Price, a former cocaine dealer turned art dealer who has spent twenty years living luxuriously in anonymity. That peaceful existence ends when the Seven Demons, a crew of elite assassins who very much want her dead, show up with murder on their minds. Jackie, however, decides that turning the tables and hunting them down with style, wit, and a taste for revenge sounds like a much better evening. It’s also the first time Zeta-Jones has used her native Welsh accent on screen, an experience she describes as liberating, presumably because telling seven assassins what she thinks of them in a Welsh accent carries a gravitas most people never get to experience.
Vibe: An ex-drug queenpin with a point to make and an accent she’s finally allowed to use. Consider us influenced.
Saturday, October 3rd is expected to bring back Untamed (Netflix, season two), returning to the mystery-thriller world of National Park Service special agent Kyle Turner. The show’s central argument remains that America’s national parks are beautiful, majestic, spiritually restorative places where you should never wander more than twelve feet from another human being. Season one already established that trees, mountains, and breathtaking vistas are considerably less calming when someone has recently discovered a body nearby.
If you were planning a peaceful weekend outdoors, Netflix would like you to reconsider.
Vibe: America’s national parks, brought to you by people determined to make you suspicious of every scenic overlook.
Also this week:
America’s Funniest Home Videos (ABC, Sunday, September 27, season 37 premiere)
Animal Control (Fox, Sunday, September 27, season five premiere)
Universal Basic Guys (Fox, Sunday, September 27, season three premiere)
Grimsburg (Fox, Sunday, September 27, season three premiere)
The Amazing Race (CBS, Wednesday, September 30, season 39 premiere)
Shark Tank (ABC, Wednesday, September 30, season 18 premiere)
Unmasking a Monster: Aileen Wuornos (Investigation Discovery, Wednesday, September 30, limited-series premiere)
Wonka’s The Golden Ticket (Netflix, Wednesday, September 30, two-part finale)
Big Brother (CBS, Thursday, October 1, season 28 finale)
Digger (theaters, Friday, October 2)
The Scout (theaters, Friday, October 2)
Beware Boiúna (theaters, Friday, October 2)
Appofeniacs (theaters, Friday, October 2)
Donnie Darko (theaters, Friday, October 2, 25th-anniversary re-release)
This Week’s Hostage: Kill Jackie
There are technically more responsible options this week. Scrubs is back. The Amazing Race can teach us geography. Big Brother will conclude its summer of interpersonal chaos.
But Kill Jackie is asking a question that will not leave you alone.
Jackie Price spent twenty years building a legitimate life. She moved art. She made money legally. She became someone other than who she used to be.
Then seven people arrived to kill the person she used to be.
And she had to become her again to survive.
This is the part that haunts: not that seven assassins showed up, but that Jackie Price probably knew the second they arrived that the art-dealer version of herself was never going to be enough. That the only Jackie who could fight back was the one she’d buried two decades ago.
She didn’t choose to hunt these assassins. Circumstance chose for her. But somewhere in that choice lives a question about whether anyone ever really leaves the past behind, or whether we’re all just one crisis away from becoming who we were before.
There are shows about racing and betting and survival. There is a music awards ceremony.
But Kill Jackie is about a woman discovering that the person you become is only as permanent as the world allows it to be.
And she’s telling that story in her own voice.
You are watching.
I am watching.
Jackie, keep hunting.
