From East of Eden to Carrie: The Best New TV to Stream This October
October’s schedule brings fresh adaptations of classic novels alongside starry new dramas and a monster horror shot on the coast of Newfoundland. Here’s what’s worth queuing up.
War (HBO/Sky, from 1-2 October) casts Dominic West and Sienna Miller as a tech billionaire and an actress whose marriage collapses into a vicious, headline-grabbing divorce fought by rival teams of lawyers. Creator George Kay says the goal was to “show London off at its most aspirational.”
East of Eden (Netflix, 1 October) reimagines John Steinbeck’s novel as a miniseries centred on Florence Pugh’s manipulative Cathy, created by Zoe Kazan, granddaughter of the director who filmed the original adaptation. Pugh says she was determined “not to warm her up or make excuses for her.”
Kill Jackie (AMC+/Prime Video, 2 October) stars Catherine Zeta-Jones, using her native Welsh accent, as a retired art dealer and former drug trafficker who becomes the target of assassins from her past.
Carrie (Prime Video, 7 October), Mike Flanagan’s update of Stephen King’s novel, drags the bullied telekinetic teenager into the age of smartphones and social media. King himself praised the result on Threads, calling it “brilliant” and writing that “what it has to say about social media is shocking and true.”
Small Prophets (BBC iPlayer/Apple TV, 7 October), from The Detectorists’ Mackenzie Crook, follows a grieving man, played by Pearce Quigley, who tries his ailing father’s recipe for creating truth-telling homunculi, a show The Age called “a gentle, jewel-like, unhurried masterpiece.”
Cupertino (CBS/Paramount+, 8 October), from The Good Wife creators Robert and Michelle King, follows two lawyers wronged by Silicon Valley power players who team up to take on the tech industry itself.
Below (Netflix, 8 October) sends Josh Hartnett’s struggling fisherman up against something sinister beneath the waves off Newfoundland, in a series the Toronto Star summed up as “man v monster.”
The Lowdown (Hulu/Disney+, 14 October) returns Ethan Hawke’s muckraking Tulsa journalist for a second season, with Tommy Lee Jones arriving as the father the hero had long told his daughter was dead.
Vision Quest (Disney+, 14 October) gives Paul Bettany’s Marvel android his own spin-off, in which Vision searches for lost emotions while James Spader’s Ultron, whom co-star Bettany describes as “this psychopath that [Vision] is keeping locked away upstairs in the attic”, looms over the story.
Nocturne (Apple TV, 30 October) relocates a Scandinavian crime series by husband-and-wife writing duo Lars Kepler to small-town America, with Liev Schreiber as a detective hunting a killer long thought already caught.
Source: BBC News