What Returning Or New Series Are You Excited About?

The home stretch to the calendar year is on. Summer is all but behind us. We're essentially starting Ye Olde Fall Season right now.

I’ve been tinkering with my Q3 Watchlist rankings for later this month. Two things are apparent: The Streaming Age didn’t quite do away with the old traditional fall season on TV (meaning the summer lull is still very real and almost everybody throttles down or avoids it). Plus, an infusion of high quality international series is challenging American dominance (and if you want to count England as international, as I do and we all should, even though our Cousins slipped their shows in with ours and its hard to think of them as foreign, per say — then yeah, American television isn’t leading the way anymore. The winning has waned. We’re losing, in my opinion.

(Which is fine. We should lose more anyway. It would probably help with our national attitude.)

Okay, in fairness to the tricky narrative thread here, you might be thinking, “I’m not sure I remember the Q1 or the Q2 Watchlist rankings, to be quite honest, TIM.”

Well, smarty-pantses, that’s because I didn’t even think of the idea until Q2 and then didn’t even wait until the end of that quarter to post the results, so, surprise motherfuckers!

Fine, slight timeout here to remind you of that post:

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The Watchlist: TV.

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I put 10 television series on that list (many international) and it was a free post back then and remains that way now. Check it out.

I was going to do film in a separate list and then thought better of that idea. Something about ranking films just isn’t my style, so just know that if I write about movies here, I generally loved them and endorse them (and told you so if I didn’t — see the last post from last week).

But yeah, like it or not, you’ll get a Q3 Watchlist ranking by the end of this month and then Q4 in late December, likely in lieu of a Best Things I Saw This Year list, but I can’t promise I won’t do both. My moods are ever-changing. You know that. It’s part of my charm.

But anyway, in the process of looking back on what have been the best TV series — new or just discovered for the first time in this third quarter — I’ll admit that my eye has been drifting toward what’s coming.

For starters, I know a lot of you Bastards are looking forward to the next season of “Slow Horses” on Sept. 24 on AppleTV+ with the same glee that I am. (The show would then technically qualify for Q3). Equally exciting for me is the third season of “Alice In Borderland” coming Sept. 25 on Netflix.

In fact, I’m pretty sure most of you are caught up on “Slow Horses” so I will make my ongoing plea to give the wildly weird and inventive “Alice In Borderland” — the most popular Japanese series on Netflix — your full attention by trying to sneak in the first two seasons before the third starts. The attentive among you will remember that I have been a zealot about this series and wrote about the first two seasons, quite lovingly, right here:

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Ah, but that wandering mind and eye — it’s definitely looking forward.

The other big names yet to come — at least based on what your likes have tended to be, expressed in the comments, etc. — aren’t exactly plentiful. “The Diplomat” returns to Netflix on Oct. 16; as does the final season of “Stranger Things” on Nov. 26, (if you’re still doing that; I’m not). And then S2 of “Fallout” from Amazon Prime drops Dec. 17.

Before you ask in the comments, “Severance” is a next year (or Q1) thing — Jan. 17, on AppleTV+.

Slim pickings? Debatable. But at least you know I’m going to pack this space with highly recommended international series to offset any lulls in quality.

That said, it’s possible that some of the brand new entries will be excellent. (As a reminder, I don’t watch any way-in-advance episodes for this sweet operation you’e reading now that I’m off the full-time hamster-wheel).

But here’s what looks good on paper/concept and in the trailer, though that last part is an unreliable entity.

• Jude Law and Jason Bateman in “Black Rabbit” on Netflix starting Sept. 18 is certainly the leader in the clubhouse at the moment:

• That is followed closely by FX/Hulu’s “The Lowdown” on Sept. 23, from “Reservation Dogs” co-creator Sterlin Harjo and starring Ethan Hawke, with an all-star cast at least partially filled out by Keith David, Jeanne Tripplehorn, Kyle MacLachlan, Tim Blake Nelson and Tracy Letts:

Are there more? Oh, of course there are. The summer semi-doldrums are officially over, people. Let’s take a look at what else might be worthy coming up on us fast: