Lock In: The Fall Watch List

Every autumn the slate arrives all at once, everybody screenshots three things, and by November nobody can remember what they meant to watch. So here is the whole fall in one place, with dates, to be screenshotted exactly once.

September 1. The Varnell Hill Show. Paramount+. Tommy Davidson revives his Martin character as an old-school late-night host fighting to stay relevant. The premise is sharper than it sounds.

September 8. The Drop: A Snowfall Saga. FX and Hulu. Wanda and Leon in 1990s Los Angeles as West Coast hip-hop explodes, and Wanda goes after a record empire. The ownership angle is the interesting part.

September 24. A Different World. Netflix. Hillman reopens for a generation that has only heard about it. It did more for HBCU enrollment than any recruiter ever has.

September 26. Saturday Night Live, season 52. NBC and Peacock. Returning with rumours of a new Black woman in the cast, which is the thing to actually watch for, because who gets a seat there has always shaped the next decade of comedy.

On Netflix now. Straight Outta Compton. The N.W.A biopic, which pairs with the room that holds the actual artifacts.

The national slate is the easy part, because it arrives with marketing attached. The harder and more valuable habit is watching something with no machine behind it.

Knect TV has independent films, music videos and shows from people who own their work, and Frequency is the same for music. The numbers there are small enough that your attention is not a rounding error, which is the opposite of everything above.

And if your fall plan involves leaving the house at some point, here is what is actually happening near you.