While sweater weather has yet to arrive throughout much of the United States, September does still mark the official beginning of autumn. Which, in the realm of entertainment, means that summer fluff has begun to give way to more substantial fare. Among this month’s TV highlights, you’ll find a vindication of gonzo investigative journalism, an unusually insightful psychological thriller, a crime drama that doubles as a meditation on forgiveness, a heavy metal docuseries that couldn’t feel less like Spinal Tap, and even a scathing prestige portrait of Benito Mussolini.
Into the Void: Life, Death, and Heavy Metal (Hulu)
The consolidation of the entertainment industry has given rise to some remarkable ironies. To wit: In the past month, Disney—the parent company of ABC, Hulu, and FX among other platforms—has brought viewers both the shocking act of censorship that was Jimmy Kimmel’s temporary silencing and two full-throated celebrations of free speech. One of these is Into the Void, an eight-episode documentary on heavy metal. (The other is The Lowdown, about which you can read more below.) Rather than a history of the genre or a taxonomy of its many styles and scenes, the series profiles a different personality or act in each episode. And it casts a wide net, devoting more attention to undersung, non-white-guy pioneers (“Iranian Metal Crusade,” “Ann Boleyn of Hellion”) than it does to big stars (“Randy Rhoads,” “Judas Priest on Trial”).
While Into the Void is worth watching all the way through, two episodes in particular stuck out to me. “Kurt Struebing of NME” recounts the harrowing story of a 1980s Seattle black metal frontman whose band was on the rise when, in the throes of a psychotic break, he killed his mother. But this is no case study in the evils of devil-worshipping musicians. Told through empathetic interviews with his bandmates and family, Struebing’s ordeal becomes a tale of partial redemption and a lament about the failure of our justice system to meet the mental-health needs of people caught up in it. In “Wendy O. Williams,” the anarchic Plasmatics rise out of ’70s New York, infusing Times Square sleaze into the transgressive art of the downtown punk scene. Often dismissed in her own time as a scantily clad, attention-seeking shock rocker—a reputation that fueled violent arrests on obscenity charges—their leader, Williams, gets her due here as the radical activist, feminist trailblazer, and anti-consumerist culture warrior she actually was.
The Lowdown (FX)
“There’s nothing worse than a white man who cares.” A character named Marty, played by the great Keith David, issues this lament in the premiere episode of the FX crime drama The Lowdown. The white man in question is the show’s protagonist, Lee Raybon, an anticorruption crusader investigating a powerful family in his home city of Tulsa, Okla. And although Marty may be the first to diagnose his affliction, he is not the only person of color in this story who suspects our hero’s bravery and righteousness—traits that those who doubt him might call foolhardiness and sanctimony—stem, in part, from his privilege. Whether this means he’s uniquely positioned to topple Goliaths or bound to lose and too blithely self-assured to realize it remains to be seen.
His predicament combines the perspectives of two Lowdown executive producers: creator Sterlin Harjo, best known for the transcendent FX coming-of-age dramedy Reservation Dogs, and Ethan Hawke, who stars as Lee. A self-styled “truthstorian,” which is a quirky way of saying he’s an investigative journalist bent on exposing historical injustices, Lee is shambolic, tenacious, hyperliterate yet earthy, and a bit wild-eyed, with a paucity of concern for his own safety and a searing social conscience. [Read the full review.]
Mussolini: Son of the Century (Mubi)
For anyone who has been waiting to see our most immediate narrative art form (television) seriously confront the most urgent political reality of our time (the global resurgence of right-wing authoritarianism), I have good news and bad news. The good news is that an A-list international creative team—including director Joe Wright, executive producers Paolo Sorrentino and Pablo Larraín, and co-writer Stefano Bises (Gomorrah, The New Pope)—came together to make an outstanding eight-episode, Italian-language drama that traces the rise of founding fascist Benito Mussolini. The bad news, for anyone who isn’t already subscribed to the arthouse streaming service Mubi, is that you’ll have to shell out yet another monthly fee to watch it.
Those who do will be rewarded with one of the year’s most intelligent, artful, and, yes, timely shows. Adapted from the historical novel by Antonio Scurati, the expressionistic series takes an inspired approach to the problem inherent in making a hateful demagogue your main character: You have to get close enough to his perspective to make his motives, ideas, and appeal legible without apologizing for his monstrousness. Mussolini: Son of the Century threads that needle with a bold lead performance from Luca Marinelli (Martin Eden), a screenplay that effectively uses first-person narration to get into Mussolini’s warped brain, and direction that illustrates the discrepancy between his populist rhetoric and the violence he unleashed in service of elite backers. The propulsive electronic soundtrack from Chemical Brother Tom Rowlands further liberates the show from period-drama stodginess while echoing the action-obsessed art of the Italian futurists who were among Il Duce’s early associates. Mussolini is at once an incisive psychological portrait of one of the 20th century’s most destructive individuals and a clear-eyed dissection of fascism’s politically expedient, intellectually incoherent origins.
Task (HBO)
Crime dramas, especially in our distracted times, tend to front-load said crimes. More often than not, there’s a murder within the first five minutes. This is only one of the genre’s many implicit rules that HBO’s Task breaks. The series from Mare of Easttown creator Brad Ingelsby opens with a montage of quotidian scenes from the lives of two men. Weary Tom Brandis (Mark Ruffalo) folds his hands in prayer, dunks his face in a sink full of ice water, downs Advil while driving. Rugged Robbie Prendergrast (Tom Pelphrey) carries his sleeping son to bed, pours himself a tall mug of coffee, perks up at a radio ad for a dating app. [Read the full review.]
Wayward (Netflix)
We all know what Philip Larkin had to say about parents. It’s hard to argue with his gleefully profane poem, which has become a sort of secular gospel, about how people can’t help passing their flaws down the family tree. But humanity has yet to devise a method of raising children superior to the nuclear family. Is such a thing even possible, let alone desirable?
This is the question that propels Netflix’s Wayward, an extraordinary new series from the comedian and Feel Good creator Mae Martin. Combining elements of psychological thriller, teen drama, and police procedural—earnest genres that benefit from a dose of Martin’s downbeat humor—it tweaks familiar tropes in service of a narrative whose ideas about family are novel. As it touches on hotly debated topics, from trans identity to the troubled teen industry, the show distinguishes itself by contextualizing and complicating them rather than devolving into polemic. [Read the full review.]
The post The Best New TV Shows of September 2025 appeared first on TIME.
