October is for scaring yourself silly, and the month’s best new TV shows have supplied plenty of opportunities to do just that. Among the best horror-adjacent offerings are Peacock’s satanic panic flashback Hysteria! and an unconventional serial-killer story, Sweetpea, from Starz. Apple TV+ highlight Where’s Wanda? wrings dark comedy out of any parent’s worst fear. Even Hulu’s Rivals could frighten you with the depths of its amorous characters’ depravity. And if all that anxiety-inducing TV makes you a bit too nervous, the week before an anxiety-inducing election? Switch to the PBS docuseries Citizen Nation to witness a less stressful exercise in democracy.
[time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”]Citizen Nation (PBS)
A documentary series about contemporary American politics that won’t make you sick to your stomach? The week before a Presidential election that has devolved into an alleged comedian at one candidate’s home-stretch rally calling Puerto Rico “an island of garbage”? Could such a show really exist? Believe it. PBS’s four-part doc Citizen Nation follows high school students and their faculty coaches from around the country competing in a national civics competition called We the People. From rival teams—one privileged, one underdog—in Wyoming to working-class kids in rural West Virginia to champs in Richmond, Va., director Singeli Agnew and creator Bret Sigler capture teens and teachers from across demographics and political persuasions thinking and talking seriously but civilly about the most divisive issues of our time.
It’s a compelling premise, elevated by Citizen Nation’s shrewd subject selection. We meet the daughter of Nigerian immigrants, in Las Vegas, whose father, a professor of history, served two years in prison for a murder he didn’t commit. In Wyoming, an indefatigable teacher inspires even her most disengaged pupils to learn about their rights and responsibilities as Americans. A Virginia teen vies for the state championship against a team coached by his dad—who also happens to be a local politician. While the series feels relevant to such current crises as the epidemic of mass shootings, the politicization of teaching, and the financial burdens facing college-bound kids, my biggest takeaway was a sense of hope derived from watching young people engage in good faith with the policies and ideas that will shape their futures.
Hysteria! (Peacock)
In the 1980s, as Reagan reigned and the liberation movements of the previous two decades waned, respectable society lost its collective mind. Rumors of satanic cults spreading across the country were amplified by TV news personalities like Geraldo Rivera and treated as serious threats by the FBI. Daycare providers got dragged into absurd, widely publicized court cases alleging ritualistic child abuse. Such innocuous forms of teenage rebellion as heavy metal fandom or Dungeons & Dragons could get a kid branded a cultist—if not a murderer. This yearslong wave of mass hysteria came to be known as the satanic panic. The witch hunt had no basis in real occult violence. And yet, as Hugh Downs noted in a silly 1985 20/20 segment called “The Devil Worshippers”: “there is no question that something is going on out there.”
What exactly that something turned out to be is the central preoccupation of Hysteria!, a fun, insightful, and occasionally scary coming-of-age horror series. Set in a small Michigan town called Happy Hollow—where, as one character puts it, “you’re either one or the other”—in the late ’80s, the story opens with a masked assailant bursting into a bedroom where two teens are about to hook up. As the quiet residential neighborhood slumbers, Faith (Nikki Hahn) and Ryan (Brandon Butler) fight for their lives like the horny kids in Halloween. While both vanish that night, only Ryan, a star quarterback, gets the breathless attention of the local news media. Rumor has it that satanists are to blame. [Read the full review.]
Rivals (Hulu)
With so many dark, sad comedies kicking around, we should really have more light, fun dramas to balance out the vibes. Rivals is the all-too-rare show that fits the description—and it should particularly delight fans of British TV, with Doctor Who and Broadchurch star David Tennant and Aidan Turner, a.k.a. Ross Poldark, in key roles. Just don’t expect anything polite enough to air on Masterpiece. Set in the world of 1980s British television, this adaptation of Jilly Cooper’s hit satirical romance romp casts Tennant as Lord Tony Baddingham, the arriviste head of an independent commercial station, who poaches a mercurial Irish reporter (Turner’s Declan O’Hara) from the BBC and airs his combative interviews live, facilitated by a ruthless American producer (Nafessa Williams’ Cameron Cook) whom Baddingham is also shagging. Fueling this audacious power play is Baddingham’s rivalry with Rupert Campbell-Black (Alex Hassell), a sexually insatiable, blue-blooded politician. The O’Haras happen to move in next door to him.
Frothy and often filthy without being brainless (send thanks across the Atlantic for that good British dialogue), this is escapism done right. The ’80s excess is on point, from maximalist cocktail attire to the mile-high-club encounter in the Concorde bathroom that opens the series. There are chaotic dinner parties, torrid affairs, a nude tennis match. Old money vs. new money, journalistic ethics vs. small-screen spectacle, highfalutin hypocrisy vs. horny hedonism—all are themes. More precious, though, is the vacation Rivals delivers from mundane reality.
Sweetpea (Starz)
Consider the bully. This juvenile sadist makes a hobby out of humiliation, intimidation, inflicting pain both physical and emotional. In many cases, they are effective enough at gaslighting to avoid so much as a detention’s worth of punishment. Adults comfort young victims with assurances that bullies are living their glory days in the locker room and have nothing but misery to look forward to. But what is a person supposed to do when she grows up, stays stuck in the claustrophobic town where she was a teenage pariah, takes a soul-crushing job, watches her family disintegrate around her… and her bully, still thriving, just keeps making things worse?
This is the conundrum facing Rhiannon Lewis, the abject antihero of the dark, sneakily funny British thriller Sweetpea. Played with nervous intensity by Ella Purnell, a breakout star of Yellowjackets and Fallout, Rhiannon works as a receptionist at a local newspaper—where she’s so invisible, the editor (Jeremy Swift from Ted Lasso) tosses his coat on her head as he enters the office. Her interest in an open junior reporter position is treated as a bit of a joke. And her personal life is an even bigger disaster. Friendless and without romantic prospects, she watches helplessly as her ailing father dies in the hospital. Then her sister, Seren (Alexandra Dowling), arrives from abroad for the funeral, with a plan to sell the family home out from under Rhiannon. The real estate agent she’s chosen happens to be the person most responsible for making Rhiannon such a meek, repressed person: her high school bully, Julia (Mood’s Nicôle Lecky). [Read the full review.]
Where’s Wanda? (Apple TV+)
Apple’s first German-language series is a raucous black comedy about a 17-year-old girl whose disappearance drives her parents to desperation. It doesn’t sound like the kind of predicament you’d want to laugh at, but much of the appeal of Where’s Wanda? is in creator Oliver Lansley’s (Flack) savviness about crime-drama clichés (this is a show that, for instance, knows all about Missing White Woman Syndrome) and how well he makes a difficult mix of tones work.
The series joins Dedo and Carlotta Klatt (Axel Stein and Heike Makatsch) months after Wanda (Lea Drinda) goes missing, as the police investigation flags and the couple grows convinced that if she is to be found, they’re the ones who will have to do it. When a clue suggests she hasn’t traveled far, the Klatts hatch a plan to surveil their neighbors. Hijinks, humiliations, and juicy revelations that have nothing to do with Wanda’s whereabouts ensue as they ineptly execute it, in episodes punctuated by moving, believably abrupt scenes of premature grief. Where’s Wanda? is the kind of gem Apple only seems capable of creating in its foreign-language productions lately (see also: La Maison), so here’s hoping for more where this came from. (For another recent subtitled standout, try Hulu’s La Máquina, which reunites Y tu mamá también stars Gael García Bernal and Diego Luna in a crime-soaked boxing drama.)
