Here is a list of what I am looking forward to this fall. A mixture of tv and film. Watching the stories of strong women persevere on screen is inspirational when the temperatures are dropping. Fortunately, it looks like we’re in for a good season. Ranging from remakes of beloved period pieces to new comedy from Sharon Horgan, I’m ready for it.
Youth
Sharon Horgan’s new HBO comedy, Youth opens the season, and if you have loved her since Bad Sisters, you already know what you are in for. She created it, wrote it, and stars as Alex, a fifty-year-old literary agent navigating dating after divorce while caring for her ageing parents and her supposedly grown son.
What makes Horgan’s work so relatable is her willingness to put her own insecurities on screen, which is exactly where the second hand embarrassment comes from. She’s seeing a younger man in this one, and you get the sense that watching her fumble through it will be as cringe-inducing as it is funny.
Sense and Sensibility
Working Title is back in Austen territory with a new Sense and Sensibility, directed by Georgia Oakley and adapted by Diana Reid. Daisy Edgar-Jones leads as Elinor, the sensible sister trying to hold her family together after they lose their home, with Esmé Creed-Miles as the more openly heartbroken Marianne and Caitríona Balfe as their mother.
Edgar-Jones built her name on Normal People, a story about longing that never quite gets to say what it means, so Elinor’s particular flavour of restraint feels like familiar ground for her. Balfe, for her part, gets to trade Outlander’s Highlands for Georgian drawing rooms, which is its own kind of pleasure to watch unfold.
What makes this one worth the cinema trip is the cast of sisters together in one house, all that longing and money trouble folded into cosy interiors and moody English vistas.
Extra Geography
Extra Geography has Booksmart’s energy but with a sharper, more British edge. Adapted by Succession writer Miriam Battye from a Rose Tremain short story, it follows two best friends at an English boarding school, played by newcomers Marni Duggan and Galaxie Clear (what a great name!), whose summer project to “fall in love” pulls their friendship apart in the process.
It is exactly as messy and specific as a 21st century coming of age story should be: sexuality, friendship, and ambition all tangled together with no interest in softening any of it. What makes it work is that the friendship, not the romance, is the real love story underneath.
Wicker
Wicker might be the strangest and most purely entertaining premise of the season: Olivia Colman as an ostracised fisherwoman who, fed up with her village, commissions a husband woven entirely from wicker, played by Alexander Skarsgård. Elizabeth Debicki and Peter Dinklage round out the cast, which honestly sounds like a dream team.
It really is an Olivia Colman year, and this is unlike anything she has done before: a period fable with the tone of a folk tale and the mouth of a much ruder film – dirty words are her speciality. There is something genuine underneath the absurdity about who gets to belong in a community, and who gets punished for choosing not to.
Pride and Prejudice
Netflix’s six part Pride and Prejudice comes from Dolly Alderton, whose voice I have loved since her days on The High Low, and it is billed as a faithful, classic take on the novel. Emma Corrin plays Elizabeth Bennet opposite Jack Lowden’s Darcy, with Olivia Colman as Mrs Bennet and Rufus Sewell as Mr Bennet rounding out the Longbourn household. To me, this is perfect casting.
There is something appealing about handing this particular story to a writer known for examining friendship and heartbreak with such precision. Alderton has said playing this story out is a once in a generation opportunity, and it shows in a cast this stacked. If you haven’t yet, check out Everything I Know About Love while you’re waiting for this to drop.
No release date has landed yet, just “2026”, but I am hoping it arrives in the colder months, when a story about longing and broken hearts feels more cosy and less sad.
Five very different women, five very different kinds of heartbreak. Between the drawing rooms, the boarding school dormitories, one very unconventional marriage, and a fifty-year-old figuring out her second act, this is shaping up to be the season where persevering, however messily, is the whole point.