SOUTH PARK, Colorado, September 10 — The story begins where it always has, in a small Colorado town that does not exist, with a group of kids who have been children for nearly thirty years. South Park returns this month for its twenty-ninth season, leading a back-to-school wave of streaming releases that spans returning comedies, spy thrillers, true-crime anthology, animation and a Cold War action comedy.
The animated series, created by Trey Parker and Matt Stone, is ostensibly about a group of kids living in the small town of South Park, Colorado. In practice, it has long functioned as a vehicle for its creators — described in the source material as billionaires as well as creators — to comment on society and on the US government in particular.
What unfolded across Season 28 was a renewed cultural relevance for the show, and that is the ground on which the new run arrives. A contentious upcoming midterms election is on the horizon, and the source suggests the new season will again target the hot-button issues of the week. For those involved, the formula has not changed: take the news cycle, hand it to fourth-graders, and let the absurdity do the arguing.
The Cold War, played for laughs
Over on Apple TV, Ryan Reynolds and Kenneth Branagh star in Mayday, a throwback action adventure set during the Cold War. Reynolds plays an American pilot who crash-lands in Soviet Russia and is forced to team up with an ex-KGB officer and America aficionado, played by Branagh, who wants to defect to the United States. The film’s key selling point is its writers and directors, Jonathan Goldstein and John Francis Daley, whose credits include Spider-Man: Homecoming, Game Night, Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves and the Vacation remake.
The source compares the premise to 1980s Cold War comedies such as Spies Like Us. Also on Apple TV is the sixth season of Slow Horses, the spy series starring Gary Oldman as the head of Slough House, the MI5 unit where the agency parks spies it no longer wants.
The season runs to six episodes and is based on two of Mick Herron’s novels, Joe Country and Slough House. The headline change is behind the camera. Creator Will Smith departed after Season 5, and Gaby Chiappe took over as head writer, with Ben Vanstone set to take over for Season 7, which will likely debut next year.
The cast returns with Kristin Scott Thomas’s Diana Taverner finally as First Desk, the head of MI5, and Jack Lowden’s River Cartwright dealing with a devastating loss, plus the return of a few familiar faces.
A newsroom, a monster and a mystery man
Peacock’s The Paper returns for a second season, an Office spin-off set at the Toledo Truth Teller. Season 1 starred Domhnall Gleeson as Ned, the eternally optimistic new Editor-in-Chief running a staff of mostly zero-experience news writers, clashing with the digital-first Esmerelda (Sabrina Impacciatore) and sparking a will-they-won’t-they romance with the only good news reporter, Mare (Chelsea Frei). The first season struggled to find its identity until an excellent final episode, according to the source, which points to the show’s Office lineage as a model for a stronger second season.
Elsewhere on the slate, the fourth season of Reacher ends this month on Prime Video, with a fifth season in the works and a brand new spin-off dropping the same day. Strange New Worlds concludes with a finale that sets up the final season of that series.
Netflix’s monster anthology from Ryan Murphy and Ian Brennan returns with a new installment focused on female killers — specifically axe murderer Lizzie Borden, set in 1892 and starring Ella Beatty as Borden alongside Charlie Hunnam, Rebecca Hall, Sarah Paulson and Billie Lourd. The source notes the show has faced frequent accusations of front-loading the killers and diminishing victims’ stories. True crime and comedy round out the remaining titles on the list.
What to watch next: South Park’s twenty-ninth season carries the heaviest expectation of the group, arriving with a midterms election ahead and a freshly recovered cultural foothold behind it. Mayday and Slow Horses give Apple TV two very different kinds of tension, while The Paper has a second chance to prove the newsroom can hold a season on its own.
