September 2026 starts with Glen Powell hiding behind prosthetics and ends with Matthew McConaughey and Woody Harrelson wondering whether they might actually be brothers. In between, Guy Ritchie returns to The Gentlemen, Peacock sends The Paper back into its newsroom, Reacher expands without Jack Reacher at the center, Jackson Lamb comes back to Slough House, Netflix revisits Lizzie Borden, and Tom Hardy returns to London's criminal underworld.
This is one of those unusually crowded months when the television calendar feels less like a collection of unrelated premieres and more like a sustained run of recognizable names. Most of these shows are returning series, but several are taking meaningful risks with familiar properties: a Reacher spinoff built around Maria Sten's Frances Neagley, a new Monster installment built around one of America's oldest murder legends, and Brothers, which turns a long-running real-life rumor about its two stars into the premise of a comedy.
Here are the biggest shows arriving in September, in the order they premiere.
September 3: Chad Powers and The Gentlemen open the month with two very different second seasons
Chad Powers returns on September 3 with Glen Powell back as Russ Holliday, the disgraced quarterback attempting to keep his football career alive by pretending to be somebody else. Disney says the six-episode second season will arrive all at once, with Russ's increasingly complicated double life at the center of the new episodes.
The premise was always ridiculous in the most deliberate way possible: a former football star in a prosthetic disguise trying to pass himself off as an eccentric new quarterback. Season two has a useful dramatic problem already built into it. The more successful Chad becomes, the harder it is for Russ to remain hidden.
The same day, Netflix brings back The Gentlemen for season two. Guy Ritchie's television expansion of his 2019 film continues the story of Eddie Horniman and Susie Glass as their criminal operation grows beyond the circumstances that first brought them together. Contemporary reports on the new season describe the story expanding into Italy as well as Britain.
Putting these two shows on the same date makes for an unusually clear opening choice. Chad Powers is built around sports comedy and identity deception. The Gentlemen remains a crime story about aristocracy, money and organized chaos. Neither is trying to solve the other show's problem.
September 9: The Paper returns to the newsroom after a surprisingly fast turnaround
The Paper returns for its second season on Peacock on September 9, with all episodes premiering that day. The series follows the documentary crew associated with The Office as they turn their cameras toward a historic Midwestern newspaper trying to survive.
Season two picks up after the paper's success at the Ohio Journalism Awards and gives Ned a new obsession: finding a serious journalistic crusade. That search eventually puts the staff in conflict with a local private club, while the show's personal storylines continue to develop around the newsroom.
The Paper has an obvious burden because of its connection to The Office, but its second season is also where the comparison matters less. A debut season introduces a concept. The second has to prove the characters and setting can generate stories without relying on the novelty of where the documentary crew came from.
September 16: Neagley and Slow Horses make this month's biggest Wednesday a spy-and-action double bill
September 16 belongs to two very different kinds of intelligence work.
First comes Neagley, Prime Video's Reacher spinoff starring Maria Sten as Frances Neagley. All eight episodes are scheduled to premiere together. The series moves Neagley into her own investigation as a Chicago private investigator while keeping a connection to the larger Reacher world; Alan Ritchson is set to appear as Jack Reacher.
That makes Neagley an important test for the Reacher franchise. Frances Neagley has been one of the most distinctive supporting characters in the series, but a spinoff asks a different question: can a character who works brilliantly alongside Reacher become the person who carries the entire engine of the story?
The same day, Apple TV launches season six of Slow Horses. The new six-episode season is adapted from Mick Herron's Joe Country and Slough House, with Gary Oldman returning as Jackson Lamb. The first episode premieres September 16, followed by weekly releases through October 21.
Slow Horses has survived long enough to become something television increasingly struggles to produce: a durable returning series with a recognizable rhythm and a continuing identity. Season six also brings back Olivia Cooke's Sidonie "Sid" Baker, adding another reason longtime viewers will be watching closely.
Neagley offers a new branch of an established action franchise. Slow Horses offers more of a machine that already knows exactly what it is. September 16 gives viewers both.
September 17: Monster takes on the Lizzie Borden case
Netflix releases Monster: The Lizzie Borden Story on September 17, making Lizzie Borden the subject of the fourth installment of the Ryan Murphy and Ian Brennan anthology. Ella Beatty plays Borden, with Vicky Krieps and Charlie Hunnam among the central cast.
The underlying historical case remains one of the most famous in American crime history. Borden was accused of the 1892 axe murders of her father and stepmother and was later acquitted. That distinction matters because popular culture has spent more than a century turning the case into a far more settled story than the legal record allows.
Netflix's own description frames the series as a dramatization of Borden's violent Victorian household and the murders that shocked the country.
That gives Monster another famous real-life subject, but also one with an enormous amount of mythology attached to it. The title's challenge will be separating the historical person from the legend that grew around her.
September 18: MobLand returns with Tom Hardy still in the middle of London's war
One day after Monster arrives, MobLand returns for season two on Paramount+. The new season premieres September 18, bringing Tom Hardy back as fixer Harry Da Souza alongside Pierce Brosnan and Helen Mirren.
The series remains centered on the Harrigans and Stevensons, rival London crime families whose conflict puts Harry in the middle of competing loyalties and escalating violence. Paramount's official material confirms season two as a 10-episode run.
The attraction is straightforward. Hardy, Brosnan and Mirren are not the kind of cast that disappears quietly into the background, and MobLand has leaned into the pleasure of watching major performers operate inside an expansive crime-family drama.
Season two arrives with the first season's conflicts still unresolved and with the show's larger power structure ready to become even messier.
September 23: Brothers turns a real rumor into television
The final major premiere in this run may be the strangest premise of all because its central rumor already existed outside the show.
Brothers stars Matthew McConaughey and Woody Harrelson as fictionalized versions of themselves. Their decades-long friendship is thrown into chaos when they discover information suggesting they might actually be brothers. The eight-episode comedy premieres September 23 on Apple TV with its first two episodes, followed by weekly installments through November 4.
The premise draws on real public speculation about whether the two actors could share a biological connection, although the series itself takes that rumor into an openly fictional comic story. Holland Taylor plays McConaughey's mother, Ma Mac, whose revelation helps set the plot in motion.
Brothers has a premise no conventional casting meeting could invent as efficiently as reality did. McConaughey and Harrelson already have decades of friendship and screen history behind them. The show uses that familiarity rather than pretending it does not exist.
And that may be the actual story of September's television lineup. The month's biggest shows are not arriving from nowhere. They are built from characters viewers already know, actors with established chemistry, franchises testing new directions and historical stories that have refused to disappear.
September 2026 is less about discovering television's next unknown phenomenon than watching familiar names take bigger chances with what audiences already recognize.
