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Normally the streamers spread their expensive genre shows across the year, like a sensible family rationing the good biscuits. This November, someone has upended the whole tin on the coffee table. Middle-earth, a dystopian Los Angeles, a Stephen King laboratory for psychic children and Camp Half-Blood all arrive within about three weeks of each other, and anyone hoping to keep up will need either a lot of subscriptions or a lot of free trials and a very good memory for cancellation dates.
First up is MGM+’s The Institute, whose second season starts on 8 November. The adaptation of King’s 2019 novel about kidnapped children with telekinetic and telepathic gifts made it to a second year, and King adaptations on TV haven’t always been that lucky. MGM+ doesn’t operate in the UK, so British viewers should check local listings rather than their remote.
The big one lands on 11 November, when Prime Video drops the first four episodes of The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power season three. Going by the trailer above, this is the season in which Sauron finally gets round to the One Ring, the bit of Tolkien’s Second Age that everybody has been waiting for since season one spent a good deal of its considerable budget on mysterious strangers and harfoot caravans. The show has had a bumpy relationship with Tolkien’s readers. Season three at least has the advantage that forging an all-powerful ring of evil is, dramatically speaking, hard to make boring. Netflix opens its Catholic-schoolgirls-versus-the-Devil horror series The Body the same day, should you prefer your darkness with dance routines.
Disney+ follows with Percy Jackson and the Olympians season three, adapting Rick Riordan’s The Titan’s Curse, from 20 November. We looked at the Lucca footage last week. The show has promised its first proper villain, which is a bold claim for a series that has already featured most of Greek mythology’s worst relatives.
Then, on 25 November, comes the one SF fans have been circling in red ink: Blade Runner 2099. Prime Video will release all of the eight-episode sequel series at once, with Michelle Yeoh and Hunter Schafer leading the cast and Ridley Scott among the executive producers. It’s set fifty years after Blade Runner 2049, and the franchise has a tricky relationship with success. Both films are now regarded as classics, and neither made the money at the cinema that its studio wanted. A streaming series, where nobody has to buy a ticket, may be the first time a Blade Runner production doesn’t have to worry about the box office at all.
Netflix closes the month on 26 November with Fool Night, its adaptation of Kasumi Yasuda’s dystopian manga, set in a sunless world where the poor can sell their bodies to become plants. That sentence sounds like a misprint, but it’s the most original premise of the month. Horror fans also get two Shudder originals, New Group on 6 November and The Holy Boy on 27 November, and Netflix’s steampunk western Bass X Machina rides in today.
Dates can still wobble (they usually do), but if they hold, the last fortnight of November will offer the Second Age of Middle-earth and the replicants of 2099 within the same two weeks. By the time December’s blockbusters arrive in cinemas, a lot of us will have forgotten what daylight looks like. Fittingly, so has everyone in Fool Night.
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