The award-winning Transparent returns to Amazon Prime this fall, and the streaming service is giving it some new high-profile company.
Woody Allen, Miley Cyrus, Elaine May, Billy Bob Thornton, William Hurt, Tig Notaro and Jim Belushi are among the faces of Amazon’s fall slate, which will include three new or returning dramas and six new or returning comedies.
Crisis in Six Scenes (right), Allen’s first-ever television series, will drop Sept. 30. Amazon describes it as “a comedy that takes place in the 1960s during turbulent times in the United States when a middle-class suburban family is visited by a guest who turns their household completely upside down.”
Allen will star alongside Cyrus and May. Rachel Brosnahan and John Magaro will be among the recurring actors.
While Allen spent many years early in his career writing jokes for television shows, he has created exclusively movies over the last five decades.
Another high-profile project for Amazon this fall is Goliath (top), a tense legal drama that premieres Oct. 14 starring Thornton, Hurt, Olivia Thirlby, Mario Bello and Molly Parker.
Thornton, who has carved out a compelling career of late in limited-run TV series, plays William McBride, a one-time rock-star attorney who for unexplained reasons has lost his job, his marriage, his sobriety and his way.
Then he stumbles onto a case that reignites the fire, while also pitting him against his vengeful former law partner, played by Hurt, and powerful forces whose role in the case only gradually becomes evident.
Amazon’s other new fall drama, Good Girls Revolt, which premieres Oct. 28, is a lightly fictionalized chronicle of an early gender discrimination lawsuit. It was filed in 1969 by a group of women who work at a newsmagazine where only men get meaningful promotions.
The opening episode features Grace Gummer as Nora Ephron, who is among the first women refusing to accept a system wherein women are not considered skillful enough to write published copy.
Two other new half-hour comedies will also debut this fall: One Mississippi on Sept. 9 and Fleabag on Sept. 16.
One Mississippi is a mostly autobiographical tale written by and starring Tig Notaro. She returns to her Southern hometown at a point when her life is falling apart and finds that family doesn’t always make it better.
The six-episode series is about “85%” true to life, says Notaro, who is the latest member of the Louis C.K. orbit to make a droll television show.
Fleabag is the TV adaptation of a hit stage show written by Phoebe Waller-Bridge. Waller-Bridge, who also stars, often speaks directly to the viewer about what she’s really thinking as she tries to navigate her way through a frenzied personal and professional life in contemporary London.
It premieres Sept. 16.
Amazon’s highest profile show, Transparent, returns Sept. 30 with Jeffrey Tambor as Maura.
Her Pfefferman family breaks off on separate paths as the season begins, with Maura exploring surgery, and Amazon says they will come back together as the season progresses.
The 1980s comedy Red Oaks, a coming-of-age story set at a tennis club in New Jersey, returns Nov. 11, and the award-winning Mozart in the Jungle comes back Dec. 9.
Part of this season’s Mozart was filmed in Venice, fitting its operatic and classical-music themes.
The dark drama Man in the High Castle, whose stars include Alexa Davalos, Luke Kleintank, Rupert Evans, DJ Qualls and Rufus Sewell, returns for its third season on Dec. 16.
The premise of High Castle, which is set in 1962, is that the Axis powers won World War II and have carved up America into a German zone in the East and a Japanese zone in the West, with a lawless no-man’s land as a buffer in between. A small resistance movement struggles to throw the occupiers out.