Guardian Newsletter Flags Busy Autumn TV Season After Quiet Summer

The Guardian's culture newsletter "The Guide" has highlighted what it describes as an unusually dense run of new television this autumn, following a summer the newsletter's author characterised as weak for the medium.

According to the newsletter, issue #261, the summer television schedule was disrupted by the World Cup, which the writer said "ate up all traditional television scheduling" while streaming services did not counterprogramme against it. The newsletter singled out "The Bear" as a show that "came and went before anybody noticed" during this period, and described HBO's "House of the Dragon" as having "conclusively disappeared up its own bottom," reflecting the author's critical view of the show's recent run.

The author wrote that during the quieter summer months, they relied largely on Disney's "Furious," describing the experience of waiting for new episodes in stark terms as comparable to "someone in a desert sucking condensation off the underside of a tarpaulin."

The newsletter said that with autumn's arrival, television has returned with unusual intensity. Among the titles cited was HBO's "War," described in the newsletter as an "incredible divorce drama," and "The Paper," a comedy the author called "hilarious" in its return.

The newsletter format, a recurring feature from Guardian Culture, frames its content as personal recommendation and commentary from its author rather than straight news reporting, and the observations described above reflect the writer's own characterisations of the shows discussed.