The Drama Club: September 2026

This month in The Drama Club: the zombie movie that hands you the gun, Jessica Lange plays four characters, Carly Rae Jepsen deserves better than you, the show I refuse to describe, and a playlist that never gets sent. Let's go →

Each month, I recommend two movies: one you can watch at home and one you should head out to the theater for. At the end of this section, you’ll find a list of some releases coming this month.

Sony dropped a featurette a couple weeks ago with footage from Zach Cregger’s Resident Evil that confirmed the thing I wanted most: the movie goes first person. A pistol comes up into frame. A shotgun moves through a dark house. A zombie lunges right at the camera. It’s not the whole movie and it’s not a gimmick. But it’s how the games feel, and that’s the whole point. Cregger isn’t just adapting a game, he’s trying to make you feel like you’re playing one, down to the padlocked doors and the green herbs. Now look at his credits. He started in sketch comedy. Then, he made Barbarian. Remember Barbarian? If you haven’t seen that one, do it tonight. You certainly remember Weapons, which made $269 million and won Amy Madigan an Oscar. I can’t think of anyone else in horror who is on a run like this. Resident Evil opens September 18. Rated R, 95 minutes, filmed for IMAX. This summer, I have been on a horror kick, and I want one thing out of it: to be scared in a room full of strangers. This is the one I’ve been waiting for. If you’re scared, say you’re scared. I’m scared.

I watched Singin’ in the Rain for the first time last month. I’m 35 years old. I know. I know. But, wow, it holds up completely. The dancing is out of this world. Donald O’Connor’s “Make ’Em Laugh” is less a number than an assault on the human body. He runs up walls. He throws himself through furniture. Best of all, he does it grinning. Late in the film there is a ballet between Gene Kelly and Cyd Charisse that has nothing to do with the plot. It took a month to rehearse, two weeks to shoot, and cost a fifth of the entire budget. But it was worth it because it is one of the most gorgeous things I have ever seen in a movie. After I watched the film, I dug into the lore surrounding the classic. Did you know Debbie Reynolds was 19 with no dance training at all when she shot the movie? Did you know Fred Astaire came to visit the set and found her crying under a piano? Did you know her feet bled shooting “Good Morning”? No, you probably did not, because you can’t tell from watching the movie. The humor holds too, which is the part that got me. Seventy-four years later and the jokes still land. Jean Hagen as Lina Lamont is doing something close to perfect. The whole plot hinges on one woman secretly dubbing another woman’s voice, which brings me to my favorite thing I learned afterward: in real life, Jean Hagen dubbed Debbie Reynolds in the scenes where Reynolds is supposedly dubbing Hagen. The actress playing the bad voice provided the good voice. A movie making fun of fake movie magic, quietly pulling the same trick. Don’t be me. Watch it now.

More September Movies To Be Ready For:

By Any Means (September 4)

Mayday (September 4)

Practical Magic 2 (September 11)

If I Go Will They Miss Me (September 18)

Primetime (September 25)

Each month, I recommend two pieces of music: something new and something I have recently returned to. At the end of this section, you’ll find a list of some releases coming this month.

Can we please retire the bit where Carly Rae Jepsen is the "Call Me Maybe" girl? That song topped charts in more than forty countries in 2012 and has been used ever since as a reason not to take her seriously, which is a bizarre punishment for writing arguably the most efficient pop song of its decade. Meanwhile E•MO•TION turned ten last year and has passed a billion streams, and remains the record I imagine more than half the pop girls working today wish they made. "Talking to Yourself," off 2022's The Loneliest Time, is a perfect two minutes and fifty-three seconds of dance-pop with a knife in it. She has spent fifteen years writing about love not as a brand or a lifestyle, but as an undignified condition you are stuck inside of. And when sings it, it is so bright that you are humming along before you notice she has gutted you. And now she is giving us a double album. Day and Night arrives September 18, and features twenty-four tracks, twelve for daylight and twelve for after dark. The day side is warm and organic, live instrumentation with a '70s psychedelic lean (strangely her speciality over the last five years), as evidenced by the tremendous lead single “On Wires”. The night side goes sleek and synthetic and built for a dancefloor, perfectly exemplified by latest single “Motivation.” It’s such a simple concept and yet no one else has actually tried it in recent pop memory. The other single is titled "Don't Leave Me on the Dance Floor," which is possibly the most Carly Rae Jepsen sequence of words ever printed on a tracklist. So, get up, show some respect and dance with her.

Earlier this month, My Woman turned ten. Let me be honest about where I was standing in 2016. I knew Angel Olsen the way you know an artist from someone else's aux cord. I had "Unfucktheworld," the ninety-second gut-punch that opens Burn Your Fire for No Witness, and a vague sense that something serious was happening over there. I had her filed under singer-songwriter, and I was treating that category, without ever admitting it, as a ceiling. My Woman took the file and lit it on fire. Olsen has said the album is about "the complicated mess of being a woman," and the three singles hand you the whole thesis. "Intern" opens on a synth so thin it sounds like it's coming through a wall. Two tracks later, "Shut Up Kiss Me" kicks the door in: garage stomp, stadium hook, intimacy demanded in the imperative mood. Then "Sister," seven minutes and forty-six seconds of slow-building devastation that ends in a guitar solo she absolutely did not have to give us. Where "Intern" is a single lit candle in a dark room, "Shut Up Kiss Me" is a roller rink with the lights up. Where "Shut Up Kiss Me" is flirtation as a dare, "Sister" is the reckoning that comes after. The sequencing is the argument. These aren't three moods an artist is sampling, they're three simultaneous facts about a life. As Olsen repeats "all my life I thought I'd change" through the back half of "Sister," her voice cracks, then booms, then settles, and in ninety seconds runs the entire range of looking backward and realizing the past isn't behind you but carrying the entire weight of your future. Here's what I missed in 2016 and can't unhear now. She built the record as two sides and meant it literally. Side A is the hectic day: short songs, pop architecture, hooks that go where you want them to go. Side B is where she stops being polite. "Sister" runs 7:46. "Woman" runs 7:37. It’s clear Olsen wanted the drums to hit. She wanted to be big. And the deep cuts are the entire case. "Never Be Mine" is a doo-wop heartbreaker in a leather jacket. "Not Gonna Kill You" climbs a staircase for five minutes and throws itself off the top. "Those Were the Days" renders nostalgia so precisely it turns frightening. "Woman," the one most people skip because it's long, is the actual center of gravity. My Woman carved out a lane for women singer-songwriters to be rockstars. Not in the sense of being allowed to play loud, which was never in question, but of being allowed to be ambitious in public. Funny and devastated in the same song. Wear the wig, direct the video, hire the pop producer, and still get taken seriously as a writer. Before My Woman, a woman with a guitar and a diary was a genre. After My Woman, she was an architecture. The permission structure Phoebe Bridgers stepped into a year later with her debut album was emblazoned by Olsen. The willingness to let a quiet song detonate is a door Angel Olsen walked through first. And you can draw a straight line from "Shut Up Kiss Me" to Hayley Williams self-releasing twenty songs on her own imprint and pulling four Grammy nominations in the process. Ten years on, My Woman isn't just a perfect album. It's the album that changed what indie music thought a singer-songwriter could become. 

More September Albums To Be Ready For:

Bonobo – Distance In Static (September 11)

Sylvan Esso – Ow ∞ (September 11)

Boy Harsher – GET MEAN (September 18)

Bullion – Nearly (September 25)

Jae Stephens – AUDACITY (September 25)

Each month, I recommend two pieces of television, which means less and less these days but for our purposes, television means anything you can stream that isn’t structured as a film. At the end of this section, you’ll find a list of some releases coming this month.

Let's get one thing straight. Furious is the best new drama of the year. Its first season finished streaming on Hulu this week, and I am coming to you with one simple direction: start it now. Here is the detail that should get you in the door: this thing was created by Elizabeth Meriwether, who made New Girl. The woman who gave us Nick Miller and Schmidt spent the last few years making The Dropout and Dying for Sex, and has now turned in a series so controlled and so mean that you will spend the first two episodes checking the credits to be sure you read them right. Whatever the pipeline is from network sitcom to this, I want more writers in it. Like most Hulu originals, Furious is not exactly a good time. But it is urgent, unapologetic and better written than it has any business being. At the center is Emmy Rossum, who is as always incredibly watchable and human, and who also executive produced the show, which tells you how much of herself is in it. But calling it her show undersells the structure. It is a two-hander, and opposite her is Lola Petticrew, who you may know from Say Nothing, giving a performance of such stillness that every scene they share feels like a held breath. Scoot McNairy, Quincy Tyler Bernstine and Jake Lacy fill out the rest, and the trick they all pull off together is the reason I am writing this. These characters are so deeply flawed that you should hate every one of them. Instead, the performances create this aching sense that all of them deserve your empathy, including the ones who have not earned it. The show is also, unexpectedly, funny. And there is a reason I have not told you what this show is actually about. I want you to find out for yourself. What I will tell you is that it goes to a genuinely dark place, and it is not being edgy for the sake of it. It is about what happens to people afterward, and about how much of a life anger can eat. Go in rested. Do not put it on as background. Hulu renewed it for a second season before the finale even aired, so there is no risk in starting. You just have to trust me.

Remember when American Horror Story was must-watch television? Remember how gagged we all were by Coven, texting each other at midnight about Emma Roberts coming back from the dead, about Marie Laveau, about the fact that a cable show was letting Jessica Lange say the words “cat piss”? And then remember what happened. The concepts got thinner, the seasons got sloppier, the twists stopped landing, and somewhere in there it went from appointment viewing to the thing you half-watched while doing something else. By Delicate in 2023 the whole enterprise was running on fumes. I gave up long before that. I do not think I was alone. And then Ryan Murphy went and did the one thing that could drag us all back. AHS: 13 premieres September 24, and by Murphy's own description it is a crossover event. His words: "It is like The Avengers. They all come together to defeat the ultimate evil." Every era at once. Sarah Paulson is playing six or seven roles. Evan Peters is playing five. Angela Bassett, Kathy Bates, Emma Roberts, Billie Lourd, Gabourey Sidibe, Frances Conroy, Twisty the Clown, John Waters, and Ariana Grande, who has never set foot in this universe before, are all showing up. Thirteen half-hour episodes, three a week, all barreling towards a finale the week of Halloween. And Jessica Lange is back. Not a cameo, not a voiceover. She is playing all four of her characters: Constance and Jude and Fiona and Elsa. Murphy says he reached out fully expecting a no, and that without her yes there would be no season. Evan Peters said he was shocked she agreed. So am I. Light your candles, girls, we’re getting spooky and horny again.

More September TV To Be Ready For:

78th Primetime Emmy Awards - NBC/Peacock (September 14)

Monster: The Lizzie Borden Story - Netflix (September 17)

The Traitors: New Blood - Peacock (September 17)

Brothers - Apple TV (September 23)

My Sad Dead - Netflix (September 24)

Each month, I dig into one cultural topic that feels unavoidable. Sometimes it’s a moment, sometimes it’s a movement, and sometimes it’s just a question I can’t stop thinking about.

Around three weeks after we met, I started building a playlist.

There were songs I knew I wanted on it. There were songs I knew I wanted to leave off. And there was one song in particular: “Secret Language” by Ryan Beatty, which happened to be playing in my car on the way to dinner the night I met him.

I didn’t know I was going to meet him. That is the part that turned an ordinary song into something else. The song was one day old. I had heard it maybe four times. It was barely mine yet, and by the end of that night it wasn’t only mine anymore, and he had no idea.

Sitting in the parking lot afterward, not driving yet, my mind raced as the song spilled out of my car stereo. It now had exactly one thing inside it. No other summer, no other car, no other laughing fits about something we’d both forget in an hour. One day old and it was already carrying an entire night. I remember thinking that was a lot to ask of a song, and that I was already handling it like something breakable, and that I had known him for about two hours.

Sometimes things get really big really fast. That’s what happened that night. My feelings about the song were not a warning. They were a measurement.

So when he and I started seeing each other, I protected it.

That is the only word for what I did. I put songs on either side of it inside the playlist, one before and one after, like walls. Older things, songs that existed before him. “Lights On” by Hatchie went in front, a song I have had since 2022. That is the whole trick. A song you have carried for years has other rooms in it. Other summers, other cars, other people. You can put something new in a song like that and the new thing is not the only thing holding it up.

“Secret Language” didn’t have any of that yet. It was one night and nothing else. That is why it needed walls.

Over time the walls came down, but I didn’t do it on purpose. One of them got replaced by something he played for me in his bedroom. Hatchie got bumped by a song so sincere and so uncool that I would not have put it on a playlist for anyone else in my life, and I put it on this one without hesitating, at 11am. That is what took the place of the fortifications. Not something stronger, but something dumber. The protection turned out to be scaffolding, and what it was holding up was me being completely stupid about a person.

That is the first half. Getting in the car. The dinner. Getting back in the car. The weeks after.

Side A ends with “The Louvre” by Lorde. Because of course it does.

“The Louvre” is the room where we met, or it is now. The restaurant is moody and so is the song, warm light splashing off the limewashed walls. He is working. I am at a table eating sushi and smiling to myself about how magical it is that this is happening at all. He catches my eye from across the room. I look away, and then I look back out of the corner of my eye to catch him already looking, and there is a song playing in my head the entire time I do it.

Everyone who knows me well thinks of me when they hear Lorde. So that is not really a memory sitting at the end of Side A. That is me signing my name to it.

Then there is Side B, which is the future.

These are songs I have placed in there as objects, things meant to stand in for where I imagine this might go. I recognize this as a futile task. I like it anyway, because ultimately the best playlists do one thing: they take you somewhere. There’s “It Gets So Hot” by MUNA, a song about a house with no air conditioning and daydreaming because the heat has made everything else impossible, which out here is not a metaphor. Then there are songs that could fill a living room while we dance and cook. Songs that could soundtrack a drive to go do nothing on a night we never made real plans for. Songs for laughing, for playing with the dogs, for arguing about a movie one of us hasn’t seen.

The back half is all the things we will probably do and that I can already see clearly and that we have not done yet. In a lot of ways it is the best part. Nothing back there needs protecting. Nothing has happened to it. It is just my imagination having the time of its life.

But, here’s the thing. This playlist is for me.

He and I will listen to it together, and he will clock the songs that obviously matter, because he is not stupid and neither am I. He would clock the Lorde in about four seconds. But the playlist itself does not get sent, and that is not me keeping something from him. It is that a playlist you hand over stops being a practice and becomes a statement, finished, framed, done. I am not done. We are just at the beginning.

So it sits there, and I put it on once or twice a week while doing something completely quotidian like folding laundry or driving to the store, and then almost like magic he calls as a song is ending. We talk for an hour. We make a plan. I get in the car.

And I put on the song from that first night, and I drive over to meet him.