Horror is ubiquitous on TV at this time of year, and those of us who love a good scare—myself very much included—usually look forward to it. Unfortunately, October 2025’s selection of IP expansions (IT: Welcome to Derry, Anne Rice’s Talamasca) and true crime murdersploitation left me mostly cold. You will find one worthwhile serial-killer story among this month’s highlights, though—plus a thriller with the deceptively spooky title Down Cemetery Road, a docudrama that resurrects Margaret Thatcher, an in-depth profile of a filmmaker who stares into the darkness of the human soul, and a dispatch from the delightfully unhinged brain of Tim Robinson.
Brian and Maggie (PBS)
We’ve gotten quite a few shows and movies, in the last few years, dissecting real telecasts from the annals of British news media. Prince Andrew’s disastrous 2019 Newsnight appearance yielded both a Netflix movie, Scoop, and an Amazon miniseries, A Very Royal Scandal. Princess Diana’s explosive Panorama interview, a major plot point in the 2013 biopic Diana, loomed large in the fifth season of The Crown. And now we’ve got Brian and Maggie, writer James Graham (a Crown alum) and director Stephen Frears’ (A Very English Scandal) two-part account of Labour MP turned journalist Brian Walden’s uncompromising 1989 interrogation of Margaret Thatcher, which helped to bring about the arch-conservative Prime Minister’s downfall.
You might well ask why this 90-minute series wasn’t a movie. American viewers are also liable to be confused by some of the political particulars. But Steve Coogan and Harriet Walter are both superb in nuanced lead roles; Walden’s alienation from his party and Thatcher’s isolation as a female striver surrounded by nepo noblemen go a long way towards explaining why they became so friendly, he crossed ethical lines to help her. Yet Walden’s hero turn in the second episode makes a strong case for the value of confrontational interviews with powerful politicians. Graham’s script is especially perceptive on the ideological clash between Thatcherism and the left. As one critic of the PM puts it: “We used to have communities, and now we just have stuff.”
The Chair Company (HBO)
Ron Trosper is losing it. The Chair Company, an HBO comedy that premieres on Oct. 12, traces the unraveling of this suburban family man, played by co-creator Tim Robinson, who believes he’s stumbled upon a criminal conspiracy following a minor workplace humiliation. But that conspiracy tends to manifest in the form of universal contemporary annoyances. “You can’t get a hold of anybody,” Ron rants after his investigation leads him into customer-service hell. “That’s the problem with the world today. People make garbage, and you can’t talk to anybody. You can’t complain, you can’t get an apology. I wanna scream at ’em!”
The character will be familiar to anyone who knows Robinson’s work. In his Netflix sketch show I Think You Should Leave and recent feature Friendship, the comedian portrays men who are hilariously, uncontrollably angry for reasons they don’t seem to fully understand. In his nitpicking and narcissism, the relatability of his grievances and his unhinged methods of redressing them, Ron also resembles a younger, Middle American version of Larry David’s Curb Your Enthusiasm antihero. He’s a great character—one portrayed with the explosive mix of awkwardness and rage Robinson has perfected and placed in situations that are funny because they’re absurd, but also because, despite their surreal trappings, they speak to modern discontents.
