Here’s what’s happening in the world of television for Sunday, October 31. All times are Eastern.
Top picks
Doctor Who: Flux (BBC America, 8 p.m.): The eight-episode season is set to start tonight with a “Halloween Apocalypse” episode. As the first teaser demonstrated, the 13th season will see “Whittaker taking center stage (and center frame) to declare that ‘The Flux is coming.’ The Doctor then rattles off a bunch of Who heavies who’ll be accompanying… The Flux… name-checking the Weeping Angels, the Sontarans, and ‘creatures known as the Ravages,’ who sound, and we hate to judge a book by its murder-cover here, like they might be bad.” Caroline Siede will be back in the TARDIS on recapping duty.
Insecure (HBO, 10:00 p.m)
Curb Your Enthusiasm (HBO, 10:30 p.m.): Maybe you want to spend Halloween watching Larry get tortured? Last week, the season 11 premiere even had us “feeling bad for the guy on more than one occasion and nodding vehemently as he made the very valid point that six months is a long time to wait for repayment of a $6,000 loan.”
Succession (HBO, 9 p.m.): Halloween is the “holiday we get to spend with friends” holiday before the holidays we have to celebrate with family. Why not engage in some JOMO with these monsters? In her last recap, Roxana Hadadi points out exactly how the Roy siblings claw at each other: “[T]hey’re digging into each other with particular verve and with an instinctual sense of what makes each other tick… Kendall’s read of Shiv as insincere was correct; Shiv’s read of Roman as unable to commit was correct; her ‘Unsubscribe!’ to Kendall’s self-important rant was gleefully mean.”
Wild card
Halloween TV Episodes (streaming on various): For your holiday viewing pleasure, The A.V. Club has composed a list of the best Halloween TV episodes of the 21st century. There’s also the delight in binge-watching only the Halloween episodes of a show that really delivered on them—Community, Parks And Recreation, The Office, Brooklyn Nine-Nine, and Frasier have several seasons’ worth of spookiness to choose from. What are your favorites?