Here I am again — in a waiting room. It doesn’t matter if I’m at my general practitioner or dentist or, in this case, waiting for my sister-in-law to deliver her baby girl and make me an uncle for the first time. 

There’s one thing all of these places have in common, whether I’m in my home state or visiting family multiple states away. 

​HGTV will be on the waiting room television - probably at a higher than necessary volume. That way, it can drown out the screams of the dentist drilling through your enamel or the women in the throes of labor pain. 

It’s the most harmless of all entertainment options. No cable news to remind those waiting on their procedure or their loved ones to pop a watermelon-sized baby out of their body that the world is a crazy and dangerous place. There are no politics potentially leading to fisticuffs in the room between lefties and righties bickering over the fall of America, which they can both agree is happening but can’t agree on the reasonings why.

And there’s never sports because you don’t want fans loudly cheering or jeering on a game while medical procedures go down behind the doors and walls. If there is screaming, it will be because there’s a watermelon passing through one’s birth canal and not because your team’s right fielder dropped a ball he’d lost in the sun. 

Have you ever noticed that despite the fact that these shows on HGTV feature differing faces and different names, they’re all essentially the same? Someone is helping a couple, almost always white and straight, find the right dream home, usually deemed a fixer-upper, within a certain budget, and then they start remodeling, knocking all sorts of walls down, and making it the perfect little home. 

I don’t even spend that much time in waiting rooms. But I’ve seen enough HGTV for life. Dammit, Julia, is that kid here yet?! 

Slow Horses: Season 4 (AppleTV+) – Wednesday, September 4
The fourth season of AppleTV+’s drama series “Slow Horses” premieres on Wednesday, September 4, hot after receiving nine Emmy Awards, including Outstanding Drama Series, Outstanding Actor in a Drama Series (Gary Oldman), and Outstanding Supporting Actor in a Drama Series (Jack Lowden). “Slow Horses” has become one of television’s best examples of an exciting spy thriller in recent years. 

Fight Night: The Million Dollar Heist (Peacock) – Thursday, September 5
“Fight Night: The Million Dollar Heist” tells the story of a heist in Atlanta in 1970 at an afterparty for a historic Muhammad Ali comeback fight. Based on the 2020 iHeart true-crime podcast of the same name, ‘Fight Night’ features Kevin Hart as a hustler named Chicken Man, who’s looking to clear his name as the number one suspect of the heist. The supporting cast features Don Cheadle, Taraji P. Henson, Terrence Howard and Samuel L. Jackson. The eight-episode limited series premieres on Peacock on Thursday, September 5. 

Frasier: Season 2 (Paramount+) – Thursday, September 19
Paramount+’s reboot of “Frasier” last year was better than anything I expected. It wasn’t quite the same award-winning series we remembered from the ‘90s and early ‘00s, of course, without the supporting cast of David Hyde Pierce, Jane Leeves and the late John Mahoney, but still full of laughs at the expense of the hoity-toity titular character, still played with ease by Kelsey Grammer. The second season premieres on Thursday, September 19.   

Colin From Accounts (Paramount+) – Thursday, September 26
The Australian import “Colin From Accounts,” which streams in the U.S. on Paramount+, was one of the pleasant surprises of 2023. The series features real-life couple Patrick Brammall and Harriet Dyer as a couple of down-on-their-luck people who have a meet-cute that turns complicated when a stray dog is struck by a car, and they decide to take care of it. The sitcom, which initially airs on the Australian streamer Binge, is occasionally more broad than American sitcoms, but the chemistry between Brammall and Dyer makes the show worthwhile. The second season drops on Paramount+ on Thursday, September 26.