As the temperatures rose in July, the number of must-watch shows fell. But worry not: The dragons are coming. HBO’s The House of the Dragon highlights what ought to be a huge month of streaming—so jack up the AC, turn off the lights, and tuck into some television.
What’s New to Streaming in August
A selected list of movies and TV shows coming this month that The Ringer is very excited about.
Industry, Season 2 (August 1, HBO Max)
Julian Kimble: Industry, HBO’s finance drama about damaged people working long hours to fill their voids with large sums of money, doesn’t moralize, but it does make one thing explicitly clear: Money can’t fix you. However, it can enable and distract from glaring personal problems—like a Bank of England-produced Band-Aid slapped haphazardly and feebly over internal chaos.
Reservation Dogs, Season 2 (August 3, Hulu)
Alison Herman: The first season of Reservation Dogs ends with a dream deferred. Throughout the FX comedy’s first season, its namesake crew has set its sights on California, a fantasy solution to some very real problems. Every scheme, from stealing a truck full of potato chips to hawking meat pies outside a health clinic, was supposed to save money for the foursome’s fresh start, far from the Muscogee reservation they call home. But by the end of the eighth and final episode, only Elora Danan (Devery Jacobs)—the group’s most harshly pragmatic member, named after the character from Willow—has made her escape. Cheese (Lane Factor) and Willie Jack (Paulina Alexis) have chosen to stay; Bear (D’Pharaoh Woon-A-Tai) was ready to go, only for Elora to leave him behind. She’s partnered up with the leader of a rival group instead, correctly sensing a kindred spirit beneath the meaningless turf war.
Lightyear (August 3, Disney+)
The Resort (August 4, Peacock)
Herman: At first, The Resort instills a certain sense of dejá vu. The limited series, now streaming the first three of eight episodes, is a tropical getaway suffused with mystery and dread, à la The White Lotus or Old. It’s also the latest brain-bending genre story—after Made for Love, Black Mirror’s “USS Callister,” and more—to star Cristin Milioti in a role that straddles the romantic and the supernatural. Those similarities make more sense when the credits start to roll: The Resort’s creator and showrunner, Andy Siara, is the screenwriter of Palm Springs, the riff on Groundhog Day that trapped Milioti’s character at a desert wedding with Andy Samberg.
Never Have I Ever, Season 3 (August 12, Netflix)
She-Hulk: Attorney at Law (August 17, Disney+)
Jodi Walker: You know what’s never been done? A 30-minute legal drama about a female superhero with the general shape and sex appeal of a brand-new Range Rover. She-Hulk is an opportunity to finally couple a Marvel superhero who is roughly the size of a barge with a Marvel superhero who fucks.
House of the Dragon (August 21, HBO Max)
Zach Kram: House of the Dragon was a top spinoff choice for author George R.R. Martin, as it “had all the intrigue, competition for the Iron Throne, murders, duels, big battles, 20 dragons,” he told THR. Based on part of Martin’s Fire and Blood book, House will chronicle the Targaryen war of succession about 150-200 years before the events of Thrones, with main players including King Viserys I; crown princess Rhaenyra, his daughter; Prince Daemon, his brother; and Alicent Hightower, Rhaenyra’s best friend and daughter of the king’s hand.
See, Season 3 (August 26, Apple TV+)
Alex Siquig: Nary a soul on planet Earth, no matter how bizarre, has been dreaming of finally answering the age-old question of how credibly Jason Momoa could portray a blind man—and not just any blind man, but one who kicks a ton of ass and lives in a bleak quasi-neolithic future in which sight has been lost to humanity for centuries. The counterpoint is of course that, if the so-called Golden Age of Television has taught us anything, it is that people will watch (or binge, which is sort of like watching, but sadder) literally any damn thing if it looks like it was shot on professional cameras and it features people bonking each other with swords, or things that at least look like swords.
Andor (August 31, Disney+)
Some New-ish Things You Might’ve Missed
Because it’s hard to keep up with everything, here are a few things that have premiered relatively recently that may be worth catching up on.
Black Bird (Apple TV+)
Herman: Black Bird adapts the memoir of James “Jimmy” Keene, an ex-convict once recruited to extract a confession from an alleged serial killer. (Keene himself serves as an executive producer.) Both Keene—played by Taron Egerton, doing a very different kind of impression than his turn as Elton John in Rocketman—and his target Larry Hall (Paul Walter Hauser) are real people. But it’s likely some viewers will tune in because they’re drawn to a different factual figure: that of Ray Liotta, the recently deceased actor who plays Keene’s father.
Rap Sh!t (HBO Max)
Herman: Back in 2015, FX announced its newest comedy with a simple logline: “Atlanta revolves around two cousins on their way up through the Atlanta rap scene.” That brief summary implied a different kind of show than the one Atlanta turned out to be: a screwball sitcom about an odd couple and their misadventures of the week. Donald Glover’s show ended up more moody, and less linear, than its description—or even its pilot—implied. Seven years later, though, that alternate version has finally made it to air. Rap Sh!t trades Atlanta for Miami, and cousins for estranged high school friends. The series nonetheless shares a starting point with its predecessor and peer, even if it proceeds in its own direction.
The Boys, Season 3 (Prime Video)
The Rehearsal (HBO Max)
Herman: The Rehearsal, a six-episode series, is the second product of an overall deal between Nathan Fielder and HBO, but the first in which Fielder appears in front of the camera. (Fielder is an executive producer on How to With John Wilson, the quirky, digressive docuseries that gives a softer edge to gonzo gimmickry.) The show is, in essence, a supersized version of Nathan for You’s “Finding Frances” dry run. In an effort to reduce the uncertainty of everyday life, Fielder has volunteers “rehearse” fraught interactions, from confessing a secret to confronting a sibling. Inevitably, Fielder finds himself drawn into the experiment as more than a neutral observer.
Resident Evil (Netflix)
Surrey: Netflix’s Resident Evil follows two new characters created for the series: Jade and Billie Wesker. In the 2022 timeline, Jade and Billie are teenagers who move with their father, Albert Wesker, to New Raccoon City, a company town in South Africa formed by the mysterious Umbrella Corporation. (Considering Albert’s history in the games as an over-the-top villain, it’s a bit jarring to see him introduced as a dad managing two angsty teens.) Meanwhile, we also touch base with a grown-up Jade in 2036, when the planet has been reduced to a post-apocalyptic wasteland littered with zombies, or “zeroes” as they’re called by Earth’s survivors. Obviously, the Wesker family is the connective tissue between the two timelines—the thrill is discovering how the events in 2022 lead to the collapse of civilization, and why Billie and Albert aren’t anywhere to be seen in 2036.
