It sure is August, isn’t it? Maybe for you that feels like a vacation or back-to-school shopping or finally succumbing to the “Pop Goes the Weasel” siren song of the ice cream truck that has been idling on your corner since Memorial Day. But here in TV land, it means a release calendar that’s as clear as the sky on a perfect beach day. It wasn’t easy finding five standouts among this month’s offerings of filler and fluff. Happily, though, Netflix springs eternal—and a look beyond the standard streaming services yields plenty of diverting newness. Below, you’ll find a contemporary riff on Greek mythology, an addictive reality competition, a genuinely lovely comedy about the onset of menopause, and more.
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A Good Girl’s Guide to Murder (Netflix)
The 21st century British answer to Nancy Drew is Pip Fitz-Amobi, the eponymous 17-year-old heroine of this bingeable six-episode adaptation of Holly Jackson’s YA best-seller. A brilliant late bloomer who’s more likely to obsess over a school project than a crush, Pip—played with heart and pluck by Wednesday’s Emma Meyers—becomes fixated on a grisly crime that shocked her small town five years earlier. After a high schooler, Andie Bell (India Lillie Davies), went missing, her boyfriend, Sal Singh (Rahul Pattni), killed himself, and locals accepted the murder-suicide narrative. But Pip, who is haunted by her final encounter with Sal, feels certain that he was innocent. So she investigates, tirelessly, learning things she’d rather not know about friends and family, and thereby doing a lot of maturing, in the process. The season finale is a bit scattered, but the episodes that precede it are both suspenseful and smarter than your average teen drama. Come for the mystery, stay for Meyers’ lovely portrayal of Pip’s growing pains.
The Anonymous (USA)
Social strategy games are the reality TV subgenre of the 2020s, thanks largely to the popularity of Peacock’s murder-mystery riff The Traitors and, before it, Netflix’s social-media-inspired The Circle. Both feature character-rich casting, hardcore strategy, diabolical twists, and savvy editing to addictive effect—and both are the work of British-American production company Studio Lambert. Now they’ve come to USA, a channel you probably haven’t thought much about since Suits ended in 2019, with a competition that combines elements of both shows.
The Anonymous has contestants battling on two fronts for a cash prize. Daily IRL hangouts and structured games, which can grant immunity to winners, allow for the forging of personal bonds. But players also spend a portion of their day talking anonymous smack about one another in a Circle-like online chat. Each round culminates in the nomination of candidates for elimination, one of whom is ultimately selected by the Anonymous—the cast member who’s done the best job disguising their secret identity. The mechanics are a bit complicated, but after screening a few episodes, I was hooked. Another selling point: along with Big Brother champ Xavier E. Prather and Survivor alum Nina Twine, the cast includes Andy King, breakout star of Netflix’s Fyre Fest documentary. I mean, look, it’s not The Wire. But for August, it’ll do just fine.
The Change (BritBox)
Linda has had enough. Soon after a 50th birthday party where her oafish husband (Omid Djalili) pronounces her “well fit for your age and a great mum” as she tidies up on the sidelines, she learns that she’s in the throes of menopause. So she takes the diagnosis as a sign, speeding off on her old motorcycle for a sabbatical from her ungrateful family and leaving behind a ledger documenting every second of “invisible work” she’s performed over the past 25 years. In search of peace and quiet—as well as a time capsule she hid in a tree as a little girl—Linda, played by creator Bridget Christie, ends up entangled in the civic dramas of a prototypical British village, where she befriends such eccentric local characters as garrulous barfly Tony (Paul Whitehouse) and a pair of rustic restaurateurs known as the Eel Sisters (Susan Lynch and Monica Dolan).
The Change is a tale of midlife feminist awakening—one that shares some similarities with Peacock’s heinous Apples Never Fall and particularly the great Georgian movie My Happy Family. But it’s unusually gentle and empathetic for a story of its kind. While many of Linda’s new neighbors are struggling with changing norms around gender and race, their openness to dialogue with others in their small community keeps them from becoming culture-war caricatures. Best of all is Christie’s funny, searching performance, which defies quirk and sanctimony alike to give us a rare portrait of a woman embracing a much-maligned stage of life.
Hollywood Black (MGM+)
“What is a Black movie?” Filmmaker Justin Simien (Dear White People, Bad Hair) posed this question to each of the luminaries he interviewed for his four-part docuseries that traces the Black community’s contributions to and depiction in cinema from the silent era through the present. Informed by Donald Bogle’s book Hollywood Black: The Stars, the Films, the Filmmakers, Simien filters this history through the perspectives of the contemporary creators and stars it influenced: Ryan Coogler, Issa Rae, Ava DuVernay, Gina Prince-Bythewood, executive producer Forest Whitaker, and many more. It’s an education, delving into iconic movies like Stormy Weather, The Wiz, and Boyz n the Hood along with lesser-known titles. A final episode that opens with the election of Barack Obama is fueled by firsthand accounts of a 21st century revolution in representation but also acknowledges the fragility of that progress.
KAOS (Netflix)
You would expect the king of the gods to have a pretty massive ego, but even by that standard, Zeus is a real piece of work. He swallowed his first wife, Metis, whole. His courtship, if you can call it that, of Hera (who was also his sister) involved transforming himself into an adorable cuckoo bird; he also used the animal trick on mortals, committing rapes in the form of a bull, a swan, etc. Pandora’s box? That was all Zeus. In the Netflix series KAOS, premiering Aug. 29, Prometheus—who was famously condemned by Zeus to be forever bound to a cliff and have his infinitely regenerating liver pecked out by an eagle—calls him a “transcendent, unmitigated bastard.”
This kind of gloriously polysyllabic insult is a trademark of British comedy, and in this case, it comes courtesy of screenwriter and showrunner Charlie Covell, who created the cult teen dramedy The End of the F***ing World. With KAOS, Covell updates Greek mythology for a contemporary world where Jesus never arrived to chase away the old gods. In this telling, which mixes elements of comedy and political thriller, the Olympians are a sort of divine crime family; Jeff Goldblum, that master of oleaginous creepitude, stars as Zeus in a lightning-bolt-bedazzled tracksuit. It’s a clever, if not wholly original, premise, elevated by smart casting, sharp dialogue, and world-building that makes inspired use of some of Western culture’s most enduring lore. [Read the full review.]