‘Furious,’ ‘Sterling Point’ and Other Summer TV Critics’ Picks

DANIEL FIENBERG This was the Blond Ambition summer on the small screen — a wave of platinum domination entirely unrelated to the release of a new Madonna album.

The season’s TV programming was bookended by the 2026 World Cup, an event ruled on social media (and occasionally on the pitch) by Norwegian striker Erling Haaland, who captivated our algorithms with his droll sense of humor and love of taxidermy raccoons; and by the return of Apple’s Ted Lasso, featuring Hannah Waddingham’s excitable Rebecca. (Meanwhile, Waddingham had a better series smack in the middle of summer with Amazon’s action comedy Ride or Die, which very likably paired the Emmy winner with Octavia Spencer.) Are Haaland’s and Waddingham’s towhead locks natural? Only their hairdressers know for sure. 

We got a perplexing prequel to Legally Blonde in Amazon’s canon-destroying Elle, plus the usual onslaught of blond-wigged Targaryens in HBO’s House of the Dragon, which continues to waffle frustratingly between potent palace intrigue and an excess of dragons. Critics and audiences alike went gaga over Sam Reid’s glammed-out turn as a bloodthirsty vampire gone rock star in AMC’s The Vampire Lestat. Even Will Ferrell got washed out, tonsorially and qualitatively, in Netflix’s lifeless golfing comedy The Hawk. 

Does it feel like audiences skipped beach reading for bleach viewing this summer? Or am I reaching to find a unifying theme for this conversation about another summer of wildly uneven television?

ANGIE HAN Clever wordplay, faulty premise. I’d say bleach viewing and beach reading have both been prominent themes this season.

Amazon tried to recapture that Summer I Turned Pretty sizzle with the annoyingly mopey Every Year After, another YA adaptation about teens mooning over each other by the water. FX served up a sexier, deadlier high school drama with The Shards, which has Ryan Murphy helping to bring Bret Easton Ellis’ novel to the small screen, yielding results almost exactly as stylishly excessive but uneven as you’d expect. Heck, Peacock took on a book by Elin Hilderbrand, an author who’s been described as “The Queen of Beach Reads,” with the starry yet underwhelming Five-Star Weekend.

Toss in a couple of shows that are beach-set and feel beach read-based but aren’t — Megan Park’s marvelously funny and sensitive Amazon original Sterling Point, which sees several youths flirting, crying and speedboating around a Canadian lake; and Hulu’s airily insubstantial The Season, which chronicles a yachting season for the Hong Kong elite — and, actually, I feel like a huge slice of my summer viewing has been beautiful people entering and exiting various bodies of water.

But it’s hard to say many of these titles have left much of an impression (Sterling Point excepted). In the tradition of actual beach reads, I’ve found most of them easy to tear through but almost as easy to forget. Not everything needs to be as sharp and searing as, say, Hulu’s Epstein-era female rage thriller Furious — possibly my favorite newcomer of the past few months — but it’d be nice to come away from all this TV viewing with something more than a vague sense of having passed some time.

FIENBERG Fair point. And what’s summer for if not a slew of lushly watchable literary adaptations…like the second half of Netflix’s astonishingly ambitious One Hundred Years of Solitude, which definitely has gotten less buzz than Anya Taylor-Joy running around with different haircuts in Apple TV’s underwhelming underwhelming Lucky (based on the Marissa Stapley novel) or the ensemble of genetic superheroes — their powers are “cheekbones” — doing lines, listening to ’80s hits and mostly ignoring a serial killer in The Shards. They actually do spend a lot of time getting into and out of swimming pools in The Shards, even if Murphy abandons the book at the halfway point, turning an already overextended tome into a potentially ongoing series that gives all indication of itself being overextended.

There’s nothing wrong, mind you, with taking big leaps from source material. It is in fact the smartest way to handle IP in a landscape still glutted with remakes and reboots. Take Furious, which really is one of the summer’s more provocative shows. Liz Meriwether sorta, kinda uses the 1987 thriller Black Widow — in which a government agent (Debra Winger) hunts a female serial killer (Theresa Russell) — as a starting point for a series that doesn’t even bear that title anymore. Instead, the game of cat and mouse between Emmy Rossum’s Alice and Lola Petticrew’s Catherine becomes something darker, more complexly motivated and, as you note, timelier. We haven’t even reached this year’s Emmys, but I’ll line up behind next year’s campaign for Rossum, Petticrew and supporting performers Quincy Tyler Bernstine and Steve Way.

Then again, big leaps from IP don’t always work. Case in point: HBO Max’s Stuart Fails to Save the Universe is the third straight Big Bang Theory spinoff to deviate wildly from the style and tone of CBS’ multicam blockbuster, but imagining an apocalyptic multiverse sci-fi comedy based on a group of tertiary Big Bang characters isn’t the same as doing anything good with them.

Other entries in this Hot IP Summer? Netflix’s appealingly wholesome Little House on the Prairie, Apple TV’s stylish but overextended Cape Fear and even a new Zorro for anybody who knows what MHz Choice is.

HAN They’re all Hot IP Summers now, aren’t they? But brand recognition alone doesn’t make for a good show. Stuart Fails to Save the Universe indeed came up with a fun, clever premise…and then apparently just decided to stop trying there; everything else about the series is totally lackluster. Elle had the opposite problem, sort of: It’s a decent teen dramedy on its own but a terrible idea for a Legally Blonde spinoff, since it essentially negates the whole premise of that parent film (why would Elle need to relearn in her 20s the very lessons she’s learning here in her teens?).

One franchise expansion I thought did get it right was Star City. “For All Mankind, from the perspective of the Soviet Union” wasn’t something I thought I needed. But the Apple TV series taps into some of the ain’t-space-neat appeal of the original’s early seasons while establishing its own chilly, paranoid flavor. It actually feels, contrary to so many of these spinoffs, like getting to see a new corner of an already established universe.

I guess you could also consider The Vampire Lestat in this category, even if it’s technically just the renamed third season of AMC’s Interview With the Vampire. Though I was an enthusiastic fan of the past two seasons, the pivot to a modern-day Lestat-centric story took some adjusting. But I give the show all the credit for continuing to forge ahead into new territory rather than retread familiar ground.

Especially since that’s more than can be said of some other returning hits. After three years away, Apple TV’s Ted Lasso is back with a new season but seemingly no new ideas. HBO’s House of the Dragon continues to trudge along at what feels like a glacial pace, even as stuff is technically happening and some of that stuff is even pretty compelling. And while I really enjoyed The Bear‘s final ride, it spent nearly the whole season literally stuck in place, maneuvering everyone exactly where we always knew they’d end up.

FIENBERG I liked moments of the final season of The Bear, and if the penultimate episode had been the series finale, it would have been a worthy sendoff for Carmy and the team. Speaking of finales I could have done without — Apple TV’s Sugar was a stylish, mysterious love letter to Los Angeles for most of its second season, showcasing Colin Farrell swaggering in fancy suits and solving crimes, only to steer into its alien twist in a finale I found pretty silly. 

Honestly, though, a lot of my favorite shows this summer sneaked up on me — like Sterling Point. Even with Josh Schwartz and Stephanie Savage (The O.C.) as producers, this example of teen drama done right consistently surprised and pleased me, especially the star-making roles for Ella Rubin and Amélie Hoeferle. So many teen dramas are trashy or schmaltzy; it’s nice to be reminded that love triangles and coming-of-age anxiety are still potent narrative staples that don’t need to be reinvented.

If Starz’s The Listeners had premiered on HBO and hadn’t sat on the shelf for nearly two years, we’d be talking about Rebecca Hall as an awards contender for her haunting work as a high school English teacher whose sanity frays when she starts hearing a mysterious hum that nobody else can hear. And despite its slightly icky premise — 50-something guy starts dating his best friend’s 20-something daughter — Hulu’s Alice and Steve went to some amusing, unexpected places and boasted great work from Nicola Walker and Jemaine Clement as the toxic pair of titular BFFs.

What were your favorite discoveries of the summer, Angie, other than Erling Haaland’s social media presence?

HAN That’s a pretty high bar! But I return to my love for Furious. It’s not blond, beachy escapism, but it grabbed me from its very first moments and never let go. That’s a win, no matter the season.

This story appeared in the Aug. 12 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. Click here to subscribe.