What do television, psychotherapists, and the population of Europe have in common? They all have a reputation (antiquated or otherwise) for taking long August vacations. But this year, when it comes to pumping out new shows, TV has been clocking in all month. The best of this bounty includes a prestige adaptation of a classic horror franchise, a couple of animated series, and two documentaries that are a lot more thoughtful than you might imagine given their subjects.
Alien: Earth (FX)
FX’s fantastic Alien: Earth—a prequel to Ridley Scott’s movie that is also the first live-action Alien series—is a remarkable achievement. But I wouldn’t call it a surprise. With ambitious small-screen takes on the Coen brothers masterpiece Fargo and the Marvel superhero Legion under his belt, the show’s creator, Noah Hawley, has built a reputation on reinvigorating hard-to-adapt IP in series fueled by profound insight into what makes a decades-old story relevant now. In the case of Earth, the subjects of artificial intelligence and corporate overreach provide more than enough fodder for cerebral sci-fi horror grounded in the anxieties of 2025. [Read the full review.]
Long Story Short (Netflix)
In Netflix’s Long Story Short, BoJack Horseman creator Raphael Bob-Waksberg uses the elasticity of animation to warp time, dropping in on a singular Jewish family a couple dozen times from the 1990s to 2022 (and once in 1959). Funny, idiosyncratic, philosophical, and warm, if occasionally more sentimental than BoJack fans might like, it ties together generations-spanning threads of love and resentment to create an intricate web of characters and relationships. [Read the full review.]
Magic City: An American Fantasy (Starz)
Fans of the sexy, soapy, and sneakily profound Starz noir P-Valley, which follows the denizens of an embattled Mississippi Delta strip club, have been waiting more than three years for its third season. As if to tide us over, the network has been rolling out this decidedly TV-MA documentary series about a real-life Southern strip club: Atlanta’s legendary Magic City. Backed by a team of executive producers that includes Aubrey “Drake” Graham, Adel “Future” Nur, and Jermaine Dupri, and featuring interviews with celebrity enthusiasts from Shaquille O’Neal to Nelly, Magic City: An American Fantasy is an A-list tribute to a perennial hotspot.
It’s also something more ambitious: a nuanced portrait of an unlikely institution that occupies a uniquely influential place in Black culture. Creator Cole Brown and director Charles Todd weave together the biography of the club’s ambitious owner, Michael “Mr. Magic” Barney, with the story of Black prosperity in Atlanta; the popularity of Magic City among musicians with the rise of Southern hip-hop; and the mainstreaming of stripper aesthetics with third-wave feminism. More than anything else, what makes the series so compelling is the way it centers the voices of dancers past and present, emphasizing the agency, artistry, and impossibly high standards of their occupation without glossing over the temptations or dangers of this elite form of sex work.
Women Wearing Shoulder Pads (Adult Swim)
Between Long Story Short, Hulu’s mostly great King of the Hill revival, and this series, It’s been quite the month for adult animation. The most delightfully bizarre of the three is creator Gonzalo Cordova and animation studio Cinema Fantasma’s short-form, stop-motion, Spanish-language Women Wearing Shoulder Pads, a sort of camp telenovela set in 1980s Ecuador. The characters are all female. The sensibility is extremely, sometimes explicitly queer. The shoulder pads are indeed impressive, as is the rest of the brightly colored, richly textured production design. As for the plot… it hinges on guinea pigs, a.k.a. cuyes—specifically the question of whether they should be sold as food or cherished as companions. (There’s also a character who fights supersize cuyes like a matador.) That description certainly won’t appeal to everyone, but if it does pique your interest, there’s a good chance you’ll enjoy it as much as I did.
The Yogurt Shop Murders (HBO)
“That’s the most important story,” Sonora Thomas reflects in the HBO docuseries The Yogurt Shop Murders. “To tell people that [the nightmares recounted in true crime have] a negative impact on so many people’s lives for decades and decades and decades. This isn’t something that you just overcome or recover from. That’s the story that’s more important than whodunit.” As both a therapist and the younger sister of Eliza Thomas, a 17-year-old girl who was killed alongside three of her friends in 1991, she should know that better than just about anyone.
Margaret Brown, who directed this empathetic four-part documentary, clearly took her subject’s words to heart. The quadruple homicide at an Austin, TX I Can’t Believe It’s Yogurt! store remains unsolved despite a pair of convictions in the early aughts that were overturned years later. Instead of trying to tie up the case once and for all, Brown revisits decades’ worth of failed investigations in order to show just how many innocent people became its secondary victims. There are the girls’ families, whose ordeals are recounted sensitively and in detail; the detectives, who were subject to such intense pressure that at least one was diagnosed with PTSD; and the kind of harmless local weirdos who inevitably become left-field suspects and conspiracy-theory targets when a search for culprits goes on for long enough. Yet unlike the anti-true-crime manifestoes that have, themselves, become a stock subgenre of true crime, The Yogurt Shop Murders also illustrates how telling such painful stories can be a path to healing.
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