From the anticipated return of Futurama to a Zack Snyder’s latest pair of Rebel Moon movies, we round up our top 10 shows to watch this week
1. Hotel Portofino – Sunday, July 28, WTVS & KCTS | Season Premiere
Picking up two years later, season three of PBS’s picturesque Italian period drama finds British hotelier Bella prepping for two very special guests: her father and sister. But it’s the arrival of a third that throws her for a loop, when estranged husband Cecil shows up seeking a divorce.
2. Cobra – Sunday, July 28, WTVS | Season Premiere
The taut political drama returns for season three, taking us inside the British government’s Cabinet Office Briefing Room A (“COBRA” for short), where politicians convene with the country’s top experts to suss out the best way to handle national crises. This year, professional and parental responsibilities collide for Prime Minister Robert Sutherland (Robert Carlyle), as his own rebellious daughter (Holly Cattle) leads the charge for an environmentalist group that has staged a protest in a railway tunnel. But when a sinkhole suddenly opens up, it puts the girl’s life in peril and leads to a dark discovery hidden deep underground.
3. Futurama – Monday, July 29, Disney+ | Season Premiere
Currently in the midst of its third resurrection, Futurama returns for a second season on Disney+. Indeed, the sci-fi cartoon from Simpsons creator Matt Groening has proven exceptionally difficult to cancel. In part, that’s because of a small-yet-rabid fanbase, and in part because its premise — about 20th-century pizza boy Philip J. Fry, who’s accidentally cryogenically frozen, wakes up in the 31st century and joins his great-great-great-grand-nephew’s intergalactic parcel delivery service — represents a boundless sandbox of story possibilities.
As executive producer Claudia Katz opined in an interview with Digital Spy just before the series was pulled off the TV scrap heap for a second time in 2023: “The vision and tone of the show have not changed much the past 24 years [since its original 1999 debut]. However, technology and the world we live in has changed substantially in that same time. Part of the charm of Futurama has always been how much has or has not changed 1,000 years in the future.”
Per Disney+’s press release, these next 10 episodes will see: “birthday party games to the death, the secrets of Bender’s ancestral robot village, A.I. friends (and enemies), impossibly cute beanbags and the true five-million-year-old story behind the consciousness-altering substance known as coffee. And, of course, the next chapter in Fry and Leela’s fateful, time-twisted romance.”
Meanwhile, in a separate interview with MovieWeb after last season, Katz mused on what the future of Futurama might hold, teasing: “I always like the rearview window into Fry’s life before he was frozen . . . Those episodes are always very funny and sweet. I would love to revisit the Galactic Entity, and we always enjoy the challenge of the three-part anthology episodes. They’re a great opportunity to flex.”
4. Unsolved Mysteries – Wednesday, July 31, Netflix | Season Premiere
Back for a fourth season, Netflix’s reboot of the trailblazing reality show — which aired from 1987 until 2010 and was originally hosted by Untouchables star Robert Stack — delves into stubborn enigmas that continue to confound and confuse. From unsolved murders to UFO sightings to unexplained disappearances to ghoulish ghost stories, no conundrum is too weird or too outlandish for this show, which is probably why the concept has remained as enduringly popular as it has. “This is our most unique volume yet,” says co-creator Terry Dunn. “From one of the most notorious unsolved cases of all time to all-new baffling mysteries, there’s something for everyone to solve.”
5. Mountain Queen: The Summits of Lhakpa Sherpa – Wednesday, July 31, Netflix
Lhakpa Sherpa was the first Nepali woman to completely summit and descend Mount Everest. And while that might be the greatest challenge and crowning achievement of anyone’s life, Sherpa was just getting warmed up. That’s the takeaway from this stunning documentary by filmmaker Lucy Walker, in which viewers meet Sherpa at a decidedly lower elevation: working as a dishwasher at a Whole Foods in Connecticut, raising her teenage daughters, Sunny and Shiny, in a small apartment. Now a single mother and survivor of spousal abuse, Sherpa may have kept setting records as a mountain climber, but those achievements did little to improve her life from an economic perspective.
This film shows the gulf of experience between Nepal-born Lhakpa and her daughters, who were raised in the U.S. and have not known the sort of hardship their mother endured in her native land. The centrepiece of the film is Sherpa’s decision to embark on another ascent of Everest, in the hope it might turn things around for her kids as they struggle to cope after a period of distress. Working a full-time job, she won’t have time to train, but tackling Everest one more time — her 10th — would set a world record for female climbers, and just might hold the key to changing her life for the better.
6. Miss Teen USA 2024 – Thursday, August 1, KTLA
The iconic beauty pageant returns for its latest gala under a cloud of controversy, after 2023 Miss Teen USA UmaSofia Srivastava resigned her crown this past May, just days after Miss USA Noelia Voigt did the same. Srivastava explained in an Instagram post that: “I’ve decided to resign as I find that my personal values no longer fully align with the direction of the organization.” Both women are, of course, limited by the non-disclosure agreements attached to their sashes, but it’s worth noting this comes after allegations of workplace toxicity and an overall lack of transparency at the Miss USA Organization. What’s more, while Voigt’s Instagram post chalks her departure up to “mental health” concerns, observers have noted that if you isolate the first letter from each of the first 11 sentences of that post, it just so happens to spell out: “I AM SILENCED.”
7. Batman: Caped Crusader – Thursday, August 1, Prime Video | Series Premiere
From 1992 through 1995, a Saturday-morning cartoon redefined how audiences saw one of the most iconic superheroes of all time. More than that, Batman: The Animated Series also changed our perception of what was possible in a “kid’s show” — because while it was, ostensibly, aimed at children, the program excelled at telling complex, film noir-esque stories that had adults glued to the screen too.
Now, that show’s co-creator, Bruce Timm, has partnered with Matt Reeves (director of the most recent big-screen Batman flick) and J.J. Abrams (Lost) for a 10-episode cartoon set to reimagine the Dark Knight yet again — tracing his tragic origins but also tracking the “deadly, unforeseen ramifications” that Bruce Wayne’s vigilantism have for Gotham.
Voicing Batman this time is Midnight Mass star Hamish Linklater, along with Yellowjackets’ Christina Ricci as Catwoman, Dexter: New Blood’s Jamie Chung as Harley Quinn, and former cartoon Batman Diedrich Bader as Two-Face.
8. Unstable – Thursday, August 1, Netflix | Season Premiere
Rob Lowe and his son John Owen Lowe return for a second season of their workplace comedy about Ellis Dragon — a brilliant but flaky tech billionaire who gets a chance to mend fences with his estranged son Jackson after the latter is called in to help the old man pull out of a personal and professional death spiral.
Season one ended with Ellis managing to fend off a hostile takeover, but also very publicly blowing up the car of his corporate rival.
Season two opens with Ellis and his trusty therapist (Fred Armisen) conducting prison-simulation drills to prep for his inevitable incarceration, while Ellis also puts Jackson through his paces to take over Dragon Co. On that note, New Girl alum Lamorne Morris joins the cast as a rising bio-tech magnate who stokes the rivalry between father and son.
9. Saving Bikini Bottom: The Sandy Cheeks Movie – Friday, August 2, Netflix
In 1999, one of the most iconic, indelible children’s franchises of the past two decades introduced audiences to SpongeBob SquarePants — an adorable little moppet who “lives in a pineapple under the sea.”
Family friendly with an odd, sophisticated sense of humour, the show is currently in the midst of its 14th season, with multiple spinoffs and films having been spawned along the way from the adventures of SpongeBob, his starfish best pal Patrick et al. in the aquatic town of Bikini Bottom. This latest chapter in their kooky saga comes via a Netflix film that’s all about thrill-seeking squirrel Sandy Cheeks. When the entirety of Bikini Bottom is scooped right out of the ocean, Sandy puts her adventurous spirit and scientific know-how to work in a mission that takes Sandy and SpongeBob back to Sandy’s hometown of Texas to unravel a villainous plot.
Sandy is, as ever, voiced by Carolyn Lawrence, who told Animation Scoop: “I’m glad that after 25 years, [Sandy is] getting her moment. I have two girls, and she’s been such a phenomenal character for girls and women because she is an atypical animated character. She’s highly capable. She is athletic. She is ridiculously smart. She’s a lot of things that female animated characters traditionally haven’t necessarily been able to be.”
10. Rebel Moon — Chapter One: Chalice of Blood; Rebel Moon — Chapter Two: Curse of Forgiveness – Friday, August 2, Netflix
In 2017, blockbuster auteur Zack Snyder (300) was forced by a personal tragedy to walk away from his superhero epic Justice League, which was completed (and largely reshot) by Avengers director Joss Whedon, then released to abysmal reviews. This got Snyder’s diehard fans clamouring for “The Snyder Cut” — a demand which Warner Bros. ultimately indulged, giving Snyder US$70 million to craft a four-hour redux, released directly to streamer HBO Max in 2021. Now, the filmmaker’s sci-fi epic Rebel Moon gets the same treatment. Even though Rebel Moon — Part One: A Child of Fire and Part Two: The Scargiver were released directly to Netflix (in December 2023 and April 2024), this Friday both films will be re-released with new titles and extended runtimes, fleshing out the saga of a troubled soldier (Sofia Boutella) in search of redemption as she gathers a group of misfits and mercs to fight the evil galactic empire she once served.