From the return of Project Runway to Jason Momoa’s new historical drama Chief of War, we round up our top 10 shows to watch this week

1. Worst Cooks in America – Monday, July 28, Food | Season Premiere 

The theme for this season of the cooking battle is “Talented & Terrible.” The contestants are all gifted performers who can handle a microphone like nobody’s business . . . but hand them a spatula and they’re lost. Watch as Anne Burrell and new mentor Gabe Bertaccini suss out who has a scrap of hidden culinary talent and who should just stick to their stage job.

Sadly, this marks a goodbye to Burrell, who passed away suddenly in June — which has sparked a slew of tribute specials from the network she called home. “Anne Burrell was a one-of-a-kind talent whose loss is being deeply felt by family, friends and fans,” said Food’s head of content, Betsy Ayala. “We hope to honour Anne and celebrate her impact on Food Network and beyond, and to offer fans a way to remember her passion and culinary prowess that ran through everything she did.”

2. Dusty Slay: Wet Heat – Tuesday, July 29, Netflix 

Alabama-born funnyman Dusty Slay returns with his second Netflix special. Shot at the Walker Theatre in Chattanooga, Tennessee, per Deadline the set will include the comic’s thoughts on “everything from milking cows to elevator etiquette.”

Slay has carved out a niche for himself on the vast and sprawling standup landscape as the workin’ man’s comedian (as evidenced by the title of his first Netflix special, 2024’s Workin’ Man). And indeed, he tends to draw on his own blue-collar experiences for material . . . though he’s very happy they’re in the rearview mirror. 

As Slay told 800 Pound Gorilla Media: “When people at the Lowe’s and Home Depot stores found out I did comedy, they’d say to me ‘Oh. Well, you’re not that funny at work.’ And I’m like, ‘Yeah, I hate this job. I hate being here. I’m not being funny at work!’” 

3. WWE: Unreal – Tuesday, July 29, Netflix | Series Premiere 

For more than 20 years, HBO’s Hard Knocks has been taking football fans behind the scenes of the NFL, with each season following a particular team throughout an entire season, from training camp to playoffs.

Imagine the same fly-on-the-wall documentary format applied to professional wrestling, an entertainment-oriented pseudo-sport in which outcomes are preordained and everything is scripted, and you have WWE: Unreal, a new docuseries that pulls back the curtain to not just reveal the “fakeness” of pro wrestling, but actually celebrate the art behind the artifice.

Over the course of five episodes, wrestling fans are brought into the WWE writers’ room, where chief content officer Paul Levesque (a.k.a. wrestler Triple H) and his team churn out storylines to populate 52 weeks of television across multiple platforms.According to the series’ synopsis, the drama behind the scenes “is just as intense offstage as it is under the spotlight,” as WWE stars are pushed to their limits while enduring physically gruelling spectacles in the ring while also testing their acting chops by performing as characters in the ongoing WWE soap opera. Ultimately, viewers gain a whole new level of respect for the blend of athleticism and showmanship required to make it in the WWE.

This week’s debut episode takes viewers backstage for the January 2025 premiere of WWE Raw, featuring the main event between CM Punk and Seth Rollins. Subsequent episodes delve into the Royal Rumble rivalry between Cody Rhodes and Kevin Owens, and John Cena transforming from face to heel at the Elimination Chamber in March. The fifth and concluding episode will take a deep dive inside Wrestlemania 41.

Whether you’re a wrestling fan or not, this fascinating docuseries offers an eye-opening look into how the WWE sausage is made. Click here to watch trailer.

4. The Sandman Presents: Death: The High Cost of Living – Wednesday, July 30, Netflix

The Sandman technically ended its two-season run last week, but fans get one final goodbye with this special post-finale bonus episode. Based on the three-issue limited-edition comic book from 1993, Death: The High Cost of Living shifts the spotlight away from Dream to sibling Death (played by Kirby Howell-Baptiste), who, on one day every hundred years, walks among humans in order to gain a better understanding of the mortals whom she helps to shufflfe off this mortal coil. 

As viewers have realized, Death is a far cry from the fearsome Grim Reaper, but a kind, gentle and empathetic entity. That, the actress told Tudum, has led the character to become a fan favourite. “How lovely would it be to feel like there was that person who sort of took them and took all of those feelings, and then all that insecurity, and acted as a guide into whatever is next,” she said. “And Death says it, ‘Now is when we find out.’” 

5. Conversations with a Killer: The Son of Sam Tapes – Wednesday, July 30, Netflix | Series Premiere

One of the greatest manhunts in NYC history comes to life in this gripping three-part series that takes viewers inside the NYPD’s desperate race to catch the infamous .44-caliber killer — and into the disturbing mind of deranged David Berkowitz. Newly unearthed recordings offer rare insight into his twisted psyche, revealing what was going through his mind as he unleashed a reign of terror in the late 1970s, with firsthand accounts from cops, journalists and survivors recalling how fear spread through the streets, fueled by cryptic letters and a frenzied press. Click here to watch teailer.

6. Project Runway – Thursday, July 31, Crave (Stream) | Season Premiere

TV’s most iconic fashion battle lost two of its couture cornerstones in 2018, when Heidi Klum and her bestie Tim Gunn left the show and started their own stylish competition, Prime Video’s Making the Cut. That one wrapped in 2022, and it seems that Ms. Klum has gotten the itch to stitch again, as she now makes her illustrious return as host of Project Runway for season 21. 

Despite the ongoing absence of Mr. Gunn (reportedly, he wasn’t even asked!), she’ll look to “make it work” alongside former Runway champ Christian Siriano as the contestants’ mentor, and a judging panel that features ELLE editor-in-chief Nina Garcia (herself no stranger to this show) and newcomer Law Roach, an “image architect” known for devising the signature looks of such A-listers as Anne Hathaway, Celine Dion and Hollywood power couple Tom Holland and Zendaya.

Speaking with People, Klum said: “It felt like coming home, really like coming home . . . I can do it with my eyes closed — even though I’m judging clothes, so I have to have my eyes open — but I can do it with my eyes closed. I just love fashion so much, and I love how interested [the contestants] are and how they are champing at the bit to get a spot in the fashion industry. It’s so fun to give them a platform to show what they can do.”

It all begins Thursday with two new episodes. Click here to watch trailer.

7. Twisted Metal – Thursday, July 31, Paramount+ | Season Premiere

When HBO’s The Last of Us premiered in 2023, it was hailed as a long-overdue breakthrough for video game adaptations — a genre that, on both the big screen and the small, had tended to disappoint over the years.

Yet there was a second such adaptation that came out a few months later which, while not quite so ballyhooed, was undeniably another step in the right direction.

Co-created by Deadpool writers Paul Wernick and Rhett Rheese based on the unhinged racing game that debuted in 1995, Twisted Metal introduced audiences to a quirky yet deadly post-apocalypse, where an amnesiac milkman known only as John Doe (played by Captain America himself, Anthony Mackie) was given the chance to change his life by delivering a mysterious package across the country. Teaming up with an axe-wielding car thief named Quiet (Brooklyn Nine-Nine’s Stephanie Beatriz), John was forced to brave an array of Mad Max-ish marauders — none more horrific than a demented clown called Sweet Tooth (played in the flesh by wrestler Samoa Joe and voiced by Canadian Will Arnett).

Season two revs things up as our heroes find themselves in a most twisted competition. Teasing this next chapter in an official statement, co-creator and showrunner Michael Jonathan Smith said: “The stakes couldn’t be higher as John Doe and Quiet risk their lives to compete in a dangerous demolition derby tournament. The prize? A single wish, their greatest heart’s desire, granted. The only problem is 16 other drivers have wishes of their own.”

Firing the starter’s pistol on that derby will be another fan-favourite from the video games: Calypso, a mercurial master of ceremonies who tends to put a cruelly ironic twist on the wishes he “grants.” He’s played by Barry Emmy nominee Anthony Carrigan. Click here to watch trailer.

8. My Oxford Year – Friday, August 1, Netflix 

Sofia Carson continues her transition from Disney Channel moppet (you may have seen her in the Descendants TV movie franchise) to all-grown-up thespian with a new romance flick she both stars in and executive-produces. 

She plays Anna, a driven young American who gets to live out her dream of matriculating abroad at England’s historic Oxford University. Diligent student that she is, Anna has a meticulous plan for making the most of this experience — a plan that’s interrupted when she meets a disarmingly clever local named Jamie (Corey Mylchreest, best known as King George in Queen Charlotte: A Bridgerton Story) and, in spite of herself, falls head over heels.

Based on Julia Whelan’s novel, it’s directed by The Inbetweeners creator Iain Morris, who told Tudum: “[The two stars] bounced off each other from the first moment they worked together, and clearly enjoyed trying to make each other laugh — and maybe cry? I hope watching the film allows the audience to run through all the emotions associated with the wonderful, noisy, chaotic, unexpected, funny, heartbreaking experience that is falling in love.” 

And beyond just a pretty backdrop, Oxford itself really set the tone for this particular romance. “It was an honour and joy to dive into Anna’s world of dreams, of love, of poetry — to study the great poets that walked the halls of Oxford, and who have since filled our lives with the magic of literature,” said Carson. “In 1833, Alfred Tennyson wrote, ‘It is better to have loved and lost, than never to have loved at all.’ Two hundred years after Tennyson so beautifully uttered those words, they ring truer than ever — in the halls of Oxford, and within the heart of our film . . . Our story is a film that in every frame reaffirms the belief that life is too short to not live it in love. To not live it in joy.”Click here to watch trailer.

9. Chief of War – Friday, August 1, Apple TV+ | Series Premiere 

Having first risen to fame on HBO’s Game of Thrones, Jason Momoa returns in another epic tale of clashing kingdoms . . . except this one’s a true story. 

Set in the actor’s native Hawaii and starring a mostly Polynesian cast, the series opens in the 1780s, when the territory’s major islands are bitterly divided, and certain ruthless leaders make a play for “unification.” Caught amidst the bloodshed is Ka‘iana (Momoa), a warrior prince who’s turned his back on his royal lineage. As he’s reluctantly drawn into the fight, our hero must navigate a viper’s nest of competing agendas and tenuous alliances, with his own destiny and that of his people hanging in the balance. All the while, colonization looms from across the sea.

Momoa also co-created Chief of War with his friend Thomas Pa’a Sibbett, and it’s a passion project they’ve been waiting decades to get off the ground. “This is my Braveheart, this is my Last of the Mohicans,” the actor told GQ. “When I was a little kid, I looked at all these Native American movies and I love samurai movies and I love all these cultures . . . and so this is it for [Hawaiians]. This is our chance.” Click here to watch trailer.

10. Marc Maron: Panicked – Friday, August 1, HBO Canada

A week after his Apple golf comedy Stick wraps season one, Marc Maron returns to his roots with a sixth special. Panicked will, according to HBO, find the charming curmudgeon offering “his nuanced perspective on our increasingly uncertain world.”

No doubt, he’s got plenty to draw from on that front. But in addition to the worrisome state of the outside world, Maron also looks inward, to the unplumbed depths of his own past traumas. 

Speaking about that process in a conversation with GQ ahead of this special’s release, the New Jersey-born cut-up mused on using pain to connect with an audience — even an audience that’s out to forget their troubles for the night: “One of the things I learned from talking about grief, and the position that puts an audience in, and even just another individual, is it may be dark in terms of presenting it as comedy, in terms of trying to categorize what kind of comedy it is. But there’s nothing more common than grief and trauma. I mean, it’s as common as anything else that you deal with in a day-to-day life, and everybody experiences it. So if it’s dark, it needs to be exposed to light . . . The experiment of empathy and common ground with other people who have been victimized or in paralyzing grief? There couldn’t be anything more common than that.” Click here to watch trailer.