Critics’ Conversation: TV’s Summer of Tumbleweeds

Critics’ Conversation: TV’s Summer of Tumbleweeds

ANGIE HAN Once upon a time, when broadcast ruled the roost, summer was a fallow time for TV. The traditional season would end in the spring, to start up again in the fall; it wasn’t that there were no new shows, but they’d be exceptions in a sea of reruns. Of course, that’s all changed in the past couple of decades, with cable and streaming moving the industry to year-round programming. Now there’s always something fresh to watch, whether it’s sweater or flip-flop weather.

Or … is there?

Technically, yes, we still got hundreds of hours of new TV the past few months: starry launches like Apple TV+’s Murderbot and Netflix’s Sirens and Too Much; new seasons of recent hits like Netflix’s Squid Game, Peacock’s Poker Face and FX/Hulu’s The Bear; revivals of older smashes like Showtime’s Dexter (in the form of Paramount+’s Dexter: Resurrection) and Fox’s King of the Hill (the upcoming 14th season will launch on Hulu). Not to mention long spells when it seemed all anyone wanted to talk about was Peacock’s Love Island.

And yet, compared to years past, it’s felt like tumbleweeds. There have been entire weeks that the TV scheduling gods seemed to abandon, while honest-to-god breakouts have been few and far between. Some of it is due to the fact that even now, summer is that weird period after the Emmys eligibility deadline but before the big broadcast launches of autumn. Some of it is that we’re firmly on the other side of Peak TV. But, man, it’s dry out there.

DANIEL FIENBERG I never minded those ancient days, as recently as 10 years ago, when summer was about catching up on broadcast shows — “If you haven’t seen it before, it’s new to you!” — or immersing yourself in Big Brother and its live feeds. As you say, it’s only relatively speaking to note that the landscape has been sparse this summer. But it’s been sparse enough that Love Island finally became, in its seventh installment, the sort of sensation stateside that it always was in the U.K. (CBS, which birthed Love Island in its domestic incarnation, would be wondering what took Americans so long if the network weren’t trying so desperately to kowtow to the FCC and Donald Trump to grease the wheels for its megamerger.)

As you note, it isn’t like TV has entirely fallen into some equivalent of the pre/post-Dec. 31 binary in the film release schedule. But the May 31 Emmy deadline has nevertheless hit the medium hard. You still get odd shows that straddle that deadline, like Murderbot and Poker Face, and shows that confuse the window entirely, like The Bear and Squid Game, which had new seasons arrive just as the previous seasons were being celebrated (The Bear) or snubbed (Squid Game) by the TV Academy. But there have been very few new shows that could be construed as “prestige.”

And those shows have been polarizing, sometimes even splitting individual viewers in two. I found the twists in Apple TV+’s Smoke to be ludicrous, but I liked Taron Egerton’s tricky performance and Jurnee Smollett’s fierceness. I thought stretches of Lena Dunham’s Too Much were emotionally complicated and amusingly raw; other times I wished Netflix had encouraged more self-editing.

At this point, half the shows we’re getting were delayed by the industry strikes and half were developed in the chilly aftermath of those strikes, and it all just feels unsteady. Of the big releases, what has stood out for you?

HAN Mainly the fact that a lot of this summer’s “big” releases haven’t been, really. Amazon’s We Were Liars seemed well positioned to capture the Venn diagram overlap between Big Little Lies fans and The Summer I Turned Pretty fans, but even an insane final twist couldn’t spark much conversation about such a dull series. I enjoyed Apple TV+’s Owen Wilson golf-com Stick, but it’s so squarely in the Ted Lasso/Shrinking mold that it can’t help feeling like a knockoff. Even Murderbot was less of a sensation than I expected, not to take anything away from a frequently funny, occasionally moving and always entertaining series.

That said, I have found delight in unexpected corners — including Amazon, which gave us the surprisingly wholesome YA grease-monkey drama Motorheads and Benito Skinner’s solid college comedy Overcompensating; Syfy, which yielded the clever zombie murder mystery Revival; Hulu, which provided brisk 19th century American history with Washington Black; and HBO, which offered the glossy, prickly celebrity docuseries Pee-wee as Himself.

And nothing’s felt more “Summer TV” in spirit to me than the one-two punch of Netflix’s ridiculous Sirens followed by the even more hilariously bonkers The Hunting Wives. Both are over-the-top mystery-dramedies about extremely wealthy, irredeemably terrible people with dark secrets, flashy wardrobes and unsettling sexual tension with the (somewhat) less privileged women in their midst. Both are ludicrous and trashy in ways that make it clear they’d wear those descriptors as a badge. And both are thus utterly right for hot, lazy days when it seems even your brain’s ditched you for the pool, and it’s all you can do recline with a cold drink and chortle at the shenanigans of beautiful rich people.

FIENBERG Sirens and The Hunting Wives are the latest attempts to funnel TV’s love of affluence porn through a semi-satirical lens, à la Desperate Housewives. I don’t think The Hunting Wives has much on its mind that regionally semi-specific Housewives knockoffs like GCB or Grosse Pointe Garden Society didn’t. But I have to give it credit for fully committing to its tawdriness in a way that Sirens, for me, didn’t, however great Meghann Fahy is.

There’s just so much familiarity to everything this summer. Even Dexter: Resurrection has retreated from the somber finality of Dexter: New Blood, resorting to the often cartoonish excesses that characterized both the best and worst of the original.

Lots of other stuff has felt like a pale imitation. Amazon had Countdown, a wannabe 24 that squandered Jensen Ackles’ snarky likability (and Ballard, which was Bosch only without Bosch). Netflix had The Waterfront, a wannabe CW/WB North Carolina-set soap, which at least featured a deliciously weird guest turn from Topher Grace as a sociopathic drug kingpin. MGM+’s The Institute is by-the-numbers Stephen King, while Stick on Apple TV+ and Untamed on Netflix worked despite an overreliance on clichés, not because of it.

So I appreciated how fresh settings — a sports academy in the Spanish Pyrenees; Tijuana at a moment of political upheaval — gave a bit of novelty to generally formulaic YA soap Olympo and police procedural The Gringo Hunters, both on Netflix. However powerful the Netflix algorithm often feels, neither show appears to have found much traction.

Only Netflix’s Dept. Q, with Matthew Goode leading a quirky team of cold case investigators, truly shined by both effectively embracing and upending conventions. It’s one of my summer favorites, along with The Bear, which continues to give me enough beautifully rendered moments and impossibly long tables to overcome its clear self-indulgence.

But the show I’m trying hardest to get people to check out these days is Hulu’s Such Brave Girls, a pitch-black, toxically hilarious comedy that, in its second season, confirms creator-star Kat Sadler as one of TV’s most distinctive voices. As we look to the rest of the summer, do you see television salvation on the horizon?

HAN I don’t know about salvation, but I do see a less empty calendar — though a lot of what’s on it looks familiar, too. I have not yet seen Starz’s Outlander spinoff or Amazon’s The Terminal List spin-off or Peacock’s The Rainmaker remake, but I’ve already seen a bit of Hulu’s King of the Hill revival, and while it’s nice to be reunited with the gang again (at least once all the table-setting of the premiere is out of the way), I don’t know that it’s essential when the original, available on Hulu and Disney+, still holds up so well.

Certainly, it’s possible to birth a bold stand-alone work out of existing IP — fingers crossed for Noah Hawley’s upcoming Alien: Earth for FX. But the titles I’m most excited about, sight unseen, are originals from talents I already love, like Netflix’s Long Story Short from Raphael Bob-Waksberg (Bojack Horseman) or FX’s The Lowdown by Sterlin Harjo (Reservation Dogs). And I look forward to being taken completely by surprise by something I never saw coming — which is likelier when there are, y’know, lots of new shows actually being released.

FIENBERG With King of the Hill, I’m not sure “freshness” is really required. Look at how South Park has come storming back into the cultural conversation, nearly 28 years after its premiere, by doing … exactly what it always did. Speaking of unkillable animation, there are new seasons of Beavis and Butt-Head and Futurama returning as well. The dream of the ’90s, as we say, is still alive.

But yes, having new shows from Bob-Waksberg, Hawley and Harjo, plus long-awaited The Office companion series The Paper (Peacock), promising Daniel Dae Kim thriller Butterfly (Amazon) and THREE Welcome to Wrexham-esque shows about celebrities buying down-on-their-luck soccer teams (Eva Longoria in FX’s Necaxa, Mark Consuelos and Kelly Ripa in ESPN’s Running With the Wolves and Tom Brady in Amazon’s Built in Birmingham) should help keep the tumbleweeds at bay. For now.

This story appeared in the July 30 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. Click here to subscribe.