'Fanático' finds the artful nexus point between Ingmar Bergman and Paul McCartney

Everything new this week on Netflix, Peacock, Disney+, HBO Max, Amazon Prime, Shudder, Hulu, Apple TV+ and Paramount+.

Premieres Wednesday, July 27:

Dream Home Makeover — In Season 3, Shea and Syd McGee have to refurbish their own quarters to accommodate for the runaway success of their interior-design business — and the arrival of their third child. The pièce de résistance will be the onyx altar on which they’ll sacrifice the babies of the poor to ensure their continued good fortune. (Netflix)

High School Musical: The Musical: The Series — The third season of this unrepentantly meta show spices things up a bit by shipping the cast off to theater camp, but keeps the motif of corporate incest alive by having them work on a production of Frozen while they’re there. How many weeks ’til Wednesday Addams shows up and scalps the whole lot of ’em? (Disney+)

Light & Magic — Go behind the scenes at the legendary FX house to learn how they’ve created some of the most convincing illusions in all cinema. And get a sneak preview of their latest project, Lea Michele Is Actually Not a Terrible Human At All. (Disney+)

The Most Hated Man on the Internet — A three-part docuseries chronicles the fall of Hunter Moore, a “revenge porn” kingpin who was brought down by the mother of one of his victims. She only started to get traction from the authorities when she placed a call to the FBI announcing “I have Hunter’s laptop.” (Netflix)

Recurrence — Argentina sends us a crime drama about a former federal policewoman who retires to a small town, only to become caught up in a seedy mystery. My prediction: The whole show is a stealth spinoff from last week’s Santa Evita, and what she finds is the corpse of Eva Perón. (Netflix)

Premieres Thursday, July 28:

Another Self — Three Turkish besties face a crisis of friendship when one of them elects to not seek medical treatment for her cancer, and instead invites them all on a journey of spiritual discovery. I’m thinking what she’s going to discover is that she should have gone to the doctor. (Netflix)

Harley Quinn — Poison Ivy launches her campaign to terraform Gotham City in Season 3, but girlfriend Harley may not be entirely on board. If there isn’t an “I’m a shower, not a grower” joke in there somewhere, two entire seasons will have been in vain. (HBO Max)

Keep Breathing — I remember when it was enough for the protagonist of a survival drama to have to battle the elements themselves. But the airplane passenger stranded in the Canadian wilds in this six-episode nail-biter also has to wrestle with her “personal demons” on her way back to civilization. “Don’t worry about those man-eating beavers, Liv; just try not to think about how much you could use a Molson right now!” (Netflix)

Pretty Little Liars: Original Sin — The PLL franchise moves to streaming for its latest series, an in-canon extrapolation in which a new group of youngsters suffers the consequences of their parents’ deeds of two decades ago. Doing the math, I’m assuming Scott Stapp’s daughter is gonna have to take the fall for Creed. (HBO Max)

The Resort — William Jackson Harper and Cristin Milioti play a married couple who try to find out what happened to some people who vanished without a trace 15 years ago. OK, that one’s gotta be a reference to Creed. (Peacock)


Premieres Friday, July 29:

Amber Brown — Bonnie Hunt (remember her?) is behind this series adaptation of Paula Danzinger’s novels about a young girl who copes with her parents’ divorce through art and music. An early script note from Bonnie: “Instead of art and music, could we have her coping with the divorce through failed sitcoms?” (Apple TV+)

Fanático — Spain finds the nexus point between Ingmar Bergman and Paul McCartney in a show about a trap performer who dies on stage, then gets replaced by a fan who looks a lot like him. “But if he died on stage in front of everybody, how could they even pull that off? People know to believe their own eyes,” muses Netflix subscriber Liz Cheney, on a break. (Netflix)

Justice Served — A group of revolutionaries has six episodes to convince the public that an accused man should be executed after they take his trial hostage. Damn, small-claims court be gettin’ real. Couldn’t y’all just let him pay a fine for digging up your begonias? (Netflix)

Not Okay — A simple lie spirals out of control when a would-be influencer fakes a trip to Paris just as the city is becoming the target of a deadly attack. I guess we can’t put this one down as “Marked safe from tempting fate.” (Hulu)

Paper Girls — The comics title by Brian K. Vaughan and Cliff Chiang becomes a sci-fi series about a group of newspaper delivery girls who travel forward in time from 1988 to meet their future selves. Job one: Reminding Older Them what a newspaper was. (Amazon Prime)

Purple Hearts — A working-class singer-songwriter with Type 1 diabetes marries a U.S. Marine for his military benefits, then discovers she’s developing genuine feelings for him. Shit, if you promised me free refills on my Xanax, I could make it work with that American Sniper dude. (Netflix)

The Reef: Stalked — As if being an eyewitness to the killing of her sister wasn’t bad enough, the heroine of this sequel then has to contend with a bloodthirsty shark who won’t leave her and her friends alone. It’s amazing when they think it’s going to work to slide into everybody’s DMs at once. (Shudder)

Surface — An amnesia victim has eight episodes to figure out if the stories she’s been told about her previous life are true, or if they’re part of a nefarious conspiracy. The first red flag was when they told her she had really enjoyed that album Lou Reed made with Metallica. (Apple TV+)

Uncoupled — Riding High on the success of Emily in Paris, Darren Star launches a new series in which a Manhattan real estate broker (Neil Patrick Harris) finds himself newly single in his 40s. I’m not saying I don’t expect it to be good; I’m just saying part of me really wants to fast-forward to the play-by-play from Peyton Manning. (Netflix)

Premieres Monday, Aug. 1:

Allegoria — Did you know that Spider One, lead singer of Powerman 5000, is also Rob Zombie’s brother? OK, maybe you did. But did you know that he’s a director too? It’s true! He’s made himself a horror flick about a bunch of artists (of both the performing and visual varieties) whose anxieties come to life as actual demons. Tell Spider to take his base: After that trailer for The Munsters, nothing he does is going to be the worst thing to come out of his family this year. (Shudder)

Premieres Tuesday, Aug. 2:

The Hillside Strangler: Devil in Disguise — A four-part docuseries revisits the case of Kenneth Bianchi, who terrorized Los Angeles in the 1970s via a string of murders he said he committed with the help of his cousin, and which he blamed in part on an alternate personality. The show promises new insight into Bianchi’s mental state at the time of the spree. I didn’t realize there was anything left on that topic to unpack; are we going to learn there was a gluten allergy involved or something? (Peacock)