(NOTE: All schedules remain subject to extreme upheaval as the writers’ and actors’ strikes continue. But you know what’s always there for you? Paintball!)
Premieres Wednesday:
High School Musical: The Musical: The Series — The ultra-meta spinoff series ends on an appropriately twisty note in Season 4, as the kids who have been trying to put on a stage show based on High School Musical 3 learn that their school is being taken over by a film crew that’s shooting High School Musical 4. OK, Fox, the universe is telling you it wants to see Christopher Nolan’s Glee. Don’t eff it up. (Disney+)
Ladies First: A Story of Women in Hip-Hop — A four-part series profiles the women who made the music what it is today. You’ll see MC Lyte, Queen Latifah, and maybe even that female journalist Dr. Dre threw down the stairs who didn’t get mentioned in Straight Outta Compton. (Netflix)
Moving — In this South Korean superhero series, a disbanded team of abnormally powered individuals becomes a hot topic again when a mysterious assailant goes on a killing spree against all their kind. Hey, somebody tell Alan Moore’s lawyer we’ve got another one for him! (Hulu)
Strange Planet — The generally delightful comic strip about extraterrestrial beings becomes an animated series from creator Nathan W. Pyle and sitcom kingpin Dan Harmon. See, my pet theory has always been that the “strange planet” is actually Earth, and that the aliens are sifting through the detritus of our culture after we’ve destroyed ourselves. But I guess that’s a little bleak, even for a guy who’s had to work with Chevy Chase. (Apple TV+)
Premieres Thursday:
Marry My Dead Body — This Taiwanese box-office hit puts an LGBT spin on the concept of ghost marriage, a ritual practiced in Asia and other places in which one or both of the married parties is no longer living. Or as we call it here in America, “the average straight marriage after three years.” (Netflix)
Mech Cadets — Daniel Dae Kim and Ming-Na Wen are in the voice cast of an animated series set at a training academy for robot pilots. That’s human pilots of giant robots, mind you, not pilots that are actually robots. I mean, this isn’t Spirit Airlines or something. (Netflix)
PainKiller — Netflix gets its own Dopesick, revisiting the birth of the opioid crisis and casting Matthew Broderick as a senior executive at the firm that brought Oxycontin to the world. In a surprise cameo, Nathan Lane plays a marketing consultant who tries to convince him that a failed semi-synthetic pain reliever could be more profitable than a successful one. (Netflix)
Premieres Friday:
The Communion Girl — The Spain of the late ’80s is the setting for a shocker in which two young women find a mysterious doll wearing a communion dress and take it home with them, only to discover it’s the repository of an unspeakable evil. Listen, I don’t have a lot of sympathy. Over here, we had to deal with Beanie Babies. (Shudder)
Heart of Stone — Gal Gadot takes the lead in a thriller about a network of secret agents who operate independently of politics and national borders. I’m getting the feeling this thing is a thinly veiled ad for No Labels, but maybe the whole Sound of Freedom business has just made me paranoid. (Netflix)
Red, White & Royal Blue — With a 2019 LGBT romance novel as the foundation, enter a world in which a prince of England can fall in love with the half-Mexican son of the U.S. president — who happens to be a female Democrat from Texas. The punchline “This is the future liberals want” is played out by now, so how about “This is what Mitch McConnell saw in his mind’s eye that made him go blank for 20 seconds?” (Prime Video)
Premieres Monday:
Solar Opposites — Season 4 of the animated sci-fi comedy is the first without the voice talents of co-creator Justin Roiland, who was cleared of battery and false-imprisonment charges last spring but is still out on his ass thanks to a litany of other accusations of harassment and child predation. Maybe he can start an independent studio with Kevin Spacey and call it Unrepentant Artists. (Hulu)
Premieres Tuesday:
Untold: Hall of Shame — This week’s episode takes a deep dive into the world of steroids. Are they destroying sports, or are they simply a practical option now that the cost of Powerade has gone sky-high? (Netflix)
Subscribe to Orlando Weekly newsletters.
Follow us: Apple News | Google News | NewsBreak | Reddit | Instagram | Facebook | Twitter | or sign up for our RSS Feed
This article appears in Aug 9-15, 2023.