5 Biggest TV Shows Of August 2019

Funny how the summer blockbuster’s gone the way of the dodo, isn’t it? That’s not to say this summer hasn’t seen its share of triple-A titles in the cinema, but the big studios’ desire to keep banging them out has diluted the category somewhat. Avengers: Endgame would have been tailor-made for summer audiences once upon a time, but that came out all the way back in April.

If there’s one obvious candidate for summer blockbuster of 2019, it was probably the third season of Stranger Things – which does, after all, borrow shamelessly from the big-ticket films of the ‘80s. Where the cinema’s getting bogged down in questionable remakes and ill-conceived CGI boondoggles, TV rattles along unabated. Here are the biggest TV shows of August 2019.

 

1. GLOW | August 9

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xQaCxIJX0J0

Even as Netflix loses custody of old classics like Friends and The Office, it’s still tallying up a fair number of successful and well-liked projects of its own – not least the Stranger Things juggernaut, The Haunting of Hill House, and GLOW, now returning for its third season.

There actually was a real GLOW (Gorgeous Ladies of Wrestling) franchise back in the ‘80s, and the show makes the most of being a period piece, balancing the neon-splashed gloss of the ‘80s with some fairly pointed depictions of the ways people were back then. This season sees the outfit moving to the Vegas circuit, which can only add to this – Vegas, to this day, still combines the showiness with the regressive attitudes. Vegas back in the ‘80s must surely have been like some wild free-market fever dream.

For the sake of full disclosure, I’ve enjoyed the previous seasons of GLOW and have praised it in the past. Let me make one thing clear, though: I am not the kind of chauvinist who would rate a show more highly because it features Alison Brie wearing tight swimming costumes and putting on a silly Russian accent. However, I am also an eminently fair-minded reviewer, so neither will I take points off for that.

 

2. The Terror: Infamy | August 12

The first season of this horror anthology, retelling one of the various doomed expeditions into the Northwest Passage, was very well received. Now it returns for a second season and a fresh storyline, putting Josef Kubota Wladyka – he of the Escobar-baiting tragedy Narcos – in the director’s chair.

This time round it’s set in the internment camps Japanese-Americans were sent to after Pearl Harbour, one of the main stumbling blocks in considering America to have been the ‘good guy’ of World War II. It’s got George ‘Mr. Sulu’ Takei starring and consulting, the latter since he and his family were actually interned in the real-life camps back in the 1940s.

Given the parallels between the Japanese-American internment camps, and the internment camps currently in operation on the US-Mexican border, you can probably expect a certain amount of point-making, even if only at the level of ‘it’s a bloody horrible experience’ – though this needn’t be a negative in a work of horror.

 

3. Why Women Kill | August 15

Between the title, and the fact it stars Lucy Liu, was I wrong to hope this is some kind of ultra-violent remake of Charlie’s Angels? You can’t tell me you wouldn’t watch it.

Instead, it’s an anthology covering stories of betrayed wives in the ‘60s, the ‘80s, and the present day, a formula that sounds not dissimilar to the already well-received I Am… series. Helmed by Liu, Ginnifer Goodwin, and Kirby Howell-Baptiste, alongside Jack Davenport, Reid Scott, Sam Jaeger, and Alexandra Daddario, the plot of Why Women Kill will doubtless be wrestling with the never-ending war of the sexes, as well as having given away the twist slightly in the title.

The show’s created by Marc Cherry, the maker of Desperate Housewives and as such no stranger to domestic women-led dramas. One can only imagine he’s glad to be taking the brakes off and staging some nice juicy murders.

 

4. The Righteous Gemstones | August 18

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KqJRIQO7sqw

The more troubled sorts of comedian will, if you let them, generally hit a refrain about comedy being a self-defence mechanism against a world that is intrinsically absurd and unfair. Charlie Chaplin, for instance, said “We must laugh in the face of our helplessness against the forces of nature, or go insane” – change a word or two of that and it’s something out of a H.P. Lovecraft novel.

So, given as it’s apparently impolite to call televangelists out for being amoral parasites profiting on people’s fear of death, the only option left is to poke fun, and The Righteous Gemstones’ synopsis is to do just that. Plots will presumably, based on the actions of real-life televangelists, revolve around the Gemstones needing a new private jet, and offering ridiculous, flannelling explanations of why there’s nothing less Christian than giving money to the poor. The central cast are Danny McBride, John Goodman, Edi Patterson, and Adam Devine.

 

5. On Becoming A God In Central Florida | August 25

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rpxhCX47lZg

To stay on the subject of mysterious and charismatic cult gurus making fat wedges of cash, On Becoming A God In Central Florida sees Kirsten Dunst’s penniless waterpark worker finding herself knee-deep in a multi-level marketing company – that is to say, a pyramid scheme.

While Dunst and her quest for revenge on the company that ruined her family are the main event here, it also presents Alexander Skarsgård of Big Little Lies as an impressively wild-eyed and unhinged Jim Jones type. Unlike your Jonestown setups, though, Skarsgård isn’t the main figure in the organisation – that honour goes to Ted ‘Buffalo Bill’ Levine, keeping a somewhat more sober hand on the tiller.

Again, I must specify this is a show about pyramid schemes, not fringe religious groups. However, when all the people involved are being manipulated into believing in pie in the sky of some sort, what’s the difference? Some have suggested that the Church of Scientology is basically both, but those would be unkind people, the sort who might suggest there’s something suspicious about the disappearance of Shelly Miscavige.