5 Biggest New TV Shows Of July 2021

In the West, July is a summer month, and with this year having turned up the heat it’s perhaps not the most obvious time for this month’s Hawaiian getaway The White Lotus. On the other hand, down in the antipodes it’s the depths of winter, but this is when What We Do In The Shadows spinoff Wellington Paranormal has chosen to pop its head round the door of the rest of the world. Here are the biggest new TV shows of July 2021.

 

1. Resident Evil: Infinite Darkness | July 8

Not long off the back of Resident Evil 8 and its salivating fanbase, the franchise has another go at taking to the screen. You may remember the film adaptations from the early 2000s, in which Milla Jovovich killed infinite zombies and basically became God, and which despite being profoundly silly are the highest-grossing film adaptations of a video game of all time, with a reboot due later this year.

Resident Evil’s always had a weird relationship with the screen. The original game made much of its live-action opening sequence, which has gone down in history as some of the worst acting to ever grace a video game (and this was in a game which had notoriously bad voice acting anyway), to the point that at least one of the actors now actively and aggressively refuses to comment on their role in it.

Most curiously, while the first Resident Evil was bringing in the live-action format, now things have advanced to the point that the technology is flowing the other way, and despite billing itself as an ‘anime’, this TV version is using the computerised graphics of the games. Infinite Darkness centres on Leon S. Kennedy and Claire Redfield, who fans of the games will already know very well indeed as the twin protagonists of (the also recently rebooted) Resident Evil 2.

 

2. The White Lotus | July 11

What could be better than a holiday in a top-end Hawaiian resort? Really, I’m asking. What could be better than that? Eh? Sun, sea, sand? Being thousands of miles from home? With a bunch of strangers? Watching the seconds tick by with the intense awareness you’re supposed to be enjoying yourself? What could possibly be better than that?

This increasingly tense sentiment seems to be very much the tone The White Lotus is taking, as what should be – and is on the surface – an idyllic tropical getaway degenerates into a profoundly awkward, uncomfortable experience, starting its way down a slippery slope that really can only end at ‘hell on earth’. And this is set to happen over the course of one week, which in my experience of resorts sounds about right.

And this excruciating experience isn’t even limited to the guests. The people who work at the resort want – oh, how they want – to be smiling nameless functionaries. But they too are only human, and find themselves getting sucked in.

 

3. Wellington Paranormal | July 11

Kiwi vampire mockumentary What We Do In The Shadows turned out to be a surprise hit, and the subsequent TV adaptation met with if anything even more accolades – so it’s very odd that it’s only this year that any network outside its native New Zealand was willing to take a chance on the film’s other spinoff, the slightly fantastical police procedural Wellington Paranormal.

Nonetheless, here it is. And it’s got all the same quiet charm as its shadowy predecessors, approaching the supernatural in the same bumbling, matter-of-fact way. It’s slightly more formal, following as it does coppers on the beat (the SPOOKY beat) who are being filmed for a non-violent COPS-style reality show. But even though it’s in the same universe as What We Do In The Shadows (and its leads cameoed in the film), the real continuity is in the interpersonal stuff – the same sort of casual, not-quite-squabbling exchanges that have made the other strands of the franchise so beloved.

Wellington Paranormal is airing in the US on The CW, with episodes appearing on HBO Max the day after. And, unlikely as it seems, Wellington is taking its place as a new capital of supernatural horror – up there with Transylvania, Amityville, and wherever it was that Frankenstein took place.

 

4. The End | July 18

One of those cheerful, life-affirming shows centred on a woman who’s reaching the end of her life and wants to go out on her own terms, that is to say, commit suicide because she’s sick of it all. Lucky a year and a half of plague hasn’t sent us all round the twist, isn’t it.

Complicating the issue is that her daughter is a medical professional specialising in end-of-life care, and who doesn’t agree with euthanasia at all. And her wisecracking grandchildren are there too, but try to move past that. Overall, it suggests the kind of tone that works much better when not chopped down into a two-minute trailer with some jaunt music over it.

Our euthanas-ee is played by Harriet Walter, lately best known as a disappointingly underused old-school Russian assassin in Killing Eve but with a very long list of credits in TV, film, and the stage stretching back to the 1970s, including more than a few roles with the Royal Shakespeare Company. This kind of gravity is the difference between a story working and being in inexplicably bad taste.

 

5. Masters of the Universe: Revelation | July 23

When you hear that this is a revival of an ‘80s cartoon aimed at the adults who grew up with the original, you probably get a certain mental image of what to expect. You know the sort of thing: overly knowing and cynical, replete with clapped-out, unfunny jokes about He-Man and Fisto being gay, and probably some fourth-wall-shattering stuff about being a toy commercial (which, to be fair, the original shamelessly was).

But that’s not the direction this is going! For that you can thank Kevin Smith, who may have practically invented Gen-X cynicism with Clerks, but who also knows when it should and shouldn’t be deployed. Like the original He-Man And The Masters Of The Universe, this is taking the powers of Greyskull completely seriously – and this time, it’s backed up by animation beyond the minimum required standard to sell toys.

The cast includes Smith’s old pal Jason Mewes, as well as Sarah Michelle Gellar, Chris Wood, Lena Heady, Stephen Root, Henry Rollins, Phil LaMarr, Diedrich Bader, Alicia Silverstone, and Mark Hamill as ur-baddy Skeletor.

READ NEXT: 10 Best Zombie Shows On Netflix