\n\tDANIEL FIENBERG\u00a0This was the Blond Ambition summer on the small screen \u2014 a wave of platinum domination entirely unrelated to the release of a new Madonna album.<\/p>\n
\n\tThe season\u2019s TV programming was bookended by the 2026 World Cup, an event ruled on social media (and occasionally on the pitch) by Norwegian striker Erling Haaland, who captivated our algorithms with his droll sense of humor and love of taxidermy raccoons; and by the return of Apple\u2019s\u00a0Ted Lasso<\/a><\/a>, featuring Hannah Waddingham\u2019s excitable Rebecca. (Meanwhile, Waddingham had a better series smack in the middle of summer with Amazon\u2019s action comedy\u00a0Ride or Die<\/a>, which very likably paired the Emmy winner with Octavia Spencer.) Are Haaland\u2019s and Waddingham\u2019s towhead locks natural? Only their hairdressers know for sure.\u00a0<\/p>\n \n\tWe got a perplexing prequel to\u00a0Legally Blonde\u00a0in Amazon\u2019s canon-destroying\u00a0Elle<\/a>, plus the usual onslaught of blond-wigged Targaryens in HBO\u2019s\u00a0House of the Dragon<\/a><\/a>, which continues to waffle frustratingly between potent palace intrigue and an excess of dragons. Critics and audiences alike went gaga over Sam Reid\u2019s glammed-out turn as a bloodthirsty vampire gone rock star in\u00a0AMC\u2019s The Vampire Lestat. Even Will Ferrell got washed out, tonsorially and qualitatively, in Netflix\u2019s lifeless golfing comedy The Hawk<\/a>.\u00a0<\/p>\n \n\tDoes it feel like audiences skipped beach reading for bleach viewing this summer? Or am I reaching to find a unifying theme for this conversation about another summer of wildly uneven television?<\/p>\n \n\tANGIE HAN Clever wordplay, faulty premise. I\u2019d say bleach viewing and beach reading have both been prominent themes this season.<\/p>\n \n\tAmazon tried to recapture that Summer I Turned Pretty sizzle with the annoyingly mopey Every Year After<\/a>, another YA adaptation about teens mooning over each other by the water. FX served up a sexier, deadlier high school drama with The Shards<\/a>, which has Ryan Murphy helping to bring Bret Easton Ellis\u2019 novel to the small screen, yielding results almost exactly as stylishly excessive but uneven as you\u2019d expect. Heck, Peacock took on a book by Elin Hilderbrand, an author who\u2019s been described as \u201cThe Queen of Beach Reads,\u201d with the starry yet underwhelming Five-Star Weekend<\/a>.<\/p>\n \n\tToss in a couple of shows that are beach-set and feel beach read-based but aren\u2019t \u2014 Megan Park\u2019s marvelously funny and sensitive Amazon original Sterling Point<\/a>, which sees several youths flirting, crying and speedboating around a Canadian lake; and Hulu\u2019s airily insubstantial The Season<\/a>, which chronicles a yachting season for the Hong Kong elite \u2014 and, actually, I feel like a huge slice of my summer viewing has been beautiful people entering and exiting various bodies of water.<\/p>\n \n\tBut it\u2019s hard to say many of these titles have left much of an impression (Sterling Point excepted). In the tradition of actual beach reads, I\u2019ve found most of them easy to tear through but almost as easy to forget. Not everything needs to be as sharp and searing as, say, Hulu\u2019s Epstein-era female rage thriller Furious \u2014 possibly my favorite newcomer of the past few months \u2014 but it\u2019d be nice to come away from all this TV viewing with something more than a vague sense of having passed some time.<\/p>\n \n\tFIENBERG\u00a0Fair point. And what\u2019s summer for if not a slew of lushly watchable literary adaptations\u2026like the second half of Netflix\u2019s astonishingly ambitious\u00a0One Hundred Years of Solitude, which definitely has gotten less buzz than Anya Taylor-Joy running around with different haircuts in Apple TV\u2019s underwhelming underwhelming Lucky<\/a> (based on the Marissa Stapley novel) or the ensemble of genetic superheroes \u2014 their powers are \u201ccheekbones\u201d \u2014 doing lines, listening to \u201980s hits and mostly ignoring a serial killer in The Shards<\/a>. They actually do spend a lot of time getting into and out of swimming pools in\u00a0The Shards, even if Murphy abandons the book at the halfway point, turning an already overextended tome into a potentially ongoing series that gives all indication of itself being overextended.<\/p>\n \n\tThere\u2019s nothing wrong, mind you, with taking big leaps from source material. It is in fact the smartest way to handle IP in a landscape still glutted with remakes and reboots. Take Furious<\/a>, which really is one of the summer\u2019s more provocative shows. Liz Meriwether sorta, kinda uses the 1987 thriller Black Widow \u2014 in which a government agent (Debra Winger) hunts a female serial killer (Theresa Russell) \u2014 as a starting point for a series that doesn\u2019t even bear that title anymore. Instead, the game of cat and mouse between Emmy Rossum\u2019s Alice and Lola Petticrew\u2019s Catherine becomes something darker, more complexly motivated and, as you note, timelier. We haven\u2019t even reached this year\u2019s Emmys, but I\u2019ll line up behind next year\u2019s campaign for Rossum, Petticrew and supporting performers Quincy Tyler Bernstine and Steve Way.<\/p>\n \n\tThen again, big leaps from IP don\u2019t always work.\u00a0Case in point: HBO Max\u2019s\u00a0Stuart Fails to Save the Universe<\/a> is the third straight\u00a0Big Bang Theory\u00a0spinoff to deviate wildly from the style and tone of CBS\u2019 multicam blockbuster, but imagining an apocalyptic multiverse sci-fi comedy based on a group of tertiary\u00a0Big Bang characters isn\u2019t the same as doing anything good with them.<\/p>\n \n\tOther entries in this Hot IP Summer? Netflix\u2019s appealingly wholesome\u00a0Little House on the Prairie<\/a>, Apple TV\u2019s stylish but overextended\u00a0Cape Fear<\/a> and even a new Zorro<\/a> for anybody who knows what\u00a0MHz Choice\u00a0is.<\/p>\n \n\tHAN They\u2019re all Hot IP Summers now, aren\u2019t they? But brand recognition alone doesn\u2019t make for a good show. Stuart Fails to Save the Universe indeed came up with a fun, clever premise\u2026and then apparently just decided to stop trying there; everything else about the series is totally lackluster. Elle had the opposite problem, sort of: It\u2019s a decent teen dramedy on its own but a terrible idea for a Legally Blonde spinoff, since it essentially negates the whole premise of that parent film (why would Elle need to relearn in her 20s the very lessons she\u2019s learning here in her teens?).<\/p>\n \n\tOne franchise expansion I thought did get it right was Star City<\/a>. \u201cFor All Mankind, from the perspective of the Soviet Union\u201d wasn\u2019t something I thought I needed. But the Apple TV series taps into some of the ain\u2019t-space-neat appeal of the original\u2019s early seasons while establishing its own chilly, paranoid flavor. It actually feels, contrary to so many of these spinoffs, like getting to see a new corner of an already established universe.<\/p>\n \n\tI guess you could also consider The Vampire Lestat in this category, even if it\u2019s technically just the renamed third season of AMC\u2019s Interview With the Vampire. Though I was an enthusiastic fan of the past two seasons, the pivot to a modern-day Lestat-centric story took some adjusting. But I give the show all the credit for continuing to forge ahead into new territory rather than retread familiar ground.<\/p>\n \n\tEspecially since that\u2019s more than can be said of some other returning hits. After three years away, Apple TV\u2019s Ted Lasso is back with a new season but seemingly no new ideas. HBO\u2019s House of the Dragon continues to trudge along at what feels like a glacial pace, even as stuff is technically happening and some of that stuff is even pretty compelling. And while I really enjoyed The Bear<\/a>\u2018s final ride, it spent nearly the whole season literally stuck in place, maneuvering everyone exactly where we always knew they\u2019d end up.<\/p>\n \n\tFIENBERG\u00a0I liked moments of the final season of\u00a0The Bear<\/a>, and if the penultimate episode had been the series finale<\/a>, it would have been a worthy sendoff for Carmy and the team. Speaking of finales I could have done without \u2014 Apple TV\u2019s\u00a0Sugar\u00a0was a stylish, mysterious love letter to Los Angeles for most of its second season, showcasing Colin Farrell swaggering in fancy suits and solving crimes, only to steer into its alien twist in a finale I found pretty silly.\u00a0<\/p>\n \n\tHonestly, though, a lot of my favorite shows this summer sneaked up on me \u2014 like Sterling Point. Even with Josh Schwartz and Stephanie Savage (The O.C.) as producers, this example of teen drama done right consistently surprised and pleased me, especially the star-making roles for Ella Rubin and Am\u00e9lie Hoeferle. So many teen dramas are trashy or schmaltzy; it\u2019s nice to be reminded that love triangles and coming-of-age anxiety are still potent narrative staples that don\u2019t need to be reinvented.<\/p>\n \n\tIf Starz\u2019s\u00a0The Listeners<\/a>\u00a0had premiered on HBO and hadn\u2019t sat on the shelf for nearly two years, we\u2019d be talking about Rebecca Hall as an awards contender for her haunting work as a high school English teacher whose sanity frays when she starts hearing a mysterious hum that nobody else can hear. And despite its slightly icky premise \u2014 50-something guy starts dating his best friend\u2019s 20-something daughter \u2014 Hulu\u2019s Alice and Steve<\/a>\u00a0went to some amusing, unexpected places and boasted great work from Nicola Walker and Jemaine Clement as the toxic pair of titular BFFs.<\/p>\n \n\tWhat were your favorite discoveries of the summer, Angie, other than Erling Haaland\u2019s social media presence?<\/p>\n \n\tHAN That\u2019s a pretty high bar! But I return to my love for Furious. It\u2019s not blond, beachy escapism, but it grabbed me from its very first moments and never let go. That\u2019s a win, no matter the season.<\/p>\n