If you’re anything like me, you still suffer from a post-Olympics funk. For two weeks there was no question what to watch on streaming. It was wall-to-wall swimming races, and amazing gymnastics, with some handball, equestrian, and sport climbing thrown in for good measure. And now what are we supposed to watch? Luckily, plenty of new series and movies are upcoming on Netflix and there's lots new on Disney+ and the rest of the best streaming services. But perhaps surprisingly the best stuff to watch this week is on Peacock, with both the best classic series and hopefully the best new movie.
Homicide: Life on the Street is one of the most critically acclaimed TV series of the last three decades, and yet, the show has never been available on any streaming platform. That changes this week when the show finally makes its debut. In addition to that, we have several new and classic movies and series that are arriving on various streaming platforms.
Homicide: Life on the Street - August 19 (Peacock)
Homicide: Life on the Street debuted in 1993 and ran for seven seasons, plus a TV movie. After years of Homicide not being available streaming, all of it will arrive for everybody with a Peacock subscription this week. The series struggled in the ratings through its entire run despite it being lauded by critics at the time, so there’s a decent chance you’ve never actually seen it. Now is the time to fix that.
If nothing else Homicide is a show with an incredible legacy, it introduced Andre Braughter to many audiences, and it created the character of Detective John Munch, played by the late Richard Belzer, who would outlive the series by bringing the character to Law & Order: Special Victims Unit.
Interview with The Vampire, And More AMC Series - August 19 (Netflix)
One of the problems caused by the popularity of streaming is that every studio wants its own cut of business. This has led a significant partitioning of content, leading all of us to likely be subscribing to multiple streaming services in order to get to watch all the shows and movies we care about.
In recent months however, we’ve seen a relaxing of that several WB movies have appeared on Netflix while still existing on Max, and if you’re a fan of numerous AMC series, including older shows like Preacher or current hits like Interview with the Vampire, you no longer need to subscribe to AMC+ to watch them.
A dozen AMC series, totaling nearly 30 seasons worth of entertainment all drop on Netflix on August 19. For Walking Dead fans, who have already watched that entire series, the full runs of Fear the Walking Dead, and the first season of The Walking Dead: Darryl Dixon are among the shows making the leap.
That '90s Show - August 22 (Netflix)
Netflix’s That '90s Show is a double dose of nostalgia. If you’re nostalgic for That 70s Show, the series brings many of the main characters from the original series back in a new way that fans seem to be enjoying. If your nostalgia is for the era in which you originally watched That '70s Show then the series has you covered just as well.
The third batch of new episodes for That '90s Show drops this week. And it includes guest appearances by 90s icons Kevin Smith and Jason Mewes, so it should be fun.
Incoming - August 23 (Netflix)
Once upon a time, there was a mythical period called the 1980s when R-rated comedies about kids too young to see R-rated movies were fairly common and usually hilarious. Since that time, the frequency of these films has greatly diminished, but every once in a while we still get them, and they’re still frequently funny.
Incoming follows a group of new high school freshmen who get invited to their first high school party, and the wild shenanigans that they get up to while there. If hearing f-bombs frequently is not your thing, this probably isn’t your movie, but if you think that’s hilarious, we could have a great late-summer comedy here.
City Of God: The Fight Rages On - August 25 (Max)
Earlier this year Cinemablend ranked the 100 best movies of the 2000s, and the film that came out on top was City of God. Of course, we are going to be excited then by the prospect of a sequel series.
The series is set two decades after the events of the film and will see Rocket, the main character of the film, return to his former home as a professional photojournalist as a young drug dealer is released from prison, throwing the people back into the same cycle they had been in once before.
10 Cloverfield Lane - August 24 (Prime Video)
With August coming to a close, it’s going to be the spooky season before we know it. If you can’t wait for October to get here, then take advantage of the fact that a top-notch thriller, and the best movie in the still-growing Cloverfield franchise, will be available this week with your Prime Video subscription.
Mary Elizabeth Winstead stars as a woman who gets in a car accident and wakes up to find she’s been “rescued” and locked in a bunker after some sort of apocalyptic event has taken place outside. Just which is the scarier place to be becomes a significant question.
The Killer - August 23 (Peacock)
Ask anybody who claims to be an aficionado of action movies and eventually, they will tell you how great John Woo’s The Killer is. The 1989 Hong Kong action film starring Chow Yung-fat is the movie that got both men noticed in Hollywood. It’s hard to imagine that anybody would ever consider trying to remake it.
The Killer gets an American remake with a gender-swapped protagonist this week on Peacock. Under normal circumstances, a certain segment of people might roll their eyes at such a thing, but this remake is being produced and directed by John Woo himself, so if it is at all possible to capture that lightning in a bottle twice, certainly Woo is the man who can do it.
This is just a small sampling of what’s coming to the various streaming platforms this week. Next week will see September begin, which means that a lot of streaming content will be shuffling around. Many series and films will leave
