A few TV shows to watch this August

Bad Monkey

Vince Vaughn stars as Andrew Yancy, a sardonic, smart-mouthed detective suspended from the Miami police force for driving his car into his girlfriend’s husband’s golf cart. The irreverent role sounds tailor-made for Vaughn, but in fact the show is based on a novel by Carol Hiaasen, known for his witty Florida-set mysteries. When fishermen turn up a severed arm, Yancy tries to solve the murder and get back on the force. Rob Delaney plays an unscrupulous real estate developer with interests in Florida and the Bahamas, where Neville (Ronald Peet) is trying to hold on to his beachfront shack he lives in with his pet monkey. Michelle Monaghan plays Yancy’s sometime girlfriend and Jodie Turner-Smith is the Dragon Queen, whom Neville turns to for some voodoo help. The show was created by Ted Lasso co-creator Bill Lawrence, but the satirical tone here couldn’t be further from that series’ upbeat optimism.

Bad Monkey premieres 14 August on Apple TV+ internationally.

Emily in Paris

There were hate-watchers in its first season, but the joke’s on them, as the series returns for its fourth instalment. The show may not be wildly original, but it works by offering reassuring rom-com tropes, plenty of out-there fashions and gorgeous views of Paris. The last season ended on a cliff-hanger for Emily and her friends, when (deep breath) the pregnant Camille called off her wedding to Gabriel because she realised he was in love with Emily who has been seeing Alfie. Now Emily (Lily Collins), who thought Gabriel (Lucas Bravo) was off bounds, has to choose: him or Alfie (Lucien Laviscount), or another man, or men? As she says in the trailer, “Oh my God, Mindy. Know what I saw on my run? Hot men everywhere”. As the love quadrangle resolves itself, Mindy (Ashley Park) is trying to get to Eurovision with her band and somehow in all that, Emily turns up in Rome. The season’s 10 episodes will be split in half, with the second part arriving on 12 September.

Emily in Paris season four, part one will be released on 15 August on Netflix internationally.

Pachinko

The first season of this series, based on Min Jin Lee’s century-spanning novel about four generations of a Korean family living in Japan, was another of the year’s best shows. The new season picks up where the last left off and is equally absorbing as it gracefully blends intense personal drama with the sweep of history and questions of cultural identity. The show flashes back and forth in time, with sequences set in the 1980s and just before and during World War Two, when Sunja (Minha Kim) sells kimchi on the streets of Osaka and raises her two sons, while her rich, handsome former lover Koh Hansu (Lee Min-ho) moves in and out of her life. Yuh-Jung Youn (Oscar-nominated for Minari) plays the older Sunja and Jin Ha is her grandson, Solomon, still trying to manoeuvre his way in the world of high finance. But the most dramatic scenes are set during wartime as the family struggles to survive.

Pachinko premieres on 23 August on Apple TV+ internationally.

KAOS

There’s something wonderfully mischievous about the idea of Jeff Goldblum as an all-powerful deity. In this dark comic drama, he plays Zeus, the Greek god from Mount Olympus, dropped into a contemporary setting. The series’ creator, Charlie Covell (writer of the Netflix series End of the F***ing World), has said they were intrigued by the question “what if the king of the gods had a midlife crisis?” Zeus fears he is losing his grip on power and decides to wrangle with the mortals who appear to threaten it. Here on Earth, he is a splashy, gold-watch-wearing tycoon with spectacularly bad taste in clothes, who lives in a gaudy mansion fit for a mob boss. He is surrounded by his dysfunctional family, played by a top-flight cast. Janet McTeer is his wife, Hera, with David Thewlis as his brother Hades and Cliff Curtis as Poseidon. You never know what those gods will get up to next.

KAOS premieres 29 August on Netflix internationally.

Terminator Zero

Based on the Terminator movie franchise, this animated series comes with a completely new setting and characters, and a theme more topical than ever. The show takes place in Japan in 1997, the year that, as seen in Terminator 2: Judgement Day, an AI network called Skynet threatens to take over the world. Andre Holland is the voice of Malcolm Lee, a developer creating a rival artificial intelligence, Kokoro (voiced by Rosario Dawson) and Timothy Olyphant is the voice of the Terminator, the time-travelling cyber-villain sent from the future to kill Malcolm. “There are a lot of callbacks to the other films,” series creator Mattson Tomlin told EW, and the show’s premiere date itself is an Easter egg – 29 August 1997 is the date Skynet gained consciousness in Terminator 2. But two of the movies franchise’s most famous characters, John and Sarah Connor, will not show up in this fresh take, drawn in bold anime strokes.

Terminator Zero premieres 29 August on Netflix internationally.

– BBC Entertainment