Best New TV Shows of July 2024

sthe languor of summer settled into the TV calendar in July this year, as Dragon House It is Love Island USA– but little else – captivated viewers fresh from June The bear devotion. However, there are still highlights to be found this month, especially for the internationally minded, from a Japanese reality show and a prestige cooking series hosted by a world-famous Danish chef to an irreverent adaptation of an Italian literary classic and a gripping, almost-future political thriller from Norway. Closer to home, a Baltimore-based murder mystery brings Natalie Portman to TV.

The boyfriend (Netflix)

Most dating show contestants are so horny that Netflix has an entire franchise, Too hot to handle, with the premise of challenging its cast of sexed-up singles to build romantic connections without getting together. The platform’s new reality show The boyfriend is different — and not just because, for the first time on Japanese television, its cast is made up entirely of queer men. As Terraced house Before that, this dating show simply brings nine people looking for love into a beautiful house and lets us watch as they get to know each other, with only gentle pressure to pair up. Working in pairs on a coffee truck gives potential partners a chance to spend some time alone.

But the emphasis here is on emotional intimacy rather than physical intimacy. There are passions, rivalries, changes of opinion that will make you want to throw things at the screen. But what’s radical is the show’s portrayal of gay and bisexual men – in a country that has yet to legalize same-sex marriage – as normal guys looking for a soul mate. While the panel of outside commentators that is a convention of Japanese reality television seems as unnecessary as ever, the portraits The boyfriend Paintings of men opening up about their past, testing their compatibility, and simply navigating their lives as members of an increasingly visible LGBTQ community are indelible.

The Decameron (Netflix)

The consensual interpretation of The Decameron has long illustrated the unique power of storytelling to propel humanity through history’s most devastating moments. Author Rivka Galchen summarizes this reading in her introduction for The Decameron Project: “Reading stories in difficult times is a way of understanding those times and also of persevering through them.”

Kathleen Jordan, the creator of Netflix The Decameron, came away from his pandemic-era reading of Boccaccio with a very different understanding. What if, his black comedy proposes, the book’s true timeless message is that, whether they are Florentine aristocrats in 1348 or Manhattan financiers in 2020, the privileged will always happily abandon their less fortunate neighbors when plague comes to town? Jordan undressed O Decameron of their stories, opting instead to riff on the painting’s narrative. Somehow, his irreverence pays off. [Read the full review.]

The fortress (Via play)

Considering the state of the world, isolationism may seem terribly attractive to a certain type of person in a safe and prosperous country. But what happens when you build walls, cut geopolitical ties, learn to live without imports… and then your supposed paradise is hit by a sudden disaster? This is the terrible question that drives this Norwegian political thriller, set in near-future Norway, about a decade after the nation closed its borders and diverted resources toward self-sufficiency while the (unseen) rest of the world burned.

It’s 2037 and a bacteria is infecting salmon – the country’s staple protein – farmed near the city of Bergen. At first, this is a headache for Esther Winter (Selome Emnetu), leader of the Food Safety Authority. Then the disease spreads, with shocking speed, to humans. Switching between Norwegian and English, The fortress also follows the unfolding of the crisis from the perspectives of the PM’s young speechwriter, Ariel Mowinkel (Succession former student Eili Harboe) and a refugee from the United Kingdom, Charlie Oldman (Russell Tovey, recently seen in Feudo: Capote against the Swans), who hopes to obtain asylum in Norway with his wife and daughter. The episodes are intelligently written, effectively acted, and excitingly fast-paced, but what is most notable about the series is the argument that it contributes to international cooperation in a time of growing nationalist sentiment.

Lady at the Lake (AppleTV+)

Lady at the Lake takes the form of a neo-noir police officer. But hidden within this dark aesthetic is, among other compelling themes, an ambitious deconstruction of the genre. The femmes fatales, the victims and the heroes are the same people; both leads, The Queen’s Gambit Moses Ingram’s Cleo Johnson and Natalie Portman’s Maddie Schwartz contain all of these archetypes, but neither understands the person she really is. Though she sometimes errs toward the dreamy and diaphanous at the expense of coherence, creator, writer, and director Alma Har’el (Dear boy) manages to do justice to its unusually complicated characters without sacrificing the wild twists or binge-inducing suspense that are among the pleasures we’ve come to expect from this kind of show. [Read the full review.]

Omnivorous (AppleTV+)

If you loved Salt fatty acid heat Or were you waiting for someone to do it? Waffles + Mochi but for adults, Omnivorous It could be your new favorite show. Narrated and produced by René Redzepi, the chef behind Copenhagen’s internationally renowned Noma restaurant, the documentary series travels around the world, profiling a different ingredient – ​​from coffee to corn to tuna – in each of the eight episodes.

Different subjects dictate different approaches. The debut takes chiles on a bold journey up the Scoville scale, from the paprika farmers in Serbia to the Tabasco factory in Louisiana and the sweaty, pepper-filled feasts of Bangkok. An episode dedicated to pigs focuses on the Spanish village of La Alberca, which grows not only Iberian ham, but also respect and gratitude for the animals that, in many ways, keep the city fed. While Redzepi’s monologues can sometimes get a little flowery, they complement the show’s ruminative, cinematic style, providing fascinating food facts and deep cultural context.