What to watch on streaming in August 2026: Highlights from Netflix, Disney, Apple, HBO, Stan, Prime and more

TED LASSO S4

Apple TV, 5th

We didn’t dare believe a fourth season would ever happen, but if you don’t have a little faith, then did you really watch Ted Lasso? A new season of this open-hearted series is more exciting than winning the World Cup – well, at least for some of us anyway.

The long-awaited comeback is this month, reuniting decent man Ted with his equally good people friends and colleagues at AFC Richmond, this time in service of a women’s football team. It’s not an easy task, the odds are against them, but if anyone’s going to be able to do it, we know who it’ll be.

MY BRILLIANT CAREER

Netflix, 13th

Miles Franklin wrote My Brilliant Career more than a century ago, and her story of a vivacious, ambitious young woman who has to choose between an artistic life or a domestic one is still so resonant today.

A classic reimagined for the modern era, this Australian series crackles with the spirit of Franklin’s words, featuring an effervescent Philippa Northwood as Sybylla, leading a cast which includes Anna Chancellor, Kate Mulvany, Genevieve O’Reilly, Christopher Chung and Sherry-Lee Watson.

LANTERNS

HBO Max, 17th

The pitch seems to be what if DC Comics but True Detective, and while that combo might normally elicit a dismissive chortle, in this case, there might be something to it. And that’s because we trust co-creator Damon Lindelof, whose tenure in the world of superhero adaptations was the superb 2019 HBO series Watchmen.

Lanterns stars Kyle Chandler and Aaron Pierre as two agents of the Green Lanterns, a kind of space cop, and they’re on the case to solve a baffling murder in a small town in America. Obviously, something intergalactic is involved, or they wouldn’t be here.

THE SHARDS

Disney+, 6th

Bret Easton Ellis, the enfant terrible of 1980s and 1990s American literature, the man behind Less Than Zero and American Psycho, had not published anything since 2010 before The Shards, which first appeared as a serialised audiobook in 2020.

The story is set in 1981 Los Angeles and is a veiled, dramatised recounting of Ellis’s final year of high school, and if you have any familiarity with his work, you know this is going to be about life lived to excess with a deviant edge. It stars Kaia Gerber and Homer Gere.

If the Ellis of it all isn’t enough, this series adaptation was led by Ryan Murphy, a man who has certainly never even looked up the words “nuanced” or “restrained”. This is going to be pure maximalism.

STERLING POINT

Prime Video, 5th

It would be easy to lump Sterling Point in with the glut of young adult soaps coming out of the Prime Video stable, but what distinguishes it is that this Canadian series is by Megan Park, the writer and director of the excellent comedy-drama film My Old Ass.

This series is centred on Annie, a young New Yorker who decides to spend the summer on an idyllic Canadian island after she partially inherited it from a grandfather she never knew, hoping to discover the past of a mother who died when she was young.

TWO WEEKS IN AUGUST

Binge, 12th

A holiday on a Greek island sounds heavenly, who wouldn’t want to decamp to a Mediterranean paradise with their old mates. Except, maybe hanging out with your friends over a couple of weeks is a bit different to a few hours at a pub.

That’s the scenario facing these holidaymakers in this British series which very much posits that the group vacay is not as advertised in the brochure, especially when your social circle is full of people going through stuff. The show stars Dolly Wells, Jessica Raine, Leila Farzad and Hugh Skinner.

THE AIRPORT CHAPLAIN

SBS On Demand, 26th

What’s really exciting about The Airport Chaplain is that this Melbourne-shot series features both Hugo Weaving, a beloved veteran of Australian screen, and Shabana Azeez (The Pitt), one of the leading lights of the up-and-coming generation. We love to see them come together.

The eight-part series is a workplace drama set at an international airport, and all the attendant crises that brings. Azeez plays a young-gun manager brought in to a modern professionalism to the operations, and finds herself clashing with an old-school fixer who has an unusual way of doing things.

DALLIANCE

Paramount+, 27th

Speaking of Hugo Weaving, our man is having a busy week in the final stretch of August. Weaving is part of a great ensemble cast of this original drama including Heather Mitchell, David Wenham, Catherine McClements and Georgie Parker.

Set in Sydney, this relationship drama kicks off with a chance meeting between two characters who immediately spark, but that connection could be the catalyst that upends marriages, families and communities.

POSSESSION

Binge, 27th

Strictly for those with the stomach for haunted house horrors - seriously, do you not get freaked out going to the bathroom at night after these stories have been swimming in your consciousness, or are you secretly hoping for an otherworldly encounter?

In this British miniseries, Gugu Mbatha-Raw plays a lawyer from Bristol who is sent to Jamaica to track down a mysterious nobody who has been left a fortune by a white plantation owner, to the chagrin of the deceased’s family. Also starring Jonny Lee Miller, Possession uses genre trope to explore the ghosts of Britain’s colonial past in the West Indies.

THE WHISPER MAN

Netflix, 28th

Kiwi director James Ashcroft has stepped up with this streaming crime thriller movie starring Robert De Niro, Adam Scott and Michael Keaton, and produced by the Russo brothers’ company.

The story is centred on a crime writer whose eight-year-old son is kidnapped and now needs the help of his detective father, a man he’s been estranged from. Things escalate when it’s discovered there’s a connection between this case and a decades-old one involving a serial killer. Chilling.

REACHER S4

Prime Video, 12th

He’s tall, he’s muscly, and he confronts ratbag neighbours trying to start things. OK, that’s the real-life actor, Alan Richtson, but it really burnished his reputation as every dad’s favourite streaming hero. Where does the line between Reacher and Ritchson start and end? Even their names sound similar.

Reacher returns for a fourth season, and there are changes afoot – he’s heading for the big smoke with most of the action set to take place in Philadelphia. What will a busy metropolis make of Reacher’s stature and moral fibre?

DON’T SAY GOOD LUCK

Netflix, 14th

Adam Sandler is really boosting the next generation of his family tree as a producer of this Netflix movie starring one of his own daughters, Sunny, the one who was in Happy Gilmore 2 with him. Look, she was pretty good in that, so we’re not going to disparagingly throw around the N-B words just yet.

Here, the younger Sandler plays Sophie, a high school theatre kid who’s about to play the lead in musical production, but has to contend with a lot of family dramas. There’s a great cast here with Melanie Lynskey, Steve Buscemi, Max Greenfield, Stephanie Beatriz and Bebe Neuwirth.

ADULTS S2

Disney+, 28th

You have to love an ironic title, because Adults is all about Gen Z-ers who should be living in the land of the responsible and maybe, just maybe, isn’t there yet. And who could blame them, being an adult is such a burden.

The core group of five characters share a house belonging to one of their parents, and seem to struggle with everything whether it’s their jobs, their love lives or just generally living. But that’s also what makes their scraggly stories so relatable.

YOU’RE KILLING ME

Stan, 17th

Professional investigators such as cops must really have a love-hate relationship with amateur and armchair sleuths. Where they once may have speculated on online forums, now they’re podcasters armed with curiosity and a desire for engagement and views.

So imagine the shenanigans caused by the pairing of a true crime podcaster and a mystery novelist – oh, the trouble they could get up to! That’s the premise of this Brooke Shields series set in America’s New England region.

DARK MATTER S2

Apple TV, 28th

Apple has made dense, high-concept sci-fi shows something of their specialty, and Dark Matter, which returns for a second season this month, is definitely in this basket.

Starring Joel Edgerton and Jennifer Connelly, the show kicked off with a physicist who is abducted and transported into an alternate reality which offered the possibility of a life not lived, and in this second season, another threat rears its head.

GRAHAM NORTON: MADONNA

7plus, 4th

It’s the meeting of two legends: host extraordinaire Graham Norton, and music queen, icon and legend Madonna.

Norton is giddy and Madonna is, well, Madonna, which is to say she knows exactly who she is, the position she occupies and the respect she is right to command, as the two engage in an in-depth conversation.