Summer Television Preview

We are previewing the sights and sounds of summer. We've talked about movies, music, and podcasts. Now Vulture critic Kathryn VanArendonk joins us to talk about some of the season's most anticipated TV shows, from a new season of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds to Love Island USA. Plus listeners share what they excited to be watching this season. 

Alison Stewart: This is All Of It on WNYC. I'm Alison Stewart. The new season of The Bear just dropped. New episodes of The Gilded Age are now airing Sundays, and this week there's a new series coming out from Girls creator Lena Dunham. Summer TV is back, baby, and so is Kathryn VanArendonk, Vulture's TV critic. She's here now to give us some TV suggestions to check out this summer, and yes, we will include Love Island USA. Hi, Kathryn.

Kathryn VanArendonk: Yes.

Alison Stewart: [laughs]

Kathryn VanArendonk: Hello.

Alison Stewart: Before we get to your list, there is so much TV right now, including some big shows returning this season. When you think about summer TV 2025, how does it match up to the past years?

Kathryn VanArendonk: I think increasingly what I have felt about summer TV is a return of a moment that I first remember noticing maybe 10, 15 years ago. For a long, long time, it felt like summer TV was defined by reruns. In the pre-streaming era, summer TV was like the dregs of things that you were just stuck with.

Alison Stewart: Yes. [chuckles]

Kathryn VanArendonk: Then there was this period in the early 2000s before streaming really hit, where summer TV became this opportunity to try out big, weird events. You would get these kind of eight-episode seasons that maybe didn't work or were things that a network had decided was too risky or strange to try in the big fall TV slots and they would get put in the summer, and they were these kind of interesting event TV or strange, fun, stupid reality shows. Streaming, then, has really destroyed a lot of our seasonality in television. TV comes out at any, all year round now. There's no longer that sense of, "The fall is here, TV is exciting again."

With it, there has also been this loss of sense of communal viewing. There's been a loss of the sense of any particular TV show being a big event, a big, exciting thing to rally around. One of the things that I really have appreciated about the TV this summer and I think TV will continue to learn lessons from, or I hope will, is that the stuff that is exciting, the stuff that seems to be really grabbing people, are the things that have that big event feeling to them. I'm talking about actually The Gilded Age, which I'm a little bit surprised to say, but The Gilded Age is great this season, and people are really excited about tuning in. I've really kind of gotten on the camp wavelength of that show, which I'm really appreciative of.

The Bear coming out is always this big moment. It drops all at once, and then that's all everyone talks about for a couple of days. Then, Love Island USA, which is this whole incredibly event-driven experience that is just over the summer, and has that very stupid, very fun, fully immersive feeling that people, I think, are looking for.

Alison Stewart: For people who want to know more about The Gilded Age, exactly a week ago, we talked to Morgan Spector. It was a great conversation. Check it out on All Of It. Listeners, we want to know what new TV are you watching these days? Any shows that have returned for a new season you're enjoying, and what encourages us to check it out? Give us a call. 212-433-9692. 212-433-WNYC. Maybe there was a show that you heard was great, and then you watched it and it was meh. We want to take your criticism too. Our number is 212-433-9692. 212-433-WNYC. We are talking to Vulture TV critic and friend of the show, Kathryn VanArendonk.

Let's get into your list. You have great lists. First, you have Ballard out on Amazon Prime on July 9th, stars Maggie Q as a cold case LAPD detective. Where do we meet Maggie Q's character, Renée Ballard, when the show begins?

Kathryn VanArendonk: The idea of Ballard, which is created by Michael Connelly, which you will know from Bosch, everyone who watched Amazon shows and they loved Bosch, all of the dads out there, all of the crime procedural people, you know who you are, Ballard is here to become the next thing that you can really hang on to. One nice thing about it, one thing I really appreciated, is that Maggie Q plays Renée Ballard, who is a brand new character now. Is she like most other detectives that you've ever met in crime fiction? Sure. But that's what that genre is. You're not actually looking for dramatic reinvention, but it is nice to at least have some new world-building, right? Some new person that you get to meet.

Her deal is, it is a little bit of a Slow Horses model where she has been ousted from the main thrust of the investigation. She has been shuttled off to the side. She is stuck in cold cases now because of stuff that has happened in her past. Of course, she's actually the genius detective, and we all know that. Inevitably, she then stumbles on the kinds of connections, the suggestions, the clues that other people have not been paying attention to, and starts to put all the pieces together. It's got the sense of the board with the, "What if this is connected to that?" Look, yes, of course, that is familiar, and that is the kind of thing that you will recognize from other shows you have seen before. I like those shows. It's always nice to have one where you can turn it on and be like, "All right, somebody knows what they're doing. Somebody understands the genre." I think Maggie Q is really charismatic in the role, also. Ballard.

Alison Stewart: I love police procedurals, so I will be there.

Kathryn VanArendonk: Yes. Of course.

Alison Stewart: Maggie Q, what does she really bring to the role? Because the lead always has something going on.

Kathryn VanArendonk: There are a couple different flavors of detective. I mentioned Slow Horses before, those are spies, but they tend to really divide up among the ones who really run like idiots who run through the street and that's kind of most of what they do, versus the guys who sit in the house and they just kind of put the pieces together. I think she's a more well-rounded version of somebody. She's very grounded but also competent, I think, in a way that I tend to really like that lane of detective.

Alison Stewart: Our next up is a favorite of our producer Kate, Star Trek: Strange New Worlds, she's got her hands in the air. The third season is premiering on Paramount Plus July 17th. Where does this pick up in the Star Trek universe?

Kathryn VanArendonk: The Star Trek universe is more vast, I would say, than the way Star Wars has been really centered around a few main characters, other than Andor, which is a whole thing. Star Trek has all of these different captains who relate to each other, pick up at all these different points in the timeline. Star Trek: Strange New Worlds, its central captain, his name is Christopher Pike. He's played by Anson Mount. This actually takes place right before the original Star Trek series with Kirk and Spock.

Alison Stewart: Oh, that's interesting.

Kathryn VanArendonk: Yes. It has this lovely vintage feel to it. It knows where all of the aesthetics of this franchise are going, and so it doesn't have to do a lot of anxious reinvention of what if the costumes are somehow cooler again? It is really comfortably vintage Star Trek to my eye. The other thing about Strange New Worlds that I so so appreciate, the reason that I think it is the best of the current Star Trek franchise model, is that it also feels more like vintage Star Trek. It is very episodic. The episodes switch tone wildly. You'll have, "This is like the horror episode one," and, "This is the time travel one," and, "This is the alien planet one where everyone ends up in weird new identities and then has to swap back." This, to me, is what really works about it and what distinguishes it from this vast other science fiction blob of prestigeness, which is that there's a playfulness to it, there's a real heart to it. It's an ensemble cast. You don't know exactly what you're going to get each episode, but you do also know it's going to be the guys I like, they're going to like each other, they're going to respect each other. It's just a lovely time. It's the best one to introduce kids to also, if you're like, "How do I get them into Star Trek right now?"

Alison Stewart: It sounds sort of optimistic in a way.

Kathryn VanArendonk: It is very optimistic. Star Trek is a fundamentally optimistic vision of humanity. That's really nice, I've got to say. It's just a really affirming way to think about stress and to think about the kinds of vastness of human experience and how universal actually all of these things are. Because it is so intent on being an ensemble cast and making room for all these characters-- there's a really lovely younger version of Spock and of Uhura, these familiar figures if you have been a Star Trek person for a long time. You just feel how important this is to everyone involved, but also how important it is that they are not treating it like precious glass. They are really having fun with what this franchise is.

Alison Stewart: Got a text here that says, "I've been kind of meh about this season of The Bear." Another one says, "My older girls convinced me to watch Love Island. I made it about 20 minutes in and couldn't take it anymore. I think it's for the 20-something generation."

What are you watching on TV these days? Any show you've returned to for a new season that you're enjoying? Maybe one you think is kind of eh. Give us a call or text us now at 212-433-9692. 212-433-WNYC. We'll have more with Vulture TV critic Kathryn VanArendonk, and we'll talk about Lena Dunham's show after the break. This is All Of It.

[music]

You are listening to All Of It on WNYC. I'm Alison Stewart. My guest is Vulture TV critic and friend of the show, Kathryn VanArendonk. We're talking about what you can watch this summer with the AC on. Let's talk about Lena Dunham. She's back on TV, this time as the creator of a new show on Netflix. It's titled Too Much. It's out on July 10th. Netflix describes the show as, "Heartbroken New Yorker moves to London hoping for a love story." Lena Dunham herself moved from New York to London after a breakup. Is this her own personal story?

Kathryn VanArendonk: Look, Lena Dunham is a creator who has always had this really interesting, but not one-to-one relationship autobiographically with her own work. If you recall, 10 years ago, longer, the whole narrative of Girls, her big breakthrough TV series, was this is this young woman, this is this show that is not her, she is not that character. But isn't she? But is she? But how much? It really became this big maelstrom of discourse about what a millennial generation is and who she represents within it.

She has really avoided doing a project quite that directly autobiographical since then. It is interesting to see Too Much, which is this new project from her, which, as you say, has a lot of echoes, from what we understand from profiles and what she's talked about, from what her life has been in the last 10 years. On the other hand, unlike Girls, Dunham does not play the central character of Too Much. That character is played by Megan Stalter as the protagonist character who moves from New York to London to start her career. You may know Stalter from the Max show Hacks. She plays the assistant.

Alison Stewart: [laughs] I'm laughing, though, because she's kind of a little bit like Hannah Horvath from Girls.

Kathryn VanArendonk: She is.

Alison Stewart: Yes, continue.

Kathryn VanArendonk: She totally is. For me, this is the thing that's most interesting and that I am still trying to wrestle with about Too Much. I spent a lot of time thinking about Girls. That's actually one of the things that I first did at Vulture was I was the Girls recapper. I was in the middle of the discourse, so I have a lot of feelings about his whole universe. One of the things that I'm really still trying to think about with Too Much is that Megan Stalter character, how much it is like Hannah Horvath as a joke and how much it is like that character being taken seriously and how Stalter's performance is able to flex around the sincerity points versus the self deprecation points. I'm not sure it's a show I'm still really trying to get my head around.

Alison Stewart: Lena Dunham wrote Girls, obviously, about four white girls who lived in Brooklyn in the 2010s, and her character Hannah, an aspiring writer, was famous/infamous for this line:

Hannah: I don't want to freak you out, but I think that I may be the voice of my generation, or at least "a" voice of "a" generation.

Alison Stewart: You, as the Girls recapper, what do you think about the wave of pieces that have been written about Girls in, let's say, the past year?

Kathryn VanArendonk: It has been really interesting to watch this renaissance of interest in the show. When I was first writing about it a decade ago, it was famous because it was about this moment that was happening right now. It was like, "What is this generation right now, these new young people?" Now we are in this place where it has become nostalgic. It is this looking back at a time before TikTok has eaten people's brains, before algorithms became quite so niche, before politics did what they did over the past decade. It has been a little bit unmooring to have this sense of the show as nostalgic for this time that was actually-- So much of Girls is about unhappiness.

It feels very different to me from when the same thing happened to Friends, because it did. The same thing 100% happened with the show for the sitcom Friends, it became very popular afterwards with a new group of young people. I'm very curious how this new show will hit and how it will fit into or shift people's sense of what Girls is doing in the culture right now.

Alison Stewart: That one is called Too Much. Basically, everybody's saying, The Bear is meh. This one says, "The Better Sister I watched, it was okay, but needs better actors. Deli Boys is fun summer diversion." Another says, "I agree with your comments about The Gilded Age. Is it me, or has the show been getting better over time?"

Kathryn VanArendonk: It's not just you. It's great.

Alison Stewart: It is good, right?

Kathryn VanArendonk: Yes.

Alison Stewart: All right, let's talk about some sophomore efforts. On August 6th, the new season of Wednesday is back on Netflix, starring Jenna Ortega. Wednesday is the daughter in The Addams Family [snaps fingers] who went to a Harry Potter-esque school for kids like her. Where do we find Wednesday in Season 2?

Kathryn VanArendonk: I have not had screeners for Wednesday yet. I am very excited to see what they do with this new season. One thing I wanna note is that they are splitting the season. Netflix has been doing this lately. Part of it will come out the beginning of August, and then the other half of it will come out in September. I am excited to see what's happening with Wednesday, in part, because it was one of those Netflix sleeper hits that I think they knew would be appealing, but then ballooned into popularity with a viral dance and half of the kids in my kids' elementary school were dressed as Wednesday the next Halloween. It really became this, this big cultural thing.

Part of what I'm curious about with Wednesday is will it be able to maintain that level of popularity? There is this real phenomenon with television shows, and has been for quite a long time, a sophomore slump is real; second seasons are hard. I think we have seen a little bit of that with Squid Game recently. It was this huge, blow-up thing, and then there's not as much talk about the second season. I wonder if what will happen with Wednesday is that it is able to avoid some of that because so many of its fans are so young and will be interested in the world of it.

I also think Jenna Ortega herself, as a figure who has very versed in negotiating big media storms and stories about her, will help elevate it more in the just general social awareness than sometimes happens with sophomore shows. Also, I am rooting for it. I think it is always fun when there is a show that doesn't feel quite exactly like much, as though I love Ballard look-- One of the great things about Wednesday is that it has its own lane. I'm excited. We'll see.

Alison Stewart: On Apple TV+, Season 2 of the comedy Platonic. It comes out August 6th. It stars Seth Rogen and Rose Byrne about friends who reconnect via social media at pivotal times in their lives. It's interesting, one of the show's creators, writers, and directors, Nick Stoller, he isn't writing very much in the second season. I think one episode or so. Is that good or bad for a second season?

Kathryn VanArendonk: It's hard to say. I really liked Season 1 of Platonic. I think it has been a little bit of a sleeper. Actually, Apple tends to be really well-known for its dramas. It has a really comfortable lane in comfortable shows, if that makes sense. It has really had a hard time finding its footing in the comedy space in the same way, other than [unintelligible 00:20:15] giant Asterix, Ted Lasso. I think Platonic really fits well with the Apple vibe. It is about adults. They are experiencing classic, familiar midlife relationship drama, but it's nothing too out of this world or too stressful.

I am hopeful about Platonic Season 2. Nick Stoller is a busy guy, so it could just be that. Comedy, I think, also has more space for collaboration, collaborative writing. I like shows that are not reliant on a single auteur figure. We'll see.

Alison Stewart: We've got a lot of votes for Dept. Q and The Pit. I'm going to give you 30 seconds for Love Island.

Kathryn VanArendonk: [gasps] Okay, here we go.

Alison Stewart: I really don't like reality TV, but I'm going to give it to you because you are a friend of the show. Ready. Go.

Kathryn VanArendonk: Okay, here we go. Love Island USA happens five nights a week, which is insane. Five nights a week, an hour a week. The thing that this does for you, which almost no TV does now, is total immersion in these young idiots' lives. You get so much familiarity with who they are, their speech rhythms. The editing is so much more relaxed because it fills all this time. It is this brief period where everyone gets together and watches it. It's lovely and it's so fun and weird.

Alison Stewart: All right, TV critic Kathryn VanArendonk. Thank you so much for your recommendations.

Kathryn VanArendonk: Always a pleasure.

Alison Stewart: Coming up, we're going to check in on how your summer reading challenge is going so far. Stick around.