Critics Pick Summer TV’s Beauties and Bores

DANIEL FIENBERG This was the Blond Ambition summer on the small screen — a wave of platinum domination entirely unrelated to the release of a new Madonna album.

The season’s TV programming was bookended by the 2026 World Cup, an event ruled on social media (and occasionally on the pitch) by Norwegian striker Erling Haaland, who captivated our algorithms with his droll sense of humor and love of taxidermy raccoons; and by the return of Apple’s Ted Lasso , featuring Hannah Waddingham’s excitable Rebecca. (Meanwhile, Waddingham had a better series smack in the middle of summer with Amazon’s action comedy Ride or Die , which very likably paired the Emmy winner with Octavia Spencer.) Are Haaland’s and Waddingham’s towhead locks natural? Only their hairdressers know for sure. Related Stories TV Streaming Ratings: 'Little House on the Prairie' Takes Over Top Spot TV 'Ted Lasso' Season 4 Sets Premiere Day Viewing Record for Apple TV

We got a perplexing prequel to Legally Blonde in Amazon’s canon-destroying Elle , plus the usual onslaught of blond-wigged Targaryens in HBO’s House of the Dragon , which continues to waffle frustratingly between potent palace intrigue and an excess of dragons. Critics and audiences alike went gaga over Sam Reid’s glammed-out turn as a bloodthirsty vampire gone rock star in AMC’s The Vampire Lestat . Even Will Ferrell got washed out, tonsorially and qualitatively, in Netflix’s lifeless golfing comedy The Hawk .

Does it feel like audiences skipped beach reading for bleach viewing this summer? Or am I reaching to find a unifying theme for this conversation about another summer of wildly uneven television?

ANGIE HAN Clever wordplay, faulty premise. I’d say bleach viewing and beach reading have both been prominent themes this season.

Amazon tried to recapture that Summer I Turned Pretty sizzle with the annoyingly mopey Every Year After , another YA adaptation about teens mooning over each other by the water. FX served up a sexier, deadlier high school drama with The Shards , which has Ryan Murphy helping to bring Bret Easton Ellis’ novel to the small screen, yielding results almost exactly as stylishly excessive but uneven as you’d expect. Heck, Peacock took on a book by Elin Hilderbrand, an author who’s been described as “The Queen of Beach Reads,” with the starry yet underwhelming Five-Star Weekend .

Toss in a couple of shows that are beach-set and feel beach read-based but aren’t — Megan Park’s marvelously funny and sensitive Amazon original Sterling Point , which sees several youths flirting, crying and speedboating around a Canadian lake; and Hulu’s airily insubstantial The Season , which chronicles a yachting season for the Hong Kong elite — and, actually, I feel like a huge slice of my summer viewing has been beautiful people entering and exiting various bodies of water.

But it’s hard to say many of these titles have left much of an impression ( Sterling Point excepted). In the tradition of actual beach reads, I’ve found most of them easy to tear through but almost as easy to forget.