The 5 Best New TV Shows of August 2023

August has never been the most exciting month for television, but when it comes to new releases, this year's lineup might just be the sparsest of the streaming era. While studios would like subscribers to believe that concurrent writers' and actors' strikes have yet to affect their content stockpiles, schedule changes that have seen such high-profile debuts as FX's A Murder at the Center of the World and the second season of Max's Rap Sh!t move from August to November suggest otherwise. In some cases, it's a matter of holding completed seasons until performers can promote them; in others, the shows simply haven't finished production. Either way, here's hoping this means David Zaslav, Bob Iger, et al. are finally getting ready to bargain in earnest.

Meanwhile, if new seasons of Reservation Dogs and the divinely frustrating And Just Like That aren't keeping you busy, there are still some good viewing options if you're willing to look beyond the usual platforms and genres. This month's roundup includes two great music documentaries, two fine foreign imports, and one of the wildest investigative series ever committed to video.

Ladies First: A Story of Women in Hip-Hop (Netflix)

At a back-to-school party in the Bronx on Aug. 11, 1973, a teenager who'd become world-famous as DJ Kool Herc used a pair of turntables to play a continuous set of breakbeats, in a stroke of inspiration now remembered as the birth of hip-hop. So, of course, this has been a month of 50th-anniversary celebrations, from concerts to exhibitions to documentaries. A standout among the latter glut, Netflix's four-part retrospective Ladies First takes concise but complex stock of how female artists helped shape—and have more recently come to dominate—a genre known for its machismo.

Surviving R. Kelly filmmaker dream hampton and pioneering rapper MC Lyte are among the executive producers of the series, which exclusively features interviews with women artists and experts in order to present a fully female counter-narrative. Founding mothers like Roxanne Shanté and Queen Latifah share screen time with current luminaries as different as mainstream superstar Saweetie, critical darling Rapsody, and experimentalist Tierra Whack. The result is a mix of thoughtfully dissected triumphs and tribulations that simultaneously dispels pernicious myths around women in hip-hop, acknowledges the misogyny they've endured, and honors the indelible contributions they've made to the art form. A coda that finds subjects talking up their own favorite female rappers puts an exclamation point on Ladies First's multigenerational portrait of sisterhood.

Limbo (Viaplay)

As Nordic noir aficionados but perhaps few others know, the Scandinavian streaming service Viaplay launched in the U.S. earlier this year, importing a variety of European programming that goes beyond stoic detectives investigating murders among the fjords. One recent highlight is Limbo, a six-part Swedish drama that follows three longtime best friends whose lives are thrown into crisis when their teenage sons get into a car crash. Each boy sustains a different level of injuries—and bears a different share of the blame. The incident forces their families to confront issues that have been in lingering in the background of their apparently happy middle-class lives: infidelity, money problems, career anxiety, co-parenting with exes.

Scandinavian TV has always excelled at telling poignant stories without drowning viewers in sentimentality. While an American version of this story might get bogged down in the heavy-handed weepiness of a This Is Us or an A Million Little Things, Limbo balances emotional subject matter with stark storytelling; its many extended silences make its impassioned confrontations all the more affecting. The show pulls off this feat thanks to three great central performances from The Bridge star Sofia Helin, Rakel Wärmländer, and Louise Peterhoff. Wärmländer is particularly captivating as Ebba, an ambitious real estate agent who discovers she doesn't know her family as well as she'd assumed.

San Francisco Sounds: A Place in Time (MGM+)

San Francisco in the high '60s is not exactly pop-cultural terra incognita, nor is San Francisco Sounds an especially evocative title. But this two-part documentary from the platform formerly known as Epix and directors Alison Ellwood and Anoosh Tertzakian, who previously collaborated on Laurel Canyon: A Place in Time, extends the appeal of Haight-Ashbury's Boomer Valhalla beyond its built-in audience of nostalgists. Instead of approaching the hippie moment from a detached, sociological perspective, the filmmakers zero in on a music scene that coalesced years before 1967's Summer of Love, around bands like the Charlatans, the Grateful Dead, and Jefferson Airplane.

This emphasis on the interconnected nature of the city's creative community helps Ellwood and Tertzakian trace the evolution of San Francisco's musical vanguard from folk rock to psych rock to the more diverse mix of styles that emerged as the flower children began to wilt: the Latin rock of Santana, the prog rock of early Journey, Sly & the Family Stone's radical funk. Archival interviews are thoughtfully woven together with fresh insights from such local linchpins as radio DJ Dusty Street, poster artist Victor Moscoso, and former Rolling Stone journalist Ben Fong-Torres. The takeaway—that cultural scenes thrive on the cross-pollination of young people innovating in complementary art forms, then sag under the dead weight of coolhunting hangers-on—transcends any one time or place.

Telemarketers (HBO)

Don’t be put off by the snoozy title: Telemarketers is one of the most exciting documentaries I’ve seen in years. Effortlessly dodging, and sometimes subtly parodying, every maudlin cliché of the true-crime genre, the three-part HBO series is a first-person odyssey through the legal gray area of call-center fundraising. At first, the mood is reminiscent of cult docs like Heavy Metal Parking Lot and American Movie—funny, character-rich portraits of misfit subcultures. But then the misfits realize they’re pawns in a noxious scam. And they embark on a quest to expose it. [Read the full review.]

Who Is Erin Carter? (Netflix)

It’s a paradox of 21st-century Hollywood that the genre we call action gets duller every year. Superheroes, infinite franchising, virtual production, rapidly improving VFX technology—it all adds up to a glut of formulaic shows and movies, bloated with computer-generated battle scenes and fake explosions that increasingly crowd out not just character development, but also basic plot coherence. These days, any action offering that diverges from this norm is worthy of attention. But Netflix’s Who Is Erin Carter? doesn’t just harken back to the genre’s analog past. It also tells the human story of a woman’s quest to give her daughter the stability she never had.

The central mystery of the seven-part series is right there in the title. One morning, Erin Carter (Evin Ahmad) awakens her little girl, Harper (Indica Watson), at the crack of dawn to catch a boat out of Folkestone Harbor in southeast England. Five years later, they’re living in a picturesque suburb of Barcelona, where Erin is a substitute teacher married to a gentle nurse, Jordi (Sean Teale). [Read the full review.]