While summer used to be about taking a break from TV and watching blockbuster movies, counter-programming on Netflix, Amazon and other streaming channels have made this summer more about some fun shows. While I enjoyed myself some Avengers and Spider-man action early on, over the last month there’s been a new series to binge-watch each weekend. Plus, since they’re streaming channels, even with only a month left in the summer, we can catch up on any show that we missed while busy playing outdoors (or whatever).

Stranger Things

Let’s start things off with the biggest name in summer streaming (from Netflix): Stranger Things. While I loved and raved about season one, I was far less thrilled with the second season. It had seemed like a bit of a retread; and our diminutive hero, Eleven, went off and had her own strange adventures, which really disrupted the magic. In contrast, this latest season is top-notch in so many ways, and reminded me that I loved the first season for the 80s nostalgia and spirit that was baked right in. Watching season three, that feeling came back in spades. Everything from the outfits, to the shopping mall setting, to the bad guys (Vau! Soviet Russians are back!), and the music (12-year-old me was squirming with excitement to hear the theme from The Neverending Story again!). On top of all those trappings from the best decade ever, this season also captured that sense of innocent adventure that was integral to so many of the movies of that day (from The Goonies, to E.T., and even some non-Spielberg ones as well!). For the first half of the 8-episode season, our gang of tweens and teens all form into smaller groups of twos and threes, each following up on something mysterious happening in the town of Hawkins. Whether it’s a mysterious transmission, freaky exploding rats, odd behaviour from Billy the lifeguard, or magnets falling off the fridge, eventually it all leads them to join forces to stop the big bad thing at the heart of it all. Classic 80s, am I right?

Anyway, besides all the nostalgia, this season also has some wonderful developments with each character, as the kids are growing up. We spend a lot of time focusing on tween dating as they start to couple-up. It’s refreshingly hilarious to hear them giving (bad) advice to each other about relationships and the opposite sex. As a nice balance, Joyce (Winona Ryder) and Hopper (David Harbour) also dabble in a bit of will-they-won’t-they as they investigate/flee-from a giant, Russian, Terminator-esque thug. This show, and especially this season of it, is a wonderful antidote to so much of the cynical and overly-complex television that we’ve had so much of since the 80s.

Veronica Mars

On that note, there’s another series that kind of came back (12 years later) this summer on Hulu (Crave here in Canada); but this Veronica Mars has grown up a bit, bringing some of that cynical complexity with it. Even in its original run, this story of a young girl private investigator, working to solve big crimes against the backdrop of a class-divided SoCal resort town was smart for its age. However, it feels a bit like the passage of time has allowed the characters to stew in their flaws. Meanwhile, Neptune, California is plagued by a series of bombings, and Veronica (played by Kristen Bell) and father Keith (played by Enrico Colantoni) are hot on the trail of the suspects. This season is good for fans of the show, since many favourite characters make reappearances, including boyfriend Logan, butthead buddy Dick, friends like Wallace, and frenemies like Weevil — even a few exes are thrown in for good measure. However, they kind of already paid that fan-service in the 2014 Kickstarter movie, so it’s nice that we get some great new characters introduced: Patton Oswalt plays a pizza delivery guy (who witnesses the first bombing); newcomer Izabela Vidovic plays a precocious girl whose father was killed in the bombing and who becomes a bit of a protege to Veronica; Dawnn Lewis plays the beleaguered town sheriff; the always-amazing JK Simmons plays an ex-con working for local real estate mogul Richard Casablancas; and finally Clifton Collins Jr. and Frank Gallegos play a couple of world-weary hitmen who seem like they must have wandered over from a Tarantino movie. A revival season of this clever show is wonderful summer entertainment. All the mystery, suspense, tension, character moments, witty dialogue come together just like they did in the first couple of seasons. I enjoyed this season so much that I had hoped another would be coming next year. I don’t know if that’s in the cards, given where this season ended, but as one of the few revived shows that made it work, I would love to see the story continue.

Good Omens

I wasn’t quite sure what to expect from this Amazon Prime Video mini-series adaptation of a popular novel which combines the imaginations and wit of two genre superstars: Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman. The story centres on an unlikely pair (an angel, Aziraphale, played by Michael Sheen, and a demon, Crowley, played by David Tennant) who have been clocking time on Earth since the Garden of Eden (the pair were involved in that whole Fall of Man/Explusion from Paradise hullabaloo). After millennia, everything finally becomes urgent as the day of Armageddon arrives. While the series is largely about this cosmic friendship, it wouldn’t be a British fantasy story without the introduction of numerous quirky secondary characters. There are witches, witch-hunters, the Horsemen of the Apocalypse (modernized for today’s culture), evil nuns, small-town harlots, country school-children, and of course, the Anti-Christ. All these players have their roles in the apocalyptic events, as well as their humourous back-stories. If all those characters are not enough to spin your head (in a confusion way, not a demonic-possession way) then there’s also how the story jumps around in time across hundreds and thousands of years that makes it a bit tricky to fully follow. Nevertheless, I found the series to be pretty enjoyable. The production values are excellent. I always love David Tennant, and Michael Sheen is a wonderful actor as well. I’m not sure that this show is for everyone. However, if you like a story of biblical fantasy, served with dry, British humour, this is for you.

The Boys

Another new show streaming on Amazon Prime Video is The Boys, which is a darker, more grown-up take on the super-hero genre. Set in an alternate America (since any reality with super-heroes is an alternate one, right?) where super-heroes not only dominate, they are owned employees of a mega-company named Vought. In particular, a Justice-League style super-team known as The Seven are the exclusive agents of Vought. While the show spends a lot of time with The Seven, deconstructing how their super-human powers also lead to political, cultural, and economic power (and their corresponding corruption), it also tells the story of a small band of regular mortals (the titular “Boys”) who are out to bring The Seven down. As a long-time fan of comic books and super-hero stories, I have spent many an idle thought on what it would really be like to have powers. However, in this story, someone with super-speed kills a woman by not slowing down and running right through her — not the kind of thing we imagined with our pillow-case capes flowing behind us. This show does a good job of blending the idea of super-human power with the truths of human nature (especially our baser tendencies). While this is not the first time supers have been examined in this way, I think it does a really good job because it doesn’t pull any punches. These supers are very very human, and their super-powers make their flaws so much worse. So if your kids like super-heroes (and which kids don’t, right?), I advise that they don’t watch this show. But for grown-ups (especially those who have grown up on super-heroes), this is an intriguing series with a very compelling and twisty story. Some have compared it to Game of Thrones for how the series makes its characters more extreme versions of normal people (people who have normal thoughts and feelings like greed, ambition, jealousy, selfishness but without the dragons or invulnerable skin to take it up a few notches).

In these days of “peak TV”, where streaming channels are bringing us an endless supply of new entertainment, it’s hard to keep up. I have only just begun to enjoy other recent releases such as the new series of GLOW (the clever, and warm female wrestling drama, set in my beloved 1980s, on Netflix), and I’m anticipating (though the early reviews aren’t great) another Amazon fantasy series coming soon, called Carnival Row. It features Orlando Bloom and Cara Delevigne as a detective and a fairy who fall in love in an alternate Victorian England where fairies exist. I tried to watch the new Netflix martial arts drama, Wu Assassins, but unfortunately the Chinese stereotypes were a bit too broad for me to tolerate and enjoy. Also, I still want to check out the Netflix sci-fi series Another Life (featuring Battlestar Galactica star, Katee Sackhoff), and the acclaimed HBO drama Chernobyl (on Crave here in Canada), but just haven’t gotten to it. So if you have some time left in the summer to binge a little TV, there is plenty (good and bad) for you to choose from.