Worth Watching — August 5, 2026

Jason Sudeikis is back as Ted Lasso, the folksy soccer coach who’s being wooed to return to England to shepherd a women’s team. Ryan Murphy teams with Bret Easton Ellis for the 1980s-set coming-of-age shocker The Shards. A gentler YA drama unfolds in Prime Video‘s sudsy Sterling Point. A new Discovery Channel series follows an Internet sleuth who uses crowdsourcing to locate people whose bad behavior has gone viral.

Ted Lasso

Cause for celebration: After three years, Ted Lasso (Emmy winner Jason Sudeikis) is getting back in the game. Soccer, that is — or to the Brits he long ago won over, football. Having left England to return to his Kansas City family, Ted will need some wooing to pull up stakes and return to AFC Richmond, where they’re launching a women’s team and could use his optimistic “Believe” philosophy to win over skeptics. Which explains why team owner Rebecca (the Amazonian Hannah Waddingham), operations director Higgins (Jeremy Swift) — in shorts! — and marketing ace Keeley (Juno Temple) jet to the American Midwest to convince their wistful friend to return to the fold. But first, while Ted is “running some laps up here in the old noggin,” who’s up for some messy barbecue?

The Shards

Think 9021-Oh-No in Ryan Murphy’s latest exercise in style informing substance, a decadent melodrama set in a sun-dappled 1980s Los Angeles of staggeringly beautiful and obnoxiously privileged (and often unsupervised) youth. The narrator of this glossy and gruesome tale is Bret (Igby Rigney), as in Bret Easton Ellis (Less Than Zero), author of the book on which the show is based, an executive producer and the show’s fond-of-foreshadowing main character. Part of his posh prep school’s inner circle, Bret is obsessed and feels threatened by the arrival of a studly and mysterious newcomer, Robert Mallory (Homer Gere), with a cloudy past. Bret soon begins to believe that Robert might be connected to the grisly murder spree of “The Trawler,” who’s been targeting their peer group. “The city was on edge, and so was I,” Bret says. But not so much that he can’t take a meeting with one of his friend’s dads, Terry Schaffer (Yellowstone‘s Wes Bentley), a powerful movie producer who takes a possibly unhealthy interest in the sexually fluid Bret. The series premieres with two episodes.

Sterling Point

Things are a little tamer, and a lot more scenic, in the romantic YA drama starring Ella Rubin as teenage Annie, who inherits a home and a remote wooded island in Canada after her grandfather passes. When she heads north from New York City to check the place out, she also discovers she has a half-sister (who looks just like her late mom) that she never knew existed. More conflicts, secrets, and love interests emerge over the summer and eight episodes.

How to Catch a Dirtbag

Michael “TizzyEnt” McWhorter made a name for himself as an online justice warrior when he began exposing bullies and others whose bad behavior went viral. Using crowdsourcing to track down and identify these jerks, the filmmaker with a background in directing music videos and commercials takes his mission to TV in an eight-part series. He goes to the source of each incident, interviewing victims, witnesses, law enforcement, and occasionally the actual perpetrator. Among Tizzy’s subjects in the opener: a man wielding a pipe to attack cars on L.A. roads and a New Yorker who causes mayhem with a stolen tow truck.

The Challenge

“Are we on Love Island or are we on The Challenge?” wonders one of the 24 hardbodies participating in the 42nd season (titled The Challenge: Cutthroat) of the competition series, set entirely in exotic Thailand. A fair question, but for these two-dozen reality-TV and Challenge vets, split into three teams, it’s all about getting to the grueling end, with the winning group taking a share of the $500,000 grand prize.