The Best Shows on TV This Week (August 16-22) • What's Most Popular

HBO starts its Green Lantern series Sunday night. John Stewart is the new recruit. Hal Jordan has been doing the job long enough that other Lanterns call him a legend. Rather than sending the two of them across the galaxy, the season keeps them on Earth, working a murder in the American heartland that opens onto something much darker. Two intergalactic cops asking questions in small towns is closer to a crime story than a space adventure, and that is the shape of the first episode. It is the largest new title on the schedule this week.

Paddy’s Pub is open again. Season 18 starts Monday on Hulu, with the same four friends running the same failing Irish bar in South Philadelphia and behaving terribly toward everyone, each other included. The show has spent seventeen seasons taking swings at subjects most comedies leave alone, from religion and gun control to addiction, disability, and racism, with the gang always positioned as the punchline rather than the topic. The structure has not moved: somebody floats a plan, the group escalates it well past sense, and nobody learns anything. Eighteen seasons is a long time for a sitcom to still be making new ones.

An American football coach with no soccer experience gets hired to manage an English club, and that mismatch is still the engine of the whole thing. Season 4 continues on Apple TV, with Episode 3 going up Wednesday. Ted’s relentless good cheer keeps colliding with a sport he does not understand, a country he does not know, and a locker room that cannot decide what to make of him. The joke has never been that Ted is bad at his job. It is that nobody around him can work out whether the optimism is a strategy.

Netflix posts the fifth season Thursday, all ten episodes at once. Outer Banks is set on a coastal island split between wealthy summer residents and the local families who work for them. It began with a teenager named John B pulling his three closest friends into a hunt for a treasure connected to his father’s disappearance. Four seasons of digging later, the crew is still chasing money, leads, and each other, and the island is still divided exactly the way it was on day one.

Joe runs the sharp end of the CIA’s counterterrorism work and tries to keep a personal life intact while doing it. The Lioness program places undercover operatives next to the people funding and directing state terrorism, and Cruz, an aggressive Marine Raider, is the one embedded closest to them. Sunday’s episode on Paramount+, The Bear Is Infected, puts Joe up against a breach in the operation. Finding whoever is compromising it pushes the team into a play with a lot of downside. The premise comes from a real US military program that attached women to combat units.

Episode 8 lands Friday on Apple TV. Thousands of people live out their lives inside a giant silo buried underground, in a ruined world where stepping outside means death. The rules that keep the place running are absolute, and the punishment for breaking them is public. Juliette, an engineer from the lower levels, has spent three seasons pulling at those rules and learning how much of what she was told about the silo is false. The question underneath it has never changed: what the silo actually is, and who decided that everyone inside should stay there.

Set in the decade before Kirk took command of the Enterprise, this one follows Captain Pike, science officer Spock, and Number One as they run missions to worlds nobody has charted. Episode 5 of the fourth season streams Thursday on Paramount+. The structure has stayed largely episodic across the run, so a given week tends to present a problem, work it, and resolve it, with the longer character threads moving underneath. That makes almost any Thursday a workable place to start, mid-season or not.

A hundred years from now, colonization missions are the plan for keeping the human race alive. Ark One, the first of them, hit a catastrophic event that killed much of the crew and wrecked much of the ship, leaving the survivors more than a year out from their target planet with thin supplies and nobody left in command. Wednesday’s episode, In Plain Sight, airs at 10:00 PM ET on Syfy. The show runs on that arithmetic: too few people, not enough air, water, and food, and too far to go. Nobody still on board was chosen to lead, which accounts for most of the trouble.

Vikram Chamberlain time traveled out of 1847 and got stuck in the present. He went back to his castle in Belgrade, found it had been turned into a museum, and accidentally released magic across the continent on his way in. Cleaning that up is the job, and he has six months and a team to do it with: a world history savant, a scientific genius, and a Guardian. In And the Red Rock, airing Sunday at 9:00 PM ET on TNT, the group works out that the charming scientist Lysa has been dating is the Red Rock, a superhero pushing back on a crime wave in Belgrade. Whether his powers and the crime wave both trace to an abused artifact is the open question.

Manhattan was cut off from the mainland a long time ago. What is left is a crumbling city full of the dead and of living people who have built their own rules inside it, some of that beautiful, most of it dangerous. Maggie and Negan are the pair navigating it. In Found / Lost, streaming Sunday on AMC+, Maggie and Luis go looking for resources worth the trip while Negan and Renata handle the defense of the city. Splitting the two of them up and giving each of them something to lose has been the shape of this run.

A multi-million-dollar heist went sideways, and Lucky, the con artist at the center of it, has been running since. The FBI wants her in custody. A crime boss with no interest in a court date wants her too. Episode 7 streams Wednesday on Apple TV, far enough into the first season that the space around her has gotten noticeably smaller. The premise is simple and the show has stayed with it: one person who is very good at lying, two sets of pursuers, and no clean way out.

Conan O’Brien finds people who spoke with him on his podcast, then turns up at their homes in whatever country they happen to live in. The new season starts Friday on HBO Max. Each trip is part visit and part excuse to wander around a place with a local, and O’Brien spends most of it being a bad guest on purpose. The format stays loose: no visible itinerary, a lot of time in ordinary homes and businesses, and a host who treats every local custom as a personal dare.