The Best Shows on TV This Week (August 2-8) • What's Most Popular

An American college football coach with no soccer experience takes charge of an English Premier League club, and his relentless good cheer baffles nearly everyone around him. That premise has carried Ted Lasso from the start, and it returns this week for a fourth season on Apple TV+ after a long absence. The comedy lives in the gap between Ted’s warmth and the cutthroat results culture of professional soccer, along with the locker room that slowly comes around to him. Season 4 opens with an episode titled “Episode 1,” the show’s first new stretch in a few years.

Two centuries before the events of Game of Thrones, House Targaryen turns on itself. House of the Dragon tracks that civil war: the dragons, the shifting alliances, and the betrayals that split the family and the realm. Season 3 is well underway on HBO, with the two sides now hardened into open conflict. The show remains one of the biggest draws on television, and the new episode airs Sunday at 9:00 PM ET. If you set it aside earlier in the run, it is deep enough now that catching up pays off.

Annie Jacobson is 17, raised in New York City by an adoptive father alongside her twin brother. Her world tilts when she inherits an island in Canada from a grandfather she barely knew. Sterling Point, new this week on Prime Video, follows her arrival there, the people she meets, a first romance, and the family secrets the island has been holding. The series premiere, “Episode 1,” sets all of that in motion and establishes the place and the mystery around it. It is a scripted coming-of-age story built on what Annie’s grandfather left behind.

The CIA’s Lioness program places female operatives next to high-value targets, and Joe runs the team while trying to keep her own life intact. Drawn from a real military effort, the series tracks that work alongside Kaitlyn Meade and Donald Westfield, who oversee the operation. Season 3 opens this week on Paramount+ with “The Spider and the Fly,” in which a covert strike turns up a hidden threat and pulls Joe into a tangled chain of events. Cruz, the Marine Raider recruited to work undercover beside Joe, is part of the operation as the new run begins.

Maggie and Negan, longtime foes from The Walking Dead, are stuck together in a post-apocalyptic Manhattan cut off from the mainland. The island has become its own lawless world of the dead and the desperate. This week’s episode, “Haven,” brings old enemies back into their path as the two try to survive the city. The show is into its third season on AMC+, so the history between Maggie and Negan runs deep by now. It streams this week for anyone tracking where their uneasy alliance stands.

Thousands of people live inside a giant underground silo in a ruined, toxic future, bound by strict rules nobody is allowed to question. Engineer Juliette keeps pulling at those rules, and what she finds threatens the story the silo tells about itself. The third season is on Apple TV+, with a new episode streaming Friday as Juliette digs further into the silo’s secrets. The show builds its tension slowly, layering out how the underground world actually works and who benefits from keeping its residents in the dark. It is one to catch up on if you fell behind.

Captain Pike, Spock, and Number One crew the U.S.S. Enterprise in the years before Kirk takes command, running the kind of planet-of-the-week missions the franchise was built on. Strange New Worlds leans into that episodic structure, sending the crew to a new world most weeks. Season 4 is running on Paramount+, with a new episode out Thursday. By this point in the season the crew dynamics are well established, so it is easy to drop back in on a fresh mission. It remains one of the more approachable corners of the current Star Trek slate.

Vikram Chamberlain time-traveled from 1847 and got stranded in the present, then accidentally loosed magic across Europe. Now he and a small team have to chase it all down. The Librarians: The Next Chapter starts its second season this week on TNT with “And the Burning Heart,” which sends the group to an international boarding school hit by an outbreak of unexplained rage. There they meet a man claiming to be Merlin, and they have to master their own anger to find the source of the magic. The season premiere airs Sunday at 9:00 PM ET.

A house wired with cameras, a group of strangers living together around the clock, and a weekly vote that sends someone home: Big Brother has run on that formula for years, and season 28 is in full swing on CBS. The last houseguest standing takes home $500,000, so by this point in the summer the alliances and betrayals are doing most of the work. This week’s Sunday episode, “Episode 11,” continues the competition as the numbers in the house keep shrinking. It airs at 8:00 PM ET, and it is easy to jump back into midstream.

A multi-million-dollar heist falls apart, and con artist Lucky has to run, chased at once by the FBI and a crime boss who wants her dead. That chase drives the series, which is partway through its first season on Apple TV+ after premiering recently. This week’s “Episode 5” keeps Lucky on the move as both pursuers close in. The show runs on momentum, staying with Lucky as she works angles to stay alive and find a way out. If you started it earlier this summer, this is the next chapter.

John Sugar is a private investigator working a single case: the disappearance of Olivia Siegel, granddaughter of an old-school Hollywood producer. The deeper he digs, the more Siegel family secrets he turns up, some fresh and some long buried. Sugar is in its second season on Apple TV+, with a new episode streaming Friday. The show keeps its focus tight on Sugar himself and the noir-tinged world of the case, doling out its reveals carefully. It is a good week to pick the thread back up if the investigation slipped your mind.

In Hell’s Kitchen, the Irish American Westies hold their turf against the far larger Italian Mafia through sheer brutality and cunning, sharing the spoils of a big construction project under a fragile truce. Internal tension between the younger crew and the old guard keeps threatening to blow it all up. The series is midway through its first season on MGM+, and this week’s episode, “A Right Rose Tree,” has Sweeney letting Roarke sell cocaine only if he sources it himself, which puts him in Gotti’s sights. Meanwhile Bridget helps secure explosives for an IRA plot and Polk leans on Keenan to wear a wire.