The Best Shows on TV This Week (August 9-15) • What's Most Popular

Season four opens Wednesday with “The City of Brotherly Love,” and two more episodes land the same day before the show settles into a weekly release. Jack Reacher is a former Army military police investigator with no address, no phone, and no reason to stay anywhere. This run puts him in Philadelphia, where a subway incident pulls him into something much larger than it first appears. It adapts Gone Tomorrow, the thirteenth Reacher novel. Eight episodes carry the season through mid September. Each season here tells one closed story, so arriving now costs you nothing.

An American football coach with no soccer experience whatsoever gets hired to run an English club. That was the joke going in, and the show spent three seasons turning it into something else entirely. Ted’s whole method is relentless decency aimed at people who did not ask for it and do not particularly want it, and the writing keeps testing how far that actually gets him. Season four is underway, with Episode 2 landing Wednesday on Apple TV. If you stepped away when the last season wrapped, the gap between then and now is smaller than it feels.

Two hundred years before Game of Thrones, House Targaryen turned on itself. That civil war is the whole engine here, and season three has spent its run grinding through the consequences: who holds which castle, who has a dragon, and who is willing to burn something to keep a claim. Episode eight airs Sunday at 9:00 PM ET on HBO. This is not a jumping-on point, and there is no pretending otherwise. But it remains one of the largest hours on television any Sunday it shows up, and it is showing up this week.

Valley Forge Automotive Center is a family owned repair shop bleeding money, and Will, the nervous and unqualified heir running it, cannot get anyone to take him seriously, least of all his cousin Shane, who works there and makes every problem worse. Season three arrives Thursday on Netflix with all twelve episodes available at once, the same shape as last season. The comedy stays deliberately small: bad ideas, worse follow through, several grown men arguing in a garage about nothing. It films in West Chester, Pennsylvania, next door to a real tire shop belonging to Steve Gerben’s father. Episodes are short. Clearing the season is an afternoon.

Fry woke up a thousand years late and has been delivering packages across the galaxy ever since, usually alongside a bending robot with no impulse control and a one-eyed captain who flies like she wants the ship destroyed. Monday’s episode is “Our Flag Means Medical Coverage,” and it puts space pirates between the Planet Express crew and a priceless cargo. That is the show working exactly as designed: a stupid setup, executed with far more craft than it strictly requires. Season 14 is on Hulu, and the episodes remain almost entirely self-contained.

Thousands of people live in a buried silo beneath a poisoned surface, under a set of rules nobody is permitted to question. Juliette, an engineer, started asking anyway, and the show has been paying that off ever since. Season three continues Friday on Apple TV with its seventh episode. What holds it together is how much attention it pays to the physical thing itself: the levels, the stairs, the machinery, the distance between the bottom and the top. It is a mystery, but it is also a very careful piece of world building, and the two do not get in each other’s way.

The CIA runs a program that places female operatives undercover inside the personal lives of its targets. Joe runs the field side of it, and the job costs her at home in ways the show refuses to smooth over. Season three’s second episode, “No Sorrow Like the Survivor,” has Kaitlyn trying to keep a crisis from spreading across agencies while Neal manages the fear building at home. The program itself is drawn from a real military initiative, and the series stays interested in the bureaucratic layer above the operation as much as the operation. It streams Sunday on Paramount+.

Vikram Chamberlain time traveled out of 1847, got stuck in the present, and accidentally spilled magic across an entire continent while poking around his own castle. Cleaning that up is the job, and he has a small team helping: a world history savant, a scientist, and a Guardian who handles the parts that require hitting something. Sunday’s episode is “And the Vanishing Bankers.” Bankers are disappearing in London, and the trail leads to a very unpleasant version of Peter Pan who is assembling a new crop of Lost Boys. Season two, airing 9:00 PM ET on TNT.

Manhattan got cut off from the mainland a long time ago and has been rotting on its own terms ever since, full of the dead and of the living who carved out territory in the wreckage. Maggie and Negan are still in it, still not friends, still useful to each other. Sunday’s episode, “Emigrants,” brings more survivors into their community than it was built to hold, which is rarely good news in this world. Season three keeps the scale tight and the setting doing most of the work. It streams Sunday on AMC+.

FBI agent Alice Black is chasing a female serial killer who is patient, precise, and several moves ahead. The two women are working toward their own versions of justice, and the closer their lives get, the harder it becomes to tell whose version is which. This one started up recently and reaches its fifth episode Monday with “Pick a Sticker,” in which Alice and Catherine both go further than they should to get what they are after. Still early enough in the first season that catching up is a short job. It streams on Hulu.

A heist worth millions falls apart, and the con artist who put it together has to run. The FBI wants her. So does a crime boss with fewer procedural obligations. Lucky spends the first season trying to stay ahead of both while working out an exit that does not end with her dead. Episode 6 arrives Wednesday on Apple TV. The first season is compact enough that a viewer starting now can be current before the next one drops, and the show moves at a pace that makes that a reasonable plan.

Comic book store owner Stuart Bloom breaks a device Sheldon and Leonard built, triggers a multiverse collapse, and is then handed the job of putting reality back together. He has help: his girlfriend Denise, his geologist friend Bert, and Barry Kripke, who is a quantum physicist and a considerable irritant. The trip takes them through alternate versions of faces from The Big Bang Theory. The title is not being coy about how it goes. Episode 5 streams Thursday on HBO Max, with the first season still short enough to catch in a sitting.