The Best Shows on TV This Week (July 26-August 1) • What's Most Popular

Two centuries before the events of Game of Thrones, House of the Dragon charts the Targaryen dynasty as it tears itself apart in a war of succession. The third season is well underway on HBO, and this week brings its sixth episode. The conflict has hardened into open war between rival branches of the family, each with its own claim and its own dragons, and the cost keeps climbing on both sides. It remains the biggest thing on Sunday nights this summer. If you stepped away earlier in the season, the broad lines of who wants the throne and who is willing to burn for it are easy enough to pick back up.

Maggie and Negan are back, and this time the ground is a post-apocalyptic Manhattan sealed off from the mainland. The Walking Dead: Dead City returns for a third season on AMC+, dropping the pair into an island city that has become its own lawless territory, thick with the dead and with living factions who rule blocks like fiefdoms. The two carry a long and violent history, which keeps every truce between them fragile. The season premiere, Trillium, sets them back down in that world. It is one of several offshoots of the larger Walking Dead franchise still running.

A new crime thriller lands on Hulu this week. Furious follows Alice Black, an FBI agent chasing a cold and methodical female serial killer through a case that keeps pulling her in deeper. The two women move on separate tracks at first, the agent assembling evidence while the killer stays ahead, until their lives start to cross and the line between right and wrong gets harder to hold. The premiere lays out that setup and both sides of the chase. It is the show’s first season.

A colony ship limping toward a distant planet is the whole world of The Ark. Set about a century from now, it follows the survivors of Ark One, a deep-space mission that lost much of its crew and all of its leadership in an early catastrophe. More than a year from their destination and running short on supplies, the remaining passengers have had to work out who leads and how anyone survives. The show has run on that pressure since the start. Season 3 opens this week on Syfy, Wednesday night.

A blown heist put the con artist Lucky on the run, and the show tracks her scramble to stay alive and find a way out. She has the FBI on one side and a vengeful crime boss on the other, both closing in as she keeps improvising. Lucky is a newer Apple TV series, and this week brings its fourth episode, listed as Episode 4. Because it started only recently, the earlier episodes set up the double pursuit that drives it, so it plays best from the beginning.

Thousands of people live packed inside an enormous underground silo, cut off from a poisoned surface and bound by rules no one is allowed to question. Silo follows engineer Juliette as she keeps digging into how the place really works and why the people who ask hard questions tend to turn up dead. The third season is running on Apple TV, with a new episode this week. The show doles out its answers slowly, each one reshaping what came before, so viewers a few episodes behind will want to close the gap first.

Nine seasons in, Rick and Morty is still powered by Rick, the drunk genius scientist, and Morty, the jittery grandson dragged along on his schemes. This week’s episode, Field of Dreams, nods toward Tom Sawyer in the show’s usual sideways style. It airs late Sunday on Adult Swim, capping the night’s animation block. The series mixes big sci-fi swings with the family’s ongoing dysfunction, and its late-run episodes tend to drop in without much need for a recap.

Most weeks Star Trek: Strange New Worlds tells a self-contained story, and this week is one of them. The show follows Captain Pike, Spock, and first officer Una aboard the Enterprise in the years before Kirk takes command, exploring the galaxy mission by mission. It opened its fourth season last week, and this week’s episode, Griffin Incident, is the second of the run. The standalone structure makes it an easy place to step back in without catching every earlier beat. It streams on Paramount+, keeping the mix of exploration, crew banter, and one-off problems the show has leaned on since the start.

Built from the real life of football player Spencer Paysinger, All American started with a South Central Los Angeles player recruited to Beverly Hills High and the collision between those two worlds. Now in its eighth season on The CW, the show has moved well past that first setup. This week’s episode, No More Hiding, uses a flashback to Amina’s time at Dinsberg to bring old secrets to the surface, putting Amina and KJ on the spot, while Layla turns to her father JP for help and the visit goes sideways.

Competitors throw themselves at a punishing set of obstacle courses in American Ninja Warrior, racing to finish clean and move on toward the national finals in Las Vegas and its four-stage Mt. Midoriyama course. The eighteenth season is running on NBC, and this week is the second Central regional qualifier, titled Central Regional Qualifying 2. Each round narrows the field to the runs fast and clean enough to advance. It is a straightforward one to drop into on a Monday night, no backstory required.

Anna and Tom Bowden are married attorneys whose comfortable life starts coming apart when Max Cady walks free. Cady, the killer they helped put in prison, comes back wanting revenge, and Cape Fear tracks the slow tightening of that threat around the family. The first season is deep in on Apple TV, with a new episode this week. The menace has been building steadily across the run, so the late episodes lean on everything before them, which makes starting from the beginning the better way in.

A mugging is what pushed Harriet Wild, a retired literature professor in Dublin, into a second career solving crimes. Recovering at the home of her son, a city detective, she picked up a thread on one of his cases and decided to chase it herself, eventually setting up as a private investigator with a young sidekick along for the ride. Harry Wild reaches its fifth season on Acorn TV this week with an episode called Stotious. The tone stays light and quick, and the cases close within the hour, so any episode works as a way in.