I Watch TV Shows for a Living — Here’s What I’m Streaming This Week (July 23-27)

It’s the fourth week of July, and all I want to do is watch more TV.

Can you blame me? With Netflix, Hulu and Amazon Prime Video releasing banger after banger this summer, it’s been hard to keep up with all the hits.

Fortunately, I get paid to watch shows for a living, and the following three series are in my steady rotation this week.

One is a sci-fi horror take on a classic Marvel Comics team, another is a campy soap that’s sure to be Netflix’s next big hit and the final selection is a 2024 crime drama that was just nominated for seven 2025 Primetime Emmys.

‘The Institute’ Season 1 — MGM+

Stephen King is arguably the most prolific horror writer ever, but he’s also a dedicated comic book fan. He’s shown his love for superheroes in his prose and social media posts, and in 2019, he wrote a full-length novel that’s essentially his take on the Marvel Comics mutant superheroes, the X-Men. And while it’s not as great as his earlier classics It and The Stand, the book was good enough to be adapted into an eight-episode limited series on MGM+.

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12-year-old Luke Ellis (Joe Freeman) has a secret — he can move objects with his mind. Cool, right? But late one night, Joe’s family is brutally murdered and he’s taken to a top-secret facility known as The Institute. It’s here where Joe meets other kids like him — children with telekinetic and telepathic powers who are being trained to maximize their gifts for unclear purposes. It doesn’t take a mindreader to guess what’s going on here — this place is up to no good, and Joe has to leave or else he’ll end up like all the past residents of the Institute — missing or dead.

Joe Freeman in The Institute Chris Reardon / ©MGM+ / Courtesy Everett Collection

The biggest surprise about The Institute is that it’s even better than the book. This is a story made for a visual medium, and The Institute has plenty of spooky visuals to send a decent shiver down your spine. Another great asset this adaptation has is the casting; newcomer Freeman is excellent as the scared Joe, and veteran actress Mary-Louise Parker gets to embody a more sinister version of Matilda’s mean headmistress, Miss Trunchbull.

‘The Hunting Wives’ Season 1 — Netflix

We’ll probably never have a genuinely great classy soap opera like Big Little Lies again, but The Hunting Wives is good enough, and consistently funny, to come awfully close. It has all the ingredients that made that HBO show a hit: an unusual, quasi-exotic locale (Texas), extramarital love affairs, an outsider protagonist with something to hide — and murder.

Sophie (Brittany Snow) is the outsider, a liberal from Boston who finds herself in red-state country with her son and husband. Without a job and much direction, she begrudgingly joins the inner circle of rich Texas wives led by the beautiful Margo (Malin Åkerman). Three things to know about Margo: she’s the wife of Sophie’s husband’s boss, she’s in an open marriage and she’s horny AF.

What does this all add up to? Guilty pleasure fun that’s really not so guilty. The Hunting Wives knows what it is — a purely entertaining soap opera with some thought-provoking asides on America’s culture wars. This show is exactly what the summer is made for.

‘The Penguin’ Season 1 — HBO Max

The Emmy nominations were just announced, and the usual suspects got a whole lot of attention: The Bear, The Pitt, The Studio, and Severance. A 2024 show I loved managed to snag a few nods here and there — The Penguin, a DC Comics TV show that is far better than you think it would be. And I’m not being a snob here; I’m a dedicated comic book nerd, and even I was taken aback by how good the show is.

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For those that don’t know, The Penguin follows a side character from 2022’s The Batman, Oswald Cobb (Colin Farrell), a low-life criminal who dreams of making it big. To move up in the ranks of Gotham City’s underworld, he’ll have to take out the powerful Falcone family one by one — and that includes the gang’s leader, the mentally unstable Sofia Falcone (a terrific Cristin Milioti). Does Oswald have what it takes to be a criminal kingpin?

Spoiler alert: he does. But how he gets there is such a treat, you won’t care if the outcome is inevitable. The Penguin is less a comic book tie-in and more of a gangster story by way of Martin Scorsese. It shows, in sometimes uncomfortable detail, the high price both Oswald and Sofia pay for their criminal ambitions, and the collateral damage they leave to make them happen. It deserves all the Emmys it’s nominated for and more.