July is the loudest month of the year, and it isn't close.
The World Cup final lands on the 19th. America turns 250 on the 4th, which means a patriotic deluge across every channel you own. On top of that, Star Trek: Strange New Worlds returns, Hulu reboots King of the Hill after more than a decade away, Silo comes back for season three, and Anya Taylor-Joy headlines Apple's starry heist thriller Lucky. The Heartstopper movie, a Little House on the Prairie remake, and a Legally Blonde prequel are all fighting for the same air too.
So the quiet stuff this month is very quiet. Five things landing in July that are worth your time while everyone else is watching penalties and fireworks.
Trying (Apple TV, July 8)
If there's a definition of under the radar, it's a show with a 96% critic score that almost nobody talks about. Trying returns for a fifth season after nearly two years away, and it remains the warmest comedy Apple makes. Rafe Spall and Esther Smith play Nikki and Jason, a couple who adopted two kids across the first four seasons; season five drops the children's birth mother, Kat, back on their doorstep and lets the chaos ripple out. It's gentle, funny, and quietly devastating in the way the best British sitcoms are. New episodes weekly through late August. If you've never started it, the first four seasons are right there.
The East Palace (Netflix, July 17)
A Korean supernatural drama set in a fictional Joseon-era palace, and the rare K-drama where Netflix drops all eight episodes at once. Nam Joo-hyuk (Twenty Five Twenty One) plays Gu-cheon, a ghost-slayer who can cross into the spirit world; Roh Yoon-seo plays a court lady cursed to hear the dead. The king summons them to clear something out of the palace, and the curse they uncover runs deeper than a haunting. What sets it apart from Kingdom or Alchemy of Souls is the premise: the ghosts are here because the afterlife's bureaucracy failed to process them. Palace horror as paperwork. It's a great hook, and a binge you can finish in a weekend.
Diarra From Detroit (Paramount+, July 29)
The most slept-on show on this list. Diarra From Detroit arrived in 2024 on the now-shuttered BET+ app with a 100% Rotten Tomatoes score and a spot on year-end lists at Rolling Stone and The Hollywood Reporter, then got stranded when the app closed. Now it's back for season two on Paramount+, where more people can finally find it. Creator and star Diarra Kilpatrick plays a schoolteacher turned reluctant detective; season two starts with a furniture recovery job that spirals into a triple homicide and a citywide treasure hunt. Phylicia Rashad and Glynn Turman join the cast. A murder mystery, a comedy, and a love letter to Detroit, all at once.
Stuart Fails to Save the Universe (HBO Max, July 23)
The curveball. On paper this is the fourth Big Bang Theory spinoff, which is not a phrase that usually makes anyone sit up. But the premise is strange enough to be worth a look: Stuart Bloom, the perpetually unlucky comic shop owner, breaks a device built by Sheldon and Leonard and accidentally triggers a multiverse apocalypse, then has to fix it. It's a sci-fi action comedy from Chuck Lorre and Ready Player One writer Zak Penn, with a theme by Danny Elfman, and it's launching with almost no fanfare the same week as the World Cup final. A weird, ambitious swing hiding inside a familiar logo.
Reading Lolita in Tehran (Theaters, July 10)
The closer, and the one you leave the house for. Adapted from Azar Nafisi's bestselling memoir, it follows a professor in 1980s revolutionary Iran who secretly gathers seven of her female students to read banned Western books, from Lolita to Pride and Prejudice, as the regime tightens its grip. Golshifteh Farahani plays Nafisi, with Zar Amir Ebrahimi and Mina Kavani alongside her. It won the Audience Award at the Rome Film Festival back in 2024 and is only now getting a US release, in limited theaters from Greenwich. If it isn't playing near you, it heads to Kanopy through libraries after, so keep the name.
July belongs to the final, the fireworks, and the franchises. Everything quieter is waiting for you in the gaps.
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