Ben Carter

Lee Seo-jin wanting to retire in Dallas may be the funniest running premise on Netflix this month, partly because the show treats it with almost suspicious sincerity. Ready or Not: Texas sends Lee, producer Nah Yung-suk, and a camera-ready crew across Dallas, Fort Worth, Houston, and Austin for six episodes of Korean variety tourism, cowboy cosplay, barbecue awe, and business-minded sightseeing.

Television loves a disabled protagonist it can polish into virtue. Santita rolls in from the opposite direction, usually with a debt, a drink, a bad decision, or an excellent insult close behind. The seven-episode Mexican Netflix series, created by Luis Cámara and Gabrielle Galanter and directed by Rodrigo García, gives María José Cano a nickname loaded with irony.

Pink arrives in Seattle like a clerical error nobody at Rainier West High wants to correct. The joke in Prime Video's Elle is immediate and clean: take the future Harvard Law heroine of Legally Blonde, rewind her to 1995, drop her into a grunge-heavy high school, and watch Beverly Hills sunshine collide with flannel, rain, and cafeteria cynicism. It is a good pitch. It is also a pitch that starts sweating the second the franchise timeline walks into the room.

Paid leave turns the beach into a crime scene before anyone finds the corpse. That is the sharpest idea in Summer of '36, a six-episode French period mystery set on the Côte d'Azur in August 1936, when France's first paid worker holidays send working families into spaces the rich had mistaken for private property. The sand has not changed. The guest list has.

Six households, one fake Peak District street, and a quarter of a million pounds should make gossip feel radioactive. The Neighbourhood has the raw materials for a satisfyingly nosy reality competition: Graham Norton at the gate, families peering through curtains, alliances forming over garden fences, and a voting ritual that turns suburban property anxiety into public humiliation.

Twenty copies of Liar Liar can ruin a marriage. Mariano is unconscious in a hospital bed when Nines discovers how badly he has mismanaged the family video store, yet Malena Alterio attacks the inventory list as though her husband bought every Jim Carrey VHS to spite her personally. Food for the children, she fumes. Bridges of Madison County. Twenty Liar Liars. Mariano cannot defend himself. The coma has one perk.

Kat is still standing at the front door when Season 5 picks up, which saves Trying from pretending two years off-screen have made the problem polite. Princess and Tyler's biological mother has arrived, Princess already knows Nikki hid the truth about her, and Nikki is staring at a new family arrangement nobody had the foresight to put in the adoption paperwork.

Martín Salcedo has the rare talent of turning one cocaine debt into several staffing problems. He drinks at Quiebra Canto, buys powder from waitress Verónica Pinilla, beats up customers who refuse to pay her, and somehow converts the evening into a job interview. Some people network on LinkedIn.

Charles Ingalls builds his family a cabin on land that still belongs to someone else. Netflix's Little House on the Prairie understands the contradiction immediately, then spends eight episodes deciding how uncomfortable it is willing to make everyone feel about it.

Motoko Kusanagi kills a bureaucrat before Science SARU pauses to explain what a ghost is. She slips through a police operation, watches a corrupt Far East Trade Representative hide behind jurisdiction, then executes him under an authorized order and leaves Aramaki with one brief glimpse of blue hair. It is fast, rude, and faintly funny. The sequence tells us exactly which version of Motoko has entered the room.