Summer TV Winners & Losers: The Acolyte, Umbrella Academy’s Swan Song, Big Brother, Olympics and More
Most of you might see Labor Day Weekend as the official end of summer. For us, it’s the Primetime Emmy Awards that signal the changing of TV seasons — and with Sunday’s broadcast now behind us, it’s time to look back at the summer gone by.
As is TVLine’s tradition, we’re taking stock of the summer’s winners, losers and those that were a little of both. Some shows — like CBS’ Big Brother, Peacock’s Love Island USA and even Showtime’s-but-you-thought-it-was-Netflix’s Your Honor — came away winners via solid viewership, social media buzz and/or creative comebacks. Others, like Disney+’s The Acolyte and AMC’s Orphan Black: Echoes, came and went without gaining much of a foothold in the TV discourse.
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We should note, of course, that our list below recaps select shows and events from the summer, and is not meant to include every series that aired. But below, you’ll find more than 20 standouts — for better or worse — from the months of June, July and August, a selection that includes The Bear, The Umbrella Academy and more than one daytime soap opera.
Keep scrolling for our full list of summer TV winners and losers (and a couple of draws), then weigh in with your own picks!
WINNER: Big Brother’s Return to Form
After an exhausting 25th season that landed on our list of 2023’s worst TV shows, Big Brother has pulled out of its creative nosedive with a wonderfully wacky Season 26. We can hardly pick a favorite part: Tucker, the wild card who went from predicted winner to pre-jury evictee in one week? Angela, who hasn’t gone a week without melting down from her paranoia? The ever-shifting power dynamics and last-minute voting decisions? The A.I. Arena, which has proven to be Big Brother‘s best twist in years? For the first time in a long time, we really don’t know what’s going to happen from week to week in that house; how’s that for expecting the unexpected? — Rebecca Iannucci
LOSER: Criminal Minds’ Dark Turn
A gloomier second season of the Evolution revival was done no favors by the dominating conversation about too many scenes being simply too dark to see anything. — Matt Webb Mitovich
WINNER: Cable News
Ever since the night of June 27 — when President Joe Biden performed poorly against Donald Trump in their first debate of this election — the presidential race has been a nonstop deluge of major headlines, from Biden withdrawing from the contest to the Trump assassination attempt to Vice President Kamala Harris becoming the Democratic Party’s new nominee. Viewers have got good reason to keep cable news on their TVs around the clock, and the networks’ hosts have met this unprecedented moment with poise and preparedness. — R.I.
LOSER: Late-Night Hosts
Meanwhile, just as things got very exciting in the political world, most late-night talk shows were… in reruns! By the time Stephen Colbert, Seth Meyers, et al. returned to weigh in, all of the cleverest observations had already been made. — R.I.
LOSER: Netflix’s Split-Season Approach
What might have worked for hour-long shows like Stranger Things, Virgin River and YOU isn’t working for Netflix’s half-hour comedies like Cobra Kai, Emily in Paris and That ’90s Show, which either A) are not built to be broken in half (or in the case of Cobra Kai, into thirds), or B) lose momentum/buzz between extremely short binges. — Ryan Schwartz
WINNER: Presumed Innocent
Generally speaking, we’re still not sure how so many of Apple TV’s excellent, A-lister-led series are going unnoticed; did you know that Natalie Portman, Rashida Jones, Vince Vaughn and Lisa Kudrow are all starring on really good shows over there this summer? But Presumed Innocent did, fortunately, pop up in mainstream chatter — and rightly so, with its deep bench of performers and compelling approach to Scott Turow’s source material. Plus, its July 24 season finale landed on Nielsen’s U.S. ranking of streaming originals, hitting the Top 10 with 387 million minutes watched. — R.I.
WINNER: Love Island USA
It may have taken six seasons, but the Stateside edition of Love Island finally broke out this year, escaping from under the shadow of its U.K. predecessor and garnering the social media buzz that all of these so-bad-they’re-good dating shows crave. And speaking of wins for Peacock…
WINNER: Olympics Coverage
Though NBC’s primetime coverage of the Paris Olympics was perfectly sufficient for the Games’ biggest moments, it was Peacock’s ’round-the-clock feeds and supplementary coverage of just about every Olympic event that kept us glued to our screens for two-plus weeks. One minute, we were innocently asking, “Hmm, what’s a canoe slalom?”; the next, we had somehow watched 10 straight hours of Peacock’s Gold Zone. We’re ready for you, Milano Cortina. — R.I.
LOSER: The Acolyte
One of the few Star Wars or Marvel TV series to overtly set the stage for a second season at Disney+, The Acolyte was ultimately cancelled in August after its eight-episode freshman run — despite a couple of appearances on Nielsen’s U.S. ranking of streaming originals. Even worse? Series star Amandla Stenberg said the cancellation was “not a huge shock” to her… but only because of the “rampage of vitriol that we have faced since the show was even announced… a rampage of, I would say, hyper-conservative bigotry and vitriol, prejudice, hatred and hateful language towards us.” Yikes. — R.I.
WINNER: Professional Basketball
With the July announcement of a multi-billion dollar media rights deal with Disney, NBC and Amazon — an 11-year agreement reportedly bringing in a total of $76 billion (!) from those three companies — the NBA is now reaping more money from more networks than ever. Plus, with the additions of Caitlin Clark and Angel Reese, the WNBA has generated more buzz and bigger ratings than we’ve seen in a long time, beginning in April with record viewership for ESPN’s coverage of the WNBA draft. — R.I.
LOSER: Cable TV That Isn’t News
On the other hand, Warner Bros. Discovery came away empty-handed from the NBA negotiations, with longtime NBA broadcaster Turner Sports (including Inside the NBA home TNT) getting excluded from the media rights deal. (WBD filed a lawsuit against the NBA in July, claiming that Turner Broadcasting Systems matched the offer made by Amazon, which the NBA must honor; the legal proceedings are expected to stretch until at least October.)
Elsewhere this summer, Paramount and Warner Bros. Discovery wrote down a collective $15 billion on their cable networks, accompanied by a 15% workforce layoff at the former. Among the ripple effects: Paramount in June effectively shut down its Comedy Central website, purging clips from (among others) every episode of The Daily Show since 1999 and all of The Colbert Report; MTV.com, TVLand.com and CMT.com also went dark around the same time. — R.I.
DRAW: The Bear‘s Third Course
The Bear started this year on a high, cleaning up in the comedy categories at January’s Emmy Awards. And when its much-anticipated third season arrived in late June, those episodes were still well-watched, with Ebon Moss-Bachrach, Abby Elliott and Jamie Lee Curtis among the actors applauded for their latest work. (By us, too!) But the show took a few hits — from us, too — for wobbly storytelling in Season 3, and the show’s summer Emmy campaign was overtaken by social media’s cries of, “It’s not a comedy!” (And, indeed, at the September ceremony, Hacks beat out The Bear for Outstanding Comedy Series, though The Bear collected plenty of hardware.) The Bear has still got a good thing going, no doubt… but it’s admittedly rare to see the tide turn quickly against a critical darling and Emmy juggernaut like this one. — R.I.
WINNER: Your Honor
Though not quite as big a phenomenon as Suits‘ arrival on Netflix last summer, the Bryan Cranston crime drama Your Honor (which initially aired on Showtime) did enjoy a second life at the streamer this year, with nearly 1.6 billion minutes watched for the week of June 24, per Nielsen’s streaming charts. Whether those impressive numbers bring Your Honor back from the TV grave remains to be seen, but every dad in your life is rooting for it. — R.I.
LOSER: Drag Race Burnout
We’re all for doing good, but RuPaul’s Drag Race All Stars 9 — in which queens competed for charity and no one was eliminated — will go down as the franchise’s snooziest season yet. And whose idea was it to air Canada vs. the World at the same time as Global All Stars? How many simultaneous international competitions are we expected to follow before succumbing to Drag Race fatigue? — Andy Swift
LOSER: Scripted Broadcast Shows
Just as last summer offered only ABC’s burn-off of The Wonder Years, there was scant scripted fare to watch on broadcast TV this summer — just All American: Homecoming‘s farewell run, and The CW’s acquired second season of 61st Street. — M.W.M.
WINNER: General Hospital
The ABC soap unfired co-head writer Chris Van Etten and started fixing what had been broken since his exit several months prior. — Charlie Mason
LOSER: The Young and the Restless
On the flip side: Exhausting, no-stakes business storylines made this CBS drama feel like work. Would it kill ’em to play an actual love story? — C.M.
WINNER: Homicide: Life on the Street Viewers
The NBC police procedural, long MIA from any streaming services, can now be binged to your heart’s content on Peacock, which has all seven seasons and 2000’s Homicide: The Movie. (Never seen it? Here’s one episode that will get you hooked.) — R.I.
LOSER: Orphan Black: Echoes
Despite powerhouse Tatiana Maslany’s absence, we were still hyped for this offshoot that takes place in the original series’ dangerous world of immoral scientific conspiracies. However, not only did the sequel drum up little to no buzz for AMC, but it also failed to reach any of the high highs achieved by its predecessor. A proper clone, it was not. — Nick Caruso
WINNER: Jensen Ackles Fans
Thought he’d just show up on a Tracker episode in May, did ya? On the contrary, fans of TV’s erstwhile Dean Winchester were given lots to look forward to this summer, including news of his starring role in the Amazon thriller Countdown and an even bigger presence in the Boys universe (a mid-credits appearance in the Season 4 finale, a series-regular return as Soldier Boy in the upcoming Season 5, and a headlining gig with Aya Cash in the recently announced prequel series Vought Rising) — plus, yep, more of CBS’ Tracker on the horizon. One thing not on Ackles’ schedule in the near future? Sleep, we assume. — R.I.
DRAW: The Boys
While we’re discussing The Boys: On the viewership front, Season 4 put up big numbers, claiming the No. 1 spot on Nielsen’s overall U.S. streaming ranking (for the first time!) after the release of its finale. Plus, that universe continues to expand by way of the Ackles/Cash Vought Rising prequel. Creatively, though, Season 4 was The Boys‘ most uneven outing so far… and, in an unfortunate coincidence, a content warning was added to the finale episode for its unintentional parallels to the real-life assassination attempt on former president Donald Trump in July. — R.I.
WINNER: SDCC Is Back, Baby!
For a few years there, we were worried about San Diego Comic-Con, a previous pop culture institution forced to downsize for years amid the COVID pandemic and Hollywood strikes. Fortunately, this year’s convention was a welcome return to form, featuring big-name talent, fun installations on the San Diego streets, and a packed Hall H that lost its you-know-what when Robert Downey Jr. announced his return to the Marvel Cinematic Universe. — R.I.
LOSER: The Umbrella Academy’s Farewell Run
The sci-fi drama’s short final season did show up on Netflix’s Top 10, and right away, too — but those six episodes hardly felt like a proper sendoff. Interesting storylines were abandoned (wait, what was the deal with the squid?!); others were written into nonsensical corners (all things The Keepers); we lost all of the Hargreeves siblings in the end; and, hoo boy, the fanbase had some thoughts about that Five/Lila romance. Even worse, the final season dropped a month after unsavory allegations about showrunner Steve Blackman came to light, casting an uncomfortable pall over what could have been a joyous conclusion. — R.I.
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