Disney renewed Wonder Man in March, then killed it in July

In March, Disney renewed Wonder Man for a second season. This week they canceled it. Same year. The star, Yahya Abdul-Mateen II, is Emmy-nominated for the thing they just killed — Outstanding Lead Actor in a Comedy Series, a category that presumably still exists — and per Deadline they never even opened a writers room for the season they announced. They renewed a show, told the writers to go home, sat on it for four months, and then pulled the plug on a program with an Emmy nomination attached to it. Abdul-Mateen found out the way we all find out things now, which is that he posted about it on Instagram. "Word just dropped that Wonder Man won't be coming back." Word just dropped. The lead actor is breaking his own cancellation like it's a celebrity death.

And it's not just him. Apple confirmed this week that The Morning Show is ending after season five, which at least is a decision a human made on purpose. Paramount+ canceled Tracy Morgan's Crutch after one season — a sitcom that, per the trades, had a 100% critics score, which is apparently the new kiss of death. The machine is eating the shows people liked and keeping the ones nobody watches. Anyway. The drops.

Batman: Caped Crusader is back on Prime Video

Season 2, all ten episodes, dropped July 31. Bruce Timm made this, the same guy who did the '90s animated series that is still the best Batman anything, and it's executive produced by J.J. Abrams and Matt Reeves, which is a lot of Batman guys in one room. The Joker finally shows up this season after they made you wait the entire first one. It looks like a moving noir painting and it's genuinely good, which on Prime Video, home of the algorithmically-generated Reacher content farm, counts as a miracle. Watch it before Amazon notices it has taste and course-corrects.

✅ WORTH IT

Best Medicine on Netflix

Josh Charles plays a brilliant, rude surgeon who quits Boston to be a small-town doctor in Port Wenn, Maine. It's the American remake of Doc Martin, the British show your mother has watched four times. Aired on Fox back in January, and now all thirteen episodes hit Netflix August 4. Charles is good — he was the best thing in The Good Wife and then they killed him off, so the man knows about cancellation too. Perfectly pleasant. You will watch six episodes and describe it to a coworker as "you know, fine."

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Futurama, season fourteen, on Hulu

Fourteen. The show got canceled by Fox, brought back by Comedy Central, canceled again, brought back by Hulu, and now it just refuses to stop existing. New episodes land August 3. It's the streaming equivalent of a houseplant that survives every move — nobody remembers watering it and it's somehow still alive on the windowsill. Bender's still funny. Lower your standards to 2003 and it holds up.

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The Shards is coming to Hulu

Ryan Murphy adapting a Bret Easton Ellis novel about rich prep-school kids in 1980s LA getting picked off by a killer, starring Kaia Gerber, premiering on FX and Hulu August 5. Ellis wrote the first two episodes and then, per the reporting, mostly cashed the check and left. Two episodes out the gate. Could be great, could be Murphy doing the thing where the pilot is incredible and by episode six everyone's monologuing in a swimming pool. We'll know soon.

Movies newly parked on a streamer

Five Nights at Freddy's 2 hits Netflix August 3, so the animatronics are back to explain the lore nobody asked for. Netflix also dumped the first seven Fast & Furious movies and a fistful of Chucky films on August 1, which is what a streaming service does when it needs to look full without paying to make anything.

Pick of the Week

Batman: Caped Crusader, season 2. Not close. It's the one thing this week made by people who wanted to make it instead of a spreadsheet that demanded it. Watch the whole season in a night, then feel bad that the best show on Prime is a cartoon and it took a Joker cliffhanger to earn a second one.

The closer

Paramount won the fight for Warner Bros. So the company that beat Netflix for control of half of Hollywood celebrated by canceling a Tracy Morgan sitcom with a perfect critics score and shifting away from comedy entirely. That's the plan. Buy the biggest studio in the business and immediately stop making things that are funny. Meanwhile Disney's out here renewing shows in the spring and executing them by summer like it's running a corporate farm upstate. Somebody at these places is getting paid an enormous salary to greenlight something in March, forget it exists, and shoot it in July. I want that job. I would be so good at forgetting.