13 sci-fi and fantasy shows you should watch this summer
By Dan Selcke
The Umbrella Academy — June 22 on Netflix
We’re seven entries into this list and three have been about superheroes, but at least some of these shows are putting twists on the formula. Take The Umbrella Academy, a borderline-unhinged series about a family of superheroes who commanded the attention of the world as kids and are now dealing with very adult neuroses. They’ve already fought a time-traveling secret agent played by Mary J. Blige and traveled back to Dallas on the eve of President Kennedy’s assassination to stop an apocalypse. How could things get any weirder?
Well, in season 3, the family returns to their own time to find sideways versions of themselves occupying their home. The Umbrella Academy, meet the Sparrow Academy. As if one group of maladjusted superhero basket cases wasn’t enough.
The Umbrella Academy excels when it’s exploring its characters. I mocked them all just now, but it’s clear the show has a lot of affection for its band of misfits, so I’m excited to meet more. Add in unpredictable sci-fi plots and a ton of whimsy, and you have a show that never seems to run out of new ideas.
Westworld season 4 — June 26 on HBO
The first season of Westworld was a bracingly original sci-fi drama that asked deep questions about the nature of intelligence, humanity and technology. The second and third seasons stumbled a bit as they tried to live up to that standard. The second season played with time in a way that was more clever than entertaining, and the third never quite took off the way the first did.
That said, Westworld could never be called a meek show. This series — about what happens when a group of androids in a futuristic amusement park gain sentience and invade the human world — asks the big questions: Who are we? Where are we going? What are we doing and what does it mean? The cast is spectacular is the budget is out of this world. It’s the kind of show you want to root for, even though it has a tendency to get a little full of itself.
Westworld has reinvented itself pretty much every season and season 4 should be no exception. The robotic hosts are well-established in the human world and ready to wreck some havoc. Will humanity survive? We’ll find out this summer.
