What are you watching this weekend?

The A.V. Club staff breaks down the shows and movies that grabbed our attention this week.

By The A.V. Club | August 1, 2026 | 7:00am

X-Men '97 (Photo: Marvel), The Idaho Murders: College Nightmare (Photo: Netflix), Widow's Bay (Photo: Apple TV)

TV Features What Are You Watching?

There’s always a deluge of TV shows, docuseries, and movies to catch up on, whether old or new. So The A.V. Club is bringing back an old feature to allow our staff and readers to discuss what they’ve been watching—and hopefully nudge someone else to catch up on the same. This week’s choices range from a worthy Emmy-nominated comedy to a chilling, extremely timely true-crime docuseries. So, tell us: What are you watching this weekend?

***Widow’s Bay*, “Your Baggage”**

I was late to the party on Apple’s summer sensation Widow’s Bay, having only fallen in love with its comedic blending of Northeastern horror tropes during a TV-heavy vacation last month. But fall in love I did, especially with the show’s eighth episode, “Your Baggage,” the kind of TV that makes me yearn for a world where this series had an old-school X-Files-sized season to run with so it could mix more episodic genre riffs like this one into its serialized storytelling duties. Kate O’Flynn has been getting her flowers for her performance as surprisingly resilient town oddball Patricia already, but it really can’t be hit hard enough what an appealing Final Girl she makes: Self-aware, clever, and above all exasperated that her life has somehow turned into a horror movie all over again. [William Hughes]

X-Men ’97 season two

After a near-perfect first season, it was a relief that X-Men ’97, despite behind-the-scenes hurdles, started off strong in season two. The first few outings follow up on the mutants who were dispersed across space and time, with a particularly thrilling fourth episode that zeroes in on the all too complicated bond between Magneto and Charles Xavier. (Warning: it gets emotional!) But as I’ve been catching up weekly since then, it’s been disappointing to see that season two has meandered with what feel like mostly standalone episodes (about Wolverine, Polaris, and Nightcrawler). I’m glad those heroes are getting their time to shine, but it makes X-Men ’97 disjointed, especially by this week’s “Strange Land, Savage Heart.” With only two episodes left, I’m hoping that it will tighten its focus on the Kang and Apocalypse stuff that season two launched with. And might I add that this show’s portrayal of both villains already beats whatever MCU projects and previous X-Men movies have conjured up. [Saloni Gajjar]

The Idaho Murders: College Nightmare

More than most true-crime documentary directors working with Netflix right now, Skye Borgman has proven adept at centering the victims of the crimes instead of the perpetrators or salacious details. Abducted In Plain Sight and Girl In The Picture are more focused on the innocence and life lost (and they will both make your blood boil about the people who failed the victims), which is why I started Borgman’s latest doc, The Idaho Murders: College Nightmare. I didn’t know much about the case—if you must know, I was living under a rock—before watching, but the documentary weaves together body cam footage and social media videos in an effort to present a complete, occasionally horrifying picture. And, like the recent Yogurt Shop Murders coda, College Nightmare spends time with the families of the victims, who are determined not to let their grisly end define their loved ones. [Danette Chavez]

E.R. season five

Last year, I finally read Robert Caro’s The Powerbroker as my big binge project. Now, I’m filling The Pitt-sized gap in my schedule by watching E.R. in its entirety for the first time. I wasn’t allowed to watch it when it was first on (too much death, my parents thought), so it wasn’t until I caught the episodes out of order in syndication that I finally got to see what all the fuss was about. It’s been an educational experience, seeing as how both E.R. and The Pitt use their “case of the week” stories to broach medical issues like healthcare disparities, problems with law enforcement and safety, accessibility, and the various challenges facing caregivers in scrubs or in civilian clothes. It has also been a sobering reminder of how a diagnosis of HIV/AIDS impacted people’s lives when treatment options were still only experimental, especially in the story of physician assistant Jeanie (Gloria Reuben). Representing the difficulties many with HIV/AIDS faced, from anxiety around infecting future partners to workplace discrimination, on a major network show would have stirred many conversations around the water cooler back then. So far, season 5 is a little sillier than its predecessors, including ‘90s artifacts like Tamagotchis and Taibo in the clip below, but the tension playing out between hospital politics and relationship drama are clearly still timeless. [Monica Castillo]

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