August Streaming Brings Glaciers, Magic Realism, and Very Bored Teenagers

By Andy — 2026-07-31 — Literary News

I've been staring at the streaming calendar for August and it's honestly hard to get excited about a literary adaptation these days. But then I saw Sara Dosa's Time and Water was dropping August 1, and something shifted.

The documentary tracks Icelandic writer Andri Snær Magnason as he confronts his country's melting glaciers and the loss of his grandparents. That's not a pitch you see often—grief and climate collapse filtered through family archives. The material works because Magnason isn't lecturing. He's just holding onto what's already slipping away: photographs, film reels, a grandfather's memory. Disney+ and Hulu get it on August 1, and if you can stomach something genuinely sad without the background music telling you how to feel, this matters.

Then there's Netflix's madness.

Gabriel García Márquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude drops Part 2 on August 5, with a grand finale on August 26. The first part last year was genuinely good—they managed what seemed impossible, which was making the book's nested repetitions and recursive family trees actually work on screen. The production team stuck close to the source material instead of trying to make it palatable to people who haven't read it. Part 2 is supposed to be darker. Macondo starts falling apart. Seven episodes first, then they're doing this strange theatrical finale thing on the 26th. It's ambitious and probably unnecessary, but I'll watch it.

Now for the one that'll actually divide every room it enters.

Ryan Murphy's The Shards, adapting Bret Easton Ellis' 2023 novel, premieres August 5 on FX and Hulu. The book itself is semi-autobiographical—Ellis imagining his own senior year at an elite LA prep school in 1981, set against an unsolved serial killer story. What makes this adaptation strange is that Ellis was only lightly involved, writing the first two episodes, and then Murphy took over entirely. The result looks glossy and extremely on-brand for Murphy—sex, drugs, murder, teenagers with better cheekbones than any human has earned. Kaia Gerber is in it. So is Homer Gere (yes, that Gere's son). Whether this becomes a show about the actual darkness lurking in privilege or just very attractive people committing sins depends almost entirely on whether Murphy cares more about the book than he does his own visual palette.

If you need this level of hand-wringing over literary adaptation quality, you're probably the type who's already read at least two of these books.

There's more—The Last Sunrise on Prime Video the 26th, The Whisper Man on Netflix the 27th—but honestly, those feel like the noise. The three above are what matters this month. Time and Water because it's actually trying to do something. One Hundred Years of Solitude because the first part proved it was possible. The Shards because you need to decide whether Murphy's sensibility has anything to do with Ellis' actual bone-deep emptiness, and frankly, I'm not sure myself.

Most of the throwbacks—Clueless, Sideways, Women Talking—are there if you missed them the first time. Honestly, go watch Sideways if you haven't. Better than most new television.

It's August. The new releases will probably disappoint you.