What's Worth Watching This August: Three Literary Adaptations That Actually Matter

By Andy — 2026-08-01 — Literary News

The streaming services dump new content like monsoon rain in August. Most of it drowns. But there are three things arriving this month that actually trace back to books or writers you've heard of—or ought to have.

First, the obvious one. Netflix's One Hundred Years of Solitude returns with Part 2 on August 5, then a "grand finale" on August 26. The first seven episodes drop on August 5, while the conclusion gets its own standalone release on August 26. It's the kind of structural oddness that happens when filmmakers actually care—they're treating the ending like a film rather than just more television. Directed by Laura Mora and Carlos Moreno, the whole thing was filmed in Colombia with the García Márquez family overseeing the adaptation, which matters. When the author's heirs are standing there watching, you tend not to cut corners.

The first part aired in 2024. It was gorgeous.

Nobody expected Bret Easton Ellis to finally make it to proper television. He's been optioned more times than anyone can track. But Ryan Murphy's The Shards launches August 5 on FX and Hulu, adapted from Ellis's 2023 novel. This one is strange. The book is autofiction—Ellis plays a character version of himself as a teenager in 1980s Los Angeles, and there's a serial killer. The series stars Igby Rigney as young Ellis, and the whole apparatus has been built to let Murphy do what Murphy does: turn privilege and violence into something you can't look away from. Ellis is credited as a creator and writer, so at least he's there to watch his own teenage self get traumatized for television.

Then there's the quiet one that nobody's talking about as much.

Time and Water arrives on Disney+ and Hulu August 1. It's a documentary by Sara Dosa, based on Icelandic writer Andri Snær Magnason's 2019 essay On Time and Water. Magnason turns his family archives into a time capsule as his country's glaciers disappear. This is not "climate documentary" in the way they usually bore you—it's a poet's reckoning with loss. Magnason was asked to write the eulogy for Okjökull, a 700-year-old glacier officially declared dead due to climate change, and the film spirals from there into his grandparents' lives, the photographs they left, the ice that shaped everything they knew.

Dosa made Fire of Love. She knows how to film beautiful, terrible things.

None of these three will fix anything. Netflix will need you to click. Ellis's book was written into a podcast before it became a novel—the whole thing's been designed for velocity. And Magnason's glaciers won't refreeze because you watched his family home videos. But they're each trying to do something real. That's rarer than it sounds on streaming.