August has arrived, sweaty and screen-lit, and Netflix has once again hurled content at us like a toddler with a glitter cannon—chaotic, sparkly, and mostly aimed at the wall. This month’s offerings include the much-anticipated return of Wednesday and the release of My Oxford Year, a rom-com that sounds like someone typed “feelings + accents + slow death” into ChatGPT and hit export.
Let’s begin, as one must, with the corpse bride of binge culture: Wednesday, Season 2.
Netflix has resurrected the dead-eyed goth girl of TikTok fame just in time to remind us that being different is cool, but only if you’re skinny, pale, and harbor the emotional range of a damp Victorian handkerchief. In this second season, Wednesday returns to Nevermore Academy, where the real horror isn’t monsters—it’s the underfunded CGI budget. Expect more brooding, more fiddle solos, and even less eye contact. She’s back, and this time… still wearing black.
The fanbase, naturally, has erupted. Twitter (sorry, X) is ablaze with middle-aged millennials arguing over whether Wednesday is a queer icon or just emotionally stunted. Meanwhile, Gen Z has already made five million edits of her blinking set to slowed-down Billie Eilish tracks. Netflix, ever attentive to monetized melancholy, has released a limited-edition scented candle called “Disdain” to mark the occasion. Smells like lavender and unresolved trauma.
Then there’s My Oxford Year, the rom-com no one asked for, yet here it is—posing as prestige, wearing a hand-me-down Notting Hill accent, and gaslighting us into thinking it’s original. Our protagonist is a whip-smart American woman (because of course she is) who lands a fellowship at Oxford, only to fall for a painfully British man who reads books for fun and probably has an umbrella monogrammed with generational wealth.
They meet cute. They fight. He says something devastating like, “You Americans always think tea solves everything.” She cries in a stone archway. There’s a terminal illness. Or a scholarship scandal. Or both. Eventually, she realizes that love is worth risking the Fulbright and that British men do, in fact, emote—just very quietly, and only when standing in the rain.
It’s Love Story meets Emily in England meets every third Hallmark film with a passport. Netflix has labeled it “heartwarming,” which is corporate code for “a woman will cry, but not too hard, and she’ll still look hot doing it.” The film ends with a voiceover about dreams, or tea, or how not all endings are sad even when they’re devastating. Critics are calling it “pleasant.” Which is the cinematic equivalent of being told you’re nice.
Beyond those two headliners, Netflix’s August drop includes:
- A docuseries about pyramid schemes, again. This one features a pastel-colored cult that sells leggings and shame.
- A true crime dramatization of a murder podcast that aired three months ago.
- Something starring a Hemsworth brother who only exists in low lighting.
- A reality competition where hot people do pottery while crying about childhood trauma.
- And three more foreign shows you’ll claim you’re about to start watching, but never will.
There’s also a new animated series for adults, because nothing says “cultural collapse” like watching anthropomorphic pigeons debate capitalism while smoking weed.
But let’s not pretend this wasn’t inevitable. Netflix is no longer a platform—it’s an attention landfill. Every month, they wheel out another assortment of half-baked prestige bait, algorithmically summoned romance, and low-stakes comfort shows that somehow all involve baking, betrayal, or British accents.
The August lineup isn’t a revelation. It’s a mirror. A soft, buffering reflection of our streaming era rot: where girlbosses cry in castles, dead girls dance on TikTok, and rom-coms confuse emotional intimacy with subtitles.
Yet here we are. Watching it all.
Because the truth is, we don’t want cinema. We want serotonin. We don’t want endings—we want episodes. And we don’t want new—we want familiar, just slightly rearranged. It’s not about what’s good. It’s about what’s available. And Wednesday and My Oxford Year are, without a doubt, available.
Final Thought:
August is hot, confusing, and a little desperate—just like Netflix’s content strategy. You’ll roll your eyes. You’ll binge it anyway. And by September, you’ll forget it ever happened… until Wednesday Season 3 shows up and asks if you’ve missed her.
You have. But only a little.