The Umbrella Academy has been renewed for a fourth and final season on Netflix, the streamer announced on social media. Season three of the fantasy drama was released in June. 

The cast includes Elliot Page, Tom Hopper, David Castañeda, Emmy Raver-Lampman, Robert Sheehan, Aidan Gallagher and Justin Min.

Gerard Way, frontman for My Chemical Romance, is co-executive producer with comic book artist Gabriel Ba. Way created the comic book series that The Umbrella Academy is based on. 

“On the same day in 1989, 43 infants are inexplicably born to random, unconnected women who showed no signs of pregnancy the day before,” goes the show’s premise. “Seven are adopted by a billionaire who creates The Umbrella Academy and prepares his ‘children’ to save the world. Now, the six surviving members reunite upon the news of their father's passing and must work together to solve a mystery surrounding his death. But the estranged family begins to come apart due to their divergent personalities and abilities, not to mention the imminent threat of a global apocalypse.”

Steve Blackman is showrunner and executive producer. Executive producing the show alongside Blackman are Jeff F. King, Mike Richardson and Keith Goldberg.

Blackman told Netflix’s Tudum of the fourth season, “The siblings losing their powers isn’t going to be the only oddity in this timeline. There are new enemies who want to see them wiped out of existence, but how do they manage without their powers? Is there even a way to get them back? The stakes have never been greater.” ■

The third season of Netflix's ensemble-casted fantasy-action series The Umbrella Academy got off to a solid start, ranking as the platform's No. 1 show for the week of June 20-26 with nearly 125 million streaming hours globally. 

Netflix dropped all 10 third-season episodes of the show on June 22. It's the fourth best debut week for a Netflix original show this year, trailing only limited series Inventing Anna, the second season of Bridgerton and the fourth season of Stranger Things. 

All three of those installments rank among Netflix's all-time best performers in the English-language TV series category. 

The Umbrella Academy actually unseated Stranger Things Season 4 Volume 1, which had stood atop the English-language TV series chart in Netflix's Global Top 10 rankings the previous four weeks. 

Notably, Stranger Things Season 4 is no longer on pace to surpass the Korean-language smash hit Squid Game as Netflix's all-time audience champ. ST4 had accumulated nearly 930 million hours of combined streaming through its first 28 days on the platform. 

Among English-language films, hitman-themed action-comedy The Man From Toronto, which stars Kevin Hart and Woody Harrelson, captured nearly 54 million streaming hours to win the English-language movie category. 

Several high-profile returning series highlight a busy week of programming premieres on multiple distribution platforms.

HBO will bring back its Emmy Award-winning  sci-fi/drama series Westworld for a fourth season on June 26. The eight-part series features returning stars Evan Rachel Wood, Thandiwe Newton and Jeffrey Wright, with Ariana DeBose joining the cast.

Also on June 26 Showtime's drama series The Chi will return for its fifth season. The Lena Waithe-produced series will continue to follow the complex lives of residents of a neighborhood on Chicago’s South Side. Each new episode will be available to stream two days early beginning with the first episode on June 24.

Also returning to Tv are the 1990s animated duo Beavis and Butt-Head in a new Paramount Plus movie debuting June 23. The Mike Judge-produced movie Beavis and Butt-Head Do The Universe will feature such voices as Tig Notaro, Gary Cole, Stephen Root, and Brian Huskey, according to the streaming service.

Below are video trailers and premiere dates for multiple shows debuting the week of June 20 to June 26 on cable networks and streaming services (for some videos, viewer discretion is advised):

June 21 – 37 Words (documentary) – ESPN

June 21 – The Future of … (documentary series) – Netflix

June 22 – Chernobyl: The Lost Tapes (documentary) – HBO

June 22 – Eureka! (animation) – Disney Jr.

June 22 – The Umbrella Academy (returning series) – Netflix

June 23 – The Bear (comedy) – Hulu

June 23 – Gordita Chronicles (comedy) – HBO Max

June 23 – Menudo: Forever Young (documentary) – HBO Max

June 24 – Chloe (drama) – Prime Video

June 24 – Rise (movie) – Disney Plus

June 24 – Loot (comedy) –Apple TV Plus

Trevor: The Musical (movie) -- Disney Plus

June 24 – The Man From Toronto (comedy movie) – Netflix

 June 26 – Who is Ghislaine Maxwell (documentary) – Starz

Summer movie blockbuster season is upon us and yes, there is plenty to be seen on the big screen this week. But there is plenty more to see on the small screen this week including Netflix’s Spiderhead starring Chris Hemsworth and Miles Teller and directed by Top Gun: Maverick director Joseph Kosinski. Netflix also has the third season The Umbrella Academy, which sees the Hargreeves siblings at battle yet again. Sundance 2022 favorites Cha Cha Real Smooth and Good Luck to You, Leo Grande are available on Apple TV Plus and Hulu respectively. Hulu also has the long awaited The Old Man starring Jeff Bridges. In the nonfiction arena HBO Max has Mind Over Murder.and Chernobyl: The Lost Tapes while Netflix is offering up Civil about civil rights lawyer Ben Crump. 

Father of the Bride (HBO Max, June 16)

It’s Father’s Day weekend so why wouldn’t HBO Max capitalize on the Hallmark holiday? The film stars Andy Garcia as a father who isn’t ready for his only daughter to get married. If it sounds like a familiar plot line -- it is. The HBO Max film marks the second remake of the original movie, which was released in 1950 and starred Spencer Tracy and Elizabeth Taylor. In 1991, Steve Martin played the father of the bride in the successful remake of the film. Why reboot a classic comedy that has been a hit twice before? Because it’s Hollywood and remakes are supposedly safe bets. The most notable alteration in Gary Alazraki's adaptation of the 1950 movie is that the family is Cuban-American and live in Miami. “Like 2018's Crazy Rich Asians, Alazraki's take combines glossy escapism with storytelling that centers a demographic long relegated to the sidelines in mainstream American movies. Two-plus decades into the new millennium, that shouldn't be news, though Father is surely important for all those reasons; mostly, it's just fun,” wrote Entertainment Weekly’s Leah Greenblatt.

The Old Man (Hulu, June 17)

It's been a long road for The Old Man. The drama starring Jeff Bridges was originally scheduled to premiere in 2020, but COVID stopped that from happening. Then in the fall of 2020, Bridges was diagnosed with leukemia, underwent treatment, and nearly died of COVID himself, further delaying production. An adaptation of Thomas Perry’s eponymous 2017 thriller, the seven-episode series stars Bridges as Dan Chase, a former CIA operative who has spent years living off the grid in hiding. But when someone tries to assassinate him, Chase is forced to come out of hiding and run from FBI agent Harold Harper (John Lithgow). While on the run Chase confronts his shady past. The first two episodes of The Old Man will debut on June 16 on FX and be available to stream the next day on Hulu.

Spiderhead (Netflix, June 17)

Based on George Saunders' short story Escape From Spiderhead for The New Yorker, this sci-fi thriller is directed by Joseph Kosinski -- the same guy who directed Top Gun: Maverick. (Apparently, he doesn’t require sleep.)  The film is about visionary inventor Steve Abnesti (Chris Hemsworth) who runs a prison that offers inmates the chance to shorten their sentences by participating in a drug trial that consists of taking mind-altering drugs. Miles Teller (who starred in both TG: Maverick and Only the Brave for Kosinski) plays one of the inmates. Zombieland and Deadpool screenwriters Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick penned Spiderhead, which makes this film a promising watch. “It’s a thriller at times, but also a wickedly funny dark comedy,” wrote The Hollywood Reporter’s Frank Scheck.

The Summer I Turned Pretty – Season 1 (Amazon Prime Video, June 17)

An adaptation of Jenny Han's 2009 best-selling, eponymously titled coming-of-age novel, The Summer I Turned Pretty focuses on Belly, an Asian American girl who has a complicated relationship with Jeremiah and Conrad, two brothers she’s known since childhood. Interestingly, Amazon let Han serve as creator and co-showrunner on the series, even though she had never written for television before. (For some reason Hollywood isn’t keen on letting authors adapt their work for the screen.) It will be interesting to see what aspects of her novel Han incorporated into the screenplay and what words she left out. Amazon has already renewed the series for a second season.

Cha Cha Real Smooth (Apple TV Plus, June 17)

This Sundance 2022 comedy breakout hit stars Dakota Johnson, Cooper Raiff, Leslie Mann and Brad Garrett. Apple was quite taken with the film about a bar mitzvah party host (Raiff) who forms a bond with a single mother (Johnson) and her autistic daughter (Vanessa Burghardt).  The tech company paid a reported $15 million for the rights. The film scored an aggregated 91% on Rotten Tomatoes “A smart film that ends up also being surprisingly moving,” wrote RogerEbert.com’s Brian Tallerico.

Good Luck to You, Leo Grande (Hulu, June 17)

Oscar winner Emma Thompson stars as Nancy Stokes, a 55-year-old widow yearning for some good sex after a nice but stale marriage. So she does what any 50-something widow would do and hires a 20-something handsome sex worker, Leo Grande (Daryl McCormack). Drama of the best sort ensues. The film premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in January and critics took a liking to it. “A movie starring the peerless Emma Thompson as a go-getting widow looking for good sex? You have to show up for Sophie Hyde's earnestly sex-positive dramedy based on this premise alone,” wrote Harper’s Bazaar Tomris Laffly.

Civil (Netflix, June, 19)

This Netflix documentary follows civil rights lawyer Ben Crump as he goes to trial to seek justice for the deaths of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, whose murders sparked protests across the country around race and police brutality. Nadia Hallgren (Becoming: Michelle Obama) directed the film, which premiered earlier this month at the Tribeca Film Festival. It’s a counter-narrative of sorts to the many Fox News segments branding (Crump) “the most dangerous man in America” (segments that appear throughout the documentary), but it’s also an excavation of the ways Crump himself is tirelessly dedicated to writing the counter-narratives of Black people slain by police,” wrote IndieWire’s Siddhant Adlakha.

Mind Over Murder (HBO Max, June 20)

This six-part documentary is the latest true crime nonfiction series to hit streaming services. This one involves a 68- year-old grandmother, Helen Wilson who was killed in her Nebraska apartment in 1985. Five individuals confessed to the crime but were eventually exonerated by DNA evidence in 2009. Director Nanfu Wang (In the Same Breath) explores the murder of Wilson but also tackles other interesting issues like town politics and how trustworthy one’s own memory really is. The docuseries includes archival footage, original interrogation videos and interviews with Wilson’s family members as well as the individuals who confessed to her murder.  

The Umbrella Academy - Season 3 (Netflix, June 22)

Even though they saved the world by putting a stop to 1963’s doomsday, the Hargreeves siblings aren’t allowed to celebrate when they return to the present day. Instead, they have a new rival to fight called the Sparrow Academy. Of course, they do! Otherwise this group of gifted, time traveling siblings who were born all around the world at the same time wouldn’t be doing what they are on the planet to do -- stop evil forces. Based on Gerard Way’s eponymously titled comic book, the first two seasons of The Umbrella Academy were hits with the critics. “The Umbrella Academy is what you get when you mix Wes Anderson with Matthew Vaughn, stuff them full of Red Bull and Adderall, and give them a Spotify Premium subscription. Yes, that's a compliment,” wrote The Observer’s Brandon Katz. Season three will feature 10 one-hour episodes.

Chernobyl: The Lost Tapes (HBO Max, June 22)

This 92-minute documentary tells the story of what really happened on April 26, 1986 when a nuclear reactor exploded at the Chernobyl Power Plant in Soviet Ukraine. Uncovered archival footage and recorded interviews with those who were present paint a grave picture of the disaster and the lengths to which the Soviet government went to cover up the incident. This isn’t the first time HBO has explored the Chernobyl explosion and its aftermath. In 2019, the distributor released a five-part narrative miniseries titled Chernobyl, which was a hit with critics and the winner of 10 Emmys. A nonfiction recounting of the worst man-made accident in history does not make for an upbeat watch, but knowing what actually happened does make this doc definitely worthy of a watch.

Call it a landmark moment for the business of video streaming that turned out to be rather anticlimactic. 

For the first time, audience research company Nielsen included an SVOD ranker in its top 10 audience performance rankings, alongside traditional TV and video game audience performances lists. But the ranker for subscription video-on-demand streaming doesn’t present the kind of apples-to-apples comparison many of us got used to in the halcyon days of Nielsen overnights. 

For the week starting Aug. 3 and ending Aug. 9, Netflix’s The Umbrella Academy was the most watched show in the increasingly vital U.S. SVOD business, according to Nielsen, with its 20 posted episodes garnering more than 3 billion minutes of total viewing. 

But the other nine shows on the list are all on Netflix, too. This probably shouldn't be unexpected, given that Netflix finished the second quarter with nearly 73 million U.S. subscribers. Rival SVOD service Hulu had just over 32 million subscribers at the end of Q2. Amazon Prime doesn’t disclose how many of its more than 150 million members are regular Amazon Prime Video users. But it’s probably safe to assume the number is far less than 73 million.

Competitive context is difficult to come by for a ranker that doesn’t account for the fact that the walled gardens of the respective SVOD services are vastly different in size. 

Also, measuring by total consumed minutes doesn’t take account the impact of having shows over-index based on mere content volume, such as Grey’s Anatomy, which has 361 streamable episodes on Netflix.

What is notable is that The Umbrella Academy is the only Netflix original to appear on the list. See below:

The second season of The Umbrella Academy begins on Netflix July 31. There are 10 episodes. The cast includes Ellen Page, Tom Hopper, David Castañeda, Emmy Raver-Lampman, Robert Sheehan, Aidan Gallagher and Justin Min.

Gerard Way, frontman for My Chemical Romance, is co-executive producer with Gabriel Ba. Way created the comic book series that The Umbrella Academy is based on. 

The premise goes, “On the same day in 1989, 43 infants are inexplicably born to random, unconnected women who showed no signs of pregnancy the day before. Seven are adopted by a billionaire who creates The Umbrella Academy and prepares his ‘children’ to save the world. Now, the six surviving members reunite upon the news of their father's passing and must work together to solve a mystery surrounding his death. But the estranged family begins to come apart due to their divergent personalities and abilities, not to mention the imminent threat of a global apocalypse,” according to Netflix.

Steve Blackman is showrunner and executive producer. Executive producing the show alongside Blackman are Jeff F. King, Mike Richardson and Keith Goldberg.

Blackman mentioned being “inspired by the source material and bringing my own voice to it. Ultimately, you want to respect the existing fans while attracting a whole new audience.”

Universal Content Productions produces the series. 

New programming from streaming services dominate this week’s new show premieres as the calendar turns to August.

On July 31 Beyonce’s Black Is King visual album debuts on Disney Plus along with Showtime’s music documentary on the iconic all-girl rock group the Go-Go’s.

Also on July 31 Netflix returns its sci-fi drama The Umbrella Academy for a second season.

Below are video trailers and premiere dates for several other shows debuting the week of July 27 to Aug. 2 on cable networks and streaming services (for some videos, viewer discretion is advised):

July 27 -- Don’t Look Deeper (Sci-fi/drama) -- Quibi

July 28 -- Last Chance U: Laney (returning series) -- Netflix

July 29 -- Stockton On My Mind (documentary) -- HBO 

July 29 -- The Weight of Gold (sports documentary) -- HBO

July 30 -- Frayed (comedy) -- HBO Max

July 31 -- Get Even (drama) -- Netflix

July 31 -- The Last Narc (documentary) -- Prime Video

July 31 -- Muppets Now (family) -- Disney+

Comic books have been a prime source of TV shows for some time, but the trend has hit what some are calling a second wave, the newer shows having some fun at the expense of superheroes. Netflix’s The Umbrella Academy, Amazon’s The Boys and HBO Max’s Doom Patrol all have new seasons, and these comic book offspring offer an offbeat take on the superhero genre that dominates both movies and comics. 

“Superheroes are so omnipresent right now, and some shows look to turn that upside down,” said Eric Kripke, creator and executive producer on The Boys. “We feel like the audience is really hungry for the reaction, the deconstruction to how much superhero stuff is out there.”

Season two of The Boys arrives Friday, Sept. 4. Based on the comic book franchise by Garth Ennis and Darick Robertson, it’s a cheeky look at what happens when superheroes abuse their powers. 

Kripke has long been what he called a “superfan” of Ennis’s comics, and was crushed to not get to produce Preacher, which was based on an Ennis comic and ran on AMC 2016-2019. When The Boys was in the works, Kripke pushed hard for a role in it. 

Comic Crush 

Comic books have long been a source for TV series, and the genre has hit a high point in the last decade. AMC debuted The Walking Dead, from a Robert Kirkman comic, in 2010. Netflix had Daredevil, Jessica Jones, The Iron Fist and Luke Cage, all from Marvel. The CW has Riverdale, which stemmed from Archie Comics, and the DC Comics-inspired “Arrowverse,” including Arrow, Supergirl, Batwoman and DC’s Legends of Tomorrow. HBO’s Peabody Award-winning Watchmen was originally a DC Comics series.

“The more outlets that are ordering original programs, the more they will turn to existing I.P., and comics are an ideal source,” Myles McNutt, assistant professor of communication and theatre arts at Old Dominion University and contributor to The AV Club, said. “They offer a wealth of existing source material, sometimes spanning over decades, and their stories are often serialized, giving producers a strong framework to
work from.”

Season two of Doom Patrol started June 25. The characters include Negative Man, Crazy Jane and Robotman. HBO Max calls them “DC’s strangest group of heroes.” 

“There’s a lot of layers to the show,” Jeremy Carver, executive producer and showrunner said. “Our superheroes don’t even like superheroes.”

The Boys sees some pretty ordinary humans take on a self-reverential gang of superheroes. “The superhero stuff out there is so overwhelming that someone had to take the piss out of it,” Kripke said. 

Season two of The Umbrella Academy begins on Netflix July 31. Based on a comic book series from My Chemical Romance singer Gerard Way, it is the story of 43 babies born to unconnected women who showed no signs of pregnancy. Seven are adopted by a billionaire, who trains them to save the world. 

Creator Steve Blackman was not familiar with the comic franchise, but was intrigued when he found out Way was behind it. He saw it not as “a graphic novel about superheroes, but a story about a dysfunctional family.”

Moving In New Directions

There are significant challenges to turning print stories to television, and doing so in a way that wins over diehard fans of the comics. The half-dozen Marvel shows on Netflix, for one, did not enjoy particularly long runs. 

Producers say the biggest challenge is when to be faithful to the source material and when to take it in a different direction. “You cannot do a one-to-one translation,” Kripke said. “Trying to adapt it word-for-word would be disappointing for everybody.”

Kripke described his strategy as “take what you love from the comic and remix it for the show,” which he likened to “an incredibly stressful game of Jenga.”

Blackman mentioned being “inspired by the source material and bringing my own voice to it. Ultimately, you want to respect the existing fans while attracting a whole new audience.”

Comic books offer a rich palette for producers and a trove of established entertainment brands as more and more networks hunt for compelling original content. “If there was once a time when people presumed that a comic book meant a superhero story for young kids, the breadth of adaptations across both film and television has shifted that discourse,” McNutt said, “meaning that the
industry has more latitude to explore the medium’s thematic and generic range.” 

A nostalgic look at an infamous 1970’s disco era club and a live-action movie based on a kids-targeted animated superhero lead a bevy of new series and specials launching this week.

A&E today (Feb. 11) premieres Studio 54, a documentary movie that looks at the glamorous New York City dance club that shaped the culture of New York City in the 1970s.

On Feb. 15, Disney Channel debuts Kim Possible, a live-action original movie based on the network’s popular animated series of the 2000s.

Here are video trailers and premiere dates for several shows debuting this week on cable networks and streaming services:

Feb. 11 -- Studio 54 (documentary) -- A&E

Feb. 12 -- Boomerang (series) -- BET

Feb. 12 -- Miracle Workers (comedy series) -- TBS

Feb. 13 -- Weird City (anthology series) -- YouTube

Feb. 14 -- Dating Around (reality) -- Netflix

Feb. 15 -- Doom Patrol (series) -- DC Universe

Feb. 15 -- Fast Layne (series) -- Disney Channel

Feb. 15 -- Kim Possible (movie) -- Disney Channel 

Feb. 15 -- Lorena (series) -- Prime video

Feb. 15 -- The Umbrella Academy -- Netflix

Grammy Award-winning R&B singer and Academy Award-nominated actress Mary J. Blige has signed on to appear in Netflix’s new live-action series The Umbrella Academy, the network said Monday (Feb. 12).

The series, based on the popular comics and graphic novels of the same name, follows the estranged members of a dysfunctional family of superheroes who come together to solve their father’s mysterious death. Blige plays Cha-Cha, an unorthodox assassin who travels through time to kill assigned targets, according to Netflix. 

The Umbrella Academy is being produced by Universal Cable Productions, with Steve Blackman (Fargo, Altered Carbon), serving as executive producer and showrunner. Additional executive producers include Mike Richardson, Keith Goldberg and Gerard Way.

Blige returns to Netflix after co-starring in the streaming service’s film Mudbound, which earned Blige a 2018 Oscar nomination for best supporting actress as well as a best original song nomination for "Mighty River."