With most of HBO Max’s July highlights, like Stuart Fails to Save the Universe, landing in the last ten days of the month, and House of the Dragon painstakingly dropping only once a week, now’s an excellent time to raid one of the deepest catalogs in streaming
For this week, we’re spotlighting three shows (in descending order based on Rotten Tomatoes score) you can stream right now, in their entirety if you like: a painfully honest comedy about a man’s dream of making it as a stand-up, a legendary series from a notoriously petty legend, and a gorgeous animated multiverse trip from the Adventure Time people
Crashing
Pete Holmes’ semi-autobiographical series is a joy
Pete Holmes is easily one of my favorite stand-up comedians. His quirky, existential takes on life and unflinchingly positive vibe (it’s gold when he laughs at his own jokes) are infectious. So when he fired up his own semi-autobiographical series, Crashing, on HBO in 2017, I was all-in
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Built around Holmes’ own worst year, with Judd Apatow (Knocked Up) producing and directing episodes across its three seasons (2017-2019), Crashing doubles as both a moving-on story and a love letter to New York’s stand-up scene. Holmes plays Pete, a sheltered, relentlessly nice aspiring comedian whose life implodes when his wife, Jess (Lauren Lapkus, Orange Is the New Black), leaves him for another man. Suddenly homeless, Pete crashes on the couches of other working comics on the scene—Artie Lange, T.J. Miller, and Sarah Silverman play warped versions of themselves—while grinding through open mic nights and soul-crushing bombing.
Crashing mines Holmes’ real post-divorce years for laughs that sneak up on you, but it’s his sincerity and genuinely sweet moments that will make you cheer for him. Crashing has a 90% critics’ score on Rotten Tomatoes
Curb Your Enthusiasm
12 seasons of Larry David’s magnificently petty social warfare
With Life, Larry and the Pursuit of Unhappiness currently rewriting American history on HBO, I thought now would be a great time to revisit the mothership of cringe. Seinfeld co-creator Larry David’s largely improvised comedy (do I even have to say its name?) Curb Your Enthusiasm ran for 12 seasons from 2000 to 2024, winning a Golden Globe, racking up 55 Emmy nominations (but, shocking, only two wins!), and influencing basically every awkward cringe comedy show since
For those who haven’t indulged in its brilliance, Larry plays a heightened version of himself—a wealthy, semi-retired TV writer bumbling around Los Angeles, turning minor social infractions—an unreturned phone call, sampling more than two ice cream flavors, the chat-and-cut to butt into a long line—into scorched-earth feuds of epic proportions
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Cheryl Hines plays Larry’s long-suffering wife, Jeff Garlin (The Goldbergs) his enabling manager, and comedian J.B. Smoove plays Leon, the houseguest who never leaves. There’s also a who’s-who of revolving guest stars, including an incredible seven-episode Seinfeld reunion arc that brings the whole gang back together. Pick any season; the pettiness is timeless. Curb is a must-see binge that has a 92% on Rotten Tomatoes
Adventure Time: Fionna and Cake
A multiverse animated adventure with a perfect RT score
The lone animated pick here earned a perfect 100% Rotten Tomatoes approval rating for its first season, and it’s easy to see why. A spin-off of Cartoon Network’s iconic Adventure Time (2010-2018), this HBO Max original is all about the adventures of best friends Fionna the Human and Cake the Cat—the gender-swapped versions of AT’s Finn and Jake who debuted as in-universe fan fiction written by the Ice King back in 2011
Set after the original Adventure Time series finale, it finds Fionna (Madeleine Martin, Californication) working a dead-end job in a drab, magic-less reality where her beloved Cake (Roz Ryan, Hercules) is just an ordinary house cat. When magic comes crashing back, the duo hops across the multiverse with Simon Petrikov (Tom Kenny, SpongeBob SquarePants), the tragic former Ice King, while dodging a cosmic entity called the Scarab bent on erasing them
With two seasons now streaming, Adventure Time: Fionna and Cake is aimed squarely at the grown-ups who grew up on Ooo
No new shows, no problem
New shows are great, especially on HBO Max, but when you’ve got a plethora of legacy series and more recent gems to flip through when there’s nothing of-the-moment to check out, you could do much worse. And as always, if you’re looking for more, check out our streaming section
