The Hawk to Little House on the Prairie: 10 of the best TV shows to watch this July

From a Will Ferrell golfing comedy to a Legally Blonde prequel and a new adaptation of the famous novels about 19th-Century frontier life – these are the best series to watch and stream.

Twenty-five years after she made Elle Woods an indelible pop-culture figure in Legally Blonde, Reese Witherspoon is a producer of this prequel. In 1995, six years before heading to Harvard Law School, Elle (newcomer Lexi Minetree) is in high school, already an underestimated, misunderstood, chihuahua-carrying heroine. She is horrified when her parents, played by June Diane Raphael and Tom Everett Scott, tell her the family is moving from posh, sunny Bel Air to Seattle. Sure enough, at her new school she is a fluffy pink vision in a sea of grunge, dismissed as a bubble-head by judgmental peers. Is there any doubt she will prove them wrong? Witherspoon has said she was inspired to make a prequel after watching the Netflix series Wednesday, which worked so well by sending Wednesday Addams to school. 

Elle premieres 1 July on Prime Video internationally 

2. Little House on the Prairie                                           

Few books have been as beloved as Laura Ingalls Wilder's autobiographical Little House novels about 19th-Century frontier life, and few television families as embraced as that in the classic series inspired by Wilder's stories, which ran from 1974-83 and endlessly in reruns. This new version, starring relatively unknown actors, takes a fresh look at the family. In the first season (with a second already ordered) Pa and Ma Ingalls, along with young Laura and her older sister, Mary, leave Wisconsin in a covered wagon for a new home in Kansas. Set in 1868, the story deals with the trauma of the recently-ended Civil War, in which Pa's brother died, and gives the Ingalls family sympathetic neighbours from the local Osage Nation. But while those themes and characters reflect 21st-Century expectations, there is still plenty of the old-fashioned family sentiment that made the books and original series so popular.

Little House on the Prairie premieres 9 July on Netflix internationally

3. The Five Star Weekend

In this adaptation of Elin Hilderbrand's 2023 novel, Jennifer Garner plays Hollis Shaw, a cook and best-selling author whose husband has recently died. To deal with her grief, she orchestrates a gathering of four friends from various stages of her life for a weekend in pretty-looking Nantucket, also the location of Netflix' hit Hildebrand adaptation, The Perfect Couple. Chloe Sevigny plays a friend from Hollis's teenage years, Regina Hall plays her college roommate and D'Arcy Carden's character raised her children at the same time as Hollis did. Gemma Chan plays a new friend who carries a secret (what would a reunion be without one?) that threatens to explode Hollis's sense of her own past. The series' creator, Bekah Brunstetter, has compared it to "a marshmallow that's good for you", saying: "We set out to make a show that's uplifting, funny, and gorgeous to look at – but which also has surprising depth around friendship, grief and identity." 

The Five Star Weekend premieres 9 July on Peacock in the US and 16 July on Sky Atlantic in the UK and Ireland

JK Simmons is in tough-guy mode in this crime drama set in New York City in the 1980s. He plays the fictional Eamon Sweeney, head of the real-life Irish mob known as The Westies. The series laces actual period details into the story of a younger generation challenging........

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