As summer draws to a close, the Samba weekly Wrap Report streaming chart is in a period of transition. The biggest hit of the summer, “House of the Dragon,” is absent from this week’s chart for the first time in two months, while other chart mainstays wrap up their seasons.

Of course, the streaming landscape means there are always new titles popping up, and this week’s chart has four debuts, including a brand new HBO Max series in the second spot.

First though, let’s look to the top of the chart, where “Reacher” sits for the second consecutive week. The Amazon Prime Video series, an adaptation of the novels by author Lee Child, is reaching new heights in its fourth season. This is a fast-paced season as well, with Amazon adding the first three episodes on Aug. 12, and wrapping up with its eight episodes on Sept. 16. Die-hard fans will be delighted to know that a spinoff series, “Neagley,” also debuts on Sept. 16.

Second this week is “Lanterns,” on HBO Max. The series is the third streaming TV series in the DC Universe, following “Creature Commandos” and “Peacemaker.” Of course, HBO Max had a massive hit in late 2024 with “The Penguin,” another series based on DC Comics characters, but not part of the current DC Universe franchise. Intellectual property is confusing, we know.

The Wrap Report provides an exclusive first look at the most-watched movies and TV series from the past week across both streaming and linear television, sourced from viewership trends collected from Samba’s panel of more than 3 million households, balanced to the U.S. Census.

“Ted Lasso,” perhaps Apple TV+’s biggest hit, rises up to third this week as its surprise fourth season rolls along. It’s followed by Zoe Saldaña’s spy thriller, “Special Ops: Lioness,” in its third season on Paramount+.

Continuing our trend of returning hit shows, “Outer Banks” comes in fifth this week. The Netflix teen drama returned for its fifth season on August 20.

It’s followed by another slice of Netflix teen fare, “Don’t Say Good Luck.” The high school musical drama moves up four spots in its second week on the chart.

“Facing El Chapo,” yet another Netflix title, debuts in seventh this week. The Mexican drama film tells the story of the manhunt for the notorious Mexican drug lord “El Chapo.”

There’s a double dose of Apple TV+ up next. First is “Lucky,” the Anya Taylor-Joy led crime thriller. The miniseries enjoyed a solid chart presence throughout its run, and aired its finale this week.

That’s followed by “Silo.” The science fiction series returned for its third season back in early July and has built up a chart presence in recent weeks. With two episodes to go, can it hang on?

Finally, in tenth we find “Furious,” as the Hulu crime drama returns to the chart after a week away.

While streaming is in a time of transition, the fall season hasn’t quite hit linear yet. “America’s Got Talent” extends its summer streak atop the chart, and it’s followed by tried-and-true TV fare.

“Wheel of Fortune” only claims one spot on this week’s chart, but it comes in second. It’s followed by game shows “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?” and “Jeopardy!”

There’s a trio of “American” titles up next, with “America’s Got Talent,” “American Ninja,” and “America’s Funniest Home Videos” going fourth, fifth and sixth.

“Celebrity Family Feud” is eight, “the Price is Right” is ninth, and “Big Brother,” in the midst of its 28th season, lands in tenth.

The problem with Finding Emily is not that no one in it acts like a real and reasonable human being, although no one does — not its exhaustingly lovelorn hero (Spike Fearn‘s Owen), nor its acridly skeptical heroine (Angourie Rice‘s Emily), nor any of the screeching over-reactors and thoughtless under-reactors surrounding them. Absurd behavior is, after all, a cornerstone of the rom-com genre; if you didn’t want to believe in a world where the path to true love cuts through harebrained fake dating schemes or HR-nightmare jobs that require getting dumped, you’d watch something else.

No, the problem with Finding Emily is that it’s so busy reassuring you how delightful it is that none of its characters act like real and reasonable human beings that it forgets to conjure the necessary magic to make you love them anyway. Lacking not just in sense but charm and chemistry to boot, this would-be defense of rom-com tropes against our jaded age ends up, instead, far more cynical than any of the criticisms it’s supposedly fighting against.

Director Alicia MacDonald and screenwriter Rachel Hirons’ self-awareness is apparent from the opening scene, an utterly classic meet-cute. At a party one night, struggling musician Owen strikes a connection with a young woman (Sadie Soverall) that feels downright magical — she’s even dressed as a fairy, emphasizing the dreaminess of the moment. In the cold light of day, however, Owen discovers his happy ending is further away than he might have hoped. The number she’s left him with is one digit short, making a follow-up text impossible.

But Owen, a romantic so starry-eyed that Ted Mosby from How I Met Your Mother would have advised him to chill, is not so easily deterred. Knowing nothing about his fantasy woman beyond her first name (Emily) and her school (Manchester City University, where he works as a sound engineer), he mounts a no-holds-barred campaign to track her down, pestering the school secretary for contact information and then papering the entire campus with wanted posters when that fails.

This is, to put it plainly, kinda creepy behavior, and initially it seems to be to the film’s credit that it recognizes this. Finding Emily presents itself as a rom-com that doubles as a thought exercise in how genre tropes like nice guys and manic pixie dream girls play in the era of Obsession and Companion, Couch Guy and West Elm Caleb, think pieces about incels and rape culture and toxic masculinity. But much like its own female lead, it can’t seem to resist pressing its thumb on the scale.

Because as hopeless as Owen’s dreamy idealism might be (“Oh no, not again” groans his brother, played by Jack Riddiford, when he hears about the mystery girl), he’s not the really the off-putting one here. That would be Rice’s Emily Raine, the psych student he rudely pulls out of class while looking for his One True Emily.

This Emily does not believe in romance at all, and in fact is working on a thesis paper “proving” that love is just a useless self-sabotaging state of psychosis. In Owen, she sees the perfect case study, or as she puts it, “my very own Stanford prison experiment.” And as with the actual Stanford prison experiment, questions of ethics and scientific validity are sidelined in favor of getting splashy results by any means necessary. Forging Owen’s signature on consent forms and posing as just a helpful bystander, she encourages him to keep looking when he’s ready to quit and manipulates him into more and more extreme efforts, culminating in an un-BCCed email blast sent to all 318 Emilys enrolled at the school.

Does this sound like the foundation for a true and lasting love? Or does it sound like an unforgivable breach of trust, as well as a hopelessly sloppy project that Emily’s professor (an amusingly grumpy Prassana Puwanarajah) should have nipped in the bud? I found it to be the latter, but Finding Emily stakes its bet on the former, and keeps doubling down even as the consequences pile up for Owen.

Once the email goes viral, Owen becomes a TikTok trending topic, a subject of clickbaity internet explainers (“Creep, criminal, or just cringe?”), an urgent campus security issue, a catalyst for student protests against predators. Even a winsome serenade to the Mystery Emily during an otherwise disastrous podcast interview only goes so far in turning the tide; while some onlookers are swayed to his side, others just expand their repertoire of insults from “rapist virgin” to “toxic incel true-crime Ed Sheeran.”

But if the fallout for Owen has a distinctly modern flavor, complete with trendy buzzwords getting thrown around social media, Finding Emily‘s take on his journey is stubbornly old-fashioned. “I’ve burned my bra, I’ve done the work,” snaps a dean (Minnie Driver tepidly channeling Allison Janney in 10 Things I Hate About You) who has no interest in listening to strident feminist activists like Emily Thewlis (Kat Rooney) complain about how Owen’s grand email gesture was sexual harassment or whatever.

And why would the dean be? Finding Emily has stacked the deck insurmountably in favor of Owen, whom we know to be utterly harmless and unimpeachably pure of heart. By making him the sole lighting rod for all these issues, it raises valid concerns around consent, boundaries and male entitlement only to dismiss them as hysterical. Besides, we know who’s really to blame for this whole mess — it’s not this would-be lover boy but the ruthless woman who exploited his genuine sentiment for her own careerist ends.

What’s especially exasperating about Finding Emily’s sour fixation on fending off imaginary haters is that there are moments when it betrays just enough sweetness to make you want to want these characters to make it work. I found Emily Raine too devious to like, and yet Rice plays her with enough brightness that she’s hard to completely hate. Fearn’s choice to play Owen as a mumbling, fidgeting ball of heart-on-sleeve emotion makes him feel natural and authentic, even as the circumstances surrounding him grow ever more contrived.

The two share the shaggy, laid-back ease of fast friends more than the burning desire of lovers-to-be. (My kingdom for romances to actually start casting for palpable heat again.) But there are small gestures — like when Owen defends Emily’s disgusting chip shop order before an ex (Timothy Innes) making fun of it — when it’s possible to understand how even a heart as firmly closed as Emily’s might crack open for a guy this unapologetically sincere. Maybe there could have been something there, in the unforced affection between the two stars. It’s a shame the rest of the movie — the unhinged plot, the one-sided debates, the smug self-referentiality — makes this couple impossible to root for.

EXCLUSIVE: Paramount Primal, the studio’s new genre label led by J.D. Lifshitz and Raphael Margules, has acquired rights to The Troop, the 2014 horror novel by Nick Cutter, enlisting Chris Basler to pen the feature adaptation.

The Troop follows a troop of boys who, while on their annual scout camping trip, encounter an intruder who unleashes something far more terrifying than any campfire ghost story. As fear spreads, a brutal struggle for survival begins, turning the boys against the infected… and each other.

Cutter is the pseudonym for USA Today bestseller Craig Davidson, whose novel won the James Herbert Award for Horror Writing.

Lyrical Media, the company behind Adam Wingard’s A24 action thriller Onslaught and the upcoming Osgood Perkins film The Young People, is set to produce the feature take, with Tracy Rosenblum overseeing the project for Paramount Primal.

Previously, Basler has developed projects for both film and television with Blumhouse, Bad Robot, Annapurna, the Picture Co., Tango, Hivemind, Cloud Nine, and the Black List, among others. He is repped by UTA, Untitled, and Ziffren Brittenham.

As Nick Cutter, Davidson is also known for books like The Dorians, The Deep, Little Heaven, The Queen, and The Handyman Method, co-written with Andrew F. Sullivan. Fiction written under his own name includes Rust and Bone, The Saturday Night Ghost Club, and the short story collection Cascade. He is repped by UTA and Kirby Kim at Janklow & Nesbit Associates.

Formally unveiled in July, Paramount Primal kicked things off with a bang with the announcement of a new A Nightmare on Elm Street movie, to be released domestically by Paramount. Currently in production on Tyler Falbo’s R-rated comedy Boys for Life, they’re simultaneously developing the R-rated fantasy Tower Defense from writer Evan Daugherty, along with the high-concept thriller Sweet Spot penned by Nic Curcio and Kirby Gladstein.