Steve Coogan Guides 7 Best Shows On Hbo Max Picks For May
best shows on hbo max gets a May-season twist here: GQ picked seven things to watch on Netflix in May, led by a new Steve Coogan spy drama, The Four Seasons season 2, and three documentary specials about modern soccer. The list arrives as spring turns to summer and the summer movie season approaches.
Steve Coogan and Tina Fey
Seven picks make this a tight viewing guide, not a sprawling dump of titles. The most immediate draws are Steve Coogan’s new spy drama and the second season of Tina Fey’s middle-aged dramedy The Four Seasons, which gives Netflix two recognizable names to hang the month around.
Legends is the sharpest-sounding of the scripted entries. Neil Forsyth’s series is billed as a real-life crime thriller about a group of unassuming UK customs workers who infiltrated drug gangs in the 1990s, and its official synopsis says, “They were not trained spies. These were ordinary men and women, plucked from ordinary lives around the UK.” It adds that they were given basic training and told to build new identities in the criminal underworld.
Legends and The Boroughs
The Boroughs broadens the month’s pitch beyond crime and espionage. The latest Netflix show from the Duffer Brothers is set in a remote retirement village in the middle of the New Mexico desert and stars Alfred Molina, Bill Pullman, and Alfre Woodard, which gives the streamer one more prestige title built around familiar names.
That mix matters because the article is not selling one type of show. It points to a slate that ranges from a spy drama to a retirement-village series to nonfiction, which is exactly how Netflix keeps a monthly queue feeling crowded without relying on a single launch.
Jamie Vardy and Liverpool
Three documentary specials give the month its clearest nonfiction angle. Untold UK: Jamie Vardy is one of those three feature-length specials, and Netflix blog Tudum promises “unseen archival footage, raw locker-room stories” plus interviews with Vardy and people in his orbit.
Liverpool’s Miracle of Istanbul goes back to 2005, when Liverpool came back from 3-0 down against AC Milan and leveled the score in a frantic six-minute spell. The special includes on-camera input from Steven Gerrard, Jamie Carragher, and Rafael Benítez, and its official synopsis calls the match “The greatest comeback in football history.”
For viewers, the practical takeaway is simple: the month’s strongest Netflix options are clustered around named people and known sports history, so the safest picks are the ones with the clearest hook. If you want scripted work, start with Coogan, Fey, and The Boroughs; if you want the nonfiction side, the soccer specials are the sharper bet.
