So, you have a subscription to Max, formerly HBO Max. You’re enjoying a quiet day at home on the Labor Day holiday and scrolling to find something good to watch. You have already powered through House of the Dragon, The Last of Us, The White Lotus, and other top Max shows. What can you watch next?
We have some recommendations for you with the three best (HBO) Max TV shows to stream on Labor Day. Each one is tied to some things that Labor Day represents, from the pending start of the new football season to the looming return to school timeframe that will pose challenges (and opportunities!) for kids, parents, and teachers, alike.
Need more recommendations? Then check out the best new movies to stream this week, as well as the best shows on Netflix, best shows on Hulu, best shows on Amazon Prime Video, and best shows on Disney+.
Dive into a fictional world of football with Ballers, a fantastic sports comedy drama that aired for five seasons. Ballers stars Dwayne Johnson, who once played professionally before kicking off his wrestling (then acting) career. He’s Spencer Strasmore, a retired NFL player who now works as a financial manager for players.
The show also stars Rob Corddry with Dulé Hill (Suits) and Christopher McDonald (Happy Gilmore) in recurring roles, along with a long list of athletes appearing as themselves, from Stephen Curry to Antonio Brown and Odell Beckham Jr. Ballers is absolutely perfect to watch before you kick off the real football season. The show has often been called the sports version of Entourage. Johnson brings his signature charm and level of confidence to the role of a suit-wearing businessman focused on the money as much as he is the game.
There are several seasons of this docuseries focused on a different team each time. The latest is Hard Knocks: Training Camp with the Chicago Bears, centered around this team’s training for its upcoming 105th NFL season. Highlighting new coaches and the roster of players, including quarterback and No. 1 overall draft pick Caleb Williams, as they train for the season, the series’ logline promises an “unprecedented, all-access look” at the team.
If the Chicago Bears isn’t your team, you’ll find other seasons of Hard Knocks on Max as well, including Offseason with the New York Giants and In Season with the Miami Dolphins.
Stream Hard Knocks: Training Camp with the Chicago Bears on Max.
Teachers are the backbone of society, and never before has a sitcom aimed to showcase public school life in such a realistic way that pays educators the due they so deserve. Abbott Elementary is delivered in mockumentary style, spotlighting the teachers and other staff at a fictional, predominantly Black public school in Philadelphia.
This isn’t your picturesque school but an educational institution struggling with real-life issues, from rowdy kids to budget cuts, frustrated teachers, unqualified leaders, and non-sensical policies. Through it all, the teachers just want to do right by their kids. But they’re not afraid to air their grievances in a way that has real teachers nodding their heads and pumping their fists in agreement.
Created by and starring Quinta Brunson, Abbott Elementary has been a hit since it premiered, earning a slew of Emmy nominations to date and winning a few of them in the process. You don’t have to be a teacher, or even a student, to appreciate and relate to the work frustrations the characters go through in this hilarious and topical series.
Stream Abbott Elementary on Max.
China just gave Hollywood a cautionary tale about AI filmmaking. Sanxingdui: Future Past, billed as the country's first fully AI-generated movie, hit theaters on October 23 and bombed at the box office.
According to Futurism, the film's reported $1.5 million production budget landed on more than 10,000 screens. Yet it pulled in only about $181,000, averaging roughly $20 per screen, making the budget difficult to recover.
Some of the best shots in Grok Imagine’s AI-made Odyssey don’t contain actors. Ancient landscapes stretch into the distance. Close-ups of grimy hands suggest people who have touched something rougher than a keyboard. For a few seconds, the illusion holds.
https://twitter.com/imagine/status/2113712964419063911
YouTube videos could soon look better without eating quite so much data, right? Thankfully, the platform plans to introduce a new video format called AV2 on its web player in early 2027, promising more efficient streaming and potentially fewer playback hiccups on slower internet connections. The big headline is a roughly 30% improvement in compression efficiency over AV1, YouTube's existing video format. That doesn't guarantee every video will use 30% less data, but it could make streaming a little easier on both internet connections and data allowances.
What is AV2, and why should viewers care?