The scene is almost too strange to be true: a former American president, Barack Obama, stands before a camera and delivers a straight-faced tribute to the nation’s 250th birthday. “What truly makes America unique is that we’ve always been a work-in-progress,” he says. “We’re not perfect.” Just off-frame, in a powdered wig and period costume, Larry David loiters among models of the founding fathers, looking as though he has wandered in from a particularly irritable dream. The moment opens Life, Larry and the Pursuit of Unhappiness, a new HBO sketch series that imagines the Seinfeld co-creator bumbling through US history, and it sets a tone for a July streaming calendar in which the past is rarely left untouched.

That impulse to revisit and rewrite history surfaces across platforms. Netflix will premiere a new adaptation of La casa de la pradera, the latest version of the Ingalls family’s frontier story, on 9 July. The History Channel, meanwhile, marks the same 250th anniversary with Ralph Lauren’s American Icons, a special that explores the designer’s commemorative stamp collection through archival material and interviews. On MHz Choice, a French limited series, Zorro, resurrects the masked vigilante in 1821 Los Angeles, casting the wealthy nobleman Don Diego de la Vega as a reluctant mayor forced to fight corruption. These titles share a common thread: they treat history not as a sealed archive but as a playground for contemporary anxieties and absurdities.

Franchise logic dominates elsewhere. Prime Video’s Elle, a prequel to the Legally Blonde films, drops on 1 July, transplanting a teenage Elle Woods from the sunshine of Los Angeles to a Seattle high school in the grip of grunge. Newcomer Lexi Minetree plays the pink-loving protagonist who, according to the series’ premise, must find her footing in a world where even cheerleaders wear flannel. Netflix counters with Enola Holmes 3 the same day, sending Millie Bobby Brown’s young detective to Malta, where her wedding plans are upended by Sherlock’s kidnapping. Later in the month, the platform will release Heartstopper Forever, a film that reunites the Truham and Higgs circle, while Disney+ prepares a sequel to The Devil Wears Prada on 29 July, reuniting Meryl Streep, Anne Hathaway and Emily Blunt. HBO Max extends the logic further with spin-offs: Stuart no logra salvar al Universo, drawn from The Big Bang Theory, and Presidente Curtis, a Rick and Morty offshoot, both arriving in the final week of July.

International productions fill out the slate with genre exercises that travel easily across borders. Korean dramas feature prominently on Netflix: The East Palace, a fantasy about a ghost hunter and a court lady who hears the dead, begins on 17 July; Agent Kim Reactivated, starring So Ji-sub as a former elite operative forced back into espionage when his daughter is kidnapped, follows at the end of the month. A French Zorro and an Italian crime drama prequel – one of the country’s biggest TV hits, according to its distributor – signal that the global pipeline now runs in multiple directions. In music, Madonna returns on 3 July with Confessions II, a sequel to her 2005 dance album, its early tracks leaning into house rhythms and a Sabrina Carpenter collaboration.

The lasting image, however, belongs to Larry David. As Obama speaks of a nation that is “irascible, petty, selfish, cheap,” the camera finds David in his powdered wig, silent and faintly appalled, a one-man rebuke to the grandeur of the occasion. It is a visual that captures the month’s dominant mode: the past is not a monument to be revered but a stage for the same petty arguments and social transgressions that, the show insists, have always been with us.