| | | | Welcome to Now See This, THR chief TV critic Daniel Fienberg’s weekly viewer guide newsletter dedicated to cutting through the daunting clutter of the broadcast, cable and streaming TV landscape! Comments and suggestions welcome at daniel.fienberg@thr.com. |
Woke Up This Morning / Got Myself a [Pen]guin It's a big week if you're a fan of breakout comic-book villains getting standalone TV spotlights. On the DC side of the ledger, Colin Farrell's latex-encased incarnation of the Penguin, airing on HBO then streaming on Max, offers tremendous prosthetic work and a great co-lead performance by Cristin Milioti. The Penguin fills its eight hours entertainingly enough, but it feels somewhat reductive to try to open up Oswald Cobb's world by turning him into Tony Soprano. Hailing from Marvel, Disney+'s Agatha All Along has been spun off from WandaVision with Kathryn Hahn's Agatha Harkness front and center. Hahn is having a blast and the supporting cast of scene stealers — Aubrey Plaza, Sasheer Zamata, Patti LuPone, Joe Locke — is exceptional. I enjoyed the cheeky, campy tone, though I agree with our Angie Han (no relation) that the pacing frequently takes a backseat to reference-driven cleverness. |
Carry On My Wayward Olson With the Emmys in the rearview, it must be time to start the broadcast season! If you're like me, you either watch significantly less broadcast TV than you used to or else the titles you do watch — Abbott Elementary and Ghosts, among others — still haven't returned. But the first week of the new season includes a few shows with at least SOME potential. ABC's High Potential — must.stop.saying.potential. — has … sigh … potential, or at least it has Kaitlin Olson as a brilliant cleaning lady whose tendency to tell people her IQ gets her a job consulting for the LAPD. The first episode is now on Hulu. Getting a Sunday sneak peek is CBS' Matlock, which features a tricky lead performance from Kathy Bates and is not, in fact, your grandfather's Matlock, which assumes your grandfather had a Matlock. Finally, NBC premieres the Oliver Sacks-based procedural Brilliant Minds on Monday. Like High Potential, Brilliant Minds is still trying to figure out its tone and ideal storytelling approach, but several of the early chapters are actually pretty decent. |
| | | Murphy's Blah Your guess is as good as mine as to why Netflix and FX, each with a headline-ripping, Ryan Murphy-produced true crime limited series, decided to launch the VERY similar American Sports Story: Aaron Hernandez and Monsters: The Lyle and Erik Menendez Story within two days of each other. Monsters is better than its Jeffrey Dahmer-centric predecessor and it features a breakout turn from Cooper Koch, who especially shines in the one-take fifth episode, but it's overlong, repetitive and thematically jumbled. As a football fan in general and a Patriots fan in specific, I preferred American Sports Story, especially its evisceration of Urban Meyer and its very cheeky take on Bill Belichick, as played by Norbert Leo Butz. Still, I agree with Angie that it's far too lengthy to have so little insight into its central character. |
Ryan Murphy Brown If you watch any CNN news coverage, you probably already know that TV on the Edge: Moments That Shaped Our Culture premieres on Sunday. They've been advertising it a lot! The series examines how certain pivotal episodes of television impacted the cultural conversation beyond the confines of their primetime slots. The first installment focuses on Murphy Brown's pregnancy, Dan Quayle's rebuttal and what happens when a sitcom plotline and an election news cycle intersect. No review from me, because I lent my opinions/memories/expertise to the Murphy Brown episode. How much did they use me? Only one way to find out! |
Sunday night marks the 20th anniversary of the debut of ABC's Lost, with what remains, in my opinion, the greatest pilot ever made. The rest of the show was also pretty good and if you've been doing a rewatch on Netflix or Hulu or wherever, let me recommend Lost: Back to the Island, a smart, funny and THOROUGH new companion book by Emily St. James and Noel Murray, who are tremendous writers and my friends. While I'm plugging things by my nearest and dearest … Do you like funny, sad, vividly absurd prose poems about goldfish, minotaurs, fertility struggles and bee colony collapse? Then you may be the target audience for my brother Ori's new poetry collection Where Babies Come From. |
Don't Call Me 'Daughters' After a brief theatrical run, one of the year's most acclaimed movies thus far hits Netflix. Our editor Jon Frosch — congrats on the new bambino, Jon! — called His Three Daughters "a sharp, tender tale of sisterhood under duress," praising stars Carrie Coon, Elizabeth Olsen and Natasha Lyonne. Not much else on the streaming film front for the weekend, so if you like Coon in His Three Daughters — not to be confused with Starz's Three Women — maybe it's finally time for you to watch The Leftovers, streaming on Max. |
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