| | 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. |
Lynch Pin Normally, the tributes go at the end of the newsletter, but David Lynch, who died this week at 78, was both an auteur and an adjective — "Lynchian" — that will be applied to a certain kind of enigmatic, richly unknowable storytelling for as long as we're telling stories. I think The Elephant Man (available on Kanopy) is my favorite Lynch film, but maybe my favorite is Blue Velvet (streaming on Max) or The Straight Story (Disney+). Dazzlingly ambitious and weird and imperfect, Twin Peaks is on Paramount+, along with Twin Peaks: The Return , which was always a meditation on death and impermanence and now has cemented its place as an immortal 18-hour chronicle on mortality. |
Kier as Folk After it took nearly three years to get new episodes of Severance back on Apple TV+, I'd decided season two was going to be a disaster. It's not. At all. The return of Dan Erickson's impossible-to-describe sci-fi corporate satire thriller is, for the most part, as strange, off-putting, scary, funny and sentimental as the first, the six episodes I've seen peaking with the format-bending fourth episode and a fifth episode delving into its aftermath. As our Angie Han notes , the concentration on the series' mythology and mystery-spinning somewhat detracts from the daily-grind aspects of the show, which were often so charmingly strange. That leads to a season that's "frequently darker, less frequently amusing," but when it's great, it's pretty great. Adam Scott has never been better, Britt Lower and Trammel Tillman are well-positioned to avenge the indignity of their Emmy snubs for season 1 and Zach Cherry remains the show's stealthy MVP. Oh, and get ready to welcome Sarah Bock to the acclaimed party, joining the cast as the delightfully enigmatic Miss Huang. |
| | 'Saturday Night Live' and Let Die Our Angie Han correctly describes Peacock’s SNL50: Beyond Saturday Night as "a glossy love letter to a hallowed institution." Executive produced by Morgan Neville, the docuseries opts for a 30 for 30-style approach to Saturday Night Live , with four installments from four directors taking slightly-off-the-beaten-path looks at the venerable series. I loved the hour focused on the weekly writing process and appreciated the revisionist take on the much-maligned Season 12. I liked the 30 minutes of the audition episode that were actually about auditioning, before it becomes unfocused and broad for an additional 30 minutes. And while I found the hour dedicated to the "More Cowbell!" sketch to be 25 percent too formally cutesy, it had delightful moments. I would love to see NBC/Peacock do more stories of this kind, but perhaps only if Lorne Michaels agrees to new interviews, because his absence here is distracting. |
The Win That Shapes the 'Harley' Poison Ivy could threaten me with menacing plant tentacles, and I couldn't tell you what season of Max's Harley Quinn premiered this week. I guess that technically it's "five" but between the Valentine's Day special that aired in 2023 and Kite Man: Hell Yeah! , which premiered last year and is technically part of the series’ continuity, it's confusing. One thing that remains consistent is how terrific this big-hearted, raunchy, violent animated comedy is. These 10 episodes — built around Harley (Kaley Cuoco) and Ivy (Lake Bell) leaving Gotham out of fear that their relationship has become stagnant only to find a different sort of chaos in Metropolis — find the show's creative team trying out new things, including a musical, a parlor mystery and an interstellar domestic sitcom. The new season features an alien monkey, a great vocal turn from Stephen Fry as Brainiac and a particularly gregarious baby shark. Doo, doo, doo, doo, doo, doo. |
Let's Get Medical I took a pause from reviewing new medical TV shows — The Pitt, St. Denis Medical, Brilliant Minds and many more — to do a list of TV's 10 Best Medical Shows of All Time. If you're curious, the shows that didn't quite make the final crop were: Nurse Jackie, Everwood, Northern Exposure, Doogie Howser, M.D. and, of course, Garth Marenghi's Darkplace. |
Honoring Bob Uecker and Joan Plowright It shouldn't be exclusively about honoring David Lynch this weekend. Legendary baseball announcer, sitcom star, commercial pitchman and lifetime .200 hitter Bob Uecker died at 90. While Mr. Belvedere is, alas, not streaming anywhere, Uecker's contribution to Major League, streaming on Amazon, is integral. I'd honestly thought Joan Plowright, who died this week at 95 , had won an Oscar for SOMETHING, but the Tony-winning Dame somehow only received a single nomination over her six-decade career, for 1991's Enchanted April, streaming on MGM+. Sir Laurence Olivier's third and final wife, Plowright enjoyed a film career that began with 1956's Moby Dick (streaming on Tubi) and included 1960's adaptation of The Entertainer (Tubi), 1970's Three Sisters adaptation (Kanopy) and, naturally, 1993's Dennis the Menace (Tubi). |
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