| | | | | | 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. |
Baby, You're a Firework A happy 4th of July to those feeling patriotic about such things. For anybody requiring pyrotechnics and poppy classical music to observe the holiday, NBC is your home for the Macy's 4th of July Fireworks, while The CW heads to Beantown for the Boston Pops Fireworks Spectacular, both airing Friday night. If you are, instead, seeking reminders of what the holiday is all about, it's never a bad time to watch the miniseries John Adams on Max, the filmed production of Hamilton on Disney+ or Brian DePalma's July 4th classic Blow Out , streaming on MGM+, Kanopy and The Roku Channel. For more holiday-themed content, my buddy Alan Sepinwall listed the best Independence Day television programming over at our corporate sibling, Rolling Stone. |
Mise en Cena While dinosaurs and Jonathan Bailey are taking over the multiplex, streamers are offering ersatz blockbusters aplenty and by "aplenty" I mean, there are two action movies dropping this week that resemble summer theatrical hits like products in Repo Man (not streaming anywhere) resemble brand names. In Amazon's Heads of State, the President of the United States (John Cena) and the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom (Idris Elba) join forces to… ummm… discuss tariffs or something. Our Caryn James calls it "sporadically diverting." Meanwhile, five years after The Old Guard became a very convenient piece of pandemic programming, Charlize Theron, KiKi Layne and company are back in the appropriately titled The Old Guard 2, which our David Rooney says, "gets the job done." This all seems like a good way to drive viewers to watch Ryan Coogler's Sinners, available with Black American Sign Language accompaniment, on Max. |
| | | Constant 'Brave'-ing If you didn't watch the first season of Hulu and BBC Three’s Such Brave Girls when it premiered in late 2023, now's the time to catch up ahead of Monday's season two premiere. Such Brave Girls is one of the best and most painfully funny comedies on TV, driven by creator Kat Sadler's impeccably bleak punchline writing and endearingly melancholic lead performance. The six new episodes continue sisters Josie and Billie's (Sadler and real-life sibling Lizzie Davidson) desperately narcissistic efforts to overcome their childhood traumas and find happiness and love, while their mother Deb (Louise Brealey) seeks a man able to afford to fix the hole in their bathroom floor. Hilarious and uncomfortable season two plotlines include Josie inadvertently starting a late-night book club, Dev (Paul Bazely) getting nautical, and subtler lamentations about the failings of NHS mental health services. Sadler's characters are generally awful, or at least pathologically oblivious, but their dogged insistence that they deserve better is relatable, helping Such Brave Girls avoid ever feeling excessively cringy. |
Time Thorpe Kids today, they don't know how great Jim Thorpe was. Let's be honest: I'm also too young to know exactly how great Jim Thorpe was, but I know to be amazed by an athlete who was one of the first Olympic track and field legends, a paradigm-shifting football player and a guy who, kinda on the side, played professional baseball as well. History Channel's Jim Thorpe: Lit by Lightning , premiering on July 7, struggles to capture Thorpe's voice, despite use of his unpublished autobiography. But, using re-enactments and a wealth of archival footage, director Chris Eyre is able to showcase a lot of what was so significant about the Oklahoma-born Native legend. Though the re-enactments have a pleasant, gauzy style and fill in some gaps that are inevitable with a figure who died in 1953, I wish Light by Lightning wasn't such a hodge-podge of talking heads, some of whom know a lot about Thorpe while others are clearly just responding to Eyre's prompts for platitudes. |
The Baum Squad Craving something more literary or literate this weekend? Allow me to plug In Pursuit of Beauty, the debut novel from THR senior writer Gary Baum. You might recall Gary being played by Alex Karpovsky (pictured) in the Peacock limited series Angelyne, based on Gary's investigation into the life of the Los Angeles billboard icon. His novel focuses on a different side of the city's obsession with beauty and self-modification. In Pursuit of Beauty is available through all your finer retailers — like Book Soup! — and Baum, who is constantly seeking a television viewing experience similar to My Brilliant Friend and Halt and Catch Fire, is the focus of this great THR interview . |
Honoring Michael Madsen Character actor Michael Madsen, who lived a tumultuous life and became an intense muse for directors including Quentin Tarantino, Ridley Scott and Oliver Stone, died this week at 67. Madsen's collaborations with Tarantino started with his razor-wielding turn as Mr. Blonde in Reservoir Dogs (streaming on Paramount+) and went on to include both Kill Bill movies (AMC+) and The Hateful Eight (Netflix). He also had key roles in Species (MGM+), Die Another Day (MGM+) and — perhaps my favorite of his performances — Thelma & Louise (also MGM+). |
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