| | | | | | 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. |
Wyle Hearts Can Be Broken With Angie Han writing our (extremely positive) full review, I was able to approach The Pitt as a series of mini-binges, my preferred way to handle its unrelenting intensity. Because the HBO Max drama aired weekly and because it went directly from airing into Emmy promotion, it feels like it never really left, so my biggest compliment for the five episodes I’ve seen is that it maintains its momentum seamlessly. There’s so much happening and happening to so many people that it’s easy to feel like certain pieces of the supporting cast — Taylor Dearden’s Mel in particular, though she’s clearly got bigger stuff coming — are being underserved. As was the case with season one , Noah Wyle is the show’s more-than-capable anchor, but it’s the guest stars who take things to the next level. So far, my favorites have included Center Stage favorite Amanda Schull, returning gem Ernest Harden Jr. and little Annabelle Toomey, who was last seen hiding under the world’s longest table on The Bear. I’m not sure that the series’ thematic points about the use of AI in medicine and the general economic dysfunction of American healthcare are being made with subtlety, but I guess existential crises aren’t subtle. |
Traitors Gonna Trait The first three episodes of the new The Traitors season dropped on Thursday and that’s the same number of episodes critics were sent in advance. As long as they insist on doing “celebrity” editions (a Traitors: Normies is coming), my interest is governed heavily by how much I like the people I recognize, and the new season at least features Top Chef winner/host Kristen Kish, Survivor egghead Rob Cesternino and comedy scene stealer Ron Funches. My instinct is that this season’s choice of traitors is lackluster and the first two murders did nothing to change that opinion. Still, credit where it’s due, the producers have solidly tweaked the challenges, which were previously my least favorite part of the series since I don’t make care how much money the eventual winner or winners receive. The floating coffin challenge was visually evocative and the one with the skulls at least produced funny moments from the cast. Watch for three hours and the Scottish damp goes through to your bones. |
| | | Deus Rex Machina Last year was a good one for Adult Swim, with Common Side Effects making Angie’s Top 10 and my honorable mention list. After nearly three years away (and a conclusion that didn’t seem to mandate an additional season), the network’s best show returns on Sunday. Genndy Tartakovsky’s Primal , the brutally badass story of the friendship between a Neanderthal named Spear and a T-rex named Fang, has won Emmys for its blend of anachronistic history, supernatural whimsy and some of the bloodiest action scenes on television. The new season begins with Spear, dead when we left him, being resurrected as a zombie. The challenge of the series was always conveying deep character nuance and relationship nuance without dialogue, so Spear’s zombification adds new complications as it takes a 10-episode journey for him to return to even his formerly nonverbal level of cognition. I thought some repetitiveness caused the season’s arc to drag a tiny bit, but “dragging” by Primal standards still involves extended battles royale with vicious monkeys, CHUDs and SOUS — Swine of Unusual Size — on the way to a finale with a predictable, but wholly satisfying, emotional punch. |
Hail Marcello, Well Met In 2024, Marcello Hernandez made our end-of-year Best Performances list, as he broke out as a Saturday Night Live sketch performer and became an advertising/promotional juggernaut. American Boy , Hernandez’s first Netflix standup special, offers a new (still familiar) side of the Miami-born comic. Performing in front of an enthusiastic hometown crowd and introduced by his beloved mother, Hernandez’s energy never flags, as he’s able to wring laughs out of borderline hacky comic binaries: the difference between how white people and Latinos party, the difference between how white people and Latinos parent, the difference between how white people and Latinos dance. As good as he is with character-based voices and a peripatetic movement, it’s as a storyteller that Hernandez truly stands out. An extended recounting of a seemingly harmless lie told on the bus home from school and the consequences of that lie is layered with jokes and builds to a series of well-constructed punchlines, indicating what a fully matured Hernandez might look like as a performer. Oh, and SNL returns on the 17th with Finn Wolfhard as host. |
Tessa Me Mucho Remember how quiet December TV was? Well, that’s over. In addition to what I’ve already discussed, Hulu’s A Thousand Blows, which I liked in the first season but haven’t had time to check in on in its second, returns today, while The Night Manager, which critics aren’t allowed to talk about yet, is back on Sunday. That leaves Netflix’s His & Hers, a bland Georgia-set thriller that does little with the talents of stars Tessa Thompson and Jon Bernthal and builds to a finale that you’ll find either mind-blowing (I did not) or intelligence-insulting ( I did). For a sense of why I was disappointed, check out creator William Oldroyd’s earlier features Lady Macbeth (Amazon and a few other places) and Eileen (Hulu). |
Honoring Béla Tarr This newsletter is a safe space, right? Confession time: If you’re like me, you probably haven’t seen enough movies by Hungarian auteur Béla Tarr, but know his name from rave reviews from countless international festivals. If you’ve been waiting to sample Tarr’s work, characterized by “long, elaborately choreographed takes, languid pacing and stark black-and-white visuals,” use the director’s death this week as a reason to … wonder why so few Tarr movies are streaming. Criterion Channel, which you can usually count on for these things, has his 1979 debut Family Nest and 2000’s co-directed Werkmeister Harmonies. For public library users, Kanopy appears to be your best source, with 2011’s The Turin Horse, 1985’s Damnation and, for those with seven hours and 19 minutes to spare, 1994’s Sántántangó. Look, it’s a better use of your time than watching the Golden Globes. |
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