| | | | | | 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. |
Justify My Hug A nefarious drinking game would be to challenge somebody to imbibe every time somebody hugs somebody else in the third season of Shrinking, which premiered earlier this week on Apple. If you’ve watched the hourlong (two episodes, in a technical sense) premiere, you know that it’s pretty close to a perfect series finale, but that may be the great genius of a comedy that earned a place in my Top 10 for 2024 . Bill Lawrence, Jason Segel and Brett Goldstein’s dramedy treats every chapter like a series finale, packing 150 episodes’ worth of conventional sitcom warm fuzzies and laughs into every 34-minute installment, which is to say that I’ve seen the full season and at least four entries concluded with me thinking, “Well, if that’s the show, it was a satisfying run!” And Shrinking has already been renewed! Several key midseason developments felt severely rushed to me and I’m truly not sure what a fourth season would even look like, but season three highlights include: Jessica Williams, never better; Harrison Ford, desperately in need of an Emmy, with at least a half-dozen scenes/speeches to make that happen; Ted McGinley, desperately in need of an Emmy nomination, with several moments to make that happen; Lukita Maxwell, continuing to be TV’s most underrated supporting performer; Rachel Stubington, continuing to deliver one of TV’s highest lines-to-laughs ratios; and MICHAEL J. FOX. And So. Much. Hugging. |
Roll of ‘Wonder,’ Hear My Cry It’s not like Disney+ and Marvel are strangers to outside-the-box thinking, from the meta weirdness of WandaVision to the representational leaps of Echo to the one-off creative leap of Werewolf by Night, but Wonder Man is easily the oddest thing they’ve ever collaborated on. Mostly, I mean that as a good thing. If you took its eight episodes and trimmed everything with superhero elements, you would maybe be cutting five minutes in total. Possibly not even that much. Instead, Wonder Man is a buddy dramedy about two unlikely pals (Yahya Abdul-Mateen II and Ben Kingsley) watching Midnight Cowboy and auditioning for a movie, a series that somehow makes the inside baseball Hollywood hijinks of The Studio feel surface level. The show gets at something complicated about the way the comic book movie genre presents a world that’s simultaneously aspirational and completely unobtainable, making the real world difficult to navigate even if you’re exceptional. It’s also gonna PISS OFF one version of its hypothetical core audience, and that’s great. Oh, and Midnight Cowboy is streaming on Amazon. |
| | | Miracle on Rice AMC hops into the burgeoning sports documentary marketplace with the imprecisely titled Rise of the 49ers, premiering Sunday and Monday. The four-hour series could more appropriately be named Rise of Bill Walsh, Genius Coach of the San Francisco 49ers, or perhaps Tom Brady Grew Up a San Francisco 49ers Fan and Always Wanted to Play Catch With Jerry Rice So He Became the Greatest Quarterback in NFL History on Two Teams That Weren’t the 49ers Just So He Could Help Make a Documentary About the 49ers That Would Include Him Playing Catch With Jerry Rice . OK. Fine. Maybe that second title is unwieldy. Narrated by Brady, and dominated by his on-camera presence as well, the show features Rice, Joe Montana, Steve Young, Ronnie Lott and several of the late Walsh’s children, discussing the 49ers’ domination of the ’80s and early ’90s. If you were a fan of those teams, it’s entertaining enough. Unless you were a fan of those teams and you HATE Tom Brady — a distinct possibility — in which case it’s a bit like somebody dropping an anchovy in peanut butter. Anchovies are great, but know your place, anchovies, and stop distracting me from a food substance that has nothing to do with what you’re best known for! |
Rinking Out Loud Speaking of sports documentaries, this one’s for my dad. Miracle: The Boys of ’80 directors Max Gershberg and Jake Rogal don’t have anything especially new to say about the 1980 US Olympic hockey team and its world-shifting semifinal victory over the USSR. In fact, it’s kinda amusing how much of what this feature-length documentary includes was already dramatized beautifully in Gavin O’Connor’s Miracle (one of the most galling exclusions from our 25 Best Sports Movies list), the 30 for 30 documentary Of Miracles and Men and the 2014 documentary Red Army. But what Gershberg and Rogal have is an amazing assortment of the American hockey stars whose triumph offered hope during a miserable moment in the Cold War. Assembling so many of the players, taking them to Lake Placid and showing them highlights from the Russia game and other moments from that remarkable year yields marvelously emotional results. I loved their candor reflecting on no-nonsense coach Herb Brooks and the camaraderie that returns instantly when they’re in a room together. The big game is handled solidly — Miracle, streaming on Disney+, does it better — but so many of the personal stories truly come to life here. |
Skate of the Union It’s a bit creepy how all-in Netflix is on ice dancing ahead of February’s Winter Olympics. Just one week after the premiere of the YA ice dancing romance, Finding Her Edge, Netflix is debuting the three-part ice dancing docuseries, Glitter & Gold , focused on three of the teams expected to compete for first at the Milano Cortina Winter Olympics. They are presumptive favorites Chock & Bates, whose real-life love story sounds like a Netflix YA drama; Canadian favorites Gilles & Poirier, who have gone through a LOT of personal drama; and Fournier Beaudry & Cizeron, whose run for the gold after less than a year as a duo is basically unprecedented. The series is borderline useless when it comes to clearing up the rules and logistics of the sport — I still don’t know what it means to get “a base on your twizzle” — but the character building is very good and I appreciated the acknowledgment of how much citizenship-shopping has to take place to form an Olympic skating duo. Peacock probably owes Netflix a muffin basket, because I’m now invested in watching the ice dancing when the games begin next week. |
Honoring Catherine O’Hara If you were to make a Mount Rushmore of sketch comedy, one of the monuments would belong to Catherine O’Hara. The SCTV star, who generated big laughs as part of Christopher Guest’s regular ensemble and reached a new pinnacle of fame and adoration with Schitt’s Creek, died this week at 71. It’s an embarrassment that no matter how much you pay for streaming, none of the Guest mockumentaries have a regular streaming home and you can’t even rent the original run of SCTV. But a well-rounded weekend tribute to O’Hara could include Schitt’s Creek (Hulu), The Studio (Apple TV), A Mighty Wind (YouTube, with ads) and Home Alone (Disney+). You might also want to rent After Hours and Beetlejuice. (I’ll have a fuller tribute at THR later today. Check back!) |
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