| | | | | | 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. |
‘Bait’ Accompli Before he became an ultra-serious Emmy-winning and Oscar-nominated actor (and Oscar-winning producer), Riz Ahmed starred in the still-astonishing domestic terrorism satire Four Lions, which you can stream on Kanopy and Tubi, among other services. Ahmed’s new Amazon comedy Bait, which premiered this week, isn’t quite as effectively scathing as Four Lions, but it’s a sometimes funny, sometimes perceptive examination of the burdens of representation, the power of the entertainment news industrial complex and Muslim life in contemporary London. I compared its approach to identity — especially as it impacts actors who slip into and out of identities for a living — to Disney+’s Wonder Man, which got an unexpected season two renewal this week. Plus, Bait offers plenty to mull as Amazon is presumably in the early stages of casting the next James Bond. |
I’ve Got ‘Hole,’ but I’m Not a Holier We’ve reached the Joel Kinnaman portion of this newsletter. Less than 10 days after the debut of Apple TV’s bluntly generic Imperfect Women, in which he played one of several imperfect men, Kinnaman has TWO premiering shows for you this weekend. Eliciting the most giggles is Netflix’s Detective Hole , in which Kinnaman plays a corrupt and creepy detective being investigated by Oslo’s notorious Harry Hole (Tobias Santelmann) — “HAR-ee WHO-leh — when the latter isn’t tracking a possible serial killer. The series goes off the rails a bit by the end, but it remains an improvement over the misguided disaster that was 2017’s film The Snowman (streaming on Netflix), in part because of Kinnaman’s slimy, charismatic performance. |
| | | Little More Than Kinnaman, and Less Than ‘Mankind’ Kinnaman is less charismatic in the fifth season of Apple’s For All Mankind, largely because he remains trapped under layers of old age latex in the alt-history science fiction favorite. It’s remarkable that Kinnaman’s Ed Baldwin remains part of the For All Mankind ensemble, but there he is, just limping and growling his way around Mars looking like a young Benjamin Button. For All Mankind was renewed for a sixth and final season this week, with the fifth season aggressively pushing ripped-from-the-headlines stories about immigrants not receiving due process, automation stealing jobs and whether the first amendment applies to protesters on Mars. I still carry a lot of residual affection for this extremely uneven show based on how much I loved the first two-and-a-half seasons, but I stopped watching this new season after four new episodes, in part because of a particularly ridiculous character introduction. Will I return? Probably. After all, can’t get enough Joel Kinnaman! |
Palette Cleanser As much as I like Bait, my top TV recommendation for the weekend is Color Theories by Julio Torres, which HBO is calling a “comedy special,” which is as reductive as calling “MacArthur Park” a song about an excessively moist chocolate cake. I mean, maybe Color Theories IS a comedy special, but it’s closer to a deranged TED Talk on aesthetics and the modern social order courtesy of Los Espookys and Fantasmas creator Torres, who remains one of TV’s purest visionaries in that every observation, every punchline, every deranged visual idea feels like it could only have come from Torres. Sometimes Color Theories comes across as a little too loose. This explains why his robot sidekick and Fantasmas co-star Bibo is constantly trying to get Torres focused as he swans around the whimsically cluttered stage. Color Theories has as many gently delivered bombs of profundity as big laughs, but it’s mostly a spell that you get caught up in for 72 minutes, before wishing that Torres had taken the time to work his way through the entire crayon box. The special premieres on Friday night and will live on through HBO Max, along with Los Espookys and Fantasmas. Oh and be sure to read Mikey O'Connell's chat with Torres. |
‘White’ What You Know Andrew Goldberg’s feature-length White With Fear is one of those PBS documentaries that will probably be watched by an audience that already knows the basic history of the Republican party’s multi-decade campaign to weaponize the insecurities of white voters; the audience that could learn something here wouldn’t be caught dead watching a PBS documentary. Goldberg’s film takes viewers back to Nixon’s dog-whistle “law and order” campaign and traces 60 years of fear-mongering and other-ing, from post-9/11 mobilization against Muslims to COVID-era scapegoating to the wide-ranging coded campaigns against contemporary bogeymen like immigrants and “critical race theory.” It sounds one-sided, and certainly there are interviews with a LOT of the usual PBS-friendly suspects — Rick Perlstein, Brian Stelter, Kevin Kruse, Hillary Clinton et al. — but Goldberg has mobilized a lot of conservative voices as well, including Steve Bannon, Trump operative Rick Gates and rich-guy-who-pointed-rifle-at-peaceful-protesters Mark McCloskey. Not everybody deserved to be platformed, and the doc is oddly superficial on a number of points, but it’s still a cogent and efficient summary, available on the PBS app and OnDemand platforms. |
‘Nick’ of Time The weekend’s big new streaming film is BenDavid Grabinski’s comic time-travel thriller Mike & Nick & Nick & Alice on Hulu. Our Angie Han called it “violently entertaining” out of SXSW, praising the “crowdpleasing upbeat soundtrack” and the cast, especially scene-stealer Jimmy Tatro. (She also enjoyed Netflix’s nuptial nightmare Something Very Bad Is Going to Happen , which is a series, but probably COULD have been a movie, though I liked its creepy wedding-inspired vibes.) A different cinematic project for the weekend might be watching The Godfather on Paramount+ in honor of its 50th anniversary. |
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