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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.
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Old 'Bay' Season One
Created by Katie Dippold, whom terminally online people will forever associate with her viral Babadook Halloween costume, Apple TV’s Widow’s Bay is a solidly balanced horror comedy about the supernatural curse on a small New England island. I might have liked for it to be maybe 5 percent funnier and 5 percent scarier, but I still appreciated how seriously Dippold and director Hiro Murai take both sides of the genre coin. Matthew Rhys, getting better use out of his amiable intensity than he did in The Beast in Me, anchors a spectacular cast featuring a tremendously sad-eyed Kate O’Flynn, a perfectly weary Kevin Carroll and one great character-acting guest appearance (Jeff Hiller! Toby Huss! K Callan!) after another. I think I’m generally in agreement with our Angie Han that Widow’s Bay is uneven, but still thoroughly worth watching. I also think — and this is a nice problem to have — that Widow’s Bay is possibly only the third best show premiering this week.
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Neither a Borrower Nor Allende Be
Television has been unexpectedly successful in capturing the flavor of Latin American magical realism in recent years. HBO’s adaptation of Like Water for Chocolate was solidly nourishing, while Netflix’s One Hundred Years of Solitude was a shockingly good and strikingly cinematic take an allegedly unadaptable book. Through the first four of eight episodes, I’d put Francisca Alegria’s take on House of Spirits right in the middle of those two, interpreting Isabel Allende’s beloved novel with an eye for well-calibrated whimsy that only occasionally detours into tweeness. The Amazon drama is, in places, extremely sad, extremely funny and, if you happen to be squeamish about sexual violence or violence toward animals, a bit difficult to watch. But every time I worried that the show’s strains of darkness were jarring amid its playful oddness, plotlines would converge with tangible, well, magic. It helps that the generation-spanning cast is impeccable, including a detestable Alfonso Herrera as Esteban and the trio of actresses — Francesca Turco, Nicole Wallace and Dolores Fonzi — playing Clara the Clairvoyant through the years. I look forward to finishing this one.
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Soul Meets ‘Conbody’
I also look forward to finishing Debra Granik’s five-part docuseries Conbody vs Everybody, which is debuting on Criterion Channel a year after it was nominated for a nonfiction prize at the Gotham Awards and 12 years after the Winter’s Bone director started following formerly incarcerated entrepreneur Coss Marte as he attempted to transform his prison workout routine into a unique bootcamp gym. The resulting series, through the four episodes I’ve seen, is a deeply empathetic combination of underdog uplift and burgeoning outrage at a carceral system that prioritizes profits over rehabilitation. Granik’s perspective is simultaneously patient and urgent, chronicling the twists and turns and myriad colorful characters within this journey. Between Conbody vs Everybody on Criterion and My Undesirable Friends on Mubi, it’s good to see new streaming avenues opening up for longform documentary storytelling, but I also wish that stories this important were available to a wider audience. (Oh, and check out this year’s Gotham TV Awards nominees, courtesy of juries featuring both Angie and myself.)
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Seven Creasy Pieces
So, I’d probably rank the weekend’s new TV releases as 1. Conbody vs Everybody (Criterion); 2. House of Spirits (Amazon); and 3. Widow’s Bay (Apple TV). But it’s far more likely audiences are going to tune into Man on Fire, a formulaic Netflix thriller featuring Yahya Abdul-Mateen II as a mercenary played previously by Scott Glenn and Denzel Washington in a pair of features available on Starz OnDemand and Tubi, respectively. Given A.J. Quinnell’s source material, it’s odd that creator Kyle Killen, he of the short-lived gems Lone Star and Awake, treats vengeance not as a corrosive endeavor that rots the soul, but as a dark but efficient way to make friends in contemporary Brazil. Still, most viewers will be happy to watch Abdul-Mateen torturing people and walking away from explosions in slow motion (pictured). When it comes to those things, the seven-episode season delivers. Just remember Sideshow Bob’s wise words that kettle chips are the perfect side dish for revenge.
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Derby Goes Bananas
For all of those fine TV options, it’s also a big sports weekend. There are several great boxing matches, if you’re a pay-per-view person, plus a slew of NBA and NHL playoff Game 6 and Game 7s, highlighted by the series-ender between the Celtics and 76ers on NBC and Peacock on Saturday. The most exciting two minutes of the weekend, though, will be the 152nd Kentucky Derby, also on NBC and Peacock. The official post time for Sunday’s Run for the Roses is 6:57 ET with Renegade (pictured) currently set as the betting favorite, albeit from the superstitiously poor No. 1 position on the track. I’m not sure who I’m rooting for, since apparently Potente, now at 20-1, is just named for the Italian word for “powerful” and not for Run Lola Run star Franka.
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Honoring Gerry Conway
Best known for killing off Gwen Stacy and co-creating the Punisher, Marvel and DC Comics scribe Gerry Conway died this week at 73. In our THR obit, Marvel Studios president Kevin Feige praised Conway for inspiring many of the creative choices within the MCU and other Marvel film and television properties, citing Werewolf by Night, Daredevil, Spider-Man and Punisher, many of which are available on Disney+. Me, I will always respect Conway for pushing back against the way the alt-right attempted to appropriate and misinterpret Frank Castle and the Punisher skull logo.
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