NOW SEE THIS

FEBRUARY 26, 2021

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.

Everybody Go Ho-tel, Mo-tel, Billie Holiday's In

It's a weird week, kids! For this newsletter, I stick to things available on regular streaming services rather than pay-per-view, but it may not be a bad weekend to pony up for Minari. The cinematic streaming options are sparse. Lee Daniels' The United States vs. Billie Holiday is new on Hulu, and THR chief film critic David Rooney at least raves about Andra Day's "dazzling star turn," though he says the rest of the movie is beset with "stylistic inconsistency and narrative dysfunction." There’s also Apple TV's documentary Billie Eilish: The World's a Little Blurry — it's full of juicy revelations — or HBO Max's Tom & Jerry, which I don't believe is a documentary.

Vast Wasteland

It's an almost unprecedentedly thin weekend on the TV front, without a major (or even especially minor) new series getting a Friday release on any of the major streamers. Peacock launched its reboot of Punky Brewster on Thursday and I found it impressively average, though better than some recent nostalgia-fueled returns. And Netflix launched its Gilmore Girls-esque dramedy Ginny & Georgia on Wednesday, earning the tepid praise "winsome but uneven" from THR's Inkoo Kang.

'Sin' City

As was the case last week as well, the best new thing on the TV spectrum is Russell T. Davies' five-episode HBO Max drama It's a Sin, about the rise of the AIDS epidemic as seen through the lives of a group of young, mostly gay friends in '80s and '90s London. It's sad, but almost certainly more energetic and joyful than you might be expecting. For more on the series, check out this week's TV's Top 5 interview with Davies.

Just in the 'Knick' of Time

Yeah, the week's new offerings are weak, but a few terrific shows have just resurfaced on streaming platforms, with almost no fanfare. HBO Max has been generally clueless on how to handle the Cinemax library, so it's no surprise that the deliriously pulpy chaos of Banshee — if you like Antony Starr on The Boys, you need to check this out — and the Soderberghian brilliance of The Knick slipped onto the platform last week with barely any warning. How about Quarry and Jett next, HBO Max? Meanwhile, even creator Andy Daly was surprised to hear that Review, truly one of the best comedies of the past decade, was now on CBS All Access, which definitely isn't promoting that fact.

Beyond the 'Fringe'

On Monday, NBC premieres the eerie new sci-fi drama Debris from creator J.H. Wyman, featuring Jonathan Tucker and Riann Steele playing government operatives investigating debris from a destroyed alien spacecraft. Wyman was a writer-producer on Fox’s Fringe, and Debris pilot director Brad Anderson directed on Fringe, so it shouldn't be surprising that Debris is just about the Fringe-iest new broadcast show in years. Is it good? Based on only one episode, it's hard to tell. But it's Fringe-y and if that doesn't tell you all you need to know, Fringe is available on Amazon's IMDbTV streaming platform.

This Week's THR Staff Pick

Deputy editor Degen Pener raves, "A tale of intrigue and obsessions centered on the making of a film in Israel, Apple TV+’s Losing Alice walloped me by the time the eight-episode series concluded. It wasn’t just due to all the interesting plot twists and turns — such as a woman directing her own husband in sex scenes — but because of the unexpected moral journey of the main character, a professor and mother of three who wants to restart her directing career, played superbly and with intense emotional reveals by Ayelet Zurer."

Is this e-mail not displaying correctly?
View it in your browser. 

©2021 The Hollywood Reporter, a subsidiary of Penske Business Media, LLC. 11175 Santa Monica Boulevard Los Angeles, CA, 90025 All rights reserved.

FEBRUARY 26, 2021

UNSUBSCRIBE 

MANAGE PREFERENCES

PRIVACY POLICY

TERMS OF USE