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.

In the 'Ramy' Now

In case you've forgotten, when we left Ramy Youssef's self-destructive Hulu alter ego, Ramy had just done a very bad thing to new bride Zainab and he was in a full-on crisis of faith. That was more than two years ago, but the third season of Ramy finds very little changed. Ramy has turned his back on his Muslim identity, largely distanced himself from his friends and he's one of only several sources of misery for his family. The new season is vintage Ramy , full of provocative installments — the second episode, set largely in Israel, will definitely be a discussion-starter — and giving supporting players including Hiam Abbass, Amr Waked and May Calamawy some of their best showcases to date. I laughed hard at several points, but I was cringing just as frequently. Youssef's on-camera participation is slightly reduced this season, but he's writing and directing more frequently, plus he may have been using some of that time for behind-the-scenes work on co-star Mo Amer's Netflix's half-hour Mo, which is great as well and really needs to be renewed. 

La Fin du 'Blonde'

Reviews of Andrew Dominik's Marilyn Monroe semi-biopic Blonde have been decidedly mixed. Our David Rooney says the buzzy NC-17 Joyce Carol Oates adaptation isn't bland but it is "at times overwhelmingly unpleasant." He's full of praise, though, for star Ana de Armas, who just about everybody agrees commits fully. Owing to vagaries related to rights, almost none of Monroe's actual films are available for easy streaming. You can watch any of them if you pay, but The Misfits on PlutoTV is one of the few standard streaming options (with Niagara and Asphalt Jungle on Criterion Channel).

Out of 'Pocus'

So far, nobody has exactly complained that Blonde is an exercise in nostalgia, which can't be said for the weekend's other big new streaming films. I'm not even going to try to make sense of the polarized reviews for Rob Zombie' The Munsters because that would force me to confront the fact that there's a Rob Zombie Munsters movie on Netflix. You know if you're the target audience. You also probably know if you're the target audience for Hocus Pocus 2 , a Disney+ sequel to the comedy that millennials made into a Halloween favorite. Our Lovia Gyarkye says the new film, which reunites Bette Midler, Sarah Jessica Parker and Kathy Najimy, is "a lesson in how you can't bottle and resell nostalgia," though she praises the energy of the stars. It also sounds like the Vietnam-era nostalgia of The Greatest Beer Run Ever is skippable. We have much more enthusiastic reviews for  What We Leave Behind  and Into the Deep, a pair of documentaries hitting Netflix on Friday. 

'Saturday Night' Leaver

When NBC's Saturday Night Live concluded its 47th season last spring amid speculation that Kate McKinnon, Aidy Bryant and Pete Davidson were leaving, I wrote that while those exits would hurt the show, this cast was already among the biggest and most talented ever. Then the exits continued, with Alex Moffat, Melissa Villaseñor and Chris Redd among the departures. That's a lot of talent out the door! The new season premieres on Saturday with Miles Teller hosting and Kendrick Lamar as musical guest, and it will be interesting to see which ascending players pick up the slack. Sarah Sherman, Punkie Johnson and Andrew Dismukes are among the featured players ready for more opportunities, but with the likes of Kenan Thompson, Cecily Strong, Bowen Yang, Ego Nwodim, Chloe Fineman and Heidi Gardner all returning — plus four new additions — I'm guessing the show will be OK (or as OK as the writing allows it to be). 

List of Fury

Saturday Night Live came in at No.18 on the recent Rolling Stone list of the 100 Greatest TV Shows of All Time (it was No.35 on my ballot). The list, which was topped by The Sopranos, has been generating the usual assortment of excitement and garment rending. So Rolling Stone chief TV critic Alan Sepinwall dropped by this week's TV's Top 5  podcast to discuss its methodology, its key absences — I'm pissed off about the Up documentaries, The Prisoner, The Singing Detective and Survivor — and more. Alan stuck around to also talk about the season finale of FX/Hulu's Reservation Dogs, which didn't make the Top 100, but feels like a strong candidate for whenever our sister publication next ranks TV's best.

Sum of all 'Cheers' 

Coming in at No.8 on that Rolling Stone list was the NBC classic Cheers, which had its premiere way back on Sept. 30, 1982. Ergo, happy 40th anniversary to the Boston-set comedy, which has one of TV's most unlikely paths to success, going from early audience failure to massive, Emmy-winning success thanks to the love of critics, the support of NBC's Brandon Tartikoff and the fact that NBC was struggling at the time and nobody was convinced the network could do any better. Cheers boasts one of the all-time great pilots and one of the all-time great finales, and most of the 270+ episodes in between are also pretty good, even if the more time that passes the clearer it becomes that we should all be #TeamDiane. You can find episodes of Cheers  streaming on Peacock, Hulu and Paramount+.