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.

The Last of Them

The deadline for this Emmys cycle was Wednesday, May 31, which explains why every single show on television ended in the past week. Don't argue with me. EVERY. SINGLE. ONE. Over at THR, we covered all of them except for the ones we missed because we were covering different finales. Here's my piece on the end of Succession. It was great! Here's Angie Han on the end of Barry. It was very good. Here's Angie and me on the end of Ted Lasso. It was a lot! Jackie Strause talked to Sophie Thatcher and Kevin Alves about the Yellowjackets finale. Christy Piña talked to Rachel Brosnahan about the end of The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel. And on this week's busy TV's Top 5 podcast — also featuring Mo Ryan discussing her upcoming Burn It Down — Alan Sepinwall drops in to talk with me and Lesley Goldberg about Succession, Ted Lasso, Barry and Yellowjackets.

'Lazarus' Come Forth

Nearly one year after it launched Across the Pond and months after it was supposed to drop on TNT, The Lazarus Project hits TNT on Sunday, as you'll know if you've been watching a lot of NBA playoffs coverage this month. Paapa Essiedu, so great in I May Destroy You, is a strong lead here playing an app developer who learns about a secret agency that stops apocalyptic threats with the help of a mysterious ability to alter time. The first episode is a LOT of table-setting, which makes sense since the premise is a mind-bender, even assuming you know your Groundhog Day/Edge of Tomorrow basics. But the next couple of episodes do some pretty smart and even borderline provocative things with the time travel conceit. The very good ensemble includes standouts Tom Burke and Vinette Robinson. 

A 'Soul' New World

Chef Alisa Reynolds of My 2 Cents LA describes herself as "classically trained, soul food-raised," and in her new Hulu series Searching for Soul Food, produced by Onyx Collective, she hits the road looking for the origins of and connections between different versions of… well, it's in the title. Some of the episodes have a lot in common with various food/travel hybrids, including Hulu's own Taste the Nation, but it's the connections she makes that keep Reynolds' series interesting. An episode set in Oklahoma, featuring Lil Mike and Funny Bone from Reservation Dogs  and tying Black and Indigenous food traditions together, is an early high point. I was particularly intrigued, though, in the second half of the season when Reynolds goes international and extends those connections to foodways in places like South Africa and Italy. 

Mr. Robinson's Neighborhood

God bless Tim Robinson and Zach Kanin's I Think You Should Leave. Let's leave aside its funniness, because the show offers something for nearly every comic sensibility (with, I'll admit, a heavy emphasis on cringe), but the show has admirably kept its episodes between 14 and 17 minutes, and it's rare to find any sketch that overstays its welcome. In certain social media spheres, it's mandatory viewing, because otherwise you won't recognize a not-insignificant number of memes. Highlights include a strange computer game with eggs, an increasingly frustrated performer of wordless one-man shows, Tim Meadows as a father of a bride and, once again, any sketch with Patti Harrison.

Everybody's Workin' for The Weeknd

With Succession, Barry and Somebody Somewhere wrapping their seasons last week, you would think HBO's new Sunday drama The Idol would topline a newsletter like this. However, the drama from Sam Levinson and Abel "The Weeknd" Tesfaye was generally eviscerated by critics upon its Cannes premiere. Our Lovia Gyarkye pondered whether "in trying so hard to be transgressive, the show ultimately becomes regressive," calling Tesfaye's performance "a bit stiff," though she deemed Lily-Rose Depp "persuasive." Episodes weren't made available for critics outside of Cannes, so I can neither confirm nor deny the quality of the scandal-prone series. 

Honoring John Beasley

One of the anchors of The WB's multigenerational soap Everwood and a pillar of the theater scene in his native Omaha, Nebraska, John Beasley died this week at 79. Beasley spent four seasons playing Irv, school bus driver and general voice of wisdom, on Everwood, which is available to stream on Amazon. He later played the father of Cedric the Entertainer's character on The Soul Man, streaming on Paramount+. Beasley's most memorable film role was probably in Rudy, which isn't available to stream, but he also appeared in The Sum of All Fears (Paramount+), The Purge: Anarchy  (Max) and, in his last role, the 2022 remake of Firestarter (Amazon).