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 Adaptation That Went Up a Hillerman But Came Down a Mountain

This week's newsletter theme is "There are too many great returning shows this week to fully review them all! But have some blurbs!" I want to start with Dark Winds, AMC's adaptation of Tony Hillerman's Leaphorn/Chee novels. The first season was full of promise, but it was disjointed and heavy on scene-setting exposition. The second season, adapting Hillerman's People of Darkness , is a solid step forward. The season-long mystery, featuring an ultra-creepy Nicholas Logan as a nameless bomb-maker, has immediate momentum. And period-specific details, like the impact of the Family Planning Services and Population Research Act of 1970 on Indigenous communities, add nuance. The six-episode season is still anchored by Zahn McClarnon's superb star turn as Joe Leaphorn, a soulful mixture of intelligence, raw emotion and enough grace notes of humor to keep the show, nicely set against a wintry desert backdrop, from feeling too bleak.

Where There's a Wilson, There's a Way

In the final six episodes of HBO's How To With John Wilson, our inquisitive host offers hints on finding public restrooms, learning to watch sports, and cleaning your ears, which somehow leads him to Burning Man, a convention of vacuum enthusiasts, and a cryogenics facility in Arizona. Oh, and Wilson spends a lot of time musing on whether or not he was disappointed to lose an Emmy to John Oliver. One of the oddest and best shows in recent years, How To With John Wilson  has reliably blended observational comedy and empathetic drama, and the final season is generally in fine form, though the premiere was my least favorite of the six. Not that there are any real duds. I liked the brain-bending, Nathan Fielder-esque fifth episode and thought the sixth episode absolutely ended the show with one of its most strange interviews. Great stuff.

'Quinn' and Bare It

The new season of Max's Harley Quinn is to animated butts what Minx, which Max abruptly canceled before it moved to Starz, is to non-animated penises. So many butts! Plus, lots of laughs. The fourth season of Harley Quinn  remains an exceptional example of how to satirize superhero stories and do a thrilling, carefully arced superhero story at the same time. The last finale set up a lot of interesting character reversals — Harley's working with the heroes, Ivy's working with Lex Luthor, and Joker's the mayor — and those shifts pay a lot of properly silly dividends. The first half of the new season also includes trips to Las Vegas and the moon, an interesting character introduction for Talia al Ghul, plus King Shark making gumbo. Will Harley and Ivy's love survive? Survive their new circumstances, that is — not all the butts.

'Fool' Sample

I'm sure Harley Quinn is doing fine and How To With John Wilson is ending after this season anyway, so the shows in this newsletter that I'd like to see get more attention are Dark Winds and Hulu's This Fool. Co-created by star Chris Estrada, This Fool  has a distinctive cast of characters and a uniquely droll sense of humor, and its version of Los Angeles is all its own. The second season, following off last season's demise of Hugs Not Thugs, features an unruly rooster, a wacky hostage situation, and many more jokes about the size of Michael Imperioli's character's genitals. The sensibility — sometimes grounded and realistic, sometimes delightfully bizarre — takes a little getting used to, and Estrada's Julio is one of TV's most flawed characters, in a very amusing but prickly way, but this is a show that deserves more exposure and could play to a larger audience.

Turn the Beatriz Around

How about stuff that actually got full reviews this week? Peacock's Twisted Metal is no The Last of Us, but it's a decent and disorderly video game adaptation boasting a strong turn from Stephanie Beatriz. Netflix's How to Become a Cult Leader  has some funny parts and great voiceover work from Peter Dinklage, but if you don't feel like laughing at religious charlatans responsible for countless deaths, that's understandable. And if you want to see what HBO's contribution to Shark Week might look like, head over to Max and watch After the Bite. Oh, and no review yet, but if you haven't caught up with the first two seasons of Reservation Dogs, skip everything else in this newsletter and go to Hulu and do that ahead of next week's season three premiere.

Honoring Sinéad O'Connor

In the Showtime documentary Nothing Compares, musician John Grant says of Irish singer Sinéad O'Connor, "She's taken quite a beating in the world, because the world does not take kindly to having its program interrupted. The smooth flow of entertainment must not be interrupted." That's just such a great way of putting it. Kathryn Ferguson's doc, streaming on Paramount+, does an excellent job of highlighting O'Connor's singing voice, her political voice and her legacy. Listen to this week's TV's Top 5 podcast as Lesley Goldberg describes what O'Connor, who died this week at 56, meant to her. Oh, and take a few minutes, 135 to be precise, to remember screenwriter Bo Goldman, who died this week at 90, by watching One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest on Showtime OnDemand.