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.

Fellowes Traveler

I found the first season of Julian Fellowes' The Gilded Age to be frustrating, with the brilliant cast put through erratically interesting plots that only occasionally rose to the HBO drama's "Downton Abbey in 1980s New York City" potential. The eight-episode second season is a far  more consistent affair, with soapy pleasures — Opera wars! Union battles! Engagements aplenty! — that much more frequently give its stars fruitful material. Christine Baranski and Cynthia Nixon get a real storyline this time around, and both of them, especially Baranski, are sublime. It's always a delight to watch Carrie Coon's malevolent wheels spinning as an amoral social striver, and new additions like Robert Sean Leonard, Laura Benanti and Station Eleven breakout Matilda Lawler are all excellent. Sure, several threads are far too predictable, and you may wonder why, for example, you're spending eight episodes watching a servant tinker with alarm clocks, but The Gilded Age is now far closer to a real pleasure than anything guilty.

The Way We Queer

Ron Nyswaner's eight-part Showtime adaptation of Thomas Mallon's Fellow Travelers is a 35-year romantic and political odyssey between characters played by Matthew Bomer and Jonathan Bailey. Sexually graphic and narratively disjointed, Fellow Travelers soars as a love story — Bomer, Bailey and Allison Williams are terrific — and stumbles as by-the-numbers Red Scare history. If you want your decade-spanning gay fantasias bridging the McCarthy era and Reagan to come with a little more verbal and visual poetry, HBO's spectacular adaptation of Tony Kushner's Angels in America  is on Max. And if you want your Bomer-centric '80s AIDS chronicles with a little more of that Larry Kramer brand of anger, HBO's somewhat uneven adaptation of The Normal Heart is … also on Max. Heck, Max has HBO's landmark adaptation of And the Band Played On as well.

The Puck Stops Here

If the second season of The Gilded Age improves on the first by being a smoother and more consistent piece of storytelling, the second season of Hulu and Crave's Shoresy takes perhaps a small step back by doing the same thing. The six new episodes of the Letterkenny spinoff follow Jared Keeso's eponymous hockey player as he attempts to lead the Sudbury Bulldogs to a league title and a record-breaking winning streak. It's very direct and very linear and often very  funny, especially if you like your humor to come with a variety of thick Canadian accents. But after the first season went to some effort to humanize the initially one-note Shoresy, this season has its eyes so totally on the prize — the NOSHO championship — that the character's limited maturation arc feels less convincing. Still, I love the repetitive rhythms of Keeso's writing and the equal-opportunity, sex-positive objectification that fuels Jacob Tierney's direction. Plus, I'm always happy to spend a few half-hours with Nat (Tasya Teles), Miigwan (Keilani Rose) and Ziigwan (Blair Lamora), the brains and loins behind the Bulldogs.

Scaryoke

I checked out Apple TV+'s four-part documentary series The Enfield Poltergeist because I thought the aesthetic conceit sounded interesting. You've got interviews with some of the principals from the notorious 1977 real-life haunting, as well as reenactments in which actors lip-sync along with the actual audio recorded at the time by paranormal investigator Maurice Grosse. I began to find that concept tedious within 15 minutes and I checked out before the end of the first 62-minute episode. Still, I wanted to blurb it so that I could refer to the technique as "scaryoke," which I've now done twice. The Enfield event is, of course, the basis for  The Conjuring 2, which isn't on any streaming service. That means that if you truly want entertaining poltergeist-y content this weekend, you'll have to watch Tobe Hooper's Poltergeist on Max. It's one of the scariest movies ever made, so why settle for scaryoke anyway? That's three times!

H-U-S-T-L-E-R, 'Hustlers'

There are new movies streaming this weekend. Kinda. Our Frank Scheck calls Peacock's Five Nights at Freddy's a snooze and laments that by going for a PG-13 rating, it's too sanitized to live up to its cult aspirations. The latest story of the opioid epidemic and the smiley salespeople who helped instigate it, Netflix's Pain Hustlers  earned some praise from our Lovia Gyarkye, especially for stars Emily Blunt and Chris Evans. And for something more fact-based, albeit a story about people evading the facts, Luke Korem's Paramount+ documentary Milli Vanilli forces you to reconsider your thoughts about the "Blame It on the Rain" duo — talk about scaryoke! — even if it's more interested in raising questions about a culture and industry that could yield this sort of wildly popular fraud than digging deep on the answers.

Honoring Richard Roundtree

Best known as John Shaft, one of the baddest mothers in all of cinema, Richard Roundtree died this week at 81. Sadly, we live in a world in which the 2000 remake/sequel Shaft, in which Roundtree returned as the uncle to Samuel L. Jackson's John Shaft, is readily available on Paramount+, but you have to pay a few bucks to see the original. Shaft's Big Score! and Shaft in Africa are also only streaming rentals, as is Rian Johnson's Brick, in which Roundtree played a key supporting role. You know what you can stream, though? Larry Cohen's Q: The Winged Serpent , which is on Peacock, as well as Cohen's blaxploitation homage Original Gangstas, on Amazon.