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.

We Bought a Mizu

Blue Eye Samurai, Michael Green and Amber Noizumi's new Netflix's animated series, is a violent, sexually graphic, astonishingly visualized revenge fantasy for grownups. Almost every action scene is breathtaking, the attempts at 17th-century Japanese cultural nuance are admirable and the vocal cast, led by Maya Erskine, is exceptional. Our Angie Han wishes the series had dug a bit deeper into its feminist and anti-colonialist themes, but found that it worked well as high entertainment. The best pitch I can give for the show is that it's Yentl meets Kill Bill and since Kill Bill  isn't currently streaming anywhere — Yentl is on Max — head over to Netflix for Blue Eye Samurai. And be sure to listen to this week's TV's Top 5 podcast interview with Green and Noizumi.

Veni, Vidi, Vincible

Amazon's Invincible is an odd case study in how to jeopardize a show. An animated superhero show for adults, Invincible launched in March 2021 and is premiering its first new episodes in two and a half years. I *like* Invincible. It's subversive in some of the same ways as The Boys, but with a cheery brightness to its throwback style and color scheme. But I watched the first couple of episodes back and remembered basically none of the secondary storylines. The new season doesn't start slow, but it starts familiar and repetitive. But by the third and fourth episodes, I was mostly engaged with the plotlines, even if they involve a lot of characters being miserable about a lot of things. Naturally, after the fourth episode,  Invincible goes back on the shelf until early next year. What a weird way to treat audiences.

I Have Come Here to Chew Bubblegum and Watch 'Bass'

Only know the story of post-Civil War U.S. Marshal Bass Reeves from the Drunk History retelling? Taylor Sheridan has you covered with his new Paramount+ drama Lawmen: Bass Reeves, featuring David Oyelowo as the legendary, well, lawman. Premiering Sunday and actually created by Chad Feehan, Lawmen lacks any particular voice or perspective — Blazing Saddles is a more complicated look at being a Black man in 1870s law enforcement — but if it gives viewers enough interest to go do their own research, that's valuable. Joke: What do you call the scenes in Lawmen  that feature the other main characters but not Oyelowo? Bassless Chaps! Oh and that Drunk History episode, "Oklahoma," with Jaleel White, is on Paramount+, while Blazing Saddles is on Tubi. 

All the Light You Should Not See

Steven Knight and Shawn Levy's Netflix adaptation of Anthony Doerr's All the Light We Cannot See is a mess — four hours of increasingly bizarre choices in translating a beloved book to TV. Still in the mood for something celebrating the magic of radio, but which doesn't require a main character to LITERALLY HUG A RADIO to make that point? Well, Amazon has Woody Allen’s period comedy Radio Days, as well as the Marie Curie biopic Radioactive, though that may be about something else. The classic sitcom News Radio is on Pluto TV, while Cuba Gooding Jr.'s Radio  is on Max, though that may be about something else. 

Puttin' on the Riz

The cinematic streaming options, they are eclectic. Sheri Linden praised the "smart provocation and deep feeling" of Apple TV+'s sci-fi romance, Fingernails. Stephen Farber raved about Annette Bening and Jodie Foster's performances in Nyad, new on Netflix. (Netflix also has the Sylvester Stallone documentary  Sly , which I thought was fine.) And Lovia Gyarkye loved the comic chemistry between stars Awkwafina and Sandra Oh (doing great voice work in Invincible as well) in Hulu's Quiz Lady.

Honoring Matthew Perry

Beloved as Chandler Bing from Friends, but a TV star of an even higher order than that, Matthew Perry died this week at 54. Our Lesley Goldberg did a great reported piece on why Perry's death is hitting people of a certain generation so hard, while I wrote about Perry's particular gift for playing flawed heroes who used humor as a way to shield their darker insecurities. Friends is streaming on Max, but if you're looking for deeper Perry cuts, my tribute led with his terrific work on NBC's short-lived Go On, which is streaming on Roku Channel currently. You can also check out Perry's Emmy-nominated work in The Ron Clark Story on Amazon, as well as his multiple Emmy-nominated episodes as Joe Quincy on The West Wing, also on Max.