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.

Reacher Round 2

The second season of Amazon's Reacher, this one based on Lee Child's Bad Luck and Trouble, is a lot like the first and a lot like the book series: Pulpy, entertaining and generally disposable, albeit with a much higher body count this time around. A few notes: 1) I like Maria Sten's Frances Neagley, but just as the character is only an occasional guest in the books, the writers should remember that Jack Reacher works best as a loner. 2) The bad guys in the book are only sporadically gripping, and this season's adversaries, led by Robert Patrick (all sneer no subterfuge), are fully forgettable. 3) Alan Ritchson continues to do the best he can with a clearly unplayable part, but he has sacrificed his ability to convincingly move in order to embody Reacher's mammoth size. 4) The creative team should look to Slow Horses and Dark Wind  as paragons of efficiency and aim for six episodes next time around. I've read 20+ Jack Reacher novels and not one has eight hours worth of plot in it.

Best in Peace

Looking for something to watch over the last two weeks of 2023? Check out Angie Han and my Top 10 lists, complete with 10 honorable mentions apiece. We have identical top threes — and if you haven't watched those already, definitely do — but there's a lot of variety beyond that. Don't worry, I'll link to these lists for a couple of weeks. And if you'd rather listen to me and Angie discuss our lists, this week's TV's Top 5  podcast contains lots of Top 10 talk, as well as some chatter about the year's worst shows.

Royal to a Fault

Peter Morgan's six-season run of The Crown remains a definitive examination of the monarchy at the end of the millennium. But the Netflix series has had some trouble navigating into the home stretch, losing all sense of perspective in the lack of distance from contemporary events. Angie felt that the concluding chapter "proves less interested in interrogating the status quo than admiring it." Still, the last six episodes are better than the clunky Dodi/Diana arc that premiered last month, at times far better. The finale is a well-constructed, exceptionally directed (Stephen Daldry returning behind the camera) summation of Morgan's thesis about the place of royalty in an egalitarian modern society. Many of the new actors — especially Ed McVey as Prince William and Meg Bellamy as Kate Middleton, plus Viola Prettejohn as a teenage Elizabeth — are very good and, when the series gives her material to play, Imelda Staunton thoroughly lives up to the legacy set by Claire Foy and Olivia Colman.

'Brave' 4 U

Few shows this year made me laugh as much as Kat Sadler's new Hulu/BBC Three comedy Such Brave Girls, as sadly funny a show as one could make about three women — Sadler and real-life sister Lizzie Davidson as siblings and Louise Brealey as their mother — so hung up on their trauma that they can't tell whether or not they're actually damaged. The leads are hilarious and the writing, filled with bad advice and exaggerated narcissism, is as quotably cruel as any show since Succession . The show is already beginning to mature beyond its initial solipsism and immature reliance on bodily fluid gags, but I hope it never matures too much.

Fashion 'Nugget'

It's a motley assortment of new streaming features. Our Leslie Felperin calls Netflix's distinctively animated Chicken Run: Dawn of the Nugget "a worthy successor" to Aardman's beloved Chicken Run. Brian Helgeland's nautical crime drama Finestkind  has a superb cast led by Tommy Lee Jones, Ben Foster and Jenna Ortega, but our Michael Rechtshaffen refers to "a stagnating whiff of familiarity" hovering over the Paramount+ film. Meanwhile, Frank Scheck says of Apple TV+'s action comedy The Family Plan: "To say it's predictable is an insult to predictability."

Honoring Andre Braugher

Andre Braugher spent a decade as perhaps the best dramatic actor on television, then he turned around and spent a decade as perhaps the best comic actor on television. It's heartbreaking that Braugher died this week at 61. In my tribute, I lamented that I can't just point people in the direction of Braugher's career-defining work in Homicide: Life on the Street. It's too good a show to be so absent from the streaming landscape. Fortunately,  Men of a Certain Age (Max),  Brooklyn Nine-Nine (Peacock) and the sixth season of The Good Fight (Paramount+), key texts from the lighter late stage of Braugher's career, are all streaming. And if you haven't seen it lately, be sure to watch Glory (Pluto TV) to marvel at what was Braugher's very first movie role.