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.

If You Love Something, Set It Free

FX's Shōgun, one of the spring's most deservedly acclaimed series, wrapped this week with a finale that was both powerful and rushed, attempting to tie all its myriad elements together in barely over an hour. Of course, all that resolution didn't stop reporters like THR's great Josh Wigler from asking creators Justin Marks and Rachel Kondo about a possible second season. I'm of two minds on this. Mind One: FX, a network that mostly avoids foolish creative decisions, would be foolish to order a second season. It's a close-ended book and a close-ended series, so why not embrace that closure? Mind Two: Ordering a second season immediately would let FX campaign Shōgun for Emmys in the drama categories, which are FAR weaker than the limited series fields this year. Make Shōgun  a drama and I'd bet it dominates with Emmy voters. Then just never make that second season. Sure, it's fraudulent, but it's another good way to underline how broken the Emmy categorization system is. Oh, and stream all of Shōgun on Hulu. It's damn good.

Sometimes You Gotta Say 'What the Knuck’

John Whittington and Toby Ascher's Knuckles, a six-part Paramount+ spinoff from the Sonic the Hedgehog  movie franchise, is better than it needs to be. Is it exactly good? No! But the series, in which Idris Elba's computer-animated echidna teaches a bumbling small-town sheriff (Adam Pally) to be a warrior, has a wry sense of humor and a welcome looseness within its cartoonish formula. A few questions: Would the Jewish stereotype-tweaking of the "Shabbat Dinner" episode — yes, that's a real thing — have worked better if Pally's onscreen mother had been played by somebody like Tovah Feldshuh, rather than very patrician Stockard Channing doing a Tovah Feldshuh impression? And why does the show think bowling on TV is so strange and exotic when televised bowling coverage has been an ESPN staple for decades? And why does the titular main character basically vanish for much of the season? Anyway, there are laughs here, even if Knuckles could have been an 85-minute movie.

'Door' of Perception

I watched half of the Knuckles season and half of season two of The Big Door Prize, and Knuckles was the one I chose to finish. The Big Door Prize remains a confounding show for me. When it's a comic and lightly sentimental portrait of small-town life, I really like it. The cast is great and as much as Chris O'Dowd tops the call sheet, Gabrielle Dennis, Sammy Fourlas, Djouliet Amara, Josh Segarra, Mary Holland and especially Ally Maki (plus always welcome newcomer Justine Lupe) are the real stars of the second season. But when The Big Door Prize gets lost in the mythological minutiae of the Morpho machine, I remember why my review of the first season insisted that the show was better designed as a limited series.  

Rhythm of the Knight

I've spent a lot of time pondering writer-producer Steven Knight this week. I'm not sure any current scribe is more qualitatively confounding. Dirty Pretty Things (Paramount+), Eastern Promises (Max) and Locke (not streaming) are exceptional thrillers with unexpected nuances, while Netflix's Peaky Blinders is brutal, brash and distinctive across most of its run. But then there's All the Light We Cannot See (Netflix) and Serenity (the Matthew McConaughey/Anne Hathaway one, now on Amazon) and FX's bizarre A Christmas Carol (NOT on Hulu). FX's Hulu drama The Veil , premiering Tuesday, is right in the middle. The Elisabeth Moss espionage thriller is twisty and literate and intriguing for a few episodes before it becomes generic and then gets completely lost. But catch up on the Good Knight this weekend!

By Jovi, I Think He's Got It!

With Passover travel and whatnot, our Angie Han watched a few shows this week that I haven't even had time to sample. But maybe this weekend I'll take Angie's advice and check out Netflix's Dead Boy Detectives, which she praises for its "appealingly quirky lead cast" and calls a "zippy, satisfying binge." Although I'm a child of the '80s, I'll probably skip Gotham Chopra's four-hour  Thank You, Goodnight: The Bon Jovi Story , a portrait of Millie Bobby Brown's future father-in-law that Angie deems "strictly for the fans."

Back 'Draft'

With streamers mostly skipping this weekend in terms of new features, it's a time to settle in to watch either ESPN's exhaustive/exhausting coverage of the later rounds of the NFL Draft or… Ivan Reitman's 2014 film Draft Day featuring the Patron Saint of Sports Movies, Kevin Costner, as well as the late, great Chadwick Boseman. It's on Peacock.