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.

Herbers Your Enthusiasm

Oddly, watching the first season of Paramount+'s very likable Colin From Accounts, I never once looked at co-creator/co-star Patrick Brammall and thought, "It's Kristen's hubby from Evil!" But watching the first four episodes of the final season of Evil, I often looked at Kristen's hubby and thought, "It's Gordon from Colin From Accounts !" Anyway, these new episodes have a lot of Brammall's Andy, as Robert and Michelle King's spectacular horror-comedy moves toward its endgame with possessed pigs, a possible werewolf and the rise of a Biblically prophesized Antichrist. I'm not sure any current show more effectively balances procedural and serialized elements, and when the Kings go for a visceral response — laughter, nausea, terror — they almost always hit the mark. This is Brammall's best work so far, rising to the level of an eclectic ensemble led by Katja Herbers, Mike Colter and Aasif Mandvi, plus reliable scene-stealers like Wallace Shawn and Andrea Martin. The start of the final Evil season is now on Paramount+, while the early seasons are on Netflix as well. 

I May Not Always Love You

Frank Marshall and Thom Zimny's new documentary The Beach Boys  is a soft, generally forgettable Love — as in Mike — letter despite a predictably delightful soundtrack. Press releases for the doc have referred to it having a "new interview" with Brian Wilson, which is, at best, a technicality. The relative absence of Brian Wilson's reflections — even in archival interviews, he's evasive — isn't surprising. The struggle to impose a throughline on the journey of The Beach Boys isn't shocking either, especially given how often Disney+ documentaries are basically commercials, so anything that doesn't fit that narrative is either ignored completely or glossed over. One minute on Charles Manson? No mention of "Kokomo" until the closing credits? Come on.

Whatever 'Lolla' Wants

Something musical is in the water. In addition to The Beach Boys and Saturday's premiere of Max's Lady Gaga concert special Gaga Chromatica Ball, you can also catch up on the week's launches of HBO's Stax: Soulsville U.S.A. (on Max) and Paramount+'s Lolla: The Story of Lollapalooza. I didn't get to Stax yet, but I quite enjoyed 2/3rds of Michael John Warren's three-part Lolla . The first part focuses on the creation of Lollapalooza, with great interviews from Perry Farrell and original Lollapalooza stars like Ice-T, Trent Reznor and Vernon Reid of Living Colour. The second part is a dull laundry list documenting the festival's rise and fall, but the third part does far better with the most recent resurrection of Lollapalooza, especially as it reflected the desire to return to communal experiences after the worst of the COVID pandemic. 

Memorial Day Weekend Bingeing

On this week's TV's Top 5 podcast, we were asked to recommend some quick and easy binges, and I suggested starting with the wonderful first season of Nida Manzoor's funny, heartwarming, earworm-filled Peacock comedy We Are Lady Parts, either to watch for the first time or ahead of next Friday's premiere of season two. We also talked about Freevee's recent cancelations of  Primo and High School, two great coming-of-age half-hours that deserved better. Check them out and then you can join me in wondering what's the point of being one of the world's wealthiest companies — Freevee owner Amazon, I mean — if your nurturing of inexpensive, fresh voices doesn't include second seasons.

'Atlas'? Shrug.

Do you ever wake up in the middle of the night thinking of how many innocent people died in San Andreas because The Rock ditched his emergency rescue duties in the middle of a national catastrophe to try to find his ex-wife and daughter? I do. That blockbuster was directed by Brad Peyton, the auteur behind Netflix's new sci-fi thriller Atlas starring Jennifer Lopez, Sterling K. Brown and Simu Liu. Our Angie Han's review doesn't mention how many bystanders J.Lo's character lets perish, but it does call the movie "a J.Lo rom-com in shiny metal packaging."

Honoring Dabney Coleman

No actor played the rainbow of colors within grouchiness as well as Dabney Coleman, who died last week at 92. He could be hilariously exasperated and darkly grouchy and poignantly exasperated and egotistically grouchy and sympathetically grouchy/exasperated all at once, giving one exceptional performance after another all the way through to his more recent work as The Commodore on Boardwalk Empire (streaming on Max) and as Kevin Costner's pop on Yellowstone (streaming on Peacock). Too many of my favorite Coleman performances — Tootsie, 9 to 5, NBC's Buffalo Bill  — aren't easily streamable, but WarGames (Max), The Muppets Take Manhattan (MGM+), On Golden Pond (a less grouchy role, now on Peacock) and his long run on The Guardian (Paramount+) are.