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.

Go Best, Young Man

Sure, officially the middle of the year is July 2, which means Angie and I technically compiled a list that should have been titled “The Best TV Shows of the First 45 Percent of 2024 (Give or Take).” But if you're looking for 10 great shows, from Baby Reindeer to Welcome to Wrexham, we've got you covered. And yes, our crack film team offered their own list of “ The Best Films of the First 45 Percent of 2024 (Give or Take),” too. That's a lot of entertainment!

Better Puck Tomorrow

I'm still coming to terms with the fact that there won't be a new season of Letterkenny dropping on Hulu at Christmas. Fortunately, Letterkenny spinoff Shoresy appears to be settling in quite nicely. The six episode third season, now on Hulu, was easily my favorite Shoresy stretch to date, as the show continues to find unexpected depths to Jared Keeso's eponymous trash-talking hockey star. For a show that started off as something proudly formless and disreputable, Shoresy  has actually become a more polished and structured series, thanks to the National Senior Tournament and Shoresy's growing recognition of his own hockey mortality, without sacrificing the show’s childishly anarchic spirit. Keeso has never been better, while Miigwan (Keilani Elizabeth Rose), Ziigwan (Blair Lamora) and Nat (Tasya Teles) have never been funnier and show's background rotation of ensemble players — including Jory Jordan (Maclean Fish), Anik Archambault (Kim Cloutier) and various Quebecois luminaries — has never been better deployed. I especially loved the set-up for future seasons.  

Track to the Future

The U.S. Olympic Team Trials for track and field begin this weekend in Oregon — coverage on NBC, USA and Peacock — and you may have noticed a run of documentary programming tied to the pre-Olympic mood. History's Triumph: Jesse Owens and the Berlin Olympics  — featuring Don Cheadle narrating — premiered earlier this week and is now available on the History ap, website and On Demand. Andre Gaines' feature-length doc digs effectively beneath the story you probably know — Owens and his four gold medals upstaging Hitler's Olympics — though it has a slightly inconsistent approach as to when it wants to accept possibly apocryphal pieces of Owens' astonishing accomplishment and when it wants to debunk. Keeping in the vein of former Ohio State track stars and Olympic champions, the ESPN 30 for 30 doc False Positive  — streaming on ESPN+ — looks at former 400m world record holder Butch Reynolds and the injustice he faced after a blundered drug test. It's properly infuriating, if slightly overlong. 

My Favorite Cheer

I'm happy to see America's Sweethearts: Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders has raced out to a high position on Netflix's Top 10. It happens to be both very entertaining and easily the worst of Greg Whiteley's sports-infused Netflix documentary series, so if you like this glimpse into the lives of the women auditioning to be part of the iconic Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders squad, you should definitely watch both seasons of Cheer  and the lone season of Wrestlers, which made my Top 10 list for 2023. Then you can start working your way back through Last Chance U and its basketball spinoff. Whiteley's formula has quickly become one of TV's best and most reliable.

Able Was I Ere I Saw Alba

The weekend's biggest new streaming film might be Netflix's Trigger Warning, an action thriller that represents star Jessica Alba's first feature since 2019's Killers Anonymous, a movie that I'm also hearing about for the first time. Our Frank Scheck says Trigger Warning "proves distressingly familiar, though he also says that it delivers "enough bone-crushing and knife-wielding sequences to satisfy undemanding, action-craving viewers looking for mindless distraction on a weekend night." If you want something less thrilling, might I recommend the Amazon documentary  Federer: Twelve Final Days, which I described as "comfortably dull."

Honoring Donald Sutherland

Versatile actor, political firebrand and exemplary Canadian Donald Sutherland died this week at 88. Sure, he never was even NOMINATED for an Oscar, but a resumé this tremendous speaks for itself. While M*A*S*H isn't currently streaming anywhere (nor is his spectacular JFK cameo), an impressive selection of available Sutherland performances would fill a busy weekend, including Don't Look Now (Paramount+), Ordinary People (Max), Klute (Tubi), Invasion of the Body Snatchers (Amazon), Six Degrees of Separation (Amazon) and Animal House (Netflix). Want a slight dark horse favorite? Watch Without Limits on Tubi/Roku.