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.

Me and Julio Down By the Schoolyard

HBO's latest winner in the oddball 11 p.m. Friday slot — formerly home to How to With John Wilson, A Black Lady Sketch Show and Painting with John — is Fantasmas, Julio Torres' follow-up to Los Espookys, perhaps the prototypical Friday 11 p.m. classic. Torres, a SNL writing veteran whose Problemista  was recently playing theatrically, has an absurdist sensibility that makes his shows unlike anything else on TV. Fantasmas, half bizarre futuristic odyssey and half sketch show, is a total trip, full of unrestrained silliness, wild conceptual leaps, big ideas and too-cool-for-school guest stars, including multiple Oscar winners, social media influencers and alt-comedy favorites. I probably prefer Los Espookys — still streaming on Max — but Fantasmas more than scratches my itch for existential oddness. If you have such an itch, this is Must Surreal TV.

Killer 'Queenie'

Queenie, Candice Carty-Williams' adaptation of her own 2019 novel, doesn't look like anything revolutionary. British TV is particularly good at stories of 20something women finding themselves through semi-comic journeys marked by sex and unearthed psychological trauma — see recent entries like Big Mood on Tubi and Dinosaur and Such Brave Girls on Hulu — but Queenie  is its own distinctive thing. That's thanks in no small part to Dionne Brown's exceptionally natural performance as, well, a 20something woman finding herself through a semi-comic journey marked by sex and unearthed psychological trauma, made all the more specific by the main character's Jamaican background, the culturally varied London settings and more. While I didn't always laugh and some of those darker psychological beats play out in a rush, as our Angie Han says, this "endearing, messy portrait" has great compassion for its main character.

MC 'Acolyte'

It isn't always easy to connect writer-director Leslye Headland's previous work to her current gig as showrunner on Disney+'s new Star Wars series The Acolyte, but spotting Russian Doll (still streaming on Netflix) co-stars Charlie Barnett (with a funny haircut) and Rebecca Henderson (green) is a good start. The first two Acolyte  episodes — Angie calls it "an intriguing change of pace" for the franchise — are now on Disney+. Several '80s animated specials based on Cathy Guisewite's Cathy character — I call her "The Ack!-olyte" — are streaming on YouTube. 

Jumping Through Hoops

Presumably Hulu scheduled the premiere of the FX-produced Clipped to line up with the NBA Finals, which move into Game 2 on Sunday night. Clipped is an often interesting, generally pragmatic take on the scandal that brought down Clippers owner Donald Sterling (Ed O’Neill) and the difficult choices faced by Doc Rivers (Laurence Fishburne) and his team, though the first episode is broader and coarser than the rest of the show. For more professional basketball hijinks, head over to Max for the more entertaining, if less thoughtful  Winning Time, while Peacock has all four seasons of the non-NBA-affiliated Survivor's Remorse, Mike O'Malley's very fine basketball-infused comedy. As O'Malley would say: Go Celtics. (Celtic Pride is on Hoopla, if you use such things.)

Na Na Na Na Na Na Na Na Na Na Na Na Na, 'Hit Man' 

It feels like Netflix squandered the initial buzz that Richard Linklater's Hit Man generated last September when it premiered at the Venice Film Festival, but the Glen Powell vehicle, which our Leslie Felperin called "smart and steamy screwball fun," hits the streamer this week after a brief theatrical run. Does anybody else feel like we've been referring to films and television shows as being "star-making" for Powell going back to, like,  Scream Queens ? That Fox slasher comedy is on Hulu, if you care. And if you like perplexingly lost Richard Linklater-directed festival favorites, might I recommend his feature-length installment of God Save Texas, which is on Max after a nearly invisible HBO airing in February?

Remembering D-Day

Thursday was the 80th anniversary of the D-Day invasion, but guess what? You can honor that heroic moment for more than one day. Since classics like The Longest Day and The Americanization of Emily aren't readily streamable, start with Saving Private Ryan on Peacock and Paramount+ and the miniseries Band of Brothers on Max and Netflix. Samuel Fuller's The Big Red One is on The Roku Channel. And while they aren't explicitly D-Day related, NatGeo's newly released Erased: WW2's Heroes of Color (streaming on Hulu) and Netflix's Hitler and the Nazis: Evil on Trial will add to your WWII viewing experiencing.