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.

Sunny's Halo

If you like the idea of Lost in Translation meets Her only with Rashida Jones swapped in for Scarlett Johansson, roughly half of Apple TV+'s Sunny, adapted by Katie Robbins from the book by Colin O'Sullivan, will work for you. I loved the half of the show that's mostly Jones as a dyspeptic ex-pat mourning her husband and son while hanging out with an annoyingly chipper robot sidekick in slightly futuristic Kyoto. Thanks to flashbacks, we get plenty of the character's husband, wonderfully played by Hidetoshi Nishijima of  Drive My Car, as well. But then there's also a subplot that involves a power clash in the local yakuza that became more and more important to the show and less and less interesting to me. I still found stuff to enjoy, especially in two late-season standalone episodes, but I agree with our Angie Han that the show is "better at suggesting emotional and thematic depths than plumbing them."

MasterMurder MindKiller

Hulu's new three-part documentary Mastermind: To Think Like a Killer is not to be confused with with Hulu's How I Caught My Killer, which premieres its second (apparently) season next week, but it's absolutely to be confused with Mindhunter, which is still on Netflix and is still great, even if they never make a third season. Mastermind puts the focus on the real Ann Burgess, who was the basis for Anna Torv's Mindhunter  character. Burgess is 87 and still working a full course load at Boston College's nursing school when she isn't serving in various advisory capacities on causes including Murdered and Missing Indigenous Women. Director Abigail Fuller doesn't always lean fully enough into the series' most compelling aspect, the blurring of lines between the subject’s groundbreaking professional work and the commitment she made to her family, and some of the perfunctory reenactments are a little bland. Overall, though, Mastermind is fascinating, inspiring, harrowing and even surprisingly funny in steering its story across seven decades.

Frustrated, Incorporated

I called the reenactments in Mastermind bland, but that's a damn sight better than the schlocky reenactments fleshing out Tara Malone's three-part documentary Teen Torture Inc. Although it's a Max original, Teen Torture  too frequently feels like it came from a more exploitative Warner Bros. property, which is a minor pity because when the series really gets humming, it makes some very persuasive points about the mostly ineffective and frequently criminal industry that exists at the intersection of religious fundamentalism, sociological quackery and corrupt politics. Especially in the second and third episodes, Malone is able to stage some potent and cathartic scenes involving survivors of the billion dollar "troubled teen industry" in which "the abuse is the treatment," clearly examine the complicit parties — Hi, Dr. Phil and Mitt Romney! — and offer solutions, or at least offer insight into where solutions could come from.

The Weiner and Still the Champignon

Look, if you know anything about me, you know that I enjoy puns and Amazon's Sausage Party: Foodtopia, a looooooooooooong gestating sequel to the 2016 animated feature, doesn't lack for puns. Or copulating food. What it does lack is appealing characters, an interesting storyline or a clear thesis statement beyond capitalism being bad when capitalism doesn't offer you free shipping and the budget for an eight-episode animated season of television. Still starved for adult animation? Netflix presents  Exploding Kittens, from executive producers Mike Judge and Greg Daniels. It's also narratively thin, but this story of God being sent to Earth as a housesat and befriending the Antichrist, who was sent to Earth as a cat as well, has lots of cute talking cats and occasionally it made me laugh, though as Angie notes, the series' references suggest this script has been sitting on the shelf for a while. (For those who care: You can mostly follow Foodtopia — "See, it's sentient food that f***s!" — without having seen the original Sausage Party and you can definitely follow  Exploding Kittens without having played the card game.)

If You Like Pirulinpinpina

It's a rough weekend for new streaming movies — we have no thoughts on Tyler Perry's Divorce in Black (Amazon) or Descendants: The Rise of Red (Disney+), though I found the doc Quad Gods (Max) to be properly moving — so maybe this is a good time to finish off some recent TV winners. If you're still processing your thoughts on the third season of FX/Hulu's The Bear, Angie and I discussed its divisive reactions , while if you're in more of a ranking frame of mind, Josh Wigler counted up or down his favorite The Bear episodes. Meanwhile, are you all caught up on Julio Torres' delightfully surreal Fantasmas? Then be sure to read Mikey O'Connell's interview with the Los Espookys auteur. 

Honoring Shelley Duvall

Nobody else looked or sounded like Shelley Duvall and nobody else was as well-suited for the weird and eclectic ensembles that characterized the esoteric cinema of the 1970s (and early 1980s). Duvall died this week at the age of 75 and it's a pity that the best of her collaborations with Robert Altman — 3 Women, Thieves Like Us, Nashville, Brewster McCloud — don't have streaming homes at the moment, though McCabe & Mrs. Miller is on Tubi and Altman's adaptation of Popeye , misunderstood at the time, but now embraced for all of its oddness, is on PlutoTV and Kanopy. Altman was far from the only auteur who gravitated toward Duvall's unique aspect; you can watch her in Terry Gilliam's Time Bandits on Max and a little film called The Shining on Shudder or AMC+. And, if you have not already, read Seth Abramovitch's iconic Shelley Duvall profile from 2021.