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.

Heavy Medal

I delayed this week's newsletter until after I could watch and review the Paris Olympics Opening Ceremonies , because what if I told you to watch on the assumption that the sharks in the Seine would eat somebody and then nobody got eaten? [Spoiler: Nobody important was eaten. But it was still well worth watching in its primetime encore.] While the opening was today (Friday, assuming you're reading this today), we've already had enough Olympics competition for Canada — yes, nice, polite, friendly Canada — to be involved in the first cheating scandal and for the U.S. Women's National Team (that's soccer [that's football]) to beat Zambia in preliminary action. For the next two weeks, consider me glued to my TV watching NBC, NBCUni cable and Peacock for Olympics coverage.

This Weekend at the Olympics

Saturday's highlights include Victor Wembanyama and the French basketball team tipping off against Brazil, an assortment of swimming events including the men's and women's 400m freestyle and… skateboarding! On Sunday, the women's gymnastics qualifying, featuring prohibitive favorites Team USA and Simone Biles, begins; South Sudan looks to follow up on its near-upset of Team USA basketball (and Team USA plays Serbia); and there’s more swimming, including the men's 400m individual medley and finals in the women's butterfly and men's breaststroke. Then Monday, get ready for Canada's 17-year-old swimming sensation Summer McIntosh, medals for men's diving and canoe slalom, plus the equestrian events, in which the medals really OUGHT to go to the horses. 

Sports and All

This week, ahead of the Olympics, I wrote about the state of sports TV programming — mostly sports documentary programming, which represents some of the best small-screen storytelling we've got. I've already sung the praises of FX/Hulu's Welcome to Wrexham enough and sung more tepid praises (but still praises) of Netflix's America's Sweethearts Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders  and, in this newsletter, of Netflix's Sprint, which is the perfect primer if you're looking for people to root for in the Olympics 100m and 200m track and field competitions. For something outside of the Olympics sphere, check out HBO's Charlie Hustle & the Matter of Peter Rose, a documentary that's sure to confirm whatever preconceived notions you already have about the disgraced all-time major league hit king (including the preconceived notion that four hours is WAY too much time to spend listening to Pete Rose talking about himself).

Nouvelle Plague

Netflix's VERY loose (almost unrecognizable, really) adaptation of Giovanni Boccaccio's 14th-century The Decameron has a great cast of actors I like — Zosia Mamet, Tony Hale, Tanya Reynolds, Amar Chadha-Patel, the always tremendous Saoirse-Monica Jackson from Derry Girls — and it hails from creator Kathleen Jordan, whose very clever  Teenage Bounty Hunters got a raw deal at Netflix. The raunchy Black Plague comedy is, as our Angie Han says, "fitfully funny," but I had a hard time justifying an hour (and sometimes more) per episode. For a closer and wilder adaptation of The Decameron, Pier Paolo Pasolini's 1971 film is on Amazon. And while it has nothing to do with The Decameron, when I said "The Decameron" into my Apple TV remote, it showed me that The Camerman, Buster Keaton's 1928 classic, is on Tubi. It is, I assure you, better than either adaptation of The Decameron. 

'Bandits' à Part

For a zippier, less ribald piece of historical comedy — the Black Plague does, indeed, play a role — Apple TV+'s Time Bandits , sands all the rough edges away from Terry Gilliam's 1981 film about a small British boy (Kal-El Tuck in the series), who goes through various temporal portals with a gang of thieves (played by the likes of Lisa Kudrow and Charlyne Yi). For the first half of the 10-episode first season, I felt like creators Jemaine Clement, Iain Morris and Taika Waititi's adaptation was Monty Python karaoke. Around episode six and seven, though, as Kiera Thompson's Saffron, younger sister to our main hero, becomes more involved, the show gets much funnier and much fresher. Gilliam's film is currently streaming on Max.

Fin

If the Olympics host city looks familiar, that's because Paris has been the setting for a number of films and television shows, including Netflix's Emily in Paris, AMC's Daryl Dixon in Paris and Forget Paris (streaming on Hoopla). Interestingly, the documentary Paris Is Burning was not shot in Paris. Most recently, though, I've been unable to think of Paris without reflecting on Xavier Gens' Netflix original  Under Paris . Is Under Paris a great movie? No! Is it a good movie? I'm not completely sure! But does it promise a giant shark in the Seine eating people and does it deliver? Yes, and then some! You'll never see Paris in exactly the same way again.