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.

Bonjour-y Duty

After two Olympiads marred by COVID and technological growing pains, NBC and Peacock got nearly everything right when it came to the Paris Olympics. From the spectacular (if spectacularly indulgent) Opening Ceremony on the Seine to the countless moments of athletic achievement — Simone Biles, Snoop Dogg, Gabby Thomas, Armand Duplantis, Casual Turkish Gun Guy, I'll miss you most of all — it's been a top-notch Games. Concerns about E. coli were exaggerated, concerns about American middle-distance runners were underestimated and nobody got eaten by a shark. Yet. This weekend still covers a pair of basketball finales, a handful of relays and, of course, the Closing Ceremonies, with a climax that has already been spoiled. 

Keep Calm and Curry On

Will Steph Curry win his first Olympic gold medal this weekend? Who cares? He already has the greatest honor of all: a semi-autobiographical Peacock mockumentary series that actually stars Adam Pally! Mr. Throwback has some funny moments and Curry, Ego Nwodim and Tracy Letts are all excellent, but it has some unresolvable tonal issues. The weekend's other big TV release is Paramount+'s  Tales of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles , which our Angie Han found to be a "winsome and worthy follow-up" to last year's Mutant Mayhem. Watched back-to-back, I found the drop in visual inspiration and comic sharpness from feature — still streaming on Paramount+ — to series to be a bit too much.

Dude Not-So-Perfect

I praised last week's 30 for 30 documentary, American Son, but it was back to unoffended disappointment for Oliver Lucian Anderson & Louis Burgdorf's Dude Perfect: A Very Long Shot, which somehow nobody at ESPN stopped and noticed is THE EXACT SAME DOCUMENTARY as No Scope: The Story of FaZe Clan , which aired a month ago. I have no objection to ESPN attempting to cozy up to the YouTube Generation by spending 90 minutes justifying the sports adjacency of various juvenile millennial/Gen Z favorites, but taking such similar formally stodgy approaches guarantees that those documentaries will just be old-ish filmmakers telling stories to old viewers (I count myself in the latter category) so that they understand what The Kids are into. Anyway, it's not like A Very Long Shot — streaming on ESPN+ — is bad. It's just bland and bizarrely unenlightening when it comes to anything other than celebrating the brand of the beloved trick shot artists.

The 'House' That Snored

I did not have 1000 words' worth of thoughts on the finale of season two of HBO's House of the Dragon , but I do have between 80 and 100 words of thoughts. Look, I get that we're in an era in which eight-episode seasons aren't uncommon and two-year waits between seasons aren't uncommon and "bridge" seasons — realigning the pieces between seasons of action — are sometimes necessary. But having a two-year wait for an eight-episode season that ends with almost a 10-minute, "Look how cool the thing we're setting up is!" montage feels triply cruel. I liked parts of the season a lot — the fourth episode was all over-the-top spectacle, the show comes alive any time Emma D'Arcy and Olivia Cooke share the screen — but for entirely too long, House of the Dragon  felt, as a series, like the narrative equivalent of Rhaena just running around an anonymous countryside hoping desperately to eventually run into a dragon. It's all on Max, if you're looking to catch up, and the elements are aligned for a seemingly huge season in five or six years or something.

Don't Gerry This One

If you want to watch Matt Damon and Casey Affleck attempting a Beantown heist, The Instigators is on Apple TV+, but our David Rooney damned the film as "passable entertainment." If, however, you want to watch Matt Damon and Casey Affleck wandering in the wilderness and getting stuck atop boulders, Gus Van Sant's existential thriller Gerry is streaming almost everywhere. Don't believe me? It's on Peacock, Amazon, Tubi, Pluto, Kanopy and more!

Prime 'Evil'

Let's wrap this newsletter up on a positive note. The series finale of Paramount+'s Evil is less than two weeks away. At this moment, the Robert & Michelle King -created horror dramedy is the best show on TV, possibly by a wide margin, delivering freaky scares, laugh-out-loud silliness and smart meta-commentary on its own cancelation every week. This week's episode, "Fear of the Other," features every character actor you could ever want to to see — Danny Burstein! Kurt Fuller! Nate Corddry! Richard Kind! John Carroll Lynch with a hairpiece! — some of the show's best practical and CG effects work to date and more talk about Kristen's feet. Plus, this week's "Don't Skip the Intro" gag was my favorite one to date. Catch up on Paramount+ and Netflix.