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.

After finishing as my sixth favorite show of 2025, FX's The Lowdown seems destined for another Top 10 engagement based on the first six episodes of the new season (two of which are now on Hulu). There are so many things to recommend about Sterlin Harjo's slice of comic Southwestern noir, starting as ever with Ethan Hawke's hilariously messy lead performance. But if I'm going to isolate one superlative element, it would be this: Top to bottom, The Lowdown may be the best cast show on television. You can count on anybody who clocks in for the season’s new mystery — something tied to a missing prisoner, a shady work-release program, stolen Native artifacts and whatnot — to be instantly and flawlessly integrated into Harjo’s Oklahoma-lovin’ world. That starts with Tommy Lee Jones, rascally vulnerable as Lee Raybon Sr., and Betty Gilpin, seductive and inscrutable as a public defender who thrusts Hawke’s Lee Raybon Jr. into this criminal labyrinth. But it’s everybody. Martha Plimpton. John Hawkes. Gary Farmer. Clifton Collins Jr. It’s a wildly funny, subtly emotional tapestry that more people need to check out.

No show on television fears the status quo like Netflix’s The Diplomat, which returned this week. Debora Cahn’s political thriller, still the epitome of newly departed Netflix chief Bela Bajaria’s vision of “gourmet cheeseburger” programming, shifts its entire structural paradigm practically every episode, which makes for great, if not always satisfyingly plausible, drama. The new fourth season is packed with crazy moments, superb cast additions (Jodie Whittaker is SO good) and countless reminders that perhaps not every aspect of foreign policy should be determined exclusively by people in long-term relationships with each other. As ever, my favorite aspect of the show is its ever-changing understanding of diplomatic protocol, which the characters are constantly forced to re-learn after every upending of the structural dynamic. And as ever, there are too many superb performances to list them all, though Ato Essandoh and Ali Ahn have never been better, and Rory Kinnear sings Pagliacci.

While Harold Becker’s Vision Quest didn’t make our listing of the 25 Greatest Sports Movies of All Time, Ranked, Harold Becker’s 1984 high school wrestling drama has a lot going for it, starting with Darryl Ponicsan’s nuanced script, Matthew Modine’s convincing lead performance, an appearance from Madonna and Linda Fiorentino’s breakout first role. It’s streaming on Tubi and if more people had grown up in the ’80s and felt the proper degree of affection, maybe Marvel wouldn’t be able to get away with deleting the space from the title and stealing it for a new Disney+ superhero series that our Angie Han suggests works best when it isn’t getting excessively wrapped up in its own mythology. The real Vision Quest would never.

A pitch: Slasher Babies, an animated series about preschool slasher movie villains — Baby Michael Myers, Baby Freddy Krueger, Baby Jason Voorhees, Baby Sentinel Sphere From Phantasm — trying to kill their largely unseen nanny. Peacock’s Crystal Lake isn’t quite the Muppet Babies version of the Friday the 13th franchise, but it does reveal how Jason got his beloved machete. Look at that picture! Doesn’t he look happy? The series itself is a mixed bag, anchored by a strong Linda Cardellini performance but sometimes undone by bizarre or just half-baked ideas for how to expand upon the very slender franchise mythology. I’ve seen all the films but don’t hold anything in them to be sacred, so I found enough to amuse me throughout, flaws aside. The first eight movies — from Jason Takes a Swim in the Lake to Jason Takes Manhattan — are on Paramount+ and AMC+.

If you’re in the mood for laughs, the week offers a pair of very different standup specials. HBO premieres Kate Berlant: Parmesan, which Berlant insists is not her “coming out” special, for those who like their comedy with boundless theater kid energy. While the wildly expressive actress-comic definitely discusses her sexuality, she also, working off a stage prop notebook, unpacks the genre’s conventions, from hacky one-liners to the “inherently patriarchal” notion that a special requires a carefully unifying closer. Lower energy but still occasionally amusing on its own terms is Michael Che: Shot in Minnesota, now on Netflix. Che is too proud of his willingness to be edgy and provocative — nearly five minutes up-top about why he’s still using the r-word is too many minutes — but there are pieces of clever comic writing here, if you’re willing to pay attention. Meanwhile, Che’s “Weekend Update” predecessor Norm Macdonald gets the Judd Apatow documentary treatment in Netflix’s Norm: The Tale of Norm Macdonald, which takes an archival approach to the late sardonic O.J.-basher.  

If you’re familiar with my pal Alan Sepinwall, you know his gifts as a TV recapper and critic extraordinaire. But did you know he’s also a biographer? He didn’t either when he started work on Serling, a hybrid biography and textual analysis of the Twilight Zone creator (Rod Serling, that is) and his uniquely prescient world view. It’s both an indispensable examination of a man the book’s subtitle somewhat inaccurately calls “TV’s first visionary” and a good excuse for a full, or at least partial, rewatch of The Twilight Zone on Paramount+. Both the book and the rewatch (I did my own at the beginning of the summer, realizing just how many non-pantheon episodes I’d never seen before) are well worth your time.