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.

For reasons relating to Bill Cosby adjacency, A Different World doesn’t get discussed much anymore. But the legacy of the topically innovative NBC hit gets a deserved refurbishment from Netflix’s new series reboot, which is primarily about how much new showrunner Felicia Pride loved A Different World. I enjoyed the half-season of A Different World that I watched, particularly lead Maleah Joi Moon, and our Angie Han was especially enthusiastic about the second half of the season. But I have to admit that as Netflix comedies set at fictional HBCUs go, I prefer the more pointed and adventurous Dear White People. A Different World is also my second favorite Atlanta-filmed Netflix comedy starring Kadeem Hardison, following Teenage Bounty Hunters. So watch A Different World, but be sure to watch Dear White People and Teenage Bounty Hunters, too.

In terms of star power, nothing premiering this week can equal Apple’s Brothers, in which True Detective stars Matthew McConaughey and Woody Harrelson play Matthew McConaughey and Woody Harrelson, stars of True Detective. While there are things to chuckle at in Brothers, based on the possible truth that its stars might be real-life half-brothers, the series keeps its comic and topical aspirations astoundingly low — so low that even its creative peaks float off into the ether within seconds, never to be recalled again. True Detective, streaming on HBO Max, is clearly a better McConaughey-Harrelson collaboration, but so is 1999’s EDtv, which doesn’t have a streaming home. Other superior Harrelson products available to stream include Cheers (Paramount+), The Edge of Seventeen (Amazon), Kingpin (Pluto/YouTube) and The Messenger (Tubi). Other superior McConaughey products available to stream include Mud (Amazon), Interstellar (Amazon), Bernie (Amazon, again) and, once you’re on Apple anyway, The Lost Bus.

AI technology has mastered the ability to recreate deceased celebrity voices in a way that makes them sound like they were recording in the Titan submersible, but it’s wholly incapable of capturing the idiosyncratic improvisational flair of a truly unique performer. Case in point: Netflix’s use of Gene Wilder as an unpleasantly robotic narrator in the horribly titled Wonka’s The Golden Ticket. I’m happy that Wilder’s family benefitted financially, but you know who didn’t? Audiences conned into watching this hermetically sealed exercise in hollow nostalgia, which turns the 1971 adaptation of Roald Dahl’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory into a bizarrely dull Big Brother knockoff that Roald Dahl would have hated. Normally I wouldn’t care about whether or not Roald Dahl would have hated things, but every aspect of the game show is perplexing, from the inert cast to the nebulous prize (a “lifetime supply of money” is not a thing) to the ugly cinematography that makes the doubtlessly expensive sets look like they belong in a DIY liminal horror series on YouTube. 

Two of TV's most venerable comedies return this weekend. I’ve seen Sunday’s premiere of the 38th season of Fox’s The Simpsons, which boasts a great guest appearance by Emma Thompson as a reclusive author whose new book might be the only thing that can save Springfield Elementary. The episode features loving evocations of a number of children’s literary classics and an appropriately weird tribute to Those Magnificent Men and Their Flying Machines, and ranks as probably the best 810th episode for any scripted series in television history. I have not seen Saturday’s premiere for the 52nd season of NBC’s Saturday Night Live because I don’t have a time machine and if I did have a time machine, I probably wouldn’t use it to get ahead on my SNL viewership. The premiere is hosted by Knicks star Jalen Brunson, who may struggle to rise to the athlete-hosting heights of Peyton Manning and Charles Barkley, but will almost certainly be a better host that Ronda Rousey or Lance Armstrong. It’s the little things!

Two years ago, I moderated an ATX TV Festival panel with Smriti Mundhra, discussing the Indian Matchmaking creator’s Bollywood Dance U, a docuseries that had been ordered by National Geographic and then dropped without comment. At the time, I found the show, which focuses on the competitive world of collegiate Bollywood fusion dance, to be energetic, thoroughly likable and wholly culturally distinctive, and I still don’t understand why no other network or streamer picked it up. But in the aftermath of last weekend’s release of Best of the Best, co-written by Hasan Minhaj, Bollywood Dance U, narrated by Minhaj, has landed on Minhaj’s YouTube page. It’s only four episodes — I believe it has shrunk several times since the original NatGeo order, not necessarily for the best — and if you liked Best of the Best, it’s close to essential viewing. Plus, it’s free, though Minhaj and company are encouraging donations to the Desi Dance Network.

I’m not saying that Jeff Probst was responding directly to my “Why Survivor Is Broken” column with the Survivor 51 scene in which he emphasized that while it’s fine for couch castaways to want a pure game, "When you're a player, you want a game to play." But he wasn’t NOT responding directly to me. This week’s premiere (streaming on Paramount+) launched what Probst & Co. are desperate to rename the “Open Era,” which mostly means “whatever crazy stuff we want to add gets added.” It’s a conceptual nightmare, at least for this stick-in-the-mud purist, but the episode was a lot of fun. I liked the Irish castaway who ended up on a beach sad and alone, like a supporting player from The Banshees of Inisherin with a sunburn. I liked the Rhode Island Strong alliance that lasted less than a day. I liked Maggie, who owns a farm (I, however, ain’t gonna work on Maggie’s farm no more) and worries everybody will think she’s old because she’s 40. I liked voice actress Ana and her summary of her tribe’s archetypes. I liked the potentially escalating big prize and that, after all the Mr. Beast bootlicking last season, neither Mr. Beast nor Big Brother star Rick Devens were mentioned when Probst explained the return of the big coin flip. Heck, I even liked the absurd “Swiss Family Robinson meets the Book of Jonah whale carcass treehouse” Tribal Council set.