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.

Yaaaaaas, 'Ween!

Happy Halloween Weekend! Instead of a traditional showrunner interview, this week's TV's Top 5 podcast features a roundtable on the state of TV horror with The Walking Dead showrunner Angela Kang, Sara Goodman of Amazon's  I Know What You Did Last Summer and longtime  Child's Play mastermind Don Mancini of USA and Syfy's Chucky. It's a great and wide-ranging conversation, and maybe it'll inspire you to check out one of their shows for your spooky viewing needs. Or maybe you just want to check out Mike Flanagan's spiritual nightmare Midnight Mass on Netflix or Paramount+'s Evil, which is actually the best horror show on TV.

All Hallows' 'Thieves'

What with the whole Halloween thing, you might expect the streamers to be inundated with spooky new feature offerings, but oddly the weekend's biggest new streaming release is Netflix's Army of Thieves, a prequel to Zack Snyder's zombie heist movie Army of the Dead , only without the zombies. Despite that absence, our David Rooney mostly liked this "triumph-of-the-nerd caper," directed by and starring Matthias Schweighöfer. For more traditional frights, head over to Paramount+ for Paranormal Activity: Next of Kin, which is probably basically what you expect it is.

Colin in the Deep

Perhaps missing the "It's Halloween Weekend!" memo, the week's unexpected programming theme is actually YA dramas based on the youth sports exploits of famous athletes. Scary, right? Netflix's Colin in Black & White hails from Ava DuVernay and Colin Kaepernick and uses Kaepernick's high school experiences, as a football and baseball star, as a platform to discuss the role that race plays in sports and American society. It's dogmatic and uneven, but it should make for powerful viewing, especially for young audiences. Apple TV+'s  Swagger covers some similar themes, but creator Reggie Rock Bythewood's fictionalized look at executive producer Kevin Durant's earliest days as a hoops phenom is much more purely entertaining. Read Angie Han's review, which highlights what makes Swagger so appealing, including O'Shea Jackson Jr. in probably his best performance to date.

'Sparks' and Rec

You may not have had the best year in 2021, but you know who has? The Sparks Brothers! The wildly influential, if not always wildly popular, fraternal duo provided music for Leo Carax's Cannes-opening Annette, which has been perplexing viewers on Amazon for months. Before that, though, they were the focus of Edgar Wright's acclaimed documentary The Sparks Brothers. With an impressive 140-minute running time, The Sparks Brothers earned raves at Sundance in January — our Frank Scheck suggested that longtime fans will be particularly thrilled — before a theatrical release that, if you're like me, came a bit too early in the year for a return to the big-screen experience. Fortunately, The Sparks Brothers has made its way to Netflix. And that, rather than Wright's new Last Night in Soho, will probably be central to my weekend viewing plans.

Creepy to the Max

If I'm not watching The Sparks Brothers this weekend, I'm streaming some scary movies. And it isn't exactly like I want to be plugging HBO Max here, but they've got an astonishing assortment of creepy offerings going as far back as Fritz Lang's The Testament of Dr. Mabuse and Carl Dreyer's Vampyr and Tod Browning's Freaks through an assortment of Hammer horror favorites starring Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee. If you like your horror more countercultural, HBO Max has The Night of the Living Dead and several early David Cronenberg nightmares including Rabid and The Brood. And yes, the service has my favorite scary movie, Tobe Hooper's Poltergeist . Other services certainly have their own seasonal selections — the original Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Browning's Dracula are on Tubi, The Babadook, Halloween and The Exorcist are on AMC+, and Amazon has The Descent, Midsommar and The Omen. AMC+ also has Scream, which lets me recommend Ashley Cullins' terrific Scream oral history.

This Week's THR Staff Pick 

Senior copy editor Lisa de los Reyes raves, "I would definitely recommend Hulu’s Only Murders in the Building for a gore-free Halloween marathon binge — or any other time, really. Falling somewhere between Dateline and the movie Clue on the suspense-comedy spectrum, it follows NYC condominium dwellers Charles (Steve Martin), Oliver (Martin Short) and Mabel (Selena Gomez), a ragtag group of true-crime podcast aficionados investigating the death of neighbor Tim Kono (Julian Cihi), with whom they happened to share an elevator ride just before he killed himself … or did he? Sure, you want to know who killed Tim Kono (the list of suspects includes both legendary singer Sting and a cat — really, a cat), but you also can’t wait to get to the bottom of the secrets everyone — especially the enigmatic Mabel — is keeping."