culture
Televisualist: Time-Travel Cyborgs Celebrate Canada Day
Each week, Torontoist examines the upcoming TV listings and makes note of programs that are entertaining, informative, and of quality. Or, alternately, none of those. The result: Televisualist.
And then they travel back in time to prevent the Great Knitter's Rebellion of 2021.
Monday
It’s the 2012 CFL preview, for all those of you who want to know which of the league’s eight teams will win and which of them will lose! And which will throw the football, and which [INSERT CONVINCING SPORTS TROPE HERE SO IT LOOKS LIKE I KNOW WHAT I AM TALKING ABOUT RIGHT AFTER I FINISH THIS SLICE OF PIZZA]. (TSN, 8 p.m.)
The Great Escape: Secrets Revealed has nothing to do with the new reality show which we discussed last week (airing on Showcase), which in turn had nothing to do with the classic movie. Instead, this special is about World War II Allied escapes from German prison camps, such as the massive escape from Stalag Luft III upon which the movie was based. So now we have come full circle. The next show entitled The Great Escape will be about the history of the reality show, and the one after that will be about the prison escape that was inspired by the reality show. After that, it will diverge sharply, and the next show entitled The Great Escape will be about giraffes for some reason. (History Television, 8 p.m.)
Tuesday
The Simpsons rerun of the week: “Bart the Murderer,” wherein Bart works for Fat Tony and then thinks he has inadvertently requested Skinner’s death. “Fat Tony is a cancer on this fair city. And I am the…uh…what cures cancer?” (Comedy Network, 8 p.m.)
Because NBC is starved for content, it is airing the usually-not-televised Olympic trials this summer. Tonight: swimming! See the American Olympic stars of tomorrow, and the people they will beat who will never be in the Olympics, and…well, the pool, we guess. (NBC, 8 p.m.)
Craft Wars is a competitive reality show where “competitive crafters” (which is a thing now?) duke it out to make the most extravagant crap from other crap that could possibly be imagined in order to win $10,000. Hosted by Tori Spelling, who knows from crap. This show is like a summary of everything TLC has become over the past five years. (TLC, 10 p.m.)
Wednesday
This season’s The Real World is set in St. Thomas. Because nothing says “real” like a luxury home in a tropical paradise, with MTV’s unspoken but pretty damn obvious “no more than 25 per cent” quota for visible minorities. REAL. (MTV Canada, 10 p.m.)
Thursday
This week’s Wipeout sets “12 nerdy guys against 12 beautiful women.” This is the second time the show has gone to this well. The moral of the story: the creators of Revenge of the Nerds loom large in our cultural memory. Kubrick, Coppola, Scorcese? Fuck those hacks. They didn’t invent Booger. (Global, 9 p.m.)
Bravo’s strategy of “hey, let’s pick up shows that aired in the States on cable and run them after the fact” occasionally leads to hiccups, like their decision to air The Protector, which got cancelled after one season. We hope Bravo got this Ally Walker vehicle cheaply; we like Walker (she was fantastic in Happy, Texas and Sons of Anarchy), but this show kind of sucked; it’s a bog-standard procedural where the twist is that the cop is—a divorced single mother! Zzzzzzz. (9 p.m.)
So Continuum is getting a lot of buzz in the nerd community for being an original television series about time travel and the ramifications thereof, as well as for its relatively complex politics—the cyborg cop from the future in neo-Vancouver (or whatever) isn’t hunting down criminals but instead violent rebels against a corporate-ruled regime where human rights are no longer guaranteed, and her kid sidekick in the past becomes one of the corporate overlords in the future. Plotwise, the show is very sharp. Acting-wise…okay, it could use a little work. But we’re happy to see a Canadian series get plaudits for being smart and cool, and also happy to see Americans complaining that they can’t watch one of our shows online for once. (Showcase, 9 p.m.)
Awkward. returns for a second season, and we’re quite pleased to see it return; MTV’s high-school sitcom was sharply written and well-acted last year (and Ashley Rickards as the protagonist was all of Ellen Page’s talent minus all of Ellen Page’s baggage—which is not to say that we don’t find Ellen Page wonderful, because we do, but, let’s be honest, having to listen to people complain about Juno for the tenth time gets old real fast). Plus, it’s nice to have a show that’s well-written enough to set up the fat girl as the villain without making her being evil directly because she is fat or making a lot of cheap fat jokes. (MuchMusic, 10 p.m.)
Friday
Tonight in U.S. Olympic trials: gymnastics! Meet the American gymnasts of tomorrow, today! Before they come in second to the Chinese, that is. Which is what’s almost certainly going to happen. Sorry for ruining the Olympics for you! (NBC, 9 p.m.)
The Weekend
It is Canada Day weekend, which means the CBC has a Canada Day special from Ottawa. This year’s musical embodiments of Canadian-ness: Simple Plan, Jully Black, and Feist. We’re not going to snark about those choices. We would have snarked about whatsername who sings the “Call Me Maybe” song, just because we’re sick of that song now. Aren’t you sick of that song, too? (8 p.m. Sunday)
Queen and Country is a reality series about the Queen’s staff and servants and life in the palace and, really, the only reason to watch it is to know, once and for all, that none of the Queen’s servants are as awesome as Alfred, Batman’s butler. Which is to be expected, because the Queen is not as cool as Batman. Really, if Batman were the King of England, there’d be a lot less anti-monarchists around because, come on. Batman. (PBS, 8 p.m. Sunday)
