When telling the story of the Holocaust, one effective way to overcome our sheer inability to comprehend the scope and scale of such atrocities is to zoom in on one or two stories: share one particular experience, in all its brutal specificity, and we have at least a small way into the event—the small details illuminate the larger whole.

One theatre company from the Netherlands, Hotel Modern, takes a related approach in KAMP (CAMP). The production depicts a typical day at the Auschwitz concentration camp, but instead of zooming in into a closeup, it shrinks everything down, literally, into miniature. It’s the accumulation of thousands of small details that has the impact in this case.

Eleanor McMahon thinks it’s time to change the conversation around cycling in Ontario.

McMahon is the founder of the Share the Road Cycling Coalition, who will be hosting the fifth annual Ontario Bike Summit this week in Toronto. She says that we need to stop talking about things like bike lanes and other bicycle infrastructure as a zero sum game between cars and bikes.

“We do polling, and our polling tells us that 89 per cent of Ontarians are both drivers and cyclists,” she says. “The notion that it’s cars versus bikes is overblown, and it’s really not working anymore. Deciding to change the conversation means going out of our way to poke holes in that idea and say from the get go ‘We don’t buy into that philosophy, and just because you say it, doesn’t make it true.’ ”

Is Michael Douglas too fabulous as Liberace? Trick question: there is no such thing.

Monday

For your Victoria Day viewing pleasure: it’s the Indiana Jones trilogy! Yes, we said “trilogy.” We don’t know of any Indiana Jones movies that have aliens or something in them. That would be crazy. (MovieTime, Raiders of the Lost Ark at 6:30 p.m., Temple of Doom at 9 p.m., Last Crusade at 11:30 p.m.)

The Goodwin Games is the new offering from the creators of How I Met Your Mother. It has a suitably wacky premise: adult siblings reunite when their father dies and leaves them a video will that sets out a contest to see who inherits his massive estate. It has a strong cast (Scott Foley, TJ Miller, Becki Newton, Beau Bridges) and a decent pedigree, and the pilot is fun. Worth a try. (City, 8:30 p.m.)

Celebrating both its season finale and its hundredth episode: Rules of Engagement. Somehow. (CBS, 8:30 p.m.)

Tuesday

Dancing With The Stars has its finale with a bunch of people you mostly won’t recognize as the remaining finalist stars and we would explain who they are—but really, if you don’t already know, it’s not gonna make you care. (CTV2, 9 p.m.)

Wednesday

MasterChef is back for another round of Slightly Nicer Gordon Ramsay And His Two Other Guys Who Do Cooking Stuff as they bring America’s finest amateur chefs into competition against one another. Hooray for slightly nicer! (CTV, 7 p.m.)

Thursday

Walking the fine line between “clever” and “annoying” is Save Me, a sitcom about Anne Heche having a near-death experience and then becoming a prophet of God. (Or maybe she just thinks she’s a prophet. The show is a bit vague about that, obviously on purpose.) (Global, 8 p.m.)

Walking the fine line between “evil” and “really evil” is Does Someone Have To Go?, a reality show that focuses on employees at a struggling company and has the employees decide who should be fired. We trust that one-line description will make clear how abysmally low Fox has sunk in its reality programming, and remember that this is the network that ran Who Wants To Marry A Multi-Millionaire and Temptation Island, so it’s not like they were exactly falling from grace when they made this show. (Global, 9 p.m.)

Rookie Blue returns for its fourth season of young cops learning as they go, although really, at four years into anything, “rookie” is not that applicable a term any more. But Relatively Experienced Blue doesn’t sing as a title, so. (Global, 10 p.m.)

Friday

The Simpsons rerun of the week: “Coming to Homerica,” wherein Homer forms a border patrol group to prevent desperate workers from Ogdenville from entering Springfield. “Men, our negative energy has been harnessed to help keep Springfield’s borders secure from Ogdenvillians. But first, our group needs a name that evokes America’s proud history of citizens rising up to defend our way of life.” “The Klan?” (CFMT, 6 p.m.)

The Weekend

Rowan Atkinson’s performance as Mr. Bean was strongly influenced by French comic actor Jacques Tati’s Mr. Hulot, who first appeared in Mr. Hulot’s Holiday in 1953. That film airs tonight. It mostly holds up, because there’s quite a bit of slapstick involved, and it’s not like this is on TV regularly, so give it a shot. (TVO, 9:40 p.m. Saturday)

Smash is cancelled, but tonight you can watch the last two episodes ever of what was once called “Glee for grownups” but was in fact “Glee for people with even lower standards than people who watch Glee.” (NBC, 9 p.m. Sunday)

HBO’s centerpiece original dramatic film for this summer is Steven Soderbergh’s Liberace biopic Behind the Candelabra, which (interestingly) premieres at Cannes in theatres before it begins its television run on HBO and therefore is technically eligible for the Oscars. The film itself is an interesting dramedy, with Michael Douglas playing Liberace very broadly (and of course getting all the best lines), and Matt Damon carrying most of the dramatic heft as Liberace’s boyfriend Scott Thorson. We’re not quite sure if we want to call it “great” yet—it merits a rewatch—but it’s definitely good. (HBO Canada, 9 p.m. Sunday)

Something something beet farm something something vague reference to ancestors being weird racists something something Star Trek. We’ll miss you, Dwight.

Monday

Fans of The West Wing who do not already own the entire series on DVD and are STILL waiting for the Blu-Ray edition (HURRY UP ALREADY, BLU-RAY PEOPLE) can enjoy that the show, currently airing daily on CITS, has looped around so the pilot episode airs tonight. Everybody else should just watch The West Wing, because come on already. This is an obvious starting point. (8 p.m.)

How I Met Your Mother concludes its eighth season, which has actually been sort of a rebound season for the show after a relatively lacklustre seventh. At the same time, it looks forward to the ninth (and announced-to-be-final) season. At this point it’s traditional for someone to complain that the identity of the mother cannot possibly live up to all of time spent building it up, but that argument is wrong because the show has never been, really, about the buildup to meeting someone, but rather the transition from post-adolescence to adulthood and how it can be joyful and shitty and everything else all at once. Also, we hope Sarah Michelle Gellar plays the mother when the mother finally shows up, because that would be kinda awesome. (City, 8 p.m.)

Tuesday

Golden Boy concludes its first and only thirteen-episode season. If you didn’t watch this show about a young cop who is fated to become the youngest police commissioner of New York City in history, congratulations. Many people also didn’t. At best this show is drawing Mad Men numbers, and CBS doesn’t screw around with Mad Men numbers. Frankly, the show was not a Mad Men–level show, anyway. (CTV, 8 p.m.)

So You Think You Can Dance rushes into its tenth season—so much so that the pilot episode, rather than being titled after a city as is usual, is simply titled “Audition City No. 1.” Next week, to fit in with this new “generic-ness” strategy, they’ll change the title of the show to Dancing Show, and the judges will all wear bland zentai suits. (CTV2, 8 p.m.)

New Girl and The Mindy Project end their second and first seasons, respectively, and both are likely renewals despite moderately low ratings. That’s good, because if you haven’t been watching these shows this season, they’re probably the strongest back-to-back comedy block currently airing on TV (at least now that 30 Rock‘s ending has halted the brilliant Rock/Parks and Recreation block). So basically you should watch them, is what we’re saying. (City, 9 and 9:30 p.m.)

The Simpsons rerun of the week: “How I Wet Your Mother,” wherein the Simpson family enters into Homer’s dreams in order to make a lot of Inception references. (This week is not a particularly strong one for Simpsons reruns.) “In my dreams, I’m an intermediate skier!” (Fox, 11 p.m.)

Wednesday

Tonight is the final competition episode of American Idol, and the final episode where Randy Jackson will be judging the show, because, after 12 years, he has decided to take his talents (saying “dawg” and complaining that a singer is “pitchy”) to the wider free market. Also, there are probably some singers or something competing for the million dollars. Does the winner of this show still get a million dollars? We have no idea. (CTV2, 8 p.m.)

Thursday

And now we come to the end of The Office, which also had sort of a rebound season this year—albeit one that worked because it transitioned more firmly into dramedy, following Jim and Pam working out the kinks in their marriage, rather than returning to the inspired lunacy that worked so well in the early years. Anyway, in many ways last week’s hour-long episode was the actual finale (as it concluded with the Office people watching the documentary of themselves that finally got finished) and now this is the “six months later” final epilogue, which is an hour long for some reason, but at least we get to see some Steve Carell, right? (NBC, 9 p.m.; there’s also a retrospective special at 8 p.m.)

Elementary concludes and…well, it’s been good? There are certainly some aspects of this show that we aren’t fond of (jumping into Moriarty with the very first sweeps, for example—it would have been nice to save that for later on, but we guess a Sherlock Holmes TV show has to hit all the points required by fans as soon as possible or risk cancellation), but the core of the show, the relationship between Lucy Liu’s Watson and Jonny Lee Miller’s Sherlock, works quite well (even if we still think the actors would excel in each other’s roles), and that’s the most important thing. (Global, 9 p.m.)

Friday

Star Trek: Secrets of the Universe is a special about how the science of Star Trek would work (or not). And it is airing on History Television, because why not. (8 p.m.)

The Weekend

The season finale of Doctor Who is titled “The Name of the Doctor,” and the show has been hinting all season that the Doctor’s name is the big reveal for this season, but A) who really cares and B) it’s fun because he’s just called “the Doctor,” so we’re betting they don’t actually reveal it. (Space, 8 p.m. Saturday)

In the Flesh debuted a couple of months ago on the BBC and Space is getting it now. The premise is that the zombie uprising happened, they found a sort-of-cure for zombieism that allows suffers of “Partially Deceased Syndrome” to live normal lives and prevent them from going “rabid” again, but there is understandably a lot of anti-zombie sentiment after all those massacres. Clever premise. The show itself is decent. (Space, 10 p.m. Saturday)

The 2013 Billboard Awards air this weekend, and will help us all celebrate those most under-recognized individuals: multimillionaire musicians. (ABC, 8 p.m. Sunday)

All-Star Celebrity Apprentice concludes, with Penn Jillette and Trace Adkins being the last two Celebrity Apprentices competing for Donald Trump’s approval. So, yeah, fuck all of these people, really. (Global, 9 p.m. Sunday)

This is true: Cochran (centre) accurately defined the Monty Hall problem this season on “Survivor” and became our favourite Survivor ever for just that reason. (Because we’re nerds.)

Monday

So tonight is game three of the first-round NHL playoff series between the Toronto Maple Leafs and the Boston Bruins. The Leafs have tied up the series at 1-1, and their win no doubt led to all sorts of Toronto notables making bets with Bostonians about the playoff outcome, all of which have been met with “yeah, we just had a bombing here, maybe next year, okay” and really, can you blame them? (CBC, 7 p.m.)

In other Toronto sports news, the Blue Jays, who are playing Tampa Bay tonight, are 11-21 and are the third-worst team in baseball and HA HA HA HA HA THIS IS WHAT BEING A SPORTS FAN IN TORONTO IS LIKE SO MUCH OF THE TIME. (Sportsnet, 7 p.m.)

If you aren’t a sports person (and given Toronto’s sports teams, that seems like a definite possibility), The Voice has progressed to the “live playoffs,” which are the first bits where viewers actually get to vote. As always, the contestants by this point are a terrifically skilled lot, and Usher and Shakira have proven themselves to be entertaining coaches/judges (we already knew Adam Levine and Blake Shelton’s aggro-bromance wouldn’t fail to be fun). So this is good. (CTV, 8 p.m.)

Tuesday

We’re going to lay odds that Constitution USA With Peter Segal, PBS’ new series about the history of the Constitution, will within two episodes cause at least four online political communities to accuse Peter Segal and PBS of bias, treason, or both. (9 p.m.)

The Simpsons rerun of the week: “Mypods and Broomsticks,” which is mostly a toothless late-season Simpsons but does feature the brutally vicious introduction of Mapple to the Simpsonsverse in a scene that reminds you of what The Simpsons used to be like. “I see you’re admiring our MyCube. It’s fueled by dreams and powered by imagination.” “What does it do?” “You should ask yourself: what can I do for it?” (CFMT, 6 p.m.)

Wednesday

Karma’s A B-tch!, a show where wronged women get back at their cheating bastard husbands, is proof of two things: firstly, along with the late and lamented Don’t Trust The B—- In Apartment 23, it proves that television people really want to use the word “bitch” in show titles; and secondly, that if you just handed Slice’s network programmers a stack of old Best of the Jerry Springer Show videotapes, they would treat it like the Lost Ark. (9 p.m.)

Thursday

Community concludes yet another season hovering on the brink of cancellation but still with decent odds of being renewed simply because NBC has so few shows that have any audience whatsoever. (City, 8 p.m.)

Returning for its annual summer engagement: Wipeout. Because deep down, you just want to see people do spectacular pratfalls into swiming pools, and that is okay. (ABC, 8 p.m.)

Friday

“The One With All The Poker” is probably the first of the truly great episodes of Friends (and if you’re one of the haters who says no such things exist, you are bad and wrong). The very best episodes were either the bottle episodes featuring all six characters bouncing off one another and continually upping the ante, or the ones with the most openly sentimental endings. “Poker” has both. (TVTropolis, 8 p.m.)

Vegas comes to an end, and did anybody watch this show? We don’t even know any critics who watched this show. (Global, 9 p.m.)

The Weekend

Concluding this weekend with the usual two-hour finale-plus-reunion show: Survivor, which has presented us with an uncommonly strong season. The triple-immunity surprise play by Malcolm served up one of—if not the single best—tribal councils ever, which was immediately followed by Malcolm failing to find the second immunity idol and his immediate ouster. Shortly thereafter, when Erik found that idol and gave it (for reasons still unknown) to Andrea, Andrea decided that it was time to start blindsiding her biggest threats—which in turn caused Cochran to grow concerned and arrange her blindside, and now it appears that Cochran may be in trouble. All of this, of course, is all the sweeter because at every tribal council you get to watch poor eliminated Phillip, who is still clearly raging on the inside over being voted out, and that is delicious. (Global, 8 p.m. Sunday)

Family Tree is what happens when HBO decides to just give Christopher Guest and his buddies a TV show. There are lot of improvised scenes, a lot of Guest regulars (Michael McKean, Ed Begley Jr., Fred Willard, Bob Balaban, etc.), the eminently wise choice of Chris O’Dowd (The IT Crowd, Bridesmaids) as lead, and generally a good old time to be had by all. Recommended. (HBO Canada, 10:30 p.m. Sunday)

“So, wait, they thought people would seriously believe they PLANNED to interrupt a continuing drama right in the middle? Really?” “Apparently so.” (The “Bomb Girls” girls don’t believe this.)

Monday

Bomb Girls concludes tonight, having been cancelled because of dropping ratings. Apparently Global’s strategy—”delay the show to make room for simulcasts of American shows and then claim to have done that on purpose”—didn’t quite work, on account of that is a terrible, terrible strategy (you don’t see AMC interrupting Mad Men), but then again at least fans got two seasons of the show. (9 p.m.)

The Following also concludes, and, unlike with Bomb Girls, Canadians will get to see a second season of this unbelievably stupid, stupid show, which has caught its share of zeitgeist thanks to some good acting on the part of James Purefoy and Kevin Bacon. It’s otherwise so dumb it makes a Jim Belushi sitcom look like Twelfth Night. (CTV, 9 p.m.)

Tuesday

Panic Button is a reality show where people try to face their worst fears (e.g. snakes) without pressing the Panic Button, and—man, we only got through 22 words before we ran out of things to say about this show! And that’s counting “e.g.” as a word, which is probably cheating. (Space, 10 p.m.)

If a show about panicking buttons is too abstract for you, perhaps you should watch Ke$ha: My Crazy Beautiful Life, which is pretty self-explanatory in that it is probably about Ke$ha and her crazy beautiful life. (MTV Canada, 10 p.m.)

Wednesday

The Breakfast Club airs in primetime, and you know what that means: time to edit out all of the “fucks” in the dialogue! “No, Dad, what about you? / Freak you. / No, Dad, what about you? / Funk you! / NO, DAD, WHAT ABOUT YOU? / FLICK YOU!” (AMC, 8 p.m.)

The Family Tools has a solid lineup of talent (J.K. Simmons, Leah Remini, Edi Gathegi) backing up another sitcom starring Kyle “Worst Week” Bornheimer as another guy with insanely bad luck trying to fix a relationship with a male authority figure. Maybe this time it will not be awful! (CTV2, 8:30 p.m.)

Thursday

It’s the season finale of Big Brother Canada! We have no idea what happened, so instead we’re just going to make it up. See, first Daequan created an alliance within the house of himself, Timothy, and Alicia, but then Alicia backstabbed the alliance to team up with the twins, Herschel and Roberta—but then the man known only as Savage went on a killer competition streak! In the end, someone was stabbed to death. (Slice, 9 p.m.)

Weed Country is interesting because it’s a docu-reality show about marijuana growers and the police who try to catch them, which means it’s a show that explicitly uses law enforcement’s generally tepid response to marijuana in order to be able to exist on an ongoing basis. (Discovery Channel, 10 p.m.)

Friday

The Simpsons rerun of the week: “Dangerous Curves,” which is a flashback episode from late in the series’ run focusing on the early years of Homer and Marge’s marriage. “How many times must I say I’m sorry?” “You haven’t said you’re sorry.” “I know. I was hoping the number would be zero.” (Comedy Network, 8:30 p.m.)

The Weekend

So, Anthony Bourdain: Parts Unknown is pretty much exactly what you expect out of every Anthony Bourdain travel show: some snark from Bourdain, some interesting local activities, and so on. Not so much with the cuisine this time around, but still, it’s an interesting travel show. That doesn’t explain why it’s on CNN, although we expect that CNN is trying to remake itself into a lifestyle channel. Can Wolf Blitzer give us all helpful cooking tips better than he can report the news? Answer: yeah, probably. (9 p.m. Sunday)

The Amazing Race concludes after a really solid season, with the unofficial Team Canada (Bates and Anthony) having established a solid leading presence (and the thoroughly annoying Max and Katie having run a very solid race as well, even winning the most recent leg). Thankfully, Megan and Joey, the grating team of “Youtube celebrities” (still a phrase we think oxymoronic) got eliminated most recently, so the finale will not feature them, making it instantly 1,000 per cent better. (CTV, 8 p.m. Sunday)

The “Happy Endings” Caption Guy soon fell into a depression, claiming he “had peaked” with the Dave caption. He was replaced by a caption robot three months later and eventually took his own life in shame. (Luckily, Torontoist can’t yet afford a caption robot.)

Monday

The Simpsons rerun of the week: “Dial N for Nerder,” wherein Bart and Lisa believe they’ve killed Martin Prince. “Martin Prince was known by many names. Martin Priss, Martin Princess, Fartsin Prince, Martin the Brown-Nose Reindeer…” (CFMT, 6 p.m.)

Last Car Standing is exactly the sort of reality competition show that the Discovery Channel—which for a long time now has been our measuring stick for non-terrible docudrama reality shows—should be airing. Each episode is a competition between terrible, beat-up cars to see which is the “best beater.” So it’s really more of an investigation into which old cars have held up the best than anything else. The show is sort of a new-age spin on classic shows like Junkyard Wars. The first episode features a 1996 Dodge Stratus, a 1991 Honda Accord, a 1992 Volvo Wagon, a 1996 Chrysler Sebring convertible, and a 1997 Cadillac Catera. Our money is on the Honda, because you just can’t kill those things. They are the cockroaches of cars. If you liked cockroaches and cockroaches were useful, that is. (10 p.m.)

Tuesday

Returning for a ninth season of documenting the lives of people involved in an industry in sharp decline: Deadliest Catch, which is called that because Fisherman Subsidies would have been too on the nose. After all, this season’s “plot” is that last season’s catch really sucked for all of the ships and they “need to make a comeback.” Like this was boxing, instead of exploiting a severely strained resource or something like that. (Discovery Channel, 10 p.m.)

Wednesday

The finale of the tenth season of Top Chef airs tonight, assuming you didn’t watch it two months ago when it originally aired in the United States and then made it onto the internet. It’s a good finale, though, and the first all-female one in Top Chef history, so it’s even a little bit noteworthy. It was a lot more noteworthy back in February, but of course Canadian cable networks get a discount if they air programs after the fact, and it’s not like they’re run by massively powerful and wealthy media conglomerates or anything. (Food Network Canada, 10 p.m.)

Thursday

This week’s season finale of The Nature of Things is a feature about Chris Hadfield: Canadian astronaut, national hero, and future-Member-of-Parliament-if-he-wants-to-be (let’s just admit it). (CBC, 8 p.m.)

Texas Car Wars is a new reality show that’s sort of a hybrid competition and drama, since it’s about competing custom mechanic shops trying to bid on, rebuild, and flip classic cars. In other words, the show relies both on the competitive rebuild process as well as the personalities of the mechanics. The good news is that it’s a fun show that has a good process on which to build its “stories.” The bad news is that the narrator is too strongly reminiscent of Waylon Jennings on The Dukes of Hazzard and you keep waiting for Boss Hogg to show up. (Discovery, 8 p.m.)

Utopia debuted earlier this year in the U.K. and quickly found an audience for its “people find a conspiracy buried in a comic book” plot and clever (even daring) writing. The show has solid actors (as most British shows tend to) and works smartly around its low budget (as most British shows have to). And since it’s only a six-episode commitment for the full season, the first episode will let you know sooner rather than later if you want to make this a weekly thing. (Space, 10 p.m.)

Friday

Happy Endings concludes its third season of being royally screwed by its network, as ABC has taken to burning off episodes of the critically acclaimed comedy two at a time on Friday nights. It seems unlikely that the show will return for a fourth season on ABC (although it is possible). More probable is the show jumping to a cable network like USA and continuing to air, albeit with a lower production budget. Which better not conflict with Max’s next Mandonna reunion! (City, 8 p.m.)

The original 1970s Gone In 60 Seconds got some attention about a decade ago when it was remade with Nicolas Cage and Angelina Jolie. The remake was bad, because it managed to be a movie about stealing cars that had only one good car chase. The original (airing tonight) is essentially one great, very long car chase—after you wait through some very long, boring stretches of low-budget movie. Tune in at about the hour mark. (Spike, 8 p.m.)

The Weekend

It’s the Canadian Video Game Awards! Did you know those existed and were televised? We did not know this! (City, 9 p.m. Saturday)

Mr. Hockey: The Gordie Howe Story is CBC’s high-profile biopic about Howe’s return from retirement to play in the World Hockey Association in the 1970s with his sons Mark and Marty. Michael Shanks of Stargate: SG-1 plays Gordie Howe, which we would not have expected because, come on, it’s Guy From Stargate. (8 p.m. Sunday)

“Man, this sure looks ominous. I wish I wasn’t trapped in a time loop that made causality into a cruel joke.” (From “Continuum.”)

Monday

For those interested in seeing how something goes viral—or not—in real time, you may be inclined to tune into WWE RAW tonight, because “Fandangoing” is on the verge of becoming a thing. If you do not know what Fandangoing is, let us explain: the WWE recently debuted a new wrestler called Fandango, whose gimmick is that he is an evil ballroom dancer who insists that his name must be pronounced “Fahn-DAHN-goh.” (“No, no, you’re doing it wrong, you have to let the As breathe.”) This is of course tremendously silly and therefore quite fun, but has little to do with Fandangoing, which is about singing—or, well, musically groaning—Fandango’s cheesy-but-catchy theme. And now it’s starting to catch on. But only just. This is a fascinating look at how memes are born and must then survive in the cruel, harsh world outside their homes. (The Score, 8:15 p.m.)

Defiance is getting a lot of press because it’s a teevee show and a vidya game all at once! It’s a teevee-vidya-game show! The stuff that happens on your teevee will affect the vidya game! The vidya game will tie into the teevee show! It’s synergy, people! Synergy! We ain’t gonna see stuff like this happening again for a long time! (FOR MAXIMUM EFFECT, READ THIS BLURB IN A “SLEAZY HOLLYWOOD PRODUCER” VOICE.) (Showcase, 10 p.m.)

Tuesday

Storage Wars returns for a fourth season of non-ironically profiting off the loss and pain of other people. Whee! They’re like vultures, except less necessary to the ecosystem! (A&E, 9 p.m.)

Also returning: The Real Housewives of Miami, which profits off your loss (of time better spent elsewhere) and pain (when you watch it). Since your participation in this is voluntary, we will go ahead and say that this is slightly more upstanding than what the Storage Wars people do. (Slice, 9 p.m.)

Wednesday

The Toronto Raptors play their last game of the season at home against the Boston Celtics, in a year which, while not outright disastrous, was exceptionally disappointing: the team is battling for a ninth-place finish (against a Philadelphia team that traded away a lot of talent for a star player who spent the entire season injured), has no lottery picks at all this season (since we traded them all away), has no star player (Rudy Gay is not a star player), is carrying enough salary to take it into luxury-tax territory next season, isn’t playing even .500 ball since the Rudy Gay trade, and has played mediocre-to-bad offense and defense all season. The positives are that our rookies this year played reasonably well and Amir Johnson has shown himself to be an excellent player. Unfortunately, there are a lot of people on the team who are not Amir Johnson. Next season looks to be more of the same, most likely, since most Raptors fans are sadly expecting that Bryan Colangelo will continue to keep his job despite the team having missed the playoffs for five straight seasons. (TSN2, 8 p.m.)

The Ron James Show concludes its fourth season of being the CBC’s finest comedy-adjacent show. (CBC, 8:30 p.m.)

Thursday

The Simpsons rerun of the week: “That 90′s Show,” which is mostly interesting because The Simpsons‘ need for a sliding timeline forces them to recast Homer and Marge as coming-of-age in the 1990s and puts Homer in a grunge band with Carl, Lenny, and Apu. “Things happened between your mother and me that we’re not proud of. It was the middle of a wild decade known as the 1990s.” “The ’90s? Never heard of it.” (CFMT, 6 p.m.)

Doc Zone brings us “The Secret World of Gold,” which will be an informative hour-long investigation into who really owns most of the world’s gold. SPOILER: It will not be Mike Myers speaking with a Belgian accent. (CBC, 9 p.m.)

Friday

Slice’s Money Moron is another show about people who spend money stupidly and need a bossy person life coach to set them straight. It is different from all the other shows about this sort of thing because oh wait they didn’t explain that in my press packet. Which they did not send anyway, and really, I was going to trash this show and we all knew it, so I really can’t blame them for not sending a press packet. Well done, Slice. Well done. (9 p.m.)

The Weekend

Continuum comes back for its second season, after a first season where Americans were actually envious of Canadians getting to watch a show that they couldn’t watch for once, which was such a wonderful novelty for dedicated Canadian telly-watchers that we all were in danger of choking on the sheer schadenfreude of it all. Anyway, last season Young Alec managed to read a message from Old Future Alec, and this will apparently affect him in some way. Also—and you will be surprised to hear this—the protagonist did not go out to sea forever and abandon the narrative! Shocking! (Showcase, 9 p.m. Sunday)

What Would Ryan Lochte Do? is a question literally nobody in the history of mankind has ever asked, which is precisely why it is so bold of E! Canada to have asked it. (10 p.m. Sunday)

FUN FACT: Simply including a picture of Jeremy Irons (here pictured in “The Borgias”) in your column makes it 200 per cent classier.

Monday

The NCAA Division 1 Men’s Basketball Championship is decided tonight, as everybody-expected-them-to-win-it-going-in Louisville takes on the University of Michigan in what will certainly be a college basketball game. Interestingly, it’s Michigan that has the higher-profile players. Their point guard, Trey Burke, is likely to be a lottery pick in this year’s NBA draft, and the team also features Glenn Robinson III (son of two-time NBA all-star Glenn “the Big Dog” Robinson) and Tim Hardaway Jr. (son of five-time NBA all-star Tim Hardaway), whereas Louisville has nobody particularly famous and is still favoured to win. (CBS, 8 p.m.)

Tonight on The Agenda: Steve Paikin and company discuss the pluses and minuses of building a casino in Toronto. We eagerly await seeing what the pluses are, other than “someplace to legally play blackjack at 2 a.m. when you just really, really need to play some blackjack.” (TVO, 8 p.m.)

Perfect Storms is History Television’s new show about gigantic storms of history, and—wait, this is actually a show about history on History Television! Somebody alert the media! Wait, we are the media! Somebody alert everybody else—wait, that’s our job! It’s all coming together, people! (9 p.m.)

Tuesday

AMC airs Kingdom of Heaven tonight, and, judging by the run time, it’ll be the edited-for-theatres cut, which is not great, because it cuts the full version to shreds and makes a lot of the movie not make sense. This is a shame, because the full version of the movie (which you can watch on DVD or Blu-ray) is really quite good. Watch that one instead. It’s just over three hours with no commercials, rather than AMC’s edited version, which will be three hours with lots of commercials. (8 p.m.)

Ready For Love dares to ask the burning question: will women sign up to be contestants on a game show where they’ll have to compete to date a a rich, good-looking guy? Oh, wait, we all already knew the answer to that because The Bachelor has been around forever. At least Eva Longoria is the host this time. She’s kind of fun, right? (NBC, 8 p.m.)

Chopped All-Stars is fun because it basically takes people from The Food Network and people from The Cooking Channel and forces you to remember which are which. That’s even harder here in Canada, since Food Network Canada airs shows from both networks. (Food Network Canada, 9 p.m.)

Disaster Decks is a show where handymen come and fix up terrible decks. We think this is a misuse of the word “disaster.” Did anybody die on these decks? (As a result of the decks themselves, we mean, rather than just your garden-variety “somebody got murdered on this deck,” since that wouldn’t be the deck’s fault.) (HGTV, 10 p.m.)

Wednesday

Over on Survivor, post-tribal-merge, things are rapidly becoming interesting. Last week’s attempted blindside by Corinne failed miserably and got her booted, mostly because Corinne is an idiot. (When Phillip came to her and suggested splitting the vote in order to eliminate one of two members of her secret alliance, Corinne should have simply said “okay” and then gotten all of her alliance to vote for Phillip, but we guess Corinne didn’t ever master skills like “counting.”) In the process she revealed the entirety of Malcolm’s secret alliance, which leaves Malcolm vulnerable—except, of course, that his alliance has not one but two immunity idols among them, and they only have to strip away one vote from the existing alliance and they’ll be back on top anyway. And also Malcolm, unlike Corinne, is not a damned idiot. But mostly we’re watching because Cochran’s interviews this year are the best thing ever. He’s awesome. (Global, 8 p.m.)

Thursday

The Moment is a reality show where normal everyday folks get to live their dreams from when they were younger. So basically it’s Thrill of a Lifetime. Except not made here. It’s just aired here, because that’s much cheaper for Canadian networks. Also, the hair is better now. (Bravo!, 10 p.m.)

Friday

The Simpsons rerun of the week: “Margical History Tour,” which is one of those “let’s do three vignettes with the Simpsons cast telling stories from other settings” episodes, this time doing historical stories. “Mom, everyone who ever lived is boring.” (Comedy Network, 8:30 p.m.)

The Weekend

So this current run of Doctor Who is getting nerds all hepped up because they don’t like the new companion (who is, apparently, a manic pixie dream girl) and because they don’t like Steven Moffat’s take on the Doctor (you can find all sorts of long essays about it, most of which can be summarized as “it’s not like it was when I was a kid and that is wrong”). Us, we think it’s good enough as Doctor Who goes, so maybe we are not nerding properly. We don’t know. (Space, 8 p.m. Saturday)

Best Ink returns, because there needed to be a competition show for tattoo artists. If it got cancelled there would be a void in our competition show universe. At some point they’ll figure out a way to do a competition show for “being pointlessly snarky on the internet” and then watch out, world, because that is our ticket to the big time. (MuchMoreMusic, 9 p.m. Sunday)

Back for its third season: The Borgias, which has long since surpassed The Tudors (not that doing this was hard, considering that The Tudors was awful), mostly because, come on, it has Jeremy Irons in it, so how are you surprised it’s good? Seriously, do we have to hold your hand for all of this stuff?. Okay, yes, he was also in Dungeons and Dragons, we admit that, but one would think the lack of dungeons and/or dragons in this instance would be a tip-off that this is a classier work than the one where Jeremy Irons played an evil wizard. (Bravo, 10 p.m. Sunday)

CORRECTION: April 9, 2:00PM The post previously stated that The Borgias was airing on Showcase, when, in fact, it will be airing on Bravo. The correction has been made above.

“Is not our unconventional family filled with love?” “Yes, but not as far as attractive marketing demographics are concerned.” (Screencap from The New Normal.)

Monday

The New Normal concludes its first season, which may or may not be its only season as the ratings have been not terribly great, to say the least. But then again this is an NBC show, and NBC these days is thrilled if the audience for a show consists of three teenagers and a cute puppy, and The New Normal reaches at least two teenagers and a scrappy mutt with character, so it is accordingly on the bubble. (CTV, 8:30 p.m.)

Tuesday

It’s the Blue Jays season opener, and fans are excited—baseball fans because the Jays look to be a strong team this year that can legitimately push for the playoffs, and sports fans in general because “Toronto sports team” and “competitive” are two concepts that traditionally are not chocolate and peanut butter, if you follow. Anyway, they’re hosting the Indians at Rogers Centre. (Sportsnet, 7 p.m.)

The Rick Mercer Report and This Hour Has 22 Minutes both have their season finales tonight, which is convenient because there will be no more news until they premiere again in the fall. Yes, we know we make this joke every time these shows debut and conclude, but tough. Jon Stewart’s breaks are a week or two every three or four months and then he goes right back to work. Suck it up, hosers! (CBC, 8 p.m. and 8:30 p.m. respectively)

Donut Showdown is an improperly-spelled cooking competition show about doughnuts. They’re spelled that way because doughnuts are fried dough, you see. Anyway, expect a lot of fancy gourmet doughnuts, many of which you will never want to eat. (Our over/under on foie gras doughnuts for the season is five.) (Food Channel, 10 p.m.)

Wednesday

We’re going to give How to Live with Your Parents (For the Rest of Your Life) a chance, because it stars Sarah Chalke, and we love Sarah Chalke, and the cast also features Brad Garrett, Elizabeth Perkins, and Orlando Jones, who are all also very good at the acting and the comedic-ness. It has Jon Dore in it, and Televisualist historically is not strongly pro-Jon Dore, but we’re willing to keep an open mind given that it’s likely he won’t be writing his own lines. (City, 9:30 p.m.)

TLC brings back My Crazy Obsession because money. (10 p.m.)

Thursday

Some might call Hannibal a desperate ratings grab by NBC, but those people are cynics! Cynics! Just because Mads Mikkelsen plays Hannibal Lecter before anybody knew he was crazy as the creepiest person imaginable (he is even wearing A CREEPY LOOKING SUIT) in no way makes this otherwise bog-standard procedural show predictable as all get out. We don’t think even Laurence Fishburne can save this show, and that says something. (City, 10 p.m.)

Friday

The Simpsons rerun of the week: “Husbands And Knives,” the one with Jack Black as a rival comic book store guy, and featuring Alan Moore and Dan Clowes in vocal cameos. “Yeah, yeah, whatever. Do you know anyone at Batman? ‘Cause I really want to draw Batman. I’m awesome at utility belts. Check these out. This is where the Batman keeps his money in case he has to take the bus.” (CFMT, 6:30 p.m.)

The Weekend

March Madness continues, and at this point most of the underdogs have been shaken out and the overdogs (are there such things, in fact, as overdogs?) have mostly reasserted themselves: Louisville were the favourites going into this tournament and they have pounded their opponents throughout, and neither Michigan nor Syracuse is a tremendous surprise in the Final Four either. The lone outlier remaining is Wichita State, who already dropped highly favoured Gonzaga earlier in the tournament, but of course that means they’re up against the Louisville juggernaut. (CBS, Louisville/Wichita State 6 p.m. Saturday, Michigan/Syracuse 8:30 p.m. Saturday)

It’s the 48th Annual Academy of Country Music Awards! Hosted by Blake Shelton, who really should do all the country music hosting for all the country music awards. Anyway, Televisualist always mentions the country music awards shows (all seventeen of them every year) because they are, as music awards shows go, the best of the lot: a lot of music, some nice speeches and a minimum of stupid awards-show bullshit. Many music awards shows could stand to follow this template. (CTV, 8 p.m. Sunday)

Oh yeah, just look at him, exuding power and intelligence like that. No way does Tywin Lannister go the way of a Gonzaga or Georgetown! (No, we haven’t read the books—why are you looking at us like that?)

Monday

The Voice returns for its fourth season, minus Cee-Lo Green and Christina Aguilera, who are both taking a season off to do other things. Their fill-ins are Usher and Shakira, and hopefully neither of them will be bad. Other than that, it’s The Voice, so you know what you’re gonna get: a singing competition show with less bad “comedy” moments than American Idol and more overall talent. (CTV2, 8 p.m.)

PBS debuts 180 Days: A Year Inside An American High School, and because just any high school would not necessarily be a great documentary feature, the school in question is Washington Metropolitan High School, so the filmmakers can review the school-reform movement in depth and watch the requisite fighting young principal trying to improve the lives of her poor students. (9 p.m.)

Tuesday

The Simpsons rerun of the week: “C.E. D’Oh,” where Homer becomes CEO of the nuclear power plant by freeing the canary that Mr. Burns technically named owner of the plant. Interestingly, this is one of the few “d’oh”-themed Simpsons episode titles that doesn’t refer to the “d’oh” as “(Annoyed Grunt).” “Unlike Mr. Burns, I will respect you, the working-class slob, because we are all equals! And now, as I ascend this crystal staircase to my office, I say-avert your gaze!” (Comedy Network, 8:30 p.m.)

Wednesday

Hey, did you watch The Neighbors, ABC’s sitcom about aliens living among us? Neither did we. But it’s getting renewed. The moral of this story is that there are people out there who will watch things you don’t watch. Which, come to think, explains much of television. Isn’t it amazing when we apply these little life lessons to other areas of life? Try it and see! It’s an amazing thing, we promise. (8:30 p.m.)

The Real World: Portland is in Portland, Oregon. Not Portland, Maine. This is awfully important if you spend fifteen minutes trying to find amusing facts about Portland, Maine, for a TV-column-entry-factoid sort of a thing, and then have to give up because there is quite literally nothing interesting about Portland, Maine, and then you realize it’s actually set in Portland, Oregon, and you could have just spent three or four sentences doing cheap hipster jokes for easy applause. (MTV Canada, 10 p.m.)

Thursday

1600 Penn comes to an end this week, and, unlike The Neighbors, is likely not coming back. The second moral of this week, therefore, is that TV shows that get cancelled are cancelled because they did not have enough aliens in them. (NBC, 9:30 p.m.)

Friday

This week brings the season finale of Transporter: The Series, which stars Not Jason Statham as the Transporter. Every episode of this series is the same: the Transporter has a set of rules that he never breaks, because if you’re going to be a criminal for hire you have to have rules, and then he breaks the rules anyway because of Reasons and kicks people in the face and shoots them and stuff. This is either the worst show ever or the best show ever. We are undecided. (HBO Canada, 9 p.m.)

The Weekend

Regional finals for the NCAA Division I Men’s Basketball Tournament, AKA “March Madness” are this weekend, and as of this writing a number of high seeds have already been knocked out of the tournament early, most notably South regional division number-two seed Georgetown, which was eliminated in the first round by number-15 Florida Gulf Coast University—which was appearing in the NCAA tournament for the first time. Meanwhile, over in the West regional division, the number-three, number-four, and number-five seeds were all eliminated in the first round, and number-one Gonzaga was eliminated in the second round, so there’s still plenty of competition for the Most Awesome Underdog Story prize this year. (CBS, beginning 4:20 p.m. Saturday and continuing through the weekend)

The Bible comes to an end, suspiciously without retelling the Book of Revelations. Maybe it’ll be a DVD extra or something? Who knows. (History Television, 8 p.m. Sunday)

OH YEAH MOTHERFUCKIN’ GAME OF THRONES SEASON THREE FUCK YEAH WITH DRAGONS AND MAGIC AND NAKED PEOPLE DOIN’ IT AND EVERYTHING! **extended metal riff on electric guitar** (HBO Canada, 9 p.m. Sunday)

You know, now that Brett isn’t doing scathing, vicious caricatures of all the worst things about television every week, we can just put up things that we like instead! Like this shot from The Truman Show. That is art right there, people.

Monday

The Bachelor concludes, but don’t worry—it’ll be back in about six months! You know, like herpes. (CFMT, 8 p.m.)

Gallery Girls is a reality show about seven women trying to make it in the New York art gallery scene and [oh god I'm not going to even watch this but I should mark this bit for later so I can go to a thesaurus, find some appropriate synonyms, and just pretend like I watched it like a real journalist would—remember to delete this bit] but I suppose that’s why they’re on a reality show and we are not. (E! Canada, 9 p.m.)

Tuesday

The Game Show Network is airing The Truman Show tonight, which we suppose is apropos enough even if it’s not their usual thing. We’re mentioning it because the movie really does hold up very well and Jim Carrey really did deserve to be nominated for an Oscar. (8 p.m.)

Hell’s Kitchen is back for yet another season of bumbling nincompoops who can barely figure out how to turn on a burner, Gordon Ramsay shouting, and the horrible Fox house production team, which guarantees that the exact same minute of footage will be shown before and after every commercial break because they think if you see that Kia commercial with the driving hamsters, you will completely forget what you were watching beforehand, as well as “what cooking is,” and just stare at your television in confusion. (City, 8 p.m.)

Meanwhile, as Hell’s Kitchen debuts, The Taste concludes. The season of Anthony Bourdain wanes as Gordon Ramsay waxes. Finalist chefs contend to create the perfect dish while new contestants elsewhere arise to try and boil water properly. The sun rises in the east and sets in the west, and people fall in love. (ABC, 8 p.m.)

19 Kids and Counting: Duggars Do Asia will be exactly what you would expect when a large American fundamentalist Christian family travels abroad. In short: they will stare at things a lot, and the phrase “well, we don’t have this back at home” will be said so often that it will eventually lose all meaning. (TLC, 8 p.m.)

The Simpsons rerun of the week: “Poppa’s Got A Brand New Badge,” wherein Homer forms a private security service with Lenny and Carl. “You know, I’ve had a lot of jobs… boxer, mascot, astronaut, imitation Krusty, baby-proofer, trucker, hippie, plow driver, food critic, conceptual artist, grease salesman, carny, mayor, grifter, bodyguard for the mayor, country western manager, garbage commissioner, mountain climber, farmer, inventor, Smithers, Poochie, celebrity assistant, power-plant worker, fortune-cookie writer, beer baron, Kwik-E-Mart clerk, homophobe, and missionary. But protecting Springfield, that gives me the best feeling of all.” (Comedy Network, 8:30 p.m.)

World’s Worst Tenants returns for a second season of craaaaaaazeeeee tenants. Is there a World’s Worst Landlords? No? Well, there should be. I expect universal agreement on this point, as I cannot be the only renter whose landlord failed to repair a back door for an entire winter and thus was forced to simply duct-tape wood slats over what was supposed to be the fire exit in order to prevent some of the heat from simply going outside. Or the only renter whose landlord refused to give their full name for tax purposes and insisted on cash payments only. Really, I could go on. I’m sure many of you could too. (Spike, 9 p.m.)

Wednesday

Yukon Gold is appropriate fare for History Television because historically people mined gold in the Yukon, so if somebody does it nowadays that is practically, like, Black Creek Pioneer Village, or something like that. (10 p.m.)

Thursday

Similarly, Big Rig Bounty Hunters is historical because the big rig truck was invented in 1898, and that’s history. Also, bounty hunting dates back to the Middle Ages! See? There’s history all over if you know how to look for it! Now, if you will excuse us, we are off to pitch Amazon Mud Wrestlers to History Television, since the Dahomey Amazons really existed and wrestling dates back to Ancient Greece and mud, well, mud has been around practically forever, really. So historical! (10 p.m.)

Friday

The Toronto Raptors host the Charlotte Bobcats tonight, and we will probably win because hey, it’s Charlotte, and they’re the worst team in the league. (Although that did not stop us from losing to Charlotte back in the first month of the season.) Of course, as any Raptors fan can tell you, a potential win like this will not ease the pain of knowing that Bryan Colangelo wants to give Rudy Gay an extension when Gay is one of the most overpaid players in the league and any extension would have to, well, continue overpaying him. But then again, we are talking about the man who is already responsible for three of the worst contracts in the NBA, according to Bill Simmons (Landry Fields, Andrea Bargnani, and Hedo Turkoglu, who he eventually managed to trade away) and apparently just wants to keep adding to that number. Dear Maple Leafs fans: we’re glad you’re having a good season this year, but MLSE fired the wrong Brian. (TSN, 7 p.m.)

The Weekend

Playing With Fire focuses on Derek and Daniel Koch, a pair of twins who are former male models and “nightlife impresarios” (read: Kardashian-class professional partiers), and who have decided they now want to run a high-concept restaurant. But let’s be honest: they’re professional celebrity-rubber-up-againsters, which is why they have a show on E!. (10 p.m. Sunday)