The name “Mesopotamia” derives from a Greek term meaning “land between the rivers.” The Royal Ontario Museum’s latest major exhibit, which opens on June 22, takes this literally, as visitors flow between painted representations of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers on the floor.

Presented by the British Museum and rounded out with pieces from institutions in Chicago, Detroit, and Philadelphia, Mesopotamia: Inventing Our World covers 3,000 years of human development in the cradle of urban civilization. Most of the 170 artifacts on display have never been shown in Canada.

There are a lot of chefs in the kitchen for the Canadian premiere of Sarah Ruhl’s Passion Play, a triptych set in three time periods that tells the stories of amateur actors (played by real actors) involved in staging performances of the story of Christ. Three different Toronto independent theatre companies, all with reputations for innovative staging and creation in their past work, each tackle one of the three acts. Ordinarily, such a complicated arrangement would be to a show’s detriment, but not in this case. While you need to be prepared for a marathon of theatre (the show runs four hours, incluing two intermissions), you’re certainly going to get your money’s worth.

“A cross between Woodstock and the Algonquin Round Table,” is what Michael Redhill called it. Dorothy Parker grinding out an electric cover of “The Star Spangled Banner”? Well, not quite. Rather, Redhill, the literary curator for Luminato 2013, was describing A Literary Picnic, the annual festival’s celebration of storytelling, creativity, and the written word.

The 2013 Toronto Jazz Festival descends on the city this Friday with a huge “free for all” event. That means all of Friday’s programming at every Jazz Festival venue is, yes, completely free of charge. There will be concerts from local favourites Molly Johnson and Mary Margaret O’Hara, plus a show by Smokey Robinson and Martha Reeves, who will be launching the fest from its epicentre, Nathan Phillips Square.

Here’s a rundown of some of the shows worth checking out on Friday—and during the rest of the festival, when you’ll actually have to pay.

Folks who are planning on having a swim in the pool at Scadding Court Community Centre over the next few days may find themselves a little disappointed. Those who want to go fishing, however, will probably be ecstatic.

For the rest of the week, the Community Centre will be holding its annual Gone Fishin’ event, meaning its indoor pool will be an indoor fish pond. The pool has been drained, dechlorinated, and refilled with 2,000 rainbow trout, to be caught by local children and families.

The mystery around this cast photo of “Whodunnit”: which of these people was NOT Photoshopped into the picture?

Monday

World’s Weirdest Restaurants returns for a second season of novelty restaurants you’d never want to eat at. Tonight’s featured restaurant: a German eatery where guests must communicate what they want for dinner to the staff via charades. Yes, that definitely is someplace we wouldn’t want to eat. (Food Network, 9 p.m.)

Don’t Drive Here is a pretty clever idea for a travel/reality show: dude goes to various densely populated third-world cities, learns what traffic is like, and then tries to drive there. Tonight’s episode starts off relatively easy in Delhi, which is just insanely chaotic vis-a-vis its traffic (“Have you ever seen anybody die in traffic?” “Oh yes, many times”), but later episodes will feature the host trying to drive tuk-tuks and motorcycle taxis as opposed to just cars. Don’t know if there’s more than one season’s worth of fun here, but that’s enough for now. (Discovery, 10 p.m.)

Tuesday

It’s the live finale of The Voice, and this year’s finalists include two of Blake Shelton’s country protégés: the quite-decent Swon Brothers (the first duo to advance to the finals) and the 16-year-old, might-be-good-in-a-decade-but-why-is-she-a-finalist-right-now Danielle Bradbery. This just goes to show that The Voice‘s fanbase is skewing more and more towards country singers. Maybe fellow finalist Michelle Chamuel, rocking the “talented nerd with pipes” schtick and coached by Usher, can sneak up between the middle of the two country acts and eke out a win. (NBC, 9 p.m.)

Wednesday

Tonight’s The West Wing rerun, “In The Shadow of Two Gunmen,” kicked off the second season following the assassination-attempt cliffhanger of the first season. It’s generally considered to be where The West Wing ascends to true greatness. (CTS, 8 p.m.)

Thursday

If you’re in the market for a comic book adaptation that utterly failed in every possible respect, how about The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen? Because it’s a bad movie: horribly shot, horribly directed (Stephen Norrington has not directed anything since), the acting is mostly awful (it’s not for nothing that Sean Connery retired from acting after making this flick), the plot mostly stupid and all the subtleties of the original Alan Moore/Kevin O’Neill comic are shoved in your face and exaggerated to irritating, ridiculous levels. It’s not even fun bad. It is just bad bad. (FX Canada, 7 p.m.)

The Simpsons rerun of the week: “G.I. (Annoyed Grunt),” wherein Homer joins the Army when Bart accidentally enlists. “Yo! I don’t know which one I dig more: Hip-hop, crunk, or serving my country.” Comedy Network, 8:30 p.m.)

Friday

Hey! Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle! We never have anything bad to say about this movie, or indeed any of the Harold & Kumar movies, not even A Very Harold & Kumar 3D Christmas. Really, the franchise resurrected Neil Patrick Harris’s career, and aren’t we all thankful for that? The answer to that question is “yes.” (MuchMusic, 10 p.m.)

The Weekend

Whodunnit? is a reality competition series with an interesting gimmick: the contestants’ challenge each week is to solve a mystery (usually a “murder”). This is the sort of show that could be brilliantly fun or it could be awful, based largely on how difficult the murders are to solve. If they’re too simple, we’ll think the contestants are idiots, and if they’re too hard, we’ll think the contestants are idiots. So basically, appearing on this show is a lose/lose when you get down to it. (CTV, 9 p.m. Sunday)

If you’re sitting around thinking, “man, I wish I had a summer TV series to watch that had a lot of cops in it” then Crossing Lines is your cup of cop tea! This is a show where William Fichtner leads a team of international (almost entirely white) cops to fight international crime, in places like Europe and also other parts of Europe. Donald Sutherland plays the boss of the international cops because he can do what he likes at this point and nobody will say boo about it. (NBC, 9 p.m. Sunday)

CNN premieres Crimes of the Century, leading off with the 2002 DC sniper attacks, so basically this is yet another excuse for CNN to do CNN’s Greatest Hits, because it’s easier for them to do shows about when they were relevant rather than do anything to become relevant again. (9 p.m. Sunday)

Okay, so we haven’t had time to watch practically any of this season of AMC’s Mad Men and have no idea what’s going on. All we know is that there is a character named Bob Benson and people are obsessed with him having some sort of secret, and also during one episode all the characters took drugs and the show got real trippy. Oh, and Pete is now balder than ever, and if we were Vincent Kartheiser we’d be annoyed about having to shave our heads partially to portray “guy balding early,” but then again that’s why Vincent Kartheiser makes the big money, right? (10 p.m. Sunday)

“Well, Inspector Graham, you definitely have a problem this week. Perhaps you need to think LIKE a serial killer. Which of course I have no experience in doing. I’m just saying.”

Monday

The Simpsons rerun of the week: “Treehouse of Horror XI,” which is the one where the dolphins attack Springfield. “Hmm. Bottlenose bruises…blowhole burns…flipper prints. This looks like the work of rowdy teens! Lou, cancel the prom.” (CFMT, 6 p.m.)

The Winner Is… has such a bad title that we think they chose it just to make mockery harder, and we’ll play their game by instead explaining that this show is basically a mash-up of American Idol and Who Wants To Be A Millionaire? The idea is that working-class schlubs compete against one another by singing songs, but are then judged by a crowd of 101 “musical experts” who include critics, DJs, and “YouTube personalities.” Can we just say that the whole “YouTube celebrities” thing is a trend that needed to end yesterday? Or well before yesterday? (Also, in the crowd of experts we think we saw Tay “Chocolate Rain” Zonday. Good to see he’s getting work, we guess.) Anyway, these musical experts will judge the two singers and then give them competing scores, but not identify which singer won the challenge, at which point the singers have to decide if they’ll risk it all and wait for the result, or take some walk-away money. And each song, of course, means more money. So be prepared for a whole lot of “oh, um, this is hard, this is such a tough decision” and other such sweet nothings. (Global, 8 p.m.)

It’s the premiere of Renovation Raiders, which is a radio program audiobook television show about flipping homes repairing homes renovating homes that is totally unlike moderately unlike totally like all the others of its type. (HGTV, 10 p.m.)

Tuesday

Hey, let’s all play “guess what network is airing My Teen Is Pregnant And So Am I: Slice, TLC, or A&E. Well, there are no celebrities, so Slice immediately drops to a distant third. And there’s no wacky or unusual job that is the focus of the show, so that makes A&E distinctly less likely. That leaves TLC! Congratulations if you guessed correctly! Please go to the Torontoist office to get your free tote bag. NOTE: There are in fact no free tote bags. (10 p.m.)

Wednesday

Play It to the Bone is a great little sports movie about rough-mouthed lovable underdogs (directed by the master of sports movies about rough-mouthed lovable underdogs, Ron Shelton) that completely flopped at the box office despite a good story, smart dialogue, good acting (Woody Harrelson, Antonio Banderas, Lolita Davidovich) and wide distribution during its opening weekend. Sometimes good movies bomb at the box office. That’s how it is. The nice thing is that we live in an era when it’s easy to watch them at home. (AMC, 8 p.m.)

Thursday

Here’s a list of shows that have aired fewer episodes than Intervention, which returns for its 14th season tonight: Seinfeld, Night Court, Will & Grace, Scrubs, Star Trek: The Next Generation, Family Ties, Newhart, The Mary Tyler Moore Show, and I Love Lucy. We offer that list in the interest of providing some perspective on how popular this show is. It’s kind of terrifying, really. (A&E, 9 p.m.)

Hannibal got renewed for a second season, because apparently key demographics really like it when Mads Mikkelsen smirks knowingly because he’s a serial killer and nobody knows he’s a serial killer! (City, 10 p.m.)

Friday

Tonight’s episode of 30 For 30, “Broke,” is a great hour-long documentary about how professional athletes make a ton of money and then lose it all because most of them are basically kids who don’t know how to handle money and, worse, trust their friends and families who don’t know how to handle money either. It’s a great piece of documentary filmmaking, much like this entire series mostly is. (TSN, 8 p.m.)

The Weekend

Okay, so there are no Canadian teams playing, but hockey fans must appreciate the fact that we have an Original Six Stanley Cup Playoffs for the first time since 1979, as the Chicago Blackhawks and the Boston Bruins square off in a series that will definitely make hockey fans as obnoxious as all get out because of an endless stream of factoids like the one Televisualist just used. (CBC, 8 p.m. Saturday)

HOW TO PRETEND IT’S 1985: Drink beer from stubby bottles, use the words “radical” and “tubular” without any sense of irony, and watch the Miss USA Pageant, because it’s been that long since it was relevant. (NBC, 9 p.m. Sunday)

Alternately, you can watch the 2013 MuchMusic Video Awards, which somehow became a Massive Thing even as they progressively grew more and more soulless. (MuchMusic, 9 p.m. Sunday)

PICTURED: The Rock, who is host of “The Hero,” and nine people who are not The Rock.

Monday

Tonight is game seven of the NBA Eastern Conference Finals, and the story of this series so far has been “okay, can LeBron James win a playoff series against a top-level team like the Indiana Pacers all by himself when the rest of his team basically is useless” and the answer, apparently, is “about half the time, yes.” Of course, if Dwyane Wade and Chris Bosh and Ray Allen and Shane Battier actually show up like they want to play basketball (which has not been happening), then this game should be a cakewalk for the Miami Heat, but if they don’t, then they just have to rely on the best basketball player alive to win the entire series for them. The scary part is that LeBron James is actually potentially capable of doing this, and this series has been unbelievable as a result. The winner will go up against the San Antonio Spurs, and we’re kind of rooting for the Heat simply because we want to see the best basketball player of his generation go up against the best basketball player of the previous generation (Tim Duncan, who’s 37 and playing like he’s 24). (TSN, 8:30 p.m.)

For all six of you who are deeply invested in the life of former-Hugh-Hefner-girlfriend and now just-a-reality-TV-star-for-no-reason-other-than-being-a-former-Hugh-Hefner-girlfriend Kendra Wilkinson, Kendra On Top premieres. For the rest of you: thank god you aren’t one of those six people! (Slice, 9 p.m.)

Mistresses is basically Desperate Housewives except all the protagonist characters are “other women” cheating with guys who are married. Refreshing racial politics aside (e.g. not treating interracial relationships like they’re somehow scandalous or impressive), we’re curious to see if this show is moralized out of existence in weeks or becomes a smash hit precisely because of all the cheating. It’s a test case! (ABC, 10 p.m.)

Back again: Teen Wolf, which has its own cult following, mostly because it’s about handsome boys who turn into wolves. We’re not saying that that’s a thing, but: it’s a thing. (MuchMusic, 10 p.m.)

Tuesday

America’s Got Talent returns for another round of…talenting? Talentry? Talentosity? Anyway, you know the drill by now: the tryout episodes are the best parts of this show because that’s when the acts are still fresh and new and exciting. So now is when you should watch it, if you’re gonna watch it at all. (City, 9 p.m.)

Returning for a fifth season: The Real Housewives of Atlanta, on Slice of course. Nobody should be shocked by this. (10 p.m.)

Wednesday

Toddlers and Tiaras, season-premiering tonight, seems oddly quaint now in the post-Honey Boo Boo era. Honey Boo Boo was and is the apotheosis of all things toddler-pageant-related and everything else basically pales in comparison. If this show can’t find us a four-year-old meth-addicted pageant competitor, then what is the point of it now, we ask you. (TLC, 9 p.m.)

The Good Buy Girls is a new reality show about women who work on a home shopping channel, so it’s a reality show about people who already work as themselves on television, making it a sort of reality show ouroboros. Go ahead, Wikipedia that reference, we’re not going anywhere. (TLC, 10 p.m.)

Thursday

Be The Boss Canada is the Canadian version of the American reality show wherein franchise employees compete in order to win their very own franchise, which is just another sign that the revolution cannot come soon enough, really. (W, 9 p.m.)

Hey, Slice picked up some reality shows that aren’t just trashy docu-soaps! First, The Hero, which is a competition show wherein The Rock asks contestants to be heroic by having them do stunts and not take bribes and the like. This show was a lot better when it was Who Wants To Be A Superhero? and it was Stan Lee rather than The Rock. (9 p.m.)

Immediately after The Hero you can watch 72 Hours, where people are stranded in the middle of nowhere and have to use survival skills so they can search for hidden caches of money. It’s your standard “let’s do Survivor but more extreme!” type of show. (Slice, 10 p.m.)

Friday

The Simpsons rerun of the week: “She of Little Faith,” wherein Lisa becomes a Buddhist. “Lenny and Carl? You guys are Buddhists?” “Oh, yeah. If I didn’t have inner peace, I’d go completely psycho on all you guys all the time.” (CFMT, 6 p.m.)

The Weekend

This year’s host of the Tony Awards is once again Neil Patrick Harris, and really, you don’t need to know any more than that. (CBS, 8 p.m. Sunday)

So we just got through watching the internet explode over episode 9 of Game of Thrones, and the book-reading contigent of fans is just shaking their heads at all those fans who decided to just stick with watching the TV show so they wouldn’t get spoiled. Oh, you poor little doves. (HBO Canada, 9 p.m. Sunday)

We’re using a pic from the new “Arrested Development” season airing on Netflix because it’s better than anything airing on the channels this week. Also because Ron Howard’s still got it, actorly speaking.

Monday

This season’s The Bachelorette is, like all Bachelorettes, someone who was previously rejected by a Bachelor on The Bachelor. Because as TV has taught us, there is no such thing as a desirable woman who is independently successful. (City, 8 p.m.)

Bakery Boss is just a spinoff of Cake Boss, both of which premiere tonight. Televisualist doesn’t quite understand why TLC always feels the need to program these sorts of shows in blocks like this. Why air new episodes of Cake Boss at the same time as you premiere Bakery Boss? It seems logical that you would want one running new episode at a different time, because they are the same damn show really. We don’t mean to question the wisdom of television executives who have made their careers out of buying American shows and scheduling them (since that is really most of the job these days), but you have to admit there is some logic to the proposition that maybe you don’t want to air all your new episodes of “reality show where a person bakes things” at once. Maybe you spread them out so fans of reality-baking come back over a longer period of weeks. (TLC, Cake season premiere at 9 p.m.; Bakery at 10 p.m.)

Longmire returns for a second season of laconic prairie justice and also Katee Sackhoff. Really, we watch this show because we will watch anything former Starbuck is in. (A&E, 10 p.m.)

Tuesday

Family S.O.S. With Jo Frost is basically just Supernanny all over again, except it’s less “horrible children need discipline” and more “horrible families need therapy.” This is for fans of authoritarians with British accents only, but then again there are an awful lot of those. (TLC, 9 p.m.)

We’re not sure if there was really a market for “what if The Day After was an adventure show” (or, alternately, “what if Jericho was not cancelled and actually had even a smaller budget”) but Nuclear Family is a fun premise for a TV show: after nuclear war, a family flees into the woods and tries to survive in the new dog-eat-dog world. Granted, there’s the usual conspiracy angle to give the show more of an extended and farcical plot (and also to explain why they just don’t die from fallout giving them all radiation poisoning), but it is fun to see Ray Wise be an evil baddie again, and to see Corin “Parker Lewis” Nemec as a male lead for the first time in god knows how long. (FX Canada, 10 p.m.)

Wednesday

The American Baking Competition is your standard theme-week reality show competition series, and for some reason it’s hosted by Jeff Foxworthy, because baking is…redneckish, now? We dunno. (Global, 8 p.m.)

Thursday

The Simpsons rerun of the week: “The Italian Bob,” because it’s a Sideshow Bob episode and Kelsey Grammer makes any Simpsons episode better. “Simpsons, I beg of you: please don’t destroy the new life I’ve created here! Surely even the most heinous criminal deserves a seventh chance.” (Comedy Network, 8 p.m.)

Friday

If you missed out on The Following when it debuted and you want to catch up on the new buzz-worthy, water-cooler-talkin’ series that became a surprise hit despite it being a massively, massively stupid show that makes Two and a Half Men look like Arrested Development (speaking of which, the fourth season of AD airing on Netflix? Is pretty damn good despite the obvious cost cutbacks)—well, you can catch a rerun of the pilot tonight. It’s new to you, as mid-90s NBC commercials might say. (Fox, 9 p.m.)

The Weekend

We’re not sure why The Killing is returning for a third season, because AMC initially cancelled this show (on account of it being terrible) but then they decided to renew it in spite of seemingly everybody hating it and it not having terribly great ratings. Seriously, we have no idea why this show is back. We might hate Two and a Half Men but we know why that gets renewed: tons of people watch it despite it being awful. This show has no excuse. (AMC, 8 p.m. Sunday)

The Women’s Concert for Change “helps raise funds and awareness for female empowerment,” which sounds mostly like not actually anything helpful charity-wise (these days the word “awareness” just raises all sorts of red flags when applied to charitable ventures), but it has a nice selection of performers, including Beyoncé, Florence and the Machine, and John Legend, who is not actually a woman but whom we suppose very much likes them. (NBC, 9 p.m. Sunday)

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)