culture
Televisualist: “The Dramatists” Didn’t Sound as Good
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.
“One of them is old, and the other one has a phone and likes to text and such! The hilarity writes itself!”
Monday
The 2015 NCAA Men’s Division I Basketball Tournament final is tonight, featuring two number 1 seeds—Duke (a.k.a. Always the Worst College Basketball Team With the Worst Fans Whom We Boo) and Wisconsin, who… well, we don’t have a fun nickname for them, but probably something involving cheese. Anyway, the tournament has been full of low-scoring, badly officiated games, but…college basketball! (CBS, 9 p.m.)
Tuesday
Younger features Sutton Foster as a 40-something woman looking for work who gets a makeover from her best friend and then lands a job because her new employer thinks she is in her mid-20s. It’s a Darren Star series, his first since he rebooted 90210, and represents the closest thing he has had to an original idea in years. It is not enough. (M3, 8 p.m.)
Returning for a fourth season where, inexplicably, no character at any time will kill another character and then utter “it was justified”: Justified. (Showcase, 10 p.m.)
Wednesday
Survivorman: Bigfoot rightly figures out that simply surviving in the merciless open wild was not enough for today’s stimulus-addled viewing audience, so accordingly they have added a search for Bigfoot. Next week, Ice Road Truckers will have the truckers start wondering if Ogopogo lurks beneath the frozen ice roads. (OLN, 9 p.m.)
Thursday
Mississippi Snake Grabbers is a show about Mississippi cops who start up a snake-fishing tourism business. It is, amazingly, a Canadian-produced reality series. “But what does this have to do with Canada?” you might reasonably ask. And the answer is, “Nothing, really.” But then again, Canadian content of any kind does not have a lot to do with the Canadian TV industry at this point. (CMT, 10 p.m.)
Billy Crystal and Josh Gad star as thinly veiled fictional versions of themselves teaming up for a new sketch-comedy show in The Comedians, which also features Dana Delany as someone improbably married to Billy Crystal. Because Hollywood. The pilot is decent, but it’s partially written by Larry Charles, and Charles isn’t on board for the full series. (FXX, 10 p.m.)
Speaking of thinly veiled fictional versions of popular comedians, Louie returns for season five tonight, and really, nothing else matters this week. No, not even Grandma’s 90th birthday. She already had her run. She’s just waiting it out at this point. (FXX, 10:30 p.m.)
Friday
The pre-Netflix-series version of Daredevil isn’t awful, but it is, for the most part, a terribly generic superhero action movie. Ben Affleck is a perfectly acceptable Daredevil, Michael Clarke Duncan a perfectly reasonable Kingpin, Jennifer Garner a woefully miscast but at least game Elektra. It’s almost entitely bland; only Colin Farrell’s lunatic performance of Bullseye sticks with you. (FX, 9 p.m.)
The Weekend
The CBC airs Happy Gilmore to serve as your periodic reminder that it has now been 19 years since the last time Adam Sandler was actually funny. (8 p.m. Sunday)
The 2015 MTV Movie Awards: because who else will celebrate movies which were already massively successful with the American viewing public in their theatrical runs? It is not enough that The Fault In Our Stars made over $300 million worldwide: it must be critically applauded! (Much, 8 p.m. Sunday)
This article originally said that Larry David was not on board for the whole run of The Comedians, when we meant Larry Charles. We’re pretty, pretty, pretty sorry for the error.