Televisualist: Two Hours of Cats Farting

By Christopher Bird

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.

“Of course they wouldn’t let me read for the farting-cat part. Because they’re racists, that’s why.”

Monday
David Letterman: A Life On Television is a lengthy and reverent look back at David Letterman’s TV career, which means that it is almost oxymoronic given the subject. Really, we suspect Letterman himself would say, “Two hours of cats farting. That would work,” with respect to a special honouring him. (CBS, 9 p.m.)

We know a lot of nerds disliked I, Robot when it came out in 2004 because it’s an exciting action movie rather than a narrative think-piece about the laws of robotics. In truth, it is an exciting action movie (and a well-directed one, too—Alex Proyas did good work here), but it also takes most of its story cues from a couple of Asimov’s robots stories, and adds some explosions. And we don’t think there’s anything wrong with explosions. (AMC, 8 p.m.)

The Willis Family is TLC’s latest entrant in the “we have a really large family, aren’t we wacky” brand of reality shows. We haven’t seen any of it yet, but we’ll lay our money on a series of individual bets: they’re conservative Christians, they serve their meals buffet-style, they’re all boring people in any other situation other than the large-family thing. We’ll get at least two out of three, we’re pretty sure. (10 p.m.)

Deadliest Catch returns for an 11th season. There have been 171 episodes of this show so far, not counting the pre-shows and discussion shows and the like. That is more episodes than The Mary Tyler Moore Show, Barney Miller, The West Wing, The Twilight Zone, and Boy Meets World. By the end of this season they’ll have exceeded I Love Lucy, Scrubs, Golden Girls, Seinfeld, Newhart and every single Star Trek. What we’re saying here is: what the hell. (Discovery, 10 p.m.)

I Still Didn’t Know I Was Pregnant is a reality show about women who, after having given birth not realizing they were pregnant once, somehow manage to do it again. The working title for the show was Schadenfreude: The Series. (TLC, 9 p.m.)

Labor Games: a game show where expecting parents (including, yes, pregnant moms) go through degrading contests in order to win some money for the baby’s college fund. Brought to you by TLC. The L stands for “learning about how low we can sink.” (10 p.m.)

Oh, hey, Grease! It’s not depressing yet since most of the principal cast aren’t dead! Well, of the teenagers, anyway. The adults are mostly dead. And Jeff Conaway. Maybe it’s a little depressing now. (W, 9 p.m.)

Hawaii Five-O has a two-hour season finale, and we mention this because it’s a well-made action/police show (and has been for five seasons) with an extremely diverse cast that is hovering on the brink of cancellation. (Basically: it depends if CBS has good international syndication deals in place for it. Welcome to the realities of the international TV market.) Sometimes solid shows like this get a lack of critical attention because they’re not trying to be anything other than popcorn entertainment, but you know what? We like watching Grace Park kick people in the face. More of that, please. (Global, 9 p.m.)

W has a double-bill of What To Expect When You’re Expecting and I Don’t Know How She Does It as part of their “Sundays Are Shitty” programming strategy. Next week: a double-bill of Adam Sandler movies made in the past decade. (Beginning at 7 p.m. on Sunday)

BoJack Horseman is one of those original series that really benefits from the binge watch: it works much better as a story told in 13 chapters rather than one or two episodes at a time, because the running gags start to really hit harder and harder over the binge, and so does the main thrust of the story (namely, someone dealing with crippling depression in not-often-good ways). A second season is in the works, so you might want to take a look now. (Netflix)