Televisualist: Rick and Andie

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.

Insert biting commentary here.

Monday

Deep Blue Sea, the movie about superintelligent sharks with That One Amazing Scene Which We’re Not Gonna Ruin. Also featuring Thomas Jane, before he was… well, sorta-famous. (Movietime, 9 p.m.)

Knock Knock Live is a sort of door-to-door game show hosted by Ryan Seacrest where he knocks on people’s doors, quizzes them about their neighbours for money, and maybe invites a celebrity or two to “hang out, maybe play sport” (Seacrest’s words, not mine). Some people like this sort of thing. Good for them. They can go play “sport” with celebrities. (Fox, 8 p.m.)

Storage Wars: Behind The Locker is the latest entry in the behemoth that is the Storage Wars franchise. This particular one focuses on other elements of the lives of the Storageers (?) because they are such fascinating people! Really! (A&E, 9 p.m.)

Big Smo, the eponymous reality series for the hick-hop rapper, returns for a second season. Presumably this is because he appeals to A&E’s target demographic, which is “anybody who watches the commercials during Duck Dynasty.” (10 p.m.)

Home Free: Mike Holmes’s new reality show, where couples compete to renovate a broken-down home the best, with the home itself being the prize. But wait, if couples are being eliminated based on their lousiness at home renovations, doesn’t that mean the winner gets a home that will be, approximately, 40 per cent crappily-renovated? SCREW YOU, MIKE HOLMES! (HGTV, 9 p.m.)

Back again: Last Comic Standing. Previous winners of this show include Iliza Shlesinger and several other people whose names you will not immediately recognize. (NBC, 9 p.m.)

Also back again: Dating Naked, whose audience is five per cent people who are really interested in the social interactions presented by the series and 95 per cent teenagers who couldn’t figure out how to get past the parental locks on their home internet and have to masturbate to something, dammit. (M3, 9 p.m.)

Cedar Cove returns for a third season of Andie McDowell “acting.” Yes, her performance merits quote marks. All of her performances merit quote marks. She is bad at acting. Hey, whatever happened to Trini Alvarado? Does anybody else remember her? She was like Andie McDowell but with talent. Maybe Andie McDowell put an evil magic curse on her. After all, she has to be good at something, right? (W, 8 p.m.)

Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol may only be, when you get down to it, a movie centred around three or four amazing stunt sequences, but oh man, those stunt sequences! The Burj Khalifa sequence alone is vertigo-inducing. (W, 9 p.m.)

I Am Cait is Caitlyn Jenner’s reality series about her day-to-day life as a woman. Regardless of the undeniable fact that most trans people will never get the support that Jenner has received, we tend to think that this show will be a net positive much in the same way that Will and Grace undeniably served as a net positive for the gay rights movement when that show aired. That doesn’t mean we’re gonna watch I Am Cait—but it’s good that it’s around, at least. (E! Canada, 8 p.m.)

Who Do You Think You Are?, the reality show about celebrities discovering their ancestry, premieres its latest season with Ginnifer Goodwin discovering where she’s descended from, and prompting us to wonder who Ginnifer Goodwin is again. Oh, right, she was in that HBO series we didn’t like! Right. (TLC, 9 p.m. Sunday)

Since no Canadian network is presently airing Rick and Morty—and the second season is set to premiere this week in Other Lands—you can at least watch several episodes from the first season online, and you should. There hasn’t been a cartoon as inventive and funny since prime-era Simpsons (not even Bob’s Burgers, which says a lot about how good Rick and Morty is). If you haven’t seen it, all you need to know is that there’s a crazy alcoholic scientist and his not-too-bright grandson and they have adventures. We’re not spoiling anything else. (adultswim.com)