Televisualist: The One Where Maleficent Has a Kid

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.

Because “Disney’s Brand-Approved Cosplay Outfits” was too on-the-nose.

Monday

The First 48: Revenge Kills is the latest spinoff of The First 48, the show that reminds us that homicide detectives have to get a lead within two days or crime will end us all. This spinoff, we are going to guess, is about homicide detectives who investigate murders that are revenge-y in nature. (A&E, 8 p.m.)

Hidden Kingdoms is a BBC nature mini-doc-series (narrated by Stephen Fry, so you know it is classy), focusing on small animals and their lives. The first episode features a grasshopper mouse, which is a mouse that eats grasshoppers rather than a mouse that jumps like a grasshopper, because those are kangaroo mice. Now just pretend Stephen Fry said all of that, rather than me writing it. You see? It’s gold! (Animal Planet, 9 p.m.)

Lara Croft, Tomb Raider: The Cradle of Life came out in 2003 and grossed over $156 million worldwide. Bearing that it was a major summer release in 2003, starred Angelina Jolie (who was, at the time, a Big Star) and made a fair bit of money, we are going to award you points for each of the following things you can accurately state about the film without Googling: Jolie’s male costar, which film it was in the Tomb Raider series, what the MacGuffin prized by all the characters actually was, who directed it, any other one actor who appeared in it. If you get five points, you are keeping the memory of this film alive! Good for you! (AMC, 8;30 p.m.)

This week’s episode of The Amazing Race Canada is entitled “Who Is Alex Trebek?” so hopefully there will in fact be a Trebek cameo. Other than that, if the idea of teams racing to Sudbury doesn’t excite you, there is no reason to watch this weaker version of The Amazing Race. (CTV, 9 p.m.)

Televisualist’s well-documented loathing of all things Say Yes To The Dress clearly makes us an outlier to the viewing public at large, as Say Yes To The Dress: The Big Day, the spinoff series about wedding planning, returns for a third season. (TLC, 10 p.m.)

Turner Classic—a.k.a. “the best channel on television,” if only because Turner Classic hasn’t turned into a seven-days-a-week-of-cheap-reality-TV channel like most specialty channels have, and remains true to its vision of bringing you old movies all the time— has a Marx Brothers marathon going on! It starts with: The Cocoanuts (their first, from 1929, at 4:30 p.m.); then Animal Crackers, which features probably the best scene Zeppo ever had (6:15 p.m.); followed by Monkey Business, which is the one that barely has a plot—as opposed to the others, which had vague excuses masquerading as plots (8 p.m.); and then there’s Horse Feathers, the one that makes fun of college football, is extremely short (under 70 minutes), and is one of the best (9:30 p.m.); then Duck Soup, which is the best of their films if you’re a snooty academic who likes to talk a lot about satire (10:45 p.m.); and then A Night At The Opera, which is the best of their films if you’re anybody else than a snooty academic (midnight); and finally A Day At The Races, which is the last truly brilliant one (2 a.m.). The Marxes have aged particularly well because lunacy and wince-inducing puns are essentially timeless, so this is your chance to get educated—after all, as Groucho Marx once said, “I find television very educational. The moment somebody turns it on, I go to the library and read a good book.”

Disney’s Descendants first aired a couple weeks ago, and it is on again tonight, and it is absolutely insane. It is about a world where all of the individual kingdoms in Disney films have sort of united into a United States of Disney, and all the villains were exiled to an island prison where they had kids, and then all of the villain kids come back to the mainland to attend prep school along with the kids of the Disney Princesses? And it’s a musical, we might add? Absolutely bonkers. Tweens, of course, loved it to death, because it’s not made for us. Soon enough, we will age out of Hollywood’s prized demographics and we’ll have to start watching Blue Bloods. Ugh. (Family Channel, 8 p.m.)

It’s Teen Choice 2015! There isn’t even a need to call them awards any more. All that we need know is that teens have made a choice. Is the cat in the box alive or dead? We cannot know… until the teens choose. (Global, 8 p.m. Sunday)

Show Me a Hero is HBO’s latest prestige miniseries: six episodes about the fight over a federally mandated public housing development in a white, middle-class neighborhood, and the racial tension accompanying same. On the one hand, it is written by David Simon, who wrote The Wire, which is one of the best shows ever and certainly one of the best to critically discuss race ever aired on television. On the other hand, it is directed by Paul Haggis, who also directed Crash, which is the single worst movie to ever win Best Picture as the Oscars and one of the stupidest, most hamfisted discussions of race and racism in movie history. So this one could really go either way. (HBO, 8 p.m. Sunday)

Finally available on streaming in Canada: The Larry Sanders Show. Garry Shandling’s workplace comedy about a late-night TV show was so good that at the time, Shandling was being considered as a potential late-night network host as Larry Sanders, which sounds crazy because it was crazy. That having been said, Larry Sanders‘ style is a clear influence on later work-coms like The Office and Parks and Recreation—really, add some interview cutaways and you’re pretty much there. (CraveTV)