Televisualist: The Adventures of Johnny Borders

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.

Pictured from left to right: Adam Borders, Isaiah Borders, Sarah Borders-Johnson, Tatum Borders, and Gary Sinise.

Monday

The Bachelor concludes its twentieth season, and if nothing else, we can certainly say that Bachelor Ben Higgins will likely get his own Wikipedia entry soon, which is not bad for a mid-20s software salesman whose greatest life achievement is being VP of his fraternity chapter. (ABC, 8 p.m.)

We have to admit that when we first heard about Project Runway: Junior we were a little taken aback because the “kids do it” versions of reality competition franchises have been hit-or-miss, to say the least. On the other hand, it does give us more Tim Gunn, and that is always good. (Bravo, 10 p.m.)

It’s Super Tuesday—yes, the latest Super Tuesday in the American presidential primaries, these just seem to keep coming. This Super Tuesday features a number of large states where the GOP winner gets a disproportionate amount or even all of the delegates: Ohio, Florida, Illinois, Missouri, and North Carolina (well, and the Northern Mariana Islands, which are important too!). This is the night where either Ohio governor John Kasich and Florida senator Marco Rubio justify their extended reigns of mostly-failure by winning their home states to help stop Donald Trump, or they fade into the ether. We’re fine with either outcome, really. Oh, and the Democrats have primaries too we guess. (CNN from 8 p.m. onward)

Awkward. returns for the second half of what is likely its final season (the producers are publicly begging for a sixth season but MTV seems unlikely to grant them that), flashing forward as the characters finish their first year of university. This show has always been rock-solid (and funny) and seems to be heading toward a predictably smart and satisfying ending. (MTV Canada, 10 p.m.)

Criminal Minds: Beyond Borders sadly does not feature a character named “Johnny Borders,” because that would be too good for us all to comprehend. It does, however, have Gary Sinise, who sadly is not playing his character from CSI: New York, because that would totally blow our minds. (CTV, 10 p.m.)

In case you were worried that we didn’t have enough stories of real-life couples overcoming their prejudiced parents who disapprove of their mixed-race/mixed-faith/gay marriages, here is Bride and Prejudice, Slice’s new reality show, to give you those stories. It’s like Guess Who’s Coming To Dinner except minus Spencer Tracy, Sidney Poitier, and Katherine Hepburn—which, come to think of it, actually became Guess Who? which starred Bernie Mac and Ashton Kutcher, and this show isn’t even that either. (10 p.m.)

The Americans returns for a fourth season of being crazy tense and totally hard-assed about how awful the spying life is. This season, the fallout from Gabriel and Elizabeth’s daughter finding out that her parents are, in fact, Commie spies will no doubt make things even more tense and awful for them! (FX, 10 p.m.)

It is March Madness, the annual NCAA Men’s Division I Basketball Tournament, which allows basketball fans everywhere to forget that 95 per cent of college basketball is a godawful unfun slog where coaches play their best players—the ones who are definitely going to have NBA careers—40 minutes per game and those players aren’t even that good yet and oh man don’t even start about the ones who aren’t gonna make it. But none of this matters because it’s a single-elimination tournament and those are so exciting! Tonight you can watch #12 Chattanooga take on (and probably lose to) #5 Indiana, and then in all likelihood #4 Kentucky will straight-up murder #13 Stony Brook (starting at 7 p.m., CBS)

More March Madness, as #3 ranked West Virginia likely steamrolls #14 Stephen F. Austin, whose team name is the Lumberjacks, and that’s a pretty great team name and they should take solace in that if they lose, which they probably will. (7 p.m., CBS)

There is, all weekend long, March Madness, because they gotta eliminate 63 teams before this thing is over and that means a lot of basketball. Given that Thursday and Friday are the round of 64, this weekend represents the round of 32, so we can’t tell you who’s gonna be playing. Well, we can tell you, with 99 per cent accuracy, that Kansas, Virginia and Oregon will all be playing, because they’re #1 seeds and their first-round opponents are, respectively, the Austin Peay Governors, the Hampton Pirates, and either the Florida Gulf Coast Eagles or the Fairleigh Dickinson Knights. (CBS, all weekend)