Televisualist: Two Kids With Cancer Edition

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.

What are they looking at so intensely? Man, this is serious stuff.

Monday

March Madness comes to an end as #2 Villanova takes on #1 North Carolina in the sort of final game you usually get out of March Madness, which is why the tournament is always less exciting than people think it is. (TSN5, 8:30 p.m.)

Cooks v. Cons is another show about professional chefs competing against amateur chefs, which makes, what, 47 of that type of show? (Food Network, 10 p.m.)

Storage Wars returns for a ninth season of selling off people’s lost hopes and dreams at a steep but still profitable discount. (A&E, 10 p.m.)

Two In A Million is a new show where the producers bring together two people who share the same extremely rare and debilitating medical condition so they can sympathize with one another, and then they film it. The first episode features two young boys with Schwartz-Jampel Syndrome, which forces their bodies into painful involuntary muscle contractions all the time. Somebody actually thought this was a good idea for a TV show. (TLC, 10 p.m.)

Early word on Underground, the new drama about pre-Civil War-era slaves escaping the North, has been very strong, with critics particularly applauding the show’s choice to not shy away from the action and suspense inherent in the premise. We are stoked for this one. (Bravo, 10 p.m.)

It’s the very last episode of American Idol! Will Bo Bice show up? That’s all we really care about. Whatever happened to that guy, anyway? (Fox, 8 p.m.)

The Thomas Lennon/Matthew Perry edition of The Odd Couple returns for a second season of relying on its considerable acting talent to deliver hackneyed, clichéd material and make it at least moderately entertaining. (CTV, 8:30 p.m.)

Nobody yet knows if Sleepy Hollow (season finale tonight) is returning for a fourth season or not. Fox has left the show in relative limbo, possibly in order to stoke a fan campaign to gauge how much interest there actually is in the program. That being said: it is entertaining genre fluff—maybe not the greatest genre fluff out there, but there’s much worse. (CTV2, 8 p.m.)

The MTV Movie Awards, where corporate product finally gets the props it so desperately needs, are on tonight! They didn’t nominate Mad Max: Fury Road for Best Picture and the Oscars did, and that’s all you really need to know about this show. (MTV Canada, 8 p.m. Sunday)

Fear the Walking Dead, which is currently the Walking Dead show that isn’t bad, returns for a second season. (AMC, 9 p.m. Sunday)

If you’re looking for a good example of how online viewing is changing serial TV beyond the capacity for binge-watching, The Ranch is a good case in point. It’s a sitcom—but it’s not, not exactly, because it settles in for long dramatic beats that don’t feel entirely at home in the sitcom format. It runs longer than network sitcoms do, too, varies length by episode, and uses profanity (but not gratuitously). It is, to be blunt, an odd duck of a show, but one with some promise, and a great cast—after all, most shows don’t have Sam Elliott and Debra Winger in prominent roles. (Netflix)