On TV This Week: Adele, The Good Wife, and Donald Trump

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.

“No, YOU act with her.”

Monday

Houdini and Doyle—it’s sort of like a Victorian version of The X-Files, with Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (Stephen Mangan) in the Mulder-equivalent role and Harry Houdini (Michael Weston) as Scully, plus Rebecca Liddiard in the “oh geez we need a female character in this very man-driven show” role. The leads are entertaining and there are spooky bits, and really, our standards are low enough at this point that we’re okay with that for right now. (Global, 9 p.m.)

Tonight in America Election Show, it’s the Indiana primary, which Donald Trump is currently favoured to win because the Republican party at some point decided that veiled racism was boring because of all those veils. (CNN, 8 p.m. onward)

Tonight, the Toronto Raptors host the Miami Heat for Game One of the Eastern Conference semifinals. The Raptors were the better team during the regular season, taking three of four from Miami during their season series—but Kyle Lowry’s elbow injury caused him to shoot abysmally in the first round against Indiana. DeMar DeRozan has not played particularly well either, and the Raptors are more or less designed to run their offence through Lowry and DeRozan. After barely surviving the Pacers, most NBA writers are calling the Heat to win this one—they’re loaded with quality veterans who don’t get rattled in the playoffs, including (former Brooklyn Net) Joe Johnson (who the Raptors have had trouble dealing with for years). Unlike Indiana they have a real starting center in Hassan Whiteside so Jonas and Bismack won’t be able to exert their will on the game so easily. If the Raptors win this series, it’s not going to be quick. (TSN, 8 p.m.)

At some point Person of Interest, AKA “that show with Michael Emerson and Jim Caviezel in it,” became the most reliably entertaining action series on TV. Somewhere around the second and third seasons is when it happened, and now it’s just… good. It’s also pretty mythology-driven, though, so it’s not the most easy show to jump into midway through, which is what happens when the show is about a seemingly omniscient supercomputer which does computer magic to find bad guys. (CTV, 10 p.m.)

7 Days In Hell is not the Andy Samberg/Kit Harington tennis mockumentary, but rather a reality show where a pair of survivalists attempt to survive historical examples of worst-case scenarios; they did a pilot several years ago themed around “1800s miners trying to survive escaping the Yukon” and now they have a whole show based on that pilot. Tonight’s episode is about them pretending to be pirates escaping the Caribbean island of Roatan. (History, 10 p.m.)

The Aliens is a vaguely sci-fi-ish British series with a lot of black comedy in it about “aliens” who look like humans and simply have different customs. In short, it’s really a blatant critique of racism, ethnocentrism and lots of other things. The reviews have been very good and it’s only a six-episode commitment for now, so give it a shot. (Space, 9 p.m.)

Once upon a time, The Challenge was about cast members of The Real World and Road Rules, but Road Rules is long gone and not particularly missed so it’s just a game show with former Real World people as contestants. Vaya con dios, rules of the road. (MTV Canada, 10 p.m.)

Turner Classic airs the original 1954 The Fast and the Furious, which is a noirish action film about a man on the run from the law who kidnaps a woman so he can use her car, and then they sneak into a amateur road race. At no point does anybody break their own arm cast by flexing, though. (8 p.m.)

Adele Live In New York City… is pretty self-explanatory so we’re not writing a blurb for it. More programs should title themselves this way. Aw, man, now we’re writing a blurb anyway! DAMN YOU, ADELE! (NBC, 8 p.m.)

The Good Wife reaches its final curtain, and depending on who you ask it is anywhere from one to three seasons late as the show drifted further and further away from its core premise, possibly because (if you believe dreadful gossip) more and more actors wanted to work less and less with Julianna Margulies. Anyway, it had at least four truly great years and that is more than most shows ever manage, so hats off to them. (Global, 9 p.m. Sunday)

Single Dad Seeking… is a reality series about single dads trying to date, except the producers decided it would be more exciting if the women they were dating also moved in, which is a somewhat above average level of reality show bullshit. (TLC, 10 p.m. Sunday)