This Week in TV: The Raptors Cross Their Fingers, and Stephen Hawking Offers Life Advice

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.

“Oh god I’m massaging a fascist.”

Monday

Mike and Molly concludes, after six seasons, because CBS didn’t want to spend more money on Melissa McCarthy’s acting services. That is the real and only reason the show is being cancelled. Paying her more money would not have made the show unprofitable, but only somewhat less profitable, and well, they can’t have that. (CBS, 8:30 p.m.)

Tonight in basketball: the NBA Draft Lottery, where we can find out if that lottery pick Toronto got from the New York Knicks back in 2013 turns out to only be good or, through a statistically improbable but still possible turn of events, becomes very, very good indeed. (TSN, 8 p.m.)

Tonight is Game 1 of the Raptors/Cavaliers NBA Eastern Conference Final, and while we of course ride or die with the Raptors, honesty demands that we admit that Toronto is a massive, massive underdog in this series. The Raptors needed 14 games to beat Indiana (not very good) and Miami (missing their biggest star), while Cleveland swept Detroit and Atlanta in a combined eight games and it wasn’t even close. We are probably going to lose this series, and Cleveland sweeping us is not impossible by any means. But…we did beat them two games out of three during the regular season. So anything is possible. (TSN, 8:30 p.m.)

Hey, are you old enough to remember Temptation Island back from the early, early days of mainstream reality TV, where people basically hooked up at a resort and it was a show for some reason? Well, Fox has hired Mark “Survivor” Burnett to essentially re-do that show as Coupled. We’re sure you’re waiting with bated breath. (Fox, 9 p.m.)

Speaking of Mark Burnett, Survivor concludes what has been a pretty strong season overall tonight. That Mark Burnett. He’s everywhere. (Global, 8 p.m.)

Genius by Stephen Hawking features Stephen Hawking (obviously), working with “normal” people and guiding them through scientific and philosophical principles to try to answer “the big questions” confronting humanity. The first episode is about the possibility of time travel; future episodes will deal with the potential existence of alien life, the meaning of our collective existence, and why hot dogs come twelve to a package but hot dog buns come in bags of eight. (PBS, 9 p.m.)

Thirteen, which is about a woman who escapes from a cellar where she was being held prisoner for thirteen years, is one of those BBC shows that ended up not being very good and only lasting a single season, which you don’t expect because whenever a British show makes its way over here, you assume it’s good and popular. But this one was not. But we still get to see it. Hooray for the British lowering their standards! (BBC Canada, 10 p.m.)

CBS airs an I Love Lucy special, featuring the two episodes from the show’s fifth season where Lucy crosses paths with John Wayne. In real life, Lucille Ball had Communist party leanings (which she disavowed before HUAC) and John Wayne was of course a fervent anti-Communist, so most likely the two of them despised one another. History! (8 p.m.)

This weekend’s The Simpsons season finale is called “Orange Is The New Yellow” and is about Marge going to prison and meeting women prisoners voiced by cast members of Orange Is The New Black, in case you were worried that Simpsons writers were running out of ideas. (Global, 8 p.m. Sunday)

Preacher is based on the infamous comic book of the same name, about a depressed preacher who is suddenly possessed of the Word of God and able to verbally command anybody to do anything. Also there is a drunken Irish vampire. Trust us, it all makes sense in the end. (AMC, 10 p.m. Sunday)

CORRECTION: A previous version of this story incorrectly stated that the Raptors game on Tuesday starts at 9 p.m. It begins at 8:30 p.m. Torontoist regrets the error.