This Week in TV: NBA’s Got Talent, a Roots Remake, and Maya Rudolph and Steve Martin

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.

Two of these amateur home cooks will advance! One will be EATEN BY WOLVES! Wait, no, apparently there are no wolves. Our bad.

Monday

So You Think You Can Dance returns for a thirteenth season, and at this point the show has been deemed it necessary to provide a new gimmick every season. This season’s hook is “how about we have little kid dancers instead of adults?”, and…we have our doubts about that idea. (Fox, 8 p.m.)

A&E remade Roots, and frankly at this point it’s well-timed; the original is still fondly remembered, but the truth is it has not aged well (the complaints that the new version doesn’t have “sympathetic white characters” in a multigenerational story about the impacts of slavery like the old one did probably explains why that is the case well enough). This remake is loaded with quality actors: Forest Whitaker, Lawrence Fishburne, Anika Noni Rose, T.I., Jonathan Rhys Meyers and Anna Paquin, among others. Looks very solid indeed. (9 p.m.)

Mistresses returns for a fourth season, largely because its domestic ratings are just high enough to make it slightly profitable, and then the immense foreign sales of the show (it does especially well in South Korea) make it much more profitable. In case you forgot this was a business before all else, see. (CTV, 10 p.m.)

America’s Got Talent adds Simon Cowell as a judge, because it was overdue to start that long slide downhill. (City, 8 p.m.)

Maya and Marty: a variety show starring Maya Rudolph and Martin Short, which is…an interesting pairing? Certainly not anything you would have expected? As if two celebrities were selected at random from a giant rotating drum? (Global, 10 p.m.)

Back again: MasterChef, and can we just say how we resent the fact that all the Gordon Ramsay shows all seem to premiere more or less in the same half of the year so our Gordon Ramsay jokes all seem stale by the time the fifth (or whatever) Gordon Ramsay show debuts in any given year? You have too many shows, Gordon Ramsay, and they all air too close to one another! How are we supposed to enjoy you calling people “donkey” if you never give us a chance to breathe? (CTV, 8 p.m.)

The Night Shift is back for a third season and we’re not even going to bother making fun of it any more because it’s just another show about friggin’ doctors. BAH. BAH to television doctors! BAH! (Global, 10 p.m.)

It’s the NBA Finals! Featuring the Cleveland Cavaliers versus either the Golden State Warriors (rematch from last year!) or the Oklahoma City Thunder (LeBron James and Kevin Durant battle in the finals for the first time since 2012!). Either way, this series promises to be some really excellent basketball. (TSN, 9 p.m.)

Autopsy: The Last Hours of Philip Seymour Hoffman was originally going to be titled A New Low but E! wanted something with a colon in the title. (E! Canada, 9 p.m.)

Morgan Spurlock: Inside Man continues Morgan Spurlock’s lengthy career of “doing something for a while and filming it to see what happens.” (CNN, 10 p.m.)

Feed The Beast is AMC’s latest: a drama about two best friends who are both extremely fucked up in numerous ways (David Schwimmer is a single father/widower with a drinking problem, and Jim Sheridan is an ex-con ex-addict with a mob problem) trying to start a hip restaurant in the Bronx. Together, they fight crime! No, wait, they don’t, they cook things and have personal problems. (10 p.m. Sunday)