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Tag: Black Lives Matter

Watchable the week of February 8, 2020

February 8, 2021 /

Clarice (Feb. 11, 10 p.m., Global)

Rebecca Breeds as Clarice Starling in “Clarice.” PHOTO CREDIT: Brooke Palmer/CBS Broadcasting Inc.

The opening scenes of “Clarice” — an artful collection of flashbacks from the Buffalo Bill case as Clarice Starling, in soft focus, recaps the events for a therapist (and the audience) in her distinctive Appalachian accent — suggest an aspiration to prestige TV. 

But it reminds me a bit of what killer Hannibal Lecter said to Clarice in “The Silence of the Lambs” about her “good bag” and “cheap shoes.” Behind the gloss of a psychological drama is a fairly standard police show.

By the way, don’t look for any mention of Lecter here. Due to rights agreements involving the source Thomas Harris novels, “Clarice” doesn’t mention the iconic serial killer character by name (just as NBC’s “Hannibal” never mentioned Clarice).

The action is set in 1993, one year after the events of the Oscar-winning film that starred Jodie Foster as the FBI trainee and Anthony Hopkins as Lecter.

Serial killer Buffalo Bill is seen and referenced, and the victim whose life Clarice saved, Catherine Martin (Marnee Carpenter), is a recurring character as is her politician mother, played by Jayne Atkinson of “24” and “House of Cards.”

In fact, it’s Ruth Martin, who’s U.S. attorney general now, who sets the series’ plot in motion when she summons Clarice (Rebecca Breeds, “Pretty Little Liars”) from her hideaway in the behavioural science unit at Quantico to Washington to help with another serial killer case.

That case, which is more complicated than it initially seems, will presumably stay in play throughout the season, although the second episode veers off into a completely unrelated investigation that superficially echoes the siege at Waco.

My issue with “Clarice” is that it doesn’t dig in a particularly deep or nuanced fashion into either its cases or its namesake’s psyche, at least not in the three episodes I saw. The inner turmoil she keeps hidden is represented by flashbacks and hallucinations of the death’s-head moths that helped her catch Buffalo Bill.

Things move at a brisk clip here, probably a factor of network TV’s preoccupation with grabbing and keeping eyeballs. Clarice is something of a criminal whisperer, able to quickly and effortlessly coax confessions out of her targets.

Clarice’s male co-workers are predictably hostile, led by Deputy Assistant AG Paul Krendler (Michael Cudlitz of “The Walking Dead”). Just as predictably, she finds an ally among the threatened men (Lucca De Oliveira of “SEAL Team”). Devyn A. Tyler (“The Purge”) plays her roomie Ardelia.

The series was shot in Toronto, so Canadian actors pop up in small roles, including Shawn Doyle as Clarice’s therapist, Kris Holden-Ried as a murder suspect and Dalmar Abuzeid as the husband of a victim.

The show’s not bad, but it’s no “Silence of the Lambs.”

21 Black Futures (Feb. 12, CBC Gem)

Lovell Adams-Gray in “The Death News,” part of “21 Black Futures.” PHOTO CREDIT: Courtesy of CBC

The futures imagined in the 21 “monodramas” in “21 Black Futures” range from the next day, as a preteen girl contemplates how she’ll present herself at school, to a time when a series of viruses has wiped out much of life on Earth.

What all of the short theatre pieces have in common is that the protagonists, the people deciding what those futures will be, are Black. Each is written by a Black playwright, staged by a Black director and performed by a solo Black actor.

Some have post-apocalyptic settings as in “Cavities” by K.P. Dennis, in which a woman (Alison Sealy-Smith) seeds the soil with her teeth and her rage before deciding to pass on joy to the next generation instead; and “Emmett” by Syrus Marcus Ware, in which a survivor of “the fall” (Prince Amponsah) decides he’d rather stay and try to heal the Earth than colonize Venus, where life has just been discovered.

Anti-Black racism is an undercurrent in all of the stories but not the point of them; they’re about Black people taking control of their realities.

So in “The Death News” by Amanda Parris, a Black man (Lovell Adams-Gray) prerecords his own obituary rather than let media dictate how he is remembered. In “Umoja Corp” by Jacob Sampson, a Black man (Pablo Ogunlesi ) is freed from jail on the condition he help other Black people navigate the system. In “Sensitivity” by Lawrence Hill, a Black woman (Sabryn Rock) treats her firing after a racial sensitivity seminar gone wrong as an opportunity rather than a failure.

This first batch of seven dramas, which includes “The Death News,” “Sensitivity” and “Jah in the Ever-Expanding Song” by Kaie Kellough, debuts Feb. 12, with another seven on Feb. 19 and the final seven on Feb. 26.

I found the ones I sampled by turns touching and thought-provoking and worth watching.

If you’d like to know more about Black visual artists, at least in the United States, HBO has “Black Art: In the Absence of Light” (Feb. 9, 9 p.m.).

If you’d like another series that falls outside the white gaze, check out “Gespe’gewa’gi: The Last Land” (Feb. 13, 7 p.m., APTN), a docuseries about the Mi’gmaq fishing community in Listuguj, Que. It’s certainly a timely topic given the ongoing conflict between Indigenous and non-Indigenous fishers in Nova Scotia.

Belgravia (Feb. 14, CBC Gem)

Tamsin Greig as Anne Blanchard and Alice Eve as Susan Trenchard in “Belgravia.”
PHOTO CREDIT: Courtesy of CBC

“Downton Abbey” was such a sensation that anything Julian Fellowes did as a followup was bound to pale in comparison (although I still have high hopes for “The Gilded Age”).

His “Belgravia” is a respectable addition to the period drama catalogue but not one that will inspire “Downton”-level devotion.

For one thing, it’s not what it might at first appear. It opens in Brussels in 1815, just days before the Battle of Waterloo. The focus is on an ill-advised romance between Sophia Trenchard (Emily Reid), daughter of the man who supplies provisions to the British army, and the aristocratic Lord Edmund Bellasis (Jeremy Neumark Jones). They rendezvous at a ball held by his aunt, the Duchess of Richmond (the ball really happened) but, before a scandal can erupt, the British march off to confront Napoleon. Soon it’s 26 years later, Sophia and Edmund are both dead, and we’re in London, in the upper-class neighbourhood of Belgravia.

The story shifts to the older members of the cast, which is not a bad thing given that the main protagonists are played by two formidable actors, Tamsin Greig and Harriet Walter. They are Anne Trenchard, mother of Sophia, and Lady Brockenhurst, mother of Lord Bellasis. 

They share their grief as well as a secret emanating from the long-ago relationship between their children but have opposing views of how to handle it. 

Anne’s husband, James (Philip Glenister), has an appetite for social climbing that she finds distasteful — an ambition inherited by their lazy but entitled son, Oliver, and his acquisitive wife, Susan.

Lady Brockenhurst and her husband the Earl (Tom Wilkinson) have greedy relatives of their own to deal with, including a brother with a gambling problem and his boor of a son.

There’s also a new pair of socially mismatched lovers, Charles Pope (Jack Bardoe) and Maria Grey (Ella Purnell).

“Belgravia” takes a sharper look at class differences than “Downton” did, with the Trenchards and Brockenhursts on either side of the new/old money divide.

Another way that “Belgravia” differs is that it’s harder to invest in these characters. Many of them are unlikeable, including the servants, a bitter and venal bunch with little if any loyalty to their employers.

Still, “Belgravia” is lovely to look at and there are enough plot twists to keep the six episodes interesting.

Short Takes

The Cecil Hotel in L.A. has a reputation as a scene of death and violent crime.
PHOTO CREDIT: Courtesy of Netflix

Crime Scene: The Vanishing at the Cecil Hotel (Feb. 10, Netflix)

Netflix’s latest true crime entry takes you down a disturbing and sometimes weird rabbit hole. It concerns the disappearance of a 21-year-old Canadian, Elisa Lam, at the infamous downtown Los Angeles hotel in 2013. Note though, that although Joe Berlinger, the Oscar- and Emmy-nominated producer/director behind crime docuseries like “Conversations With a Killer: The Ted Bundy Tapes,” lays out the Lam case in painstaking detail, it’s a misnomer to call it a crime. I won’t spoil the series if you want to watch for yourself by telling you what happened to Elisa and why, but be warned that there’s a bait-and-switch going on here and that the very title of the series, “Crime Scene,” is grossly inaccurate. And while the violent history of the hotel itself is interesting (if you watched “Night Stalker: The Hunt for a Serial Killer” you’ll be interested to know that Richard Ramirez stayed there) it has nothing to do with the sad story of Elisa Lam. The series also gives undue weight to the community of web sleuths and conspiracy theorists that has sprung up around the Lam case. Some of the theories are truly bizarre, completely ungrounded in reality and have harmed people’s lives, notably the death metal musician who was falsely accused of murdering Elisa. Netflix also has the new funeral home comedy “Buried by the Bernards” and the rom-com sequel “To All the Boys: Always and Forever,” both on Feb. 12. 

If you devoured the most recent season of “The Crown” and especially its Charles and Diana storyline you might be interested in “Diana: The Interview That Shocked the World,” debuting on BritBox Feb. 9. The interview itself, between Diana and BBC journalist Martin Bashir in November 1995, is sprinkled sparingly through the documentary, which mainly features commentary on how the interview came about, the effect its revelations about Diana’s failing marriage had on the royal family and the public, and whether it set in motion the events that led to Diana’s death in 1997.

I ran out of time before I got to preview “Little Birds” (Feb. 14, Crave), but it sounds like it’s worth a look. It’s set in 1950s Tangier and stars Juno Temple (“Dirty John,” “Ted Lasso”) as an American heiress trying to find freedom in a colourful setting stocked with eccentric characters, including Yumna Marwan as a Moroccan dominatrix.

A couple of Canadian shows debut new seasons on Valentine’s Day. “The Great Canadian Baking Show” is back for its fourth edition (Feb. 14, 8 p.m., CBC) with new hosts Alan Shane Lewis and Ann Pornel. And the comedy “Second Jen” starts its third season (Feb. 14, 8:30 p.m., OMNI 2) with Jen (Samantha Wan) trying to deal with a social media troll and Mo (Amanda Joy) having to endure a conflict resolution seminar at work.

CLARIFICATION: I edited the item on “The Vanishing at the Cecil Hotel” on Feb. 15, 2021 to reflect my revised opinion on the series after I watched the entire thing.

The talk gets real, the orgasms are fake on ‘The Bachelorette’

November 25, 2020 /
Harvard grad Bennett “proposes” to Tayshia Adams on “The Bachelorette.”
PHOTO CREDIT: All photos Craig Sjodin/ABC

Fake orgasms that would do Meg Ryan proud; not one but two men sneaking around to visit Tayshia (and, um, Chris Harrison); a pillow fight and a game of Twister; and even a serious conversation about Black Lives Matter — there was a lot going on in Tuesday’s episode of “The Bachelorette,” like. A. Lot.

At times it was almost as if other reality shows had insinuated themselves into the proceedings. The group date contestants drinking smoothies with disgusting lists of ingredients like chicken feet and cow intestines made me think a bit of “Survivor.” When Ben and Ed both set off to visit Tayshia in her suite, it was like watching two teams head for the Pit Stop at the end of an “Amazing Race” episode, not knowing which would get there first.

And when Ed got lost and ended up in host Chris Harrison’s suite instead it was the best thing ever.

Whether or not Tayshia Adams is further along in her quest to get hitched, we viewers are further along in our journey to fall in love with the show again after the season’s weird and frustrating start.

We ended the night with a classic bit of franchise drama when Noah claimed the other men were questioning Tayshia’s integrity, which got Tayshia so riled up she gave them a dressing down and cancelled the rest of the cocktail party, which then led to even more shade being thrown at Noah. Good times.

It all started off innocently enough. Eight of the 16 men who were left had to write and perform love songs for Tayshia. None of them could sing — or rap, for that matter.

Bennett worked his Harvard degree into his verses, of course; Blake played, and I use that word loosely, an accordion and a mandolin; Demar whipped up a little ditty he called “Mocha Latte”; but it was Ivan who took it home by inviting Tayshia up on the makeshift stage for his sentimental “rap.”

Ivan and Tayshia at last week’s “grown man challenge.” This week, he got to jump on her actual bed.

Ivan won the prize, a night in Tayshia’s suite, and it was the most pandemic-friendly date we’ve seen all season. Tayshia wore sweatpants; they ordered in room service; they played “the floor is lava” and Twister and went barefoot lawn bowling and had a pillow fight.

Things got serious when Ivan and Tayshia started talking about their families. He revealed, tears running down his cheeks, that his younger brother had spent four years in jail and gone through “some really dark times,” including getting beaten up by prison guards.

“Especially with George Floyd and that’s police brutality, and that’s something that really hit home for me,” Ivan said, referring to the Black man killed by a white police officer in Minneapolis in May, whose death kicked off worldwide Black Lives Matter protests.

Tayshia got so emotional thinking about the subject she couldn’t speak.

“I don’t know why it does so much but it’s like, it hurts a lot,” she said when she regained her voice.

They also talked about what it was like to grow up being mixed race, surrounded by people who didn’t look like them, and how inspirational it was to see so many people come together for the Black Lives Matter movement.

“We’re both biracial, have Black dads and have this beautiful love story developing. This is so big,” Ivan said.

It was no wonder that by the end of the date Tayshia described Ivan as really special. “He understands me more than anybody else can.”

It was a rare, refreshing dose of reality, as opposed to reality TV.

But then a new day dawned and a new group date, and it was back to silliness.

Becca Kufrin and Sydney Lotuaco help Tayshia out with her group date.

Six of the men played “Tayshia’s Truth or Dare” overseen by her friends, former “Bachelorette” Becca Kufrin and former “Bachelor” contestant Sydney Lotuaco.

The first part of it was all dares: chugging the aforementioned gross smoothies; interrupting Harrison at his lunch of crab legs and Veuve Clicquot to get him to sign their butt cheeks; eating habanero peppers and “proposing” to Tayshia, but the best — or worst, depending on your point of view — was faking orgasms over a loudspeaker so the rest of the resort could hear.

Think Meg Ryan from “When Harry Met Sally,” but louder and lewder. “I would direct him to the ER if I heard that,” quipped Becca after Kenny’s turn, which included the well known erotic phrase “Back up, back up.”

“Wow, he’s flexible, he’s bendy,” Becca said after Blake threw his leg up on a dais in the throes of fake passion.

Bennett, whom I’ve regarded as mainly comic relief up to this point, got carried away with the faux proposal. “Today was incredibly real in my mind and in my heart,” he said. “It’s the most exhilarating thing I’ve ever been a part of.”

Tayshia and Zac hang out on a previous date; hot tub not included.

Tayshia seemed to get closer to all six men, including Riley and Demar, on the evening or “truth” part of the date, but none more so than Zac, if by getting closer you mean making out in a hot tub. Zac got the date rose.

And then it was time for Ben and Ed’s Excellent Adventure.

You’ll recall that on last week‘s group date, the one that Noah crashed, Ben didn’t get to talk to Tayshia because he waited too long and ran out of time. Still brooding over that — and with Harrison’s advice that “Tayshia likes bold” to guide him — Ben went on a “secret mission” to Tayshia’s room.

And wouldn’t you know that Ed had the same bright idea, so we saw them both skulking through the resort on their way to Tayshia’s suite. It looked like Ed had beat Ben there; he knocked on the door, it opened . . . and there was Harrison in a sweatsuit saying, “It’s 2:30 in the morning. What are you doing?”

What Ed was doing was drinking red wine with Chris while Ben kissed and made up with Tayshia. Harrison eventually sent Ed on his way with directions. There was a knock on Tayshia’s door mid-smooch with Ben. Was it Ed? Nope, just a guy delivering champagne and strawberries. Ed never did find Tayshia’s suite, but he wasn’t too upset about it, describing his chat with Chris as “a great consolation.”

Noah with Tayshia when he still had what Bennett called “that terrible skidmark above his lip.”

By the time rose ceremony day rolled around, Ed was back to doing what he does best: complaining about other guys. This time it was Noah, whom Ed said was “a joke” and not there for the right reasons, blah, blah, blah. Bennett said Noah was too “juvenile” to end up with Tayshia.

That set the stage for Noah to whine to Tayshia about the heat he was getting from the other men over his fence-jumping, group date-crashing, moustache-shaving behaviour. “It’s been implied you gave me the rose just to shake things up,” Noah said, which was basically like waving a red flag in front of a bull.

To Tayshia, it went from the men taunting Noah because they think he’s a jerk — which seems pretty accurate — to the men questioning her integrity. She marched them all into a room and told them, “If you guys think that I’m just trying to start drama in the house for no reason, simply because I have a connection with some people, y’all need to grow up. If you’re gonna be questioning me, like, I’ll gladly walk you outside.” And that was the end of the cocktail party.

Noah fessed up that he was the reason for Tayshia’s bad mood and guess what? That just annoyed the other guys even more. “You ruined Tayshia’s night for your own glory,” Bennett said. More likely, he had some coaching from a helpful producer.

When rose time came, Ben, Eazy, Riley, Brendan, Bennett, Blake, Demar and Spencer all got roses along with Ed, leaving Kenny, Chasen, Jordan and Joe out in the cold.

Why did Tayshia give Ed a rose over nice, non-drama-causing Joe? No offence to her integrity, but I think I just answered my own question.

Next week, the animosity between Bennett and Noah ramps up, and Tayshia is not impressed.

“The Bachelorette” airs Tuesdays at 8 p.m. on Citytv. Feel like chatting about “Bachelorette”? Come visit my Facebook page. You can also follow me on Twitter @realityeo

Watchable the week of Sept. 28, 2020 (updated)

September 28, 2020 /

SHOW OF THE WEEK (The Good Lord Bird, Oct. 4, 9 p.m., Crave)

Joshua Caleb Johnson as Onion and Ethan Hawke as John Brown in “The Good Lord Bird.”
PHOTO CREDIT: William Gray/Showtime

When actor Ethan Hawke and author James McBride spoke to the Television Critics Association in January, George Floyd and Breonna Taylor were still alive and the Black Lives Matter uprising their deaths propelled hadn’t yet begun — but the continuum on which those killings and others like them sit was on the minds of everyone in that room in Pasadena, Calif.

As Hawke said then, “You can’t tell a story about America and not bump into race.”

“The Good Lord Bird” not only bumps into race but charges into the fray with ferocity, audacity and even glee alongside white abolitionist John Brown, played by Hawke.

Brown, of course, was a real person, the violent activist whose failed campaign to free every enslaved Black person in the United States is credited as the spark that began the Civil War. We see his exploits through the eyes of a fictional character, Henry Shackleford, played by Joshua Caleb Johnson (“Snowfall”), a teenage slave who ends up in Brown’s care when his father dies in a gun fight between pro-slavers in Kansas and Brown’s men.

Hawke, in an Emmy-baiting tour de force, plays Brown as firebrand and fool, hero and blunderer, consumed and sometimes blinded by his belief in the righteousness of his cause, full of compassion for the slaves he seeks to free, ruthless to those who would keep them suppressed.

McBride pointed out back in January that this is not your typical “white saviour story.” Indeed, the series takes the view that while Brown was a hero to many Black people at the time, not every Black person was a convert to his cause. Henry, nicknamed “Onion” by Brown, points out that he was never hungry or cold, or got shot at or saw a person murdered until he left the man who owned him and joined Brown’s ragtag army.

The evil of slavery is presented as a given rather than something that needs to be demonstrated, with the violence done to Blacks by white people mostly implied rather than shown. One hanging scene does more to demonstrate the moral strength of the woman who dies (Sibonia, played by Crystal Lee Brown) than the cruelty of those doing the killing.

McBride said the show, like his book, is meant to be funny and there is subtle humour throughout, starting with the fact that Brown mistakes Henry for a girl, leading him to don a dress and pose as Henrietta. “The Good Lord Bird” pokes fun at Brown himself, whom Onion describes as “nuttier than a squirrel turd.” And revered Black abolitionist Frederick Douglass (played by Daveed Diggs of “Hamilton” fame), is portrayed as a vain, pompous bigamist.

There is tragedy here too, to be sure. Brown was hanged after his doomed raid on the armoury at Harpers Ferry, West Virginia, in 1859, which is the denouement of the seven-episode series.

The bigger tragedy is that despite the fact slavery was officially abolished in the United States in 1965, Black people there and elsewhere are still not free of its prejudices.

Monsterland (Oct. 2, 10 p.m., CTV Drama Channel)

A scene from the new anthology series “Monsterland.” PHOTO CREDIT: Hulu/Bell Media

“Monsterland” delivers food for thought along with its chills, the main thought being whether any of the supernatural creatures it portrays are real or just manifestations of the troubled characters in each episode.

For instance, the impoverished single mother of a difficult child (Kaitlyn Dever, excellent as always) is presented with the tantalizing idea of starting over when a killer (Jonathan Tucker) who steals the identities of his victims wanders into the diner where she works. In another episode, a fisherman (Trieu Tran) turned environmental zealot after being injured in a chemical spill makes his biggest catch of all when he finds an oil-slicked mermaid (Adria Arjona) on the beach. 

And so it goes, with personal and social ills that pose threats as daunting as the monsters that haunt the lead characters.

Each episode tells a new story in a different part of the U.S.

The cast includes familiar faces like Nicole Beharie (“Sleepy Hollow”), Charlie Tahan (“Ozark”), Mike Colter (“Luke Cage”), Taylor Schilling (“Orange Is the New Black”) and Kelly Marie Tran (“Star Wars”).

“You Can’t Ask That” (Oct. 2, CBC Gem)

Maria Bangash, one of the subjects of “You Can’t Ask That.” PHOTO CREDIT: Courtesy of CBC

I confess when I first heard about this series, which is based on a successful Australian version in which people with differences of some kind are asked questions that would otherwise be deemed invasive, I thought the whole concept sounded rather rude.

In fact, after screening the first episode of the second season, I can say it’s eye-opening and inspirational.

That episode features people with disabilities like Markham’s Maria Bangash, who has a genetic condition called chromosome 9 deletion. The various subjects, including teens Saoud and Nicola, who have spina bifida; Ella, who has cerebral palsy; Kaleb-Wolf, who has with brittle bone disease; and Owen, who was born with vision and hearing impairment, are more focused on what they can do than what they can’t.

For instance, Owen’s brother Oliver, who was born with missing fingers and a thumb that points in the wrong direction, notes that “it can be hard to hold my hockey stick,” but it clearly doesn’t stop him from playing.

Asked what she would change if she could, Maria replies that she’d change nothing about herself but much about the way society perceives people with disabilities — a goal that could certainly be furthered by watching this series.

Future episodes focus on people with PTSD, deafness, schizophrenia, multiple sclerosis, bipolar disorder, Parkinson’s disease and Generalized Anxiety Disorder.

Odds and Ends

Stephen Rea and Francesca Annis as lovers of a certain age in “Flesh and Blood.”
PHOTO CREDIT: Courtesy of MASTERPIECE

I am truly sorry I didn’t have time to screen the new “Masterpiece” crime thriller “Flesh and Blood” (PBS, Oct. 4, 9 p.m.) given the crackerjack cast. Francesca Annis (“Jane Eyre”) plays a widow who begins a romance with a retired surgeon (Stephen Rea, “The Crying Game”). Imelda Staunton (“Harry Potter,” “A Confession”) is her nosy next-door neighbour and David Bamber (“Rome,” “Pride and Prejudice”) is the detective who investigates when things go awry. PBS also has the political drama “Cobra” (Oct. 4, 10 p.m.) with another stellar cast, including Robert Carlyle (“Once Upon a Time,” “Trainspotting”), Richard Dormer (“Game of Thrones”), Victoria Hamilton (“The Crown”), David Haig (“Penny Dreadful”) and Lucy Cohu (“Ripper Street”).

Good news for fans of classic peak TV: all seven seasons of “Mad Men” are to be available on Amazon Prime Video as of Oct. 1.

Oct. 2 is a busy day for new releases. Netflix has “Emily in Paris,” a fish-out-of-water tale created by Darren Star of “Sex and the City” fame, starring Lily Collins as a young American woman who gets a job with a marketing firm in the City of Light. On Crave, there’s “Kingdom of Silence,” (9 p.m.), a documentary by Rick Rowley about the murder of Saudi Arabian journalist Jamal Khashoggi; while HBO has Season 2 of martial arts action series “Warrior” at 11 p.m. There’s also Vol. 2 of the “Savage X Fenty Show,” featuring fashion by Rihanna, on Amazon Prime.

If you like shows about funny people, check out “The Comedy Store” (Oct. 4, 10 p.m., Crave), an ode to the famous L.A. club that has been a training ground for numerous famous comedians, many of whom are featured in this docuseries talking about the good old days.

I had almost forgotten about “The Walking Dead.” Truth be told, it’s been a long time since I thought the show was any good so I tend to hate-watch it more than anything. But if you are a diehard, AMC has the Season 10 finale Oct. 4 at 9 p.m., along with the spinoff “The Walking Dead: World Beyond” the same night at 10 p.m. And you thought zombies were hard to kill.

Finally, Showcase has “Tell Me a Story” (Sept. 30, 10 p.m.), which reimagines classic fairy tales as dark, modern psychological thrillers, starting with “The Three Little Pigs,” “Little Red Riding Hood” and “Hansel and Gretel.”

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