First off, wishing everyone a safe and comfortable 2022. This week, there are multiple new and returning shows I enjoyed, so I’m listing them in order of premiere date and forgoing the Show of the Week.
Son of a Critch (Jan. 4, 8:30 p.m., CBC and CBC Gem)
in “Son of a Critch.” PHOTO CREDIT: Courtesy of CBC
Give Mark Critch and Tim McAuliffe credit: they’ve taken an awfully well worn TV trope, the coming-of-age comedy, and given it a charming, quirky spin all its own in the autobiographical “Son of a Critch.”
Based on comedian Critch’s memoir, it follows 12-year-old Mark (British actor Benjamin Evan Ainsworth, “The Haunting of Bly Manor”) as he grows up in 1980s St. John’s, Newfoundland.
Mark is simultaneously a naif and an old soul, living with his radio reporter dad Mike (Critch), his stay-at-home, full-time gossip mom Mary (Claire Rankin), older brother Mike Jr. (Colton Gobbo) and grandpa Pop (Malcolm McDowell, yes, that Malcolm McDowell).
Cherub-faced Mark listens to Dean Martin, is “asthmatic with fallen arches and no hand-eye co-ordination” and shares a bedroom with his granddad. (“Nothing gets you out of bed faster than being mooned by an octogenarian,” narrator Critch says in one of the show’s laugh-out-loud lines.) So he’s ripe for picking on when he gets bused across town to the Catholic junior high school — although it’s hard to say who’s tougher, the bullies or the nuns. (Petrina Bromley of “Come From Away” plays one of them.)
Newbie actors Sophia Powers and Mark Rivera play Mark’s frenemy Fox, who comes from a family of bullies, and friend Ritche, the only Filipino kid in school and a fellow outcast.
The comedy is sharp but not cruel, and Ainsworth makes a sweetly appealing protagonist. I came into this one a little skeptical but came out a fan.
Run the Burbs (Jan. 5, 8:30 p.m., CBC and CBC Gem)
PHOTO CREDIT: Courtesy of CBC
If TV comedies were judged just on the likability of their lead actors, Andrew Phung would have a runaway hit on his hands in “Run the Burbs.”
A fan favourite in the dearly departed “Kim’s Convenience,” the Calgary-born Phung has spun his own life experience into this sitcom, co-created with his best friend, Scott Townend. Here, the Vietnamese-Canadian actor is Vietnamese-Canadian suburban dad Andrew Pham.
Whereas the actor is raising young sons in Toronto in real life, the TV dad is stay-at-home nurturer to adolescent, queer daughter Khia (Zoriah Wong) and son Leo (Roman Pesino), while his extremely smart South Asian wife Camille (Rakhee Morzaria) works in HR and is an Instagram chef on the side.
You could call it an aspirational comedy, not in the sense that the Phams are rich or famous, but that we should all be so lucky to have a bond like this family’s. It’s not that the Phams aren’t saccharine sweet, thank goodness, or joined at the hip, but their interactions are shot through with love and respect.
The plots, at least in the two episodes made available for review, stick close to the family’s suburban home: the neighbourhood block party is jeopardized by the local bylaw enforcer (Aurora Browne of “Baroness von Sketch Show”); Andrew and Camille finagle their way into the new neighbours’ pool during a heat wave; Khia has complicated feelings when her former best friend Mannix (Simone Miller) moves back to the ‘hood; Andrew frets when Leo goes to sleep-away camp.
Phung and his team have assembled a capable cast with some comedy ringers, including Ali Hassan, Chris Locke, Samantha Wan and the late Candy Palmater.
I’m rooting for this one.
You can read my Toronto Star interview with Andrew and Scott here.
Women of the Movement (Jan. 6, 8 p.m., Global TV)
PHOTO CREDIT: James Van Evers/ABC
In 1955, Mamie Till Mobley did something that seems unthinkable in Jim Crow-era America: defied authorities in Mississippi to publicly display the mutilated body of her 14-year-old son, Emmett Till, murdered by white men in that state because he had dared to smile and whistle at a white woman.
That act of defiance and her subsequent national speaking tour in support of justice for Emmett and other Black Americans are credited with sparking the U.S. Civil Rights movement.
This limited series, part of a planned anthology by Marissa Jo Cerar (“The Fosters,” “The Handmaid’s Tale”), is squarely focused on Mamie, played affectingly by Tony Award-winning theatre actor Adrienne Warren.
Mamie’s grief and determination are the conduit through which the story of Emmett’s murder is told, as well as the subsequent trial, which saw the killers go free after the woman whose encounter with Emmett (Cedric Joe) spurred the lynching lied about it on the stand. The jury never heard the testimony, but the series portrays the lie about a lascivious Emmett putting his hands on Carolyn Bryant (Julia McDermott) as tainting the jury nonetheless, after it circulated through Sumner, Mississippi.
(The doc says in a postscript that Carolyn recanted her story, a claim also made by author Timothy Tyson in 2017, although Carolyn, still alive at 88, has refused to confirm that.)
A charge of kidnapping against Roy Bryant and J.W. Milam in a different county never got prosecuted after two senators leaked a story about Emmett’s father being executed during World War II for allegedly raping two women (author John Edgar Wideman has suggested Louis Till was framed and I have little trouble believing that to be true).
While Mamie is the main focus, the series also portrays the people who helped her through the darkest days of her life, including NAACP members Medgar Evers (Tongayi Chirisa) and Ruby Hurley (Leslie Silva), the Black press, civil rights leader Dr. Theodore Howard (Alex Desert), her mother Alma (Tonya Pinkins), and her boyfriend and later husband Gene Mobley (Ray Fisher). Canadian actor Gil Bellows plays a small but important role as prosecutor Gerald Chatham.
There was never any justice for Emmett, despite the killers admitting the crime in a self-serving Look interview less than a year after the trial. And one could argue, thinking about modern-day lynchings and trials in which the killers of Black people have been set free, that justice is still an elusive target for Black Americans.
“Women of the Movement” tells a powerful story and, I would wager, not a universally known one; the least we can do, like the thousands of people who lined up to see Emmett Till’s body, is not look away.
Global also has a new American medical drama, “Good Sam” (Jan. 5, 10 p.m.), about a young surgeon who’s in competition with her surgeon father.
Short Takes
PHOTO CREDIT: Courtesy of Bell Media
Transplant (Jan. 3, 10 p.m., CTV and CTV.ca)
Good news for fans of this Canadian medical drama: if you warmed to Dr. Bashir Hamed (Hamza Haq) and his colleagues at Toronto’s fictional York Memorial Hospital last season, you’re going to enjoy catching up with them in Season 2. The show continues to judiciously mix its medical stories with glimpses of the private lives of the doctors. This season, with Dr. Bishop (John Hannah) sidelined by a stroke, they all have to adjust to divisive acting chief of emergency medicine Dr. Novak (Gord Rand). Mags (Laurence Leboeuf) is still struggling with work-life balance; Theo (Jim Watson) is still torn between his job in Toronto and his family in Sudbury; June (Ayisha Issa) is still weighing whether to apply for the chief resident job; Bash is still trying to prove himself in the ER while struggling with PTSD from his experiences in Syria and the return of a woman from his past. The good news is that the friendship between the doctors is growing, which makes the characters that much more endearing. You can read my Toronto Star interview with the main cast here. CTV also has “The Cleaning Lady” (Jan. 3, 9 p.m.), a new American show about a Cambodian doctor who comes to the U.S. for medical treatment for her son but ends up becoming a cleaning lady for the mob, and I haven’t seen it, but I hope it’s better than that description sounds.
Pretty Hard Cases (Jan. 5, 9 p.m., CBC)
My favourite team of female detectives is back for a second season. And unlike Season 1, when Samantha (Meredith MacNeill) and Kelly (Adrienne C. Moore) were still skeptical of each other, they’re functioning like a team. Sam even has a nickname for them, Skelly, which doesn’t mean she escapes Kelly’s teasing. This year, besides tackling crime together they’re both grappling with their love lives. Sam’s judgmental mother Judy (Sonja Smits) comes for an unplanned visit, complicating Sam’s budding romance with Naz (Al Mukadam), and Kelly continues to have feelings for Nathan (Daren A. Herbert), but he’s still dating Gabrielle (Sera-Lys McArthur). The season’s main criminal focus involves a primarily Black neighbourhood that Kelly feels is being overpoliced by Guns and Gangs, but a shooting there brings even more pressure and the arrest of a suspect whom Kelly believes is innocent. That’s the serious side; on the fun side, Karen Robinson (“Schitt’s Creek”) continues to be a delight as Unit Commander Shanks, and the world’s least helpful but most entertaining homicide detectives are back in Tricia Black and Miguel Rivas. You can read my Toronto Star interview with Daren A. Herbert here. Also returning to CBC and CBC Gem are “Workin’ Moms” Season 6 (Jan. 4, 9 p.m.); “Still Standing” Season 7 (Jan. 5, 8 p.m.); “Coroner” Season 4 (Jan. 6, 8 p.m.); and “Arctic Vets” Season 2 (Jan. 7, 8:30 p.m.).
All Creatures Great and Small (Jan. 9, 9 p.m., PBS)
Season 1 of this period drama was my favourite comfort food TV of 2021. That’s not to say this adaptation of the James Herriot books about being a Yorkshire veterinarian is always comfortable. As in real life, some of the animals treated by James (Nicholas Ralph), Siegfried (Samuel West) and Tristan Farnon (Callum Woodhouse) die and the humans who own them face hardships. And as the second season opens in 1938, we know the Second World War is on the horizon. Still, the natural beauty of the Yorkshire setting, the quality of the acting and the attention to detail in the production make this world a pleasure to escape to. This season, James has to decide between staying in Yorkshire or going home to Glasgow to practise there. And, of course, he still has unfinished business with Helen (Rachel Shenton). He’s not the only one dealing with affairs of the heart, as Siegfried, Tristan and even Mrs. Hall (Anna Madeley) have admirers.
Odds and Ends
“Sopranos” completists might want to check out the prequel movie “The Many Saints of Newark” (Jan. 7, Crave), starring the late, great James Gandolfini’s son Michael. Also on Crave via HBO are Season 2 of teen drama “Euphoria” (Jan. 9, 9 p.m.) and televangelist comedy “The Righteous Gemstones” (Jan. 9, 10 p.m.).
Netflix has a reality series called “Hype House” (Jan. 7) about “the world’s biggest social media stars.”
Amazon Prime Video has the George Clooney-directed movie “The Tender Bar” (Jan. 7), which sounds like a coming-of-age tearjerker starring Ben Affleck.
If you’re a fan of “A Discovery of Witches,” Season 3 debuts Jan. 8 on Sundance, Shudder and AMC Plus.
CORRECTION, Jan. 5, 2022: Edited to correct the credit on the “Women of the Movement” photo.
NOTE: The listings here are in Eastern Standard Time and I’ve verified the times where possible, but it’s always best to check listings for your own area. The selection of programs reviewed reflects what I’m given access to by networks and streamers, whether reviews are embargoed, how many shows I have time to watch and my own personal taste. The Odds and Ends section includes shows that I have not watched.
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