Watchable the week of Nov. 2, 2020

SHOW OF THE WEEK: Picture My Face: The Story of Teenage Head
(Nov. 3, 9 p.m., TVO)

Here’s some uniquely Canadian counter-programming for you. The night many viewers will be glued to news stations waiting to learn whether the reign of U.S. President Donald Trump has come to an end, TVOntario will feature a documentary about a seminal Canadian band that never got the U.S. breakout it deserved. 

The feature is billed as the story of the band, but it’s really the story of two people: Frankie “Venom” Kerr, Teenage Head’s mesmerizing lead singer, who died in 2008 of throat cancer, and guitarist Gord Lewis, who has battled depression ever since Kerr’s death.

The doc traces the group from their beginnings in 1975 as music-minded high school friends in Hamilton and leads with one of their biggest shows, the 1980 Heatwave festival at Mosport Park, for which filmmaker Douglas Arrowsmith (“Love Shines”) got access to some fantastic, previously unseen footage. 

It also touches on the events the Head is best known for: riots at the Horseshoe Tavern’s Last Pogo punk show in 1978 and at Ontario Place in 1980 when too many fans showed up for a free concert and went on the rampage when the gates were closed, leading to a ban on rock shows at the venue.

The Head, riding high on the album “Frantic City,” was due to play showcase gigs in New York City later that summer, but a car accident just before they left for the States broke Lewis’s back (it was uncertain he’d ever walk again, let alone play guitar) and killed their momentum, the doc tells us.

Frankie Venom is ever present throughout the film: in old photos and concert footage, and in the recollections of Lewis and bass player Steve Mahon, our main guide through the movie. But the doc doesn’t tell the whole story, touching briefly on Kerr’s alcohol problems and omitting the fact he left the Head for a few years in the mid-80s, while original drummer Nick Stipanitz, who quit in 1988, is barely mentioned.

Much of the latter part of the doc is about Lewis’s struggles and about the comeback that began in 2017 with the greatest hits album “Fun Comes Fast,” which gives it added poignancy. Up until the pandemic hit, Mahon and Lewis had been playing shows with drummer Gene Champagne and singer Dave “Rave” Desroches, who had filled in for Kerr before (I remember seeing him front the band during a show in the mid-90s).

Rock and roll, it seems, really will never die, even if its practitioners have wrinkles, grey hairs and pot bellies.

There’s enough here to feed the nostalgia of diehard fans (and I’ve been one ever since the Head played my high school in the late ’70s) and perhaps earn some new ones.

No less an authority on underappreciated musical acts than Marky Ramone of the Ramones calls Teenage Head the best punk band in Canada. “You guys were lucky you had a band like that there,” he says.

And if you’re too busy watching election results to tune in Nov. 3, the doc repeats on TVO Nov. 7 at 9 p.m. and Nov. 8 at 10:30 p.m., and will also be available at tvo.org and on TVO’s YouTube channel.

Private Eyes (Nov. 2, 8 p.m., Global TV)

This made-in-Toronto detective series is as much a will-they-or-won’t-they unrequited romance as a crime procedural. Four seasons in, affable leads Jason Priestley (“Beverly Hills, 90210,” “Call Me Fitz”) and Cindy Sampson (“Supernatural”) have the balancing act down to a science.  

Episodes are seeded with enough wistful glances and near physical misses to keep the tension alive while purposefully keeping private investigators Matt Shade and Angie Everett apart and the show alive.

The crimes of the week tend not be overly bloody or complicated while providing work for a steady stream of Canadian actors. Guest stars in the first few episodes of the new season include Stephen McHattie (“Orphan Black,” “Pontypool”), Erica Durance (“Smallville,” “Saving Hope”), Katie Boland (“Reign”) and John Ralston (“Life With Derek”). On deck for future episodes are Aaron Ashmore (“Killjoys”), Eric Peterson (“Corner Gas”) and even Toronto Raptors head coach Nick Nurse.

B Positive (Nov. 5, 8:30 p.m., CTV)

This comedy comes from some veteran TV makers, including sitcom king Chuck Lorre, creator of “Two and a Half Men,” “The Big Bang Theory,” “Young Sheldon,” “Mom” and plenty more. Here, he’s an executive producer along with “Two and a Half Men” producer Jim Patterson and series creator Marco Pennette (“Ugly Betty,” “Desperate Housewives”) who based the series on his own experience as a kidney transplant recipient. James Burrows of “Cheers,” “Taxi” and “Will & Grace” fame directs.

So with all that experience behind it, is “B Positive” any good? The short answer, based on the two episodes I’ve seen, is it’s OK — if you like middle-of-the-road, laugh-track-laden humour, which I don’t in general. 

Drew (Canadian actor Thomas Middleditch of “Silicon Valley”) needs a new kidney and the only person willing to give him one is his screw-up of an old high school friend, Gina (Annaleigh Ashford, “Masters of Sex,” “American Crime Story”).

Gina has a heart of gold (her job is driving senior citizens to their medical appointments) but also a penchant for drugs, alcohol and sex with random men. Presumably the tension in future episodes will come from her need to stay clean to be a viable donor, but the bad girl trying to do good conceit doesn’t feel particularly groundbreaking. Nor does the fact that therapist Drew has an ex-wife, an indifferent adolescent daughter, and friends and family who apparently don’t care about him very much automatically make him sympathetic.

If Ashford’s and Middleditch’s characters develop a more believable chemistry than what’s on view so far, maybe “B Positive” will find its groove.

If you missed it . . .

Watch Baby Yoda blink his giant eyes, twitch his oversized ears and gurgle, and you might be momentarily at greater peace with the world.

The creature is still a main attraction of “The Mandalorian,” which rolled out its second season Friday, even if all he does in the first episode is observe (adorably so) as Mando (Pedro Pascal) kicks butt.

This season, Mando is on a clearly defined mission: to return the Child to his own kind. That provides opportunities to mix with new characters, alien and human, friend and enemy (played by some fun guest stars) as well as old favourites, as Mando searches for Baby Yoda’s people.

In the premiere, John Leguizamo turns up as a cyclops bookie while Timothy Olyphant of “Justified” and “Deadwood” fame plays a marshal, appropriately enough, in a Tatooine settlement that Mando and Baby Yoda visit. And that’s W. Earl Brown, Olyphant’s “Deadwood” co-star, a.k.a. Dan Dority of the Gem saloon, under the prosthetics as a barkeep in Mos Pelgo.

It’s still a fun, albeit violent ride. Personally, I felt a little sorry for the Krayt dragon that gets dispatched in the premiere.

Odds and Ends

I can’t imagine people ever getting tired of learning about the Titanic. A lot of horrible things have happened since April 15, 1912, but the thought of more than 1,500 people being pulled into the icy Atlantic as the massive ship broke in two and plunged to the bottom of the ocean still fills one with dread. PBS has “Secrets of the Dead: Abandoning the Titanic” (Nov. 4, 10 p.m.), which is mainly concerned with the identity of a mystery ship seen by passengers and crew of the Titanic, one that it’s believed could have saved hundreds of lives if it had come to her aid.

Super Channel has a new original docuseries, “Phantom Signals” (Nov. 8, 8 p.m., Super Channel Fuse). It’s about the “invisible sphere of infinite data, bombarding us from all over the planet and from the depths of the unknown universe,” and the strange phenomena that occur when those signals go wrong. For instance, the first episode deals with the still unexplained disappearance in 1953 of a U.S. Air Force jet that was intercepting an unidentified object over Lake Superior; the strange hum that drives some people crazy in places like Windsor, Ontario, Taos, New Mexico, and Auckland, New Zealand; and the electromagnetic force that caused car key fobs to malfunction in a parking lot in Carstairs, Alberta.

Adding to the current wealth of shows about space (or in this case, aspiring to space) is Showtime’s “Moonbase 8,” a comedy starring Fred Armisen, Tim Heidecker and John C. Reilly as astronauts living at a moon base simulator in the Arizona desert. It debuts on Crave Nov. 8 at 11 p.m.

CTV has the return of a couple of popular American imports: “The Good Doctor” (Nov. 2, 10 p.m.) and “Young Sheldon” (Nov. 5, 8 p.m.). CTV Life Channel has the debut of a new series starring celebrity contractor Mike Holmes, “Holmes Next Generation” (Nov. 5, 9 p.m.), in which Holmes and his kids Sherry and Mike Jr. rescue homeowners from dodgy contractors and DIY projects gone wrong.

And one more for all you “Bachelorette” fans: Citytv will have the new episode Thursday at 8 p.m. along with ABC.