Do you feel like you’re drowning … but you haven’t even left your couch? Welcome to the Great Content Overload Era. To help you navigate the choppy digital waves, here are The Globe’s best bets for weekend streaming.
The Franchise, HBO/Crave, Sunday
Himesh Patel in The Franchise.Colin Hutton/Crave
Veep veterans Jon Brown and Armando Iannucci are moving from spoofing one DC universe to another DC universe; they’ve teamed up with James Bond-surviving director Sam Mendes for this behind-the-scenes, half-hour comedy about the crew and cast of an overbudget superhero movie in an overextended IP universe. First assistant director Daniel (Himesh Patel, Station Eleven) vapes like crazy on the set as he tries to protect his German director’s vision for Tecto: Eve of the Storm from evil producers, health and safety reps and product placements. Billy Magnussen is the comic stand-out in the cast as an American actor who becomes increasingly insecure owing to the constant digs of his British co-star (Richard E. Grant) and the disturbing amount of growth hormone that he’s injecting to stay ripped. Everyone stops every so often to marvel: “Am I killing cinema?”
The Great Canadian Baking Show, CBC/CBC Gem, Sunday
The Great Canadian Baking Show returns for Season 8.Geoff George/CBC GEM
Some TV shows are like comfort food, but only one is practically indistinguishable from it. The Great Canadian Baking Show returns for Season 8 with Second City Toronto veterans Alan Shane Lewis and Ann Pornel back as hosts – and pastry chefs Bruno Feldeisen and Kyla Kennaley there again to gently judge a new baker’s dozen of dough punchers. Actually, there are only 10 contestants: Christine Campbell’s the first ever to hail from New Brunswick – and you’ll be unsurprised to discover in the premiere that blueberries are her jam. Early front-runners seem to be Jen Childs and Marcus Tam, both from British Columbia, both accountants, both trying to balance flavours as well as they balance the books. You can have your cake week – and stream it too: The relaxing reality show is on the regular old CBC at 8 p.m. local time (8:30 NT) and on CBC Gem as of 9 a.m. ET.
The Queen of My Dreams, Crave
Amrit Kaur in The Queen of My Dreams.HO/The Canadian Press
Before Mindy Kaling and Justin Noble’s The Sex Lives of College Girls returns for a third season this fall on Crave, catch up on what its Canadian star Amrit Kaur has been up to during its long hiatus on the same streamer. In this feature film, Kaur plays two roles: Azra, a young queer Muslim Torontonian and aspiring actor, who must take an emergency trip from Toronto to Karachi; and Mariam, Azra’s judgmental mother, in flashbacks to her life in Pakistan in the 1960s before she moved to Canada. Globe and Mail critic Aparita Bhandari calls the movie directed and written by Fawzia Mirza “an ambitious project, an attempt to tell a multigenerational story of faith, culture, queer and diasporic identities, all tied together by a mother and daughter’s love for a Bollywood romance.”
Curses!, Season 2, Apple TV+
Season 2 of Curses! premieres on Oct. 4.Apple TV+
Holiday expansionism has led to the formerly one-day event known as Halloween now essentially taking up all of October. As such, all the streamers already have curated “terrifying TV” and “scream cinema” lists up to cater to horror fans. For those not quite ready for The Babadook (now on CBC Gem), Apple TV+ has just started streaming the second season of Curses! to get you in the spirit of the so-called “spooky season.” This DreamWorks Animation series flips the premise of 1980s treasure-hunting entertainments such as Indiana Jones on its head. The Vanderhouven family’s quest is to reverse a curse by returning all the ancient artifacts that their ancestors’ pillaged in the past with the help of some otherworldly creatures. All the globe-hopping adventure of Ducktales, less neo-colonialist quackery, the show is rated age 8+ by Common Sense Media but is a hit with both five-year-olds and 40-year-olds in my haunted household.
Faceoff: Inside the NHL, Prime Video
Prime Video is shooting its shot with NHL fans this season – starting with this six-part docuseries that landed on the streamer run by Amazon earlier this week. The first episode sees friends in life, opponents in hockey, William Nylander of the Toronto Maple Leafs and David Pastrnak of the Boston Bruins going over the famous rivalry between their franchises; the last two episodes allow viewers to relive the Edmonton Oilers’ run to Game 7 of the Stanley Cup finals last season. If the past is too painful, maybe wait to make new NHL memories on Prime: On Oct. 10, a new weekly show hosted by Andi Petrillo called NHL Coast to Coast makes it debut and then Prime Monday Night Hockey starts on Oct. 14 with a game between the Montreal Canadiens and Pittsburgh Penguins.