Skip to main content

The whole wide world will be agog as the new season of Game of Thrones (Sunday, HBO Canada, 9 p.m.) is launched. Agog, I tell you. Social media will be on fire. Don't even go there. You'll get burned.

Oh my, the questions to be answered. Whither the hordes of snow zombies? Is Jon Snow dead? Could that priestess Melisandre bring him back from the dead? What happened to Daenerys Targaryen? How will Cersei take revenge? Like, who would mess with her, anyway? Whatever happened to Bran Stark?

Mind you, it is a fact that a ton of people won't pay the slightest bit of attention. Dragons, murder, incest, rape and pillage, and, well, snow zombies. Who needs that? What a ton of people watch, week in and week out, is shows about homes. Renovations, buying and selling, and investing in homes. They say that Canadian TV doesn't have a star system but that's bunk – it's the home shows, the cooking shows and the renovation series that create the true stars of Canadian TV.

Home to Win (Sunday, HGTV 10 p.m.) is the mother of all Canadian renovation shows. (Happily it airs after Game of Thrones, if you must go there.) It has 20 – count 'em, 20 – HGTV contractors and designers, involved in choosing and then rejigging a property that, wait for it, viewers can win. It is also the most Canadian of productions. Adorably geeky, unslick and madly makeshift. From top to end it is a showcase for people who don't seem to belong on TV. That includes the host, ET Canada's Sangita Patel, who looks for all the world like a child sent out to spout a speech containing very, very hard words to pronounce.

The first thing that happens is the gathering of the great experts on choosing a home and renovating and decorating it: Bryan and Sarah Baeumler, Sarah Richardson, Scott McGillivray, Mike Holmes, Tiffany Pratt, Samantha Pynn, Paul Lafrance, Kate Campbell, Sebastian Clovis and Danielle Bryk. Possibly, that's all of them. They tend to blur when gathered in a posse. Certainly, none of them seem entirely comfortable together. The patter is awkward, and it appears nobody told most of them how to dress for this TV gig. Designer Paul Lefrance turns up in seriously ripped jeans and a leather jacket, and slouches. Fellow designer Mia Parres seems to be wearing a shirt/dress thing that she created too quickly from a checkered tablecloth. One could go on, but the fun is in watching all of them give it a go, this supersized reno project.

First they search, in teams, for the ideal home to get a makeover and offer to viewers. Serious embargoes from HGTV prevent me from saying much about this. (It's almost as tricky as getting info about Game of Thrones.) But I will say this – the home that's chosen is totally wrong. But that's just me. It could be your dream home. Now you get to watch this army of experts turn it into something very special, and then you can attempt to win it.

This, friends, is ideal Sunday night entertainment. No nudity, no dragons and uninhibitedly geeky, when the game is homes, not thrones.

Also airing this weekend

Silicon Valley (Sunday, HBO Canada, 10 p.m.) returns for its third season and it's a satire that has gone from strength to strength. What might at first have seemed like a one-off spoof of the tech industry now gets more layered and acid in tone. The kids who created this wizardry called Pied Piper discover that an actual businessman/CEO, one Jack Barker, has been brought in to make them rich. The casting of Stephen Tobolowsky as Barker is a stroke of genius. He does IPOs but to the kids he's an old man who should have long since retired to consume a lot of Metamucil. Tobolowsky's comic timing is, as ever, impeccable.

Veep (Sunday, HBO Canada, 10:30 p,m.) is also back. This fifth season – the first without creator Armando Iannucci on-board – confronts the absurdities of U.S. politics with glee and venom. It is hilariously, nastily brilliant at times. The rapid-fire banter in the inner circle of (now interim) President Selina Meyer (Julia Louis-Dreyfus) is sublime. If you thought no satire could come close to matching the current absurdity of U.S. politics, you were wrong. Veep does it.

Interact with The Globe