TV: Five shows worth watching tonight: March 12
A select viewing guide for Monday, March 12
REALITY Princess Slice, 8 p.m. Spending money like there’s no tomorrow is tremendous fun – until the bills arrive. Recently returned for its second season, this series features money expert Gail Vaz-Oxlade serving up tough love to pampered young women (they would be the “princesses” of the show’s title) who simply can’t control their spending. As on Vaz-Oxlade’s series Til Debt Do Us Part, the savvy financial planner’s common-sense regimen begins with the cutting-up of credit cards and putting the subject on a restricted cash diet. In tonight’s first show, we meet Treva, whose shopping habit is sustained by an endless cycle of pay advance loans. In the second, Vaz-Oxlade meets the aspiring actress Allison, whose career ambitions are stalled by staggering debt.
COMEDY 2 Broke Girls CBS, CITY-TV, 8:30 p.m. Where’s Gail Vaz-Oxlade when you need her? Money or lack thereof figures prominently in this rookie workplace comedy about two hardworking Brooklyn waitresses. Streetwise Max (Kat Dennings) is the poor kid with a tart tongue and high hopes; new pal Caroline (Beth Behrs) is a trust-fund heiress whose inheritance disappeared when her father went to jail. Both women are saving money toward their goal of opening up a cupcake shop, but they keep running into roadblocks. Tonight, for example, Max’s stove breaks, so Caroline attempts to return some of her expensive jewellery to a Manhattan department store. Not so fast, kiddo.
FOOD Top Chef Canada Food Network, 10 p.m. One of last year’s surprise hits on Canadian cable, this show begins its second season with a new host. Actress and gourmand Lisa Ray joins the cooking competition, which, like the original U.S. series, pits contestants against each other in a series of weekly cooking challenges, with a rotating celebrity panel judging the culinary results. Top prize is $100,000 and a kitchen makeover. Tonight’s opener introduces the 16 chefs, who are immediately thrown into culinary battle at Bymark restaurant in Toronto.
MOVIE The L-Shaped Room TCM, 10 p.m. ET; 7 p.m. PT The movie world was still a cloistered place a half-century ago. Some of the best-regarded film reviewers of the day were outraged by this 1962 British drama, which cast Leslie Caron as a character determined to have a child out of wedlock. The gamine actress delivers a commendable performance as Jane, a young French woman who moves to a ramshackle boarding house in a working-class London neighbourhood. Jane overcomes the scorn of her neighbours – and her own doctor – and even finds romance with the struggling writer Toby (Tom Bell), until he discovers that she’s “in the family way,” as they called it at the time.