TV: Five shows worth watching tonight
A select viewing guide for Monday, November 26
REALITY Canadian Pickers (History, 8 p.m.) Don’t go fretting that American television has cornered the market on TV programs about people who buy and sell old junk for a living. Launched early last year, this popular homegrown series follows the engaging road trips of Calgary-based “pickers” Sheldon Smithen and Scott Cozens, who routinely travel all over Canada in search of antiques or curios or anything else they can flip for profit. In tonight’s new episodes, the rambling duo wade into the real great white North of the Yukon territory, with stops in Whitehorse, Tagish and Dawson. The pair know exactly how to dicker for a hand-carved bear statue, but how do you attach a dollar value to a genuine woolly mammoth tusk?
REALITY Extreme Makeover: Home Edition (ABC, 9 p.m.) Nothing restores a celebrity’s public image like helping out the indigent. Just last week, the infamous AMW (Actress, Model, Whatever) Jenny McCarthy got into hot water for grabbing the buttocks of Canadian pop star Justin Bieber at the American Music Awards. In this special, McCarthy is billed as an AAAE (Actress, Author, Activist and Entrepreneur) who plays team leader in the home-reno project for the Watson family of Knoxville, Tennessee. It seems Daniel and Mandy Watson spend all their free time trying to provide for single mothers living below the poverty line. Enter selfless Jenny and her crew of brawny boyos who have seven days to construct a new domicile capable of housing two single-mother families at a time. And nobody’s butt gets grabbed in the process.
REALITY Cake Boss: The Next Great Baker (return; TLC, 9 p.m.) Hey, Buddy’s back in town. Returning tonight for a third season, this popular series has Cake Boss fixture Buddy Valastro overseeing a competition to find America’s next great pastry chef. Fittingly, there’s a “baker’s dozen” of contestants, each one vying for the grand prize of $100,000 US and a fulltime job working alongside Buddy at Carlo’s Bakery in New Jersey. Celebrity judges for the upcoming season will include former Hulk star Lou Ferrigno, ex- N-Sync member Joey Fatone and actor Peter Billingsley, who played Ralphie in the 1983 film A Christmas Story. In tonight’s opener, the contestants are tasked to create a Mexican-themed cake for the wedding reception of former Saved by the Bell star Mario Lopez!
DRAMA Hawaii Five-O (CBS, Global, 10 p.m.) Strange how the available viewing audience takes a three-way split in this timeslot each Monday night: Viewers over a certain age (ok, 40) opt for the mystery stories of ABC’s Castle, this generation’s Murder She Wrote; twentysomething viewers who loved The Hunger Games opt for the apocalyptic newcomer drama Revolution; while everyone else settles for this slick update version of a popular seventies crime drama. Whatever the reason, tonight’s new episode has the iron-jawed cop McGarrett playing a cat-and-mouse game with a sexy therapist he believes murdered her own patient.
MOVIE Jane Eyre (TCM, 10:15 p.m. ET) Some classics simply can’t be illustrated. Hollywood has had only middling success translating the works of Charlotte Bronte to the silver screen, but this 1944 film stands out in the crowd. Joan Fontaine assumes the role of plucky Jane Eyre, who spends several years in a wretched orphanage before securing work as a governess. Jane gets along famous with her young charge Adele (Margaret O’Brien), but is terrified of her fiery-tempered employer, Edward Rochester, played by Orson Welles. Under our gentle heroine’s ministrations, Rochester’s rage gradually subsides to the point where proposes marriage, though Jane considers her options when she discovers his current wife is mad as a hatter and locked in the manor attic. Watch for a very young Elizabeth Taylor in the opening scenes.