Television

Of course you’re not tired of the Olympics yet. But it will end with the Closing Ceremony on Sunday, Aug. 8. And then what?Perhaps all that indolence involved in watching the competition will inspire new ambitions to be more active and engaged in exertion. Perhaps not. August will bring multiple...

It takes a lot to really impress this writer. I want to find fun, be moved and impressed by innovation and enchanted by wit and sagacity. And tell you about it.The Pursuit of Love (streams on Amazon Prime Video from Friday) delighted me. It is compulsive and devastatingly funny viewing,...

Back in the day, the Olympics, winter or summer, presented an opportunity for mischief and daring. An opportunity, that is, for competing outlets to offer a dazzling alternative. In 2000, CTV countered CBC’s coverage of the Sydney games by running Season 1 of HBO’s The Sopranos, the first time the...

More below • How does Olympic rugby sevens work? A visual guideThe last time he came to Japan to play rugby, Conor Trainor found himself hauling soggy couches instead after a typhoon lashed the city of Kamaishi, where his team had prepared for their best chance at a World Cup...

When Olympic diver Tom Daley announced in 2013 that he was dating a man and “couldn’t be happier,” his coming out was an act of courage that, with its rarity, also exposed how the top echelons of sport weren’t seen as a safe space by the vast majority of LGBTQ...

As Maude Charron pressed the 131-kilogram barbell above her head with all her might, locked her elbows, and steadied her legs, a euphoric expression spread across her face.She dropped the massive bar and cupped her hands over her mouth, truly amazed. She knew that final clean and jerk attempt was...

As I write this on Tuesday morning the medals keep coming for Canada at the Tokyo Olympics. All being won by women right now. Maude Charron has just won a gold medal in weightlifting. You couldn’t help but be moved by her roar of triumph as she completed that feat...

In primetime last Saturday night, the Tokyo Olympics finally sprang to life as a TV event.It was a blistering couple of hours. Then it became a thrilling couple of days. First on Saturday, Tunisia’s 18-year-old Ahmed Hafnaoui pulled off the swimming shock of the day, winning gold in the men’s...

Grant me this: Not everyone is gripped by the Olympics. Not yet, anyway.There are other distractions to be found and enjoyed while that weirdly disconnected event builds up a head of steam and gets dramatic. Besides, the Games’s broadcasts are all over the place in terms of time zones and...

Before the pandemic, the only private space I had at work was in my head. My cubicle was a pair of headphones with walls of carefully curated playlists. Different lists were useful on different days for different reasons: Some held songs that energized me to finish a dragging afternoon; others...

It was the summer of 1994 and MuchMusic had been running promos all week for a Whitney Houston retrospective, featuring some of her biggest songs and music videos. I’d been working on my parents for days to let me stay up and watch, clutching The Bodyguard soundtrack CD to my...

What came first, the sweetness of Ted Lasso or the context that made it a cultural touchstone? Well, the show did simply arrive in August last year and got some good reviews. Not everyone was smitten. I was wary of it: a show that originated in a promo campaign for...

Think about The Masked Singer. Don’t think long or deep, just think about it.When the reality show arrived in 2019, it was ridiculed by reviewers. A concoction featuring a panel of judges trying to guess the identities of celebrities who sing while hidden behind elaborately garish, often outright ugly costumes,...

The chief of the Tokyo 2020 organizing committee on Tuesday did not rule out cancelling the Olympics if COVID-19 cases spiked, as more athletes tested positive for the virus and sponsors ditched plans to attend Friday’s opening ceremony.Asked at a news conference if the global sporting showpiece might still be...

Going for gold under the cloud of COVID-19 makes the Tokyo Summer Games an Olympics like no other. This newsletter is here to help you make sense of it all, with original stories from Globe reporters in Canada and Tokyo, tracking Team Canada’s medal wins, and past Olympic moments from...

It says here, in this official release: “The Games of the XXXII Olympiad will begin on Friday, July 23, and go through Sunday, August 8, 2021, in Tokyo, Japan.” Yeah, right.The Tokyo Games will begin for me and many other Canadians very early on Wednesday morning, two days before the...

There are things that don’t surprise you (or me) at all, such as England losing in a penalty shootout at a major soccer tournament. Or rising temperatures, wildfires, floods and increasing extreme-weather alerts, with many parts of the world devastated by the effects of climate change. I mean, all politicians...

For a guy who often bellows “Why can’t we ask these questions?” Tucker Carlson of Fox News is curiously hesitant to answer one specific question. He refuses to say whether he’s been vaccinated against COVID-19.Carlson and other Fox News personalities are, in general, against mask wearing, dubious about vaccines, loathe...

“Clang, clang, clang went the trolley/ Ding, ding, ding went the bell/ Zing, zing, zing went my heart strings/ From the moment I saw him I fell.”Some of you may remember The Sweeney Sisters on Saturday Night Live, from the 1980s. The singing sisters (Jan Hooks and Nora Dunn) would...

The team behind The Queen’s Gambit, now a runaway hit on Netflix, knew their heroine, Beth Harmon (Anya Taylor-Joy), would be a sensation in any sphere – an abused orphan turned pill-popping genius, beautiful, brilliant, mercurial. But Beth is a chess prodigy, and not only are chess fans notoriously fervid...