Food journalist Suresh Doss, left, and Nonso Amadi on the 505 Dundas West Streetcar in episode one of Locals Welcome.Yvonne Stanley/Supplied
Locals Welcome, CBC Gem
Returning for a new season starting Sunday, The Great Canadian Baking Show, the CBC’s version of The Great British Bake Off, is one of our national public broadcaster’s most widely loved comfort-food shows. Indeed, Pedro Pascal most recently said it was the reality show he’d most like to compete on.
But a new CBC food show on Gem is more mouth-watering in my opinion. Locals Welcome, premiering on Sunday, sees veteran food journalist Suresh Doss do a deep dive each episode into a different diasporic cuisine somewhere in Canada, taking viewers from strip malls to supper clubs. It’s a weekly peek into the history and stories of a particular immigrant culture – along with foodie tips that are more useful than Michelin stars.
The first episode explores Nigerian food in Brampton, Woodbridge and downtown Toronto, where there’s a portal to Lagos on the Ossington strip. The second sees Doss tour his chef pal Matty Matheson (The Bear) around South Asian kiosks frequented by airport workers near Pearson. Everything looks delicious in this anti-travel food show – even Toronto itself (apologies to the late architectural critic Anthony Bourdain).
More streaming recommendations from The Globe
Director Ann Marie Fleming and Sandra Oh on the set of Can I Get a Witness? The film will start streaming on Crave this week.ED ARAQUEL/courtesy of CIGAW Productions
Can I Get a Witness?, Crave
This 2025 movie, starring Sandra Oh and directed by Canadian Ann Marie Fleming, is set in a future where climate disaster has been averted by getting rid of cars and cellphones. Oh, and by mandating death for all citizens once they turn 50.
Kate Taylor, reviewing the film for The Globe and Mail earlier this year, called it “a clever yet touching look at what ails our current world” and made it a Critic’s Pick. She described the dystopian/utopian premise: “In a gracious performance delicately investigating mortality, bereavement and grief, Oh plays Ellie, a middle-aged single mother supporting her artistic daughter Kiah (Keira Jang), who is starting a new job attending the farewell ceremonies and deaths of the elders. Kiah’s task is to sketch their final portraits because photography is environmentally verboten.” Can I Get a Witness? gets added to Crave’s library on Oct. 3.
Kristin Scott Thomas and Sir Gary Oldman in "Slow Horses," now streaming on Apple TV+. Season 5Jack English/Apple tv
Slow Horses, Apple TV+
I still haven’t tired of this British spy series starring Gary Oldman as the acidic Jackson Lamb, leader of a group of disgraced MI5 agents who nevertheless keep stumbling upon and foiling bad-guy plots in Britain. Other TV writers keep trying to copy it, but they can’t quite nail the balance of genuinely energizing espionage with obscenity-filled black comedy.
The fifth season sees Roddy Ho, the boastful incel-adjacent IT expert played by Christopher Chung, fall into a honeytrap as a series of destabilizing attacks from the far-right and the far-left hit London. Of course, it’s the higher-ups in the security service who make the larger errors; embedded in the show is a critique of the concept of meritocracy. Three episodes out now; three more to come, on Wednesday.
Weekend Update anchors Colin Jost and Michael Che. The first host of the 51st season of Saturday Night Live will be Bad Bunny.Global TV;NBC Universal/Supplied
Saturday Night Live, Global
Its season-long 50th anniversary celebration over, Lorne Michaels’s sketch-comedy show returns live from New York on Saturday during a concerning crackdown on late-night TV satire in the United States. Watching SNL’s most oddball sketches live at 12:50 a.m. no longer seems a symptom of insomnia, but about staying up for free speech.
The 51st season’s first host will be Bad Bunny, the Spanish-language Puerto Rican rapper and singer who, to much MAGA consternation, was recently announced as halftime-show headliner for the February 2026 Super Bowl. The musical guest will be Doja Cat and – for another reason to tune in – Saturday marks the first show for new Canadian cast member Veronika Slowikowska.
Irish hip-hop group Kneecap won't be allowed to enter Canada, a step only Hungary has taken so far.Helen Sloan/Bell/Supplied
Kneecap, Hoopla
While Jimmy Kimmel’s brief exile from late night last month caused a free-speech firestorm, there has been less noise around Liberal MP Vince Gasparro, parliamentary secretary for combating crime, announcing on Sept. 19 that Irish hip-hop group Kneecap would not be allowed to enter Canada – a step only Hungary, noted bastion of freedom of expression, had hitherto taken toward the pro-Palestinian provocateurs.
The next week, House of Guinness premiered on Netflix featuring a number of Kneecap bangers on its soundtrack, and then on Sept. 26 a British court dropped a terrorism charge against one of group’s rappers. Whether you think Canada looks a little weak at the knees by keeping the group out, or you follow the general principle of know thy enemy emcees, it seems the right time to brush up on this band. You can do so easily by watching this 2024 movie that semi-fictionalizes the origin story of how two Belfast “ceasefire baby” low-lifes and a teacher with a passion for beats and preserving the Irish language banded together.
“Shot with the zigzagging energy of an incendiary rap battle and laced with the sharp politics of a generation that’s been too long disenfranchised, Rich Peppiatt’s film is both a rags-to-semi-riches success story, and a treatise on Irish geopolitics post-Troubles,” The Globe and Mail’s Barry Hertz wrote in his Critic’s Pick review last year. “Think 8 Mile meets Trainspotting, shot through with a lightning bolt of don’t-give-a-fig ferocity.” Kneecap, the film, is currently on Hoopla (free with most library cards) and Crave.