SCTV, Prime Video
From left: Eugene Levy, Catherine O’Hara, Rick Moranis, Joe Flaherty, Dave Thomas, Andrea Martin and John Candy in Second City Television, which is getting its streaming debut on Prime.Photo courtesy of The Second City, Inc./Supplied
In 1978, The Globe and Mail’s television critic Blaik Kirby wrote an article headlined “Hope for a new kind of TV comedy” about Canadian talent-led challenges to the “rigidly conservative” American TV comedy establishment (Bob Hope, Johnny Carson) and the rise of sitcoms (“the situation generally much more prominent than the comedy”).
One show Kirby admired was Second City Television – a small-screen spinoff from Toronto’s sketch-comedy troupe that had, at that point, aired 26 episodes on a sporadic schedule. “That series is satire, and often daring satire, and satire which derides the most sacred cow of them all, television,” he wrote.
You know all the legends SCTV spawned: Eugene Levy, Martin Short, Rick Moranis, Andrea Martin, Dave Thomas, the late greats Catherine O’Hara and John Candy. But for years it’s been hard to track down the actual series, outside of YouTube clips.
So don’t say Amazon never did anything for us on its path to global domination: On Tuesday, all 135 episodes became available to stream for the first time on Prime Video, and only here in Canada.
Law & Order Toronto: Criminal Intent, Citytv+
Perhaps the primary appeal of Law and Order: Toronto (which stars Kathleen Munroe, left, and Aden Young) is its setting.Steve Wilkie/Supplied
Toronto ended 2025 with the fewest number of murders in the city since 1986. Perhaps the city’s Law & Order spinoff is sating the blood lust of locals?
The third season premiere (March 5 on CITY-TV, then streaming on Citytv+) is particularly lurid, with a serial killer hunting models during fashion week.
As know-it-all Detective Sergeant Henry Graff, Aden Young goes full Shatner in his scenery-chewing questioning of a suspect. Co-star Kathleen Munroe, meanwhile, suggests more quiet complexity as Detective Sergeant Frankie Bateman.
The opening scene takes place in New York – a squandered opportunity for a crossover, but also a reminder that the fact this Law & Order isn’t normally set there is its primary appeal. I personally enjoyed the hyper-specificity of a 2025 Toronto recycling and garbage pickup calendar consulted by Graff and Bateman in the episode. I looked at the screen and thought: That’s my trash!
The Pink Pill: Sex, Drugs & Who Has Control, Paramount+
Cindy Eckert’s quest to get the “female Viagra”, flibanserin, approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration is contrasted with the fast-tracked approval of erectile dysfunction drugs in The Pink Pill.Supplied
Opening, appropriately, with a blast of a certain electro-clash track by Peaches with an unprintable title, this new documentary directed by Montreal’s Aisling Chin-Yee compares and contrasts the fast-tracked approval of erectile-dysfunction drugs in the late 1990s with the decades-long process it took to get flibanserin on the market in the U.S. to treat “hypoactive sexual desire disorder” in women.
The Pink Pill is the first project from Docs for Change, a collaboration between Toronto-based studio Catalyst and the philanthropic arm of the Canadian undergarment brand Knix. But it’s solely focused south of the border on pharmaceutical entrepreneur Cindy Eckert’s quest to get the “female Viagra” Addyi – the brand name inspired by a Grey’s Anatomy character – past the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. Eckert and other talking heads believe “the pink pill” was treated to a sexist, paternalist double standard along the way.
While Chin-Yee’s film makes this case convincingly enough, the candid testimonials from women (and their partners) about the significance of their sex lives elevate it above pharmaceutical ad. Watch the doc – but talk to your doc afterward.
It Was Just An Accident, Mubi
A still from It Was Just An Accident, one of two nominees for the best international feature film Oscar now streaming on the service Mubi.Les Films Pelleas/Supplied
This humanist, often humorous and frequently theatrical thriller, filmed secretly in Iran by director Jafar Panahi, has its exclusive Canadian streaming debut on March 6 on Mubi – the same streaming service where you’ll find Brazil’s The Secret Agent, another nominee for best international feature film at the Oscars.
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Panahi’s film concerns a group of survivors of regime repression. Auto mechanic Vahid (Vahid Mobasseri) abducts a man he believes was his torturer in prison, but his lack of complete certainty leads him to take his one-legged captive on a wild road trip.
A peek at unseen, furtively free parts of Iranian society, and the film’s exploration of the old Aeschylean questions about cycles of violence, are as pertinent as ever. The Globe and Mail’s Barry Hertz called it “a miracle of a movie.”
Rooster, Crave
Danielle Deadwyler and Steve Carell in a scene from Rooster, the series which has familiar elements but is lifted by Carell’s performance.Katrina Marcinowski/Supplied
Bill Lawrence has been working in television comedy for decades, but the writer/producer is particularly ubiquitous right now with Shrinking unfurling its third season on Apple TV, Scrubs freshly rebooted on ABC and CTV – and now this new HBO comedy (on Crave, Sunday).
Set at a liberal arts college in New England, Rooster stars Steve Carell as a bestselling author named Greg Russo (based on Carl Hiaasen) who, five years after his divorce, is still broken up about it. Meanwhile his professor daughter, Katie (Charly Clive), is dealing with rage in the immediate aftermath of her husband’s affair with a grad student.
Greg takes a writer-in-residence gig to be closer to Katie. The father-daughter relationship, the herky-jerky healing of hearts, the all-around empathy, the skirting of true complexity – it’s familiar. But Carell lifts the comedy up a level, making this an unusually laugh-out-loud Lawrence outing.