On TV in January: A choose-your-own-adventure heist and tennis as you've never seen it before

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Look, it's gonna be cold out there for the next month, and the next two after that. Even we get a break and it's unseasonably warm for a few days, it's just going to be grey and wet. 

If, by some miracle, there are a few nice days in your part of the country over the next month, you should absolutely get out and enjoy them. We would never discourage that. 

But if we're keeping it real, it's going to mostly be terrible out there. So just forget your New Year's Resolution to get more active or be more social or whatever now, and stay inside and watch TV instead. We have some suggestions.

Kaleidoscope

Netflix, the disruptive streamer that made waiting for the next episode feel like a challenge, is now challenging the very idea of "the next episode." Their new heist series Kaleidoscope is an eight-part limited series where the episodes will keep shuffling, giving audiences a different pathway through the story depending on when they decide to hit play. If you were a fiend for "choose your own adventure" books as a child, then this should be your jam.

Kaleidoscope stars Giancarlo Esposito as a master thief assembling a team to steal $7 billion while looking for payback from a partner who wronged. The series jumps back and forth in time — though which way is back, and which way is forward, will change depending on the order you get the episodes.

We've seen how playing with the order of a narrative can pay out big. Think about Christopher Nolan's Memento and the revelations at the end (middle?) as two timelines converge from opposite directions. Think about the emotional payoffs when Quentin Tarantino shuffles around timelines in Pulp Fiction and Kill Bill. The gambit (gimmick?) in Kaleidoscope, where the shuffle keeps shuffling, needs to be even craftier to pay off. Or we can just be satisfied seeing Esposito get to play in this cracked narrative, leading a series for the first time after giving us such a range of memorable roles in Do The Right Thing, Breaking Bad and The Mandalorian. Watch Kaleidoscope now on Netflix.

- Radheyan Simonpillai, contributor, CBC Arts

Copenhagen Cowboy

It's been nearly 20 years since renowned Danish filmmaker Nicolas Winding Refn has made his work in his native language. After breaking out internationally with the 2008 film Bronson (which also was largely responsible for launching Tom Hardy's career), Refn has been working in English, making films like Drive (2011) and The Neon Demon (2016) as well as the Amazon series Too Old To Die Young (2019).

But that is about to change with his eagerly anticipated neo-thriller of a Netflix series, Copenhagen Cowboy. Following a renegade (Angela Bundalovic) on a quest of vengeance through the Danish capitol's criminal underworld, the six-episode series is sure to be a New Year's gift for Refn's many fans. Copenhagen Cowboy starts streaming Jan. 5 on Netflix.

- Peter Knegt, producer, CBC Arts

Ginny & Georgia

When this show came out, it got a lot of comparisons to Gilmore Girls, and on the surface, there are a lot of similarities. It's about a former teenage mom, now in her 30s, raising a brainy, precocious daughter who is now roughly the same age mom was when she got pregnant. And they live in a picturesque small town in New England.

But here is the key difference: what if, instead of just being kind of shitty and codependent and totally lacking in boundaries — a la Lorelei Gilmore — mom was a full-on criminal?

Keeping it a buck, this show isn't highbrow prestige television, but not everything needs to be. It's well-paced, well-written, and likeable. The one-liners are fast and furious, and the constant tension that comes from wondering if mom/one-woman-crime spree Georgia (Brianne Howey) will finally have her past catch up to her keeps you hooked. Absolute optimal streaming television, because you will binge-watch the whole season. Ginny & Georgia Season 2 starts streaming Jan. 5 on Netflix.

- Chris Dart, web writer, CBC Arts

BMF

For me, The Black Mafia Family may be the most fascinating true crime story of all time. Brothers Demetrius and Terry Flenory — a.k.a. Big Meech and Southwest Tee — went from street corner drug dealers in 1980s Detroit to sitting at the top of a nationwide crime syndicate in the early '00s, and they did it with only a minimum of bloodshed. And honestly, they might never have been caught if Meech hadn't decided to go into the music business, give his record label the same name as his criminal conspiracy, and then buy billboards with his face and the name of said label/conspiracy on them. (That all really happened.) 

Starz's series BMF is not a faithful re-telling of the Black Mafia Family story. If you watch BMF and then watch The BMF Documentary: Blowing Money Fast — also from Starz, also available in Canada on Crave — you'll notice there are already some pretty big discrepancies in the story. (Those discrepancies are inevitably in the Flenory's favour, not surprising, since Demetrius Flenory, Jr. both plays his father and co-executive produces the series.) Still, if you're a fan of compelling gangster TV, this is gonna be good for you. (Also, it has Snoop Dogg playing a pastor, which I kind of love.) BMF Season 2 starts streaming Jan. 6 on Crave.

- Chris Dart, web writer, CBC Arts

Break Point

I love a sports reality docu-series. It's one of my favourite genres of television, and it's one of the genres that Netlfix does really really well. (I am seriously considering buying an East Los Angeles College Huskies hoodie after the last season of Last Chance U.) The crown jewel of Netflix's sports programming, though, is Formula 1: Drive to Survive. Drive really helped catapult Formula One — a sport that was previously the province of Europeans, rich weirdos, and rich European weirdos — into the North American mainstream. It turned people like my sister-in-law Rachel — who couldn't have picked Carlos Sainz or Pierre Gasly out of a lineup three years ago — into people who have really strongly held opinions about Ferrari's pit stop strategy and if Lewis Hamilton was robbed at the 2021 Abu Dhabi Grand Prix.

Now, the Drive team have turned their attention to tennis, another sport that has traditionally seemed pretty inaccessible to a lot of us. And I promise you this: the story editing will be riveting, the player back-stories will be moving, and the camera work will be artful. Prepare to get really, really into tennis. Break Point starts streaming Jan. 14 on Netflix.

- Chris Dart, web writer, CBC Arts

The Last of Us

Set in the near future — after the world's population has been ravaged by killer spores — a smuggler named Joel (Pedro Pascal) and his curiously immune young charge (Bella "Lyanna Mormont" Ramsey) must journey from quarantined Boston across the American west. 

TV loves an apocalyptic adventure, especially if there's some interminable questing involved. (Please refer to 11 goddamned seasons of The Walking Dead.) And The Last of Us is already based on a proven property — a best-selling video game that is not, it turns out, the Oregon Trail. 

HBO has invested in the project big time, spending more than $10 million USD an episode according to reports. And they dropped much of that lush budget right here in Canada, with filming taking place throughout Alberta. Much of the province will be standing in for post-doomsday 'Merica — Calgary, Canmore, Okotoks, even "the Ledge" grounds in Edmonton — and after filming began in 2021, CBC News declared it "the largest production in Canadian history." If nothing else, that distinction has me intrigued. The Last of Us starts streaming Jan. 15 on Crave.

- Leah Collins, senior writer, CBC Arts

Doug and the Slugs and Me

In the 1980s, Vancouver-based good-time pop-rock outfit Doug and the Slugs were almost ubiquitous on Canadian radios and music video shows. But to filmmaker Teresa Alfeld, growing up in the '90s, Slugs frontman Doug Bennett was just her best friend Shea's dad. The two grew apart as teenagers, and Alfeld was shocked when she heard that Bennet had died in 2004. 

In this documentary, Alfeld tells the story of the Slugs, their success, and their eventual implosion. It's a hard look at the intersection of music industry economic and artist mental health, but it's also a celebration of a great — albeit somewhat forgotten — Canadian band that really should be higher up in the CanRock pantheon. Doug and the Slugs and Me starts streaming Jan. 15 on CBC Gem.

- Chris Dart, web writer, CBC Arts

How To Lose Everything

The new animated series about grief, created by Cree writer and musician Christa Couture and Colonization Road filmmaker Michelle St. John, is expanding on themes CBC listeners may have first heard in 2019. Back then, Couture was guest hosting the radio show CBC Tapestry, sharing her experience losing two children, a leg and more. She was processing the heartbreak and exploring how to live with grief, speaking to experts on the matter and challenging various assumptions. When a writer compares losing a child to losing a limb, Couture essentially says "nope." It's very different. She would know.

Couture dug deeper on the subject in her memoir — published in 2020 by Douglas & McIntyre — How To Lose Everything and revisits those themes again in a five-part anthology series, alongside St. John and a roster of Indigenous animators representing Cree, Ojibwe, Ktunaxa, Inuit, Chippewa, Potawatomi, Atikamekw and Métis communities. Each episode is a short film exploring intimate loss from a different angle. They range between stories about coping and observations on grieving in different cultures, keeping a conversation that impacts all our lives going because we're not ready to let some things be the end. How To Lose Everything starts streaming Jan. 27 on CBC Gem.

- Radheyan Simonpillai, contributor, CBC Arts

Fight The Power: How Hip Hop Changed The World

Hip hop is turning 50. Rappers Rapsody and Nas — who is also turning 50 — are among the luminaries creating content and hosting festivities in 2023 to commemorate the music, street art, dance and fashion styles that have been evolving since DJ Kool Herc threw a back to school party in the Bronx on August 11, 1973.

Fight The Power is first on the playlist. Public Enemy's Chuck D hosts the four-part docuseries about the genre's influence, beginning with its roots as a sound born from the social and political turmoil in the 1960s. The series will cover hip hop coming into its own with those cutting and feverish lyrics on Grandmaster Flash and The Furious Five's "The Message"; the genre's Reagan-era revolt as voices like KRS-One, Public Enemy and NWA emerged; the 90s boom; and where it is today, post-2020, as a dominant art form that the public still needs to process current anxieties and turmoil.

You may know this story, or at least some version of it. Canadian rapper (and former CBC Q host) Shad did an impeccable job tracing the genre's history over four seasons on Hip Hop Evolution, one of many docuseries on the subject. But this art/social movement contains multitudes. And this series is headlined by the artist who first called hip hop "the Black CNN." Maybe, just this time, believe the hype. Fight The Power: How Hip Hop Changed The World starts airing on PBS on Jan. 31. Check your local listings.

- Radheyan Simonpillai, contributor, CBC Arts

Correction: this article originally misspelled Teresa Alfeld's name. It has since been corrected. We regret the error.