What to watch this weekend: Embrace the heat with Mr Loverman on BritBox and Smoke on Apple TV+ | Canada Voices

Mr Loverman, BritBox

If a cup of tea can cool you on a hot day, how about a sizzling screen performance? British actor Lennie James (The Walking Dead) recently won a BAFTA TV award for his blazing portrait of Barry, an older Antigua-raised Londoner contemplating whether to finally come out of the closet after 50 years of marriage to a woman, in this BBC One show based on a 2013 novel by Booker Prize-winning author Bernardine Evaristo.

Calloused cruelty is the first layer of Barry’s personality on view in the series – but, over the course of eight episodes, James peels the character back to help viewers understand, if not entirely forgive, his half-a-century of sexual subterfuge. The understated actor shows us the fear that’s kept Barry hiding from his loved ones, the gutting loneliness of his half-lived life – as well as his general strengths and flaws as a parent and grandparent and, yes, husband.

James is complemented by a pair of actors also giving excellent performances – Sharon D. Clarke as Barry’s long-suffering wife and Ariyon Bakare as his long-suffering lover.

With each episode just 30 minutes long, Mr Loverman is, refreshingly, a page-turner of a literary adaptation. All episodes now on BritBox.

Smoke, Apple TV+

What about hot subject matter? Dave Gudsen (Taron Egerton) is an arson investigator who thinks he’s the best in the biz but hasn’t been able to stop a pair of serial arsonists in his community. So, detective Michelle Calderon (Jurnee Smollett) has been assigned – it appears to be a demotion by her boss/ex-lover – to assist him in finally cracking the cases.

The first two episodes, on Apple TV+ as of June 27, of this nine-episode miniseries from author and screenwriter Dennis Lehane (Black Bird) chillingly communicate the fearsomeness of fire; the dialogue is sharp and the performances intense and off-kilter enough to feel original. This is enough to get past the indulgent run time of the pilot – and a twist most will see coming right away. The real series starts next week.

Wild Cards, CBC Gem

And as for hot chemistry … The most shamelessly sexy and just plain enjoyable of CBC’s current hour-long dramatic slate is this Vancouver-set show about a cop named Cole (Giacomo Gianniotti) who solves cases and will-they-won’t-theys with a con woman named Max (Riverdale’s Vanessa Morgan, magnetically mischievous).

While new episodes air in the winter, the Michael Konyves-created show really strikes me more as heat-brain entertainment. This week, I fired up Gem and belatedly caught up on the second season’s two-part finale; it pays homage to The Fabulous Baker Boys with Max going undercover as a nightclub singer, which allows Morgan, who has an off-and-on sideline as a singer, to bust out a couple jazzy renditions of tunes by the Cure and the Cars.

Wild Cards may not be prestige television – but it’s smarter than it looks and is always crafted with an Easter egg or two in the plot for pop-culture aficionados. Two seasons are on Gem now; two more have been greenlit.

Frozen: The Hit Broadway Musical, Disney+

And if you just want to cool down … I’d always been curious about the stage adaptation of Frozen – but never enough to get tickets. So when my city was under a heat dome last weekend, it seemed the right moment to chill with the kids and stream Disney+’s recently released live-capture of the closed West End production of the musical.

The former theatre critic in me had to agree with the consensus that Frozen on stage mainly pads out the story of princesses Anna and Elsa, rather than expands on it. But it was fun to watch a twist on a familiar favourite without shelling out hundreds of bucks – and British actress Samantha Barks (she was Éponine in the Les Misérables movie) won me and my kids over with her Let It Go, which we rewound several times to try to figure out how director Michael Grandage and his creative team pulled off the magical costume change at the song’s climax.

The main fact I have stored away in my brain about Goethe’s 1774 novel The Sorrows of Young Werther (which, no, I have never read) is that it was banned in a number of places in Europe after publication out of fear it was inspiring copycat suicides.

Historians debate to this day whether the so-called “Werther effect,” named after the book’s’ brooding protagonist, actually led to any deaths. What is incontrovertible, however, is that 250 years after it was published, Goethe’s novel inspired this Canadian romantic comedy directed by José Lourenço.

Set in Toronto, it concerns a writer named Werther (Douglas Booth) who falls in love with Charlotte (Alison Pill) who is engaged to Albert (Patrick J. Adams).

In what I read as a wait-for-it-to-stream review, Globe and Mail film critic Barry Hertz primarily recommended it for its performances, and one in particular: “Long underutilized and certainly undervalued, Canadian actress Pill is a pure delight here as Charlotte, anchoring and then elevating every single scene that she is in.”

Lock away your duelling pistols and check it out on Crave from June 27.