What to Watch This Week: May 14 to 19

From a remake of White Men Can’t Jump to Sylvester Stallone’s new reality show, we round up our top 10 shows to watch this week

1. Match Me Abroad – Sunday, May 14, TLC | Series Premiere

What do you do if you’ve tried and you’ve tried, but you just can’t find a soulmate in the continental United States? Why, you go on a reality show, of course, and let some expert matchmakers scour the rest of the globe for the spouse of your dreams. 

2. Zarna Garg: One in a Billion – Tuesday, May 16, Prime Video

Remember when the only real way for a comedian to get famous was hone their act on the road for a few years in the hopes of scoring a five-minute slot on some late-night talk show? Well, those days are long gone, and Zarna Garg is living proof that you can become a superstar standup simply by building a fanbase on social media. Thanks to the trifecta of Instagram, TikTok and YouTube, Garg has worked her way up to her very own special on Prime Video, filmed at New York’s Gramercy Theatre. Self-described as an unapologetic Indian-Immigrant Mom, Garg naturally focuses her quips on mom life, immigrant life and American life.  

One in a Billion is just the latest in a string of high-profile gigs for the funnywoman, including appearances on the TODAY show, This American Life and Hillary Clinton’s Apple TV+ chat series Gutsy. 

3. The Family Stallone – Wednesday, May 17, Paramount+ | Series Premiere

Sylvester Stallone is one of the most recognizable movie stars in the world. 

But what does the man they call Sly do in between playing boxers, soldiers and gangsters? Well, we’re about to find out with this unexpected yet totally welcome look into the 76-year-old actor’s home life.  

The series zooms in on the Rambo and Rocky portrayer as a family man, exploring his relationship with his wife, wellness entrepreneur Jennifer Flavin Stallone, and his daughters: fashionista Sophia, actress and model Sistine, and Scarlet, who also co-stars with her old man in Paramount+’s Tulsa King. Watch as this icon of machismo wilts in the face of his fam’s overwhelmingly female energy, meeting up with a few famous pals along the way to blow off steam. 

4. Sisters – Wednesday, May 17, Crave | Series Premiere

This six-episode series from Ireland explores how the absence of parents can influence adult life in unforeseen ways, and how that void can affect a woman’s relationship to alcohol, men, work and motherhood (or lack thereof). Sisters follows Canadian Sarah (Sarah Goldberg) and Irish Suze (Susan Stanley), two strangers who find their lives suddenly intertwined with the discovery that they’re half-sisters when Sarah visits Ireland after the death of her mother. Determined to connect with their estranged alcoholic birth father, the two embark on a road trip to track him down, along the way coming to realize they’re more alike than they ever could have imagined. 

5. Working: What We Do All Day – Wednesday, May 17, Netflix | Series Premiere

Former U.S. President Barack Obama narrates this series in which he appears alongside everyday people in their homes and places of work, following individuals at all levels of the workforce—from service jobs all the way up to the C-suite. 

6. McGregor Forever – Wednesday, May 17, Netflix | Series Premiere

Back in 2021, controversial Irish UFC fighter Conor McGregor faced one of the most demanding years of his life, with three pivotal fights in a 12-month period, as the eyes of the world watched. This four-part series places viewers in the room with one of the greatest mixed martial arts stars on the planet as he takes on the most important battle of his career. “Conor is unlike anyone I’ve ever collaborated with. As one of his trainers described him, he’s an entirely unreasonable man,” said series director Gotham Chopra. “And for that reason, he’s impossible not to watch and be fascinated by. Don’t look away, because I guarantee you, you will definitely miss something inexplicably wild.” 

7. High Desert – Wednesday, May 17, Disney+ | Series Premiere

Meet Peggy (Patricia Arquette), an on-again, off-again drug addict/drug dealer who lives in a small town in the California desert with her complicated mother, Rosalyn (Bernadette Peters). When Rosalyn unexpectedly dies, Peggy finds herself emotionally and financially adrift, leading her to step into a whole new line of work as a private investigator. 

That’s the premise of High Desert, a new Apple TV+ comedy created and written by Nancy Fichman (Grace and Frankie), Katie Ford (Miss Congeniality) and Jennifer Hoppe (Nurse Jackie), with all eight episodes directed by Jay Roach (whose credits include the Meet the Parents and Austin Powers films). 

High Desert also marks Arquette’s latest collaboration with her Flirting With Disaster co-star Ben Stiller, who is once again behind the scenes as exec producer (as he was on Arquette’s previous projects Severance and Escape at Dannemora). 

Peggy may be a complete mess, but she displays a surprising aptitude for detective work. In fact, it wouldn’t be unfair to compare the series to The Rockford Files, as Peggy solves crimes and outsmarts the bad guys while just barely holding herself together. 

Arquette is blessed with a first-class supporting cast, including: Matt Dillon as Denny, Peggy’s ex, whose current status as a parolee hasn’t hampered his gift for being a relentless hustler; Rupert Friend as Guru Bob, a former TV anchorman who has rebranded himself as a desert mystic; Weruche Opia as Carol, Peggy’s closest friend, the bored fiancée of an ER doctor who has some dark secrets of her own; Brad Garrett as Bruce, a private investigator whose business is circling the drain when he reluctantly agrees to hire Peggy; and Christine Taylor as Dianne, Peggy’s buttoned-up sister, who struggles to bring some semblance of order to Peggy’s chaos. 

8. XO, Kitty – Thursday, May 18, Netflix | Series Premiere

In this Korea-set spinoff of Netflix’s To All the Boys movies, Canadian Anna Cathcart reprises her fan-favourite character, Kitty Song Covey. When she reunites with her long-distance boyfriend, Dae (Minyeong Choi), at the same Seoul high school attended by her late mother, a whole new romance unfolds, leading the teenage matchmaker to realize that relationships are considerably more complicated when it’s your own heart that’s on the line. 

9. Grey’s Anatomy – Thursday, May 18, CTV & ABC | Season Finale

Would it really be a season finale of this addictively soapy doctor drama without some kind of monumental event rocking the staff at Grey Sloan Memorial? Of course not! And considering that this particular finale is a two-hour affair? Well, buckle up… especially since the end of season 19 also marks the end of showrunner Krista Vernoff. She hands over the creative reins to Meg Marinis starting with season 20, and you can bet she wants to go out with a bang.  

“I love putting a viewer through a good wringer,” Vernoff teased to TVLine. “[This season’s] tone has really been a return to form, where there’s high drama, there’s high emotion, and there’s also a lot of funny, a lot of humour, a lot of heart.”  

Considering this is a series that, in years past, has given us a super-storm, an airplane crash and a patient with a bomb in his torso, we’re ready for some fireworks. No specifics just yet, but one thing that has been teased is the temporary return of Dr. Grey herself, after Ellen Pompeo left the show that bears her character’s name in a tearful February 23 episode. 

10. White Men Can’t Jump – Friday, May 19, Disney+

We live in a world where originality is far too often set aside in favour of remaking (or rehashing) existing intellectual property. Sometimes those remakes are entirely justified—timely reinventions that offer a fresh, vital perspective on a classic concept. But who woulda thunk that the time was right for a remake of 1992 comedy White Men Can’t Jump? Well, black-ish creator Kenya Barris, for one.  

“I’m feeling really good about the direction it’s going in,” Barris told Rolling Stone in January, when the film was in the midst of the dreaded audience test-screening phase. “It’s an updated tale. Basketball has changed a lot from when Woody Harrelson and Wesley Snipes did it. It’s more ubiquitous in our culture… talking about it from the idea of, like, people are looking at it as a lifestyle. It’s more of a dramatic telling of it.” If you don’t remember the original… well, you’ll probably appreciate this redux all the more, but you could also probably do with a brief synopsis. Sinqua Walls stars as Kamal, a once-promising b-ball player who made some bad decisions that scuttled his chances of NBA superstardom, while rapper Jack Harlow makes his acting debut as Jeremy, another former basketball phenom whose career was cut short by injuries. The two young men don’t have much in common, but they’ve got basketball—and as you can tell if you check out the trailer, they also share a mutual mastery of trash-talk. 

Was this remake absolutely necessary? Probably not. But with Barris behind the scenes, it should be worth a watch.