What to Watch This Week: November 29 to December 4

From holiday classics to country crooners, we round up the top 10 shows to watch this week

1. Bob’s Burgers – Sunday, November 29, 9 p.m., City & Fox

When Linda’s parents (guest voices Sam Seder and Renée Taylor) fly into a nearby airport and find themselves with a brief layover, Bob and Linda pounce, trying to turn this little travel snafu into mom and dad’s yearly “visit.” Naturally, their devious plan soon splits apart at the seams.

2. Fargo – Sunday, November 29, 7 p.m., 8 p.m. & 9 p.m., FX Canada | Season Finale

The fourth season of this acclaimed crime anthology took a while to arrive, but proved to be worth the wait. Featuring Chris Rock and Jason Schwartzman as warring crime bosses in 1950 Kansas City, there have been twists and turns aplenty, and fans will want to find out what happens in tonight’s sure-to-be thrilling conclusion.

3. Feliz NaviDad – Sunday, November 29, 5 p.m. & 9 p.m., Lifetime

Fans may not realize it, but Sabrina the Teenage Witch star Melissa Joan Hart has made a segue into directing, helming episodes of such TV series as Young Sheldon. She’s also behind the camera for this yuletide comedy about a widower (Mario Lopez) who’s having a tough time with his first holiday season since his wife’s death. As a result, his daughter (Paulina Chávez) tries to help him rediscover the Christmas spirit.

4. CMA Country Christmas – Monday, November 30, 9 p.m., ABC

Grab some hot cocoa (or perhaps a little Irish cream liqueur) and snuggle in with your loved ones by that fire. How else does one prepare for this annual TV event, in which country singers show off their pipes and their Christmas spirit in equal measure?

This year’s edition is hosted by genre superstar Thomas Rhett and his wife Lauren Akins, who will bring their real-life passion for the Christmas season to this inaugural stint as emcees.

5. The Disney Holiday Singalong – Monday, November 30, 8 p.m., ABC

Earlier this year, ABC delivered two volumes of irresistible fan service known as The Disney Family Singalong, featuring many of the world’s most beloved Mouse House voices coming together to reprise all your favourite tunes. (Or, in the case of Dancing With the Stars judge Derek Hough, lip-syncing while performing jaw-dropping dance moves in his house with girlfriend and fellow DWtS pro Hayley Erbert.)

With the holidays coming up and no one quite sure when life might get back to some sense of normal, now seems like as good a time as any to introduce a third, yuletide-themed edition.

While Disney probably wants to keep most of the performers top-secret until the night of, Ryan Seacrest is expected to reprise his duties as host. Also, and we’re just speculating here, don’t be surprised to see a few returning talents—like the aforementioned Hough and Erbert, or perhaps eternal Disney star Josh Gad, a.k.a. the voice of Olaf from the Frozen flicks and the guy who played LeFou in the 2017 live-action Beauty and the Beast.

If you don’t happen to see your favourite star or preferred holiday tune on this special, that doesn’t mean you won’t. Something tells us there’s more than a three-peat in store for this franchise—which managed to pull in over 22 million total viewers in the U.S. with its first two instalments.

6. The Holiday Movies That Made Us – Tuesday, December 1, Netflix

Film buffs who have a soft spot for Christmas movies will find The Holiday Movies That Made Us to be unadulterated catnip. Produced by the same team behind The Movies That Made Us and The Toys That Made Us, this two-episode documentary series that begins streaming on Netflix this week takes a behind-the-scenes look at the making of two iconic seasonal entries: Tim Burton’s The Nightmare Before Christmas (1993) and Elf (2003).

In each case, archival footage and interviews with key players bring forth some surprising facts, such as that, with both films, their respective studios took a chance with relatively inexperienced production teams. And in the case of Nightmare (which, by the way, was not directed by Burton but by Henry Selick), Disney stuck with it even after initial poor box office numbers.

7. Big Sky – Tuesday, December 1, 10:01 p.m., CTV & ABC

In reading C.J. Box’s book The Highway, David E. Kelley, who most recently developed Liane Moriarty’s Big Little Lies and Jean Hanff Korelitz’s You Should Have Known (a.k.a. The Undoing) into must-watch HBO TV series, found himself another genie in a bottle. “It’s cliché to say that I couldn’t put it down, but, really, I couldn’t put it down,” says Kelley, of the first book in the Cassie Dewell series. “It was a page-turner.”

His new 10-episode thriller, which will incorporate several of Box’s books, follows private detectives Cassie Dewell (Kylie Bunbury) and Cody Hoyt (Ryan Phillippe), who join forces with Cody’s estranged wife, ex-cop Jenny Hoyt (Katheryn Winnick), to search for two young sisters who have been kidnapped by a truck driver on a remote highway in Montana. When they discover that these are not the only girls who have disappeared in the area, they must race against the clock to catch a serial killer. “What resonated was the layering of the characters,” says Kelley. “And beyond that, the authenticity and the sense of place that [Box] brought to Montana. When we set about adapting it, the biggest challenge for me was to be able to deliver what the book did, and that is the tension, the thrill, the drama, the relational equations of the characters, which were rich and profound, and then the sense of escapism. It was a great ride.”

8. 88th Annual Christmas in Rockefeller Center – Wednesday, December 1, 8 p.m., NBC

The 2020 edition of this annual tree-lighting ceremony in Midtown Manhattan features a variety of performers on hand, including Dolly Parton, Meghan Trainor, Kelly Clarkson, Brett Eldredge, Tori Kelly, Goo Goo Dolls, Leslie Odom, Jr., country duo Dan + Shay, the cast of The Temptations-themed Broadway hit Ain’t Too Proud and the Radio City Rockettes.

9. Mulan – Friday, December 4, Disney+

Didn’t want to fork over an extra 30 bucks to watch this live-action take on the classic Disney cartoon when it debuted for “premium subscribers” earlier this year? Not to worry—Yifei Liu’s star turn as the young Chinese warrior becomes available to all Disney+ subscribers starting Friday.

10. Selena: The Series – Friday, December 4, Netflix | Series Premiere

Twenty years after Jennifer Lopez brought Selena Quintanilla to the big screen, Netflix brings her to the small one. The saga of this legendary Tejano singer will be fleshed out across multiple seasons, this time starring Christian Serratos, best known as Rosita on The Walking Dead. The story has been described as a “coming of age” drama chronicling all the fateful choices that shaped the lives of Selena and her musically inclined family, including brother A.B. Quintanilla, sister Suzette Quintanilla and Selena’s husband, Chris Perez. And what a story it is.

Selena made a large mark in a short period of time—she was in her early 20s when she became the first female Tejano artist to win Best Mexican-American Album at the 1994 Grammys, and she was just 23 when she performed for a record-breaking audience at the Houston Livestock Show & Rodeo. However, as those who followed her career already know, Selena’s life was cut short just a month after that concert, when she was murdered by the founder of her own fan club, Yolanda Saldívar. That said, she’s not defined by her tragic end.

“What she’s become, especially for… Latin culture and women, and just the positivity that she spoke about and displayed not only onstage but offstage . . . I believe it’s her fans that have put her in the position that she’s in these days,” Perez told Good Morning America recently. “Out of everybody that I’ve known in my life, I don’t know anybody more deserving than her.”

Luckily, we’ll have plenty of time to get to know this remarkable young woman before dealing with her demise. The nine-episode Part 1 debuts Friday, with Part 2 still TBD.