From Jake Gyllenhaal’s new legal thriller to a new primetime baking show, we round up our top 10 shows to watch this week

1. Battle on the Beach – Sunday, June 9, HGTV | Season Premiere

HGTV stars Ty Pennington, Taniya Nayak and Alison Victoria return to mentor another trio of amateur home-reno duos, who battle it out fixing up three similarly afflicted beachfront properties on Oak Island, North Carolina. It all starts tonight, in the kitchens. 

2. Beat the Bridge – Monday, June 10, GSN | Series Premiere 

Cameron Mathison hosts this game show in which teams of contestants answer trivia questions by stepping on squares within a giant interactive bridge. Each step forward puts money in the team’s bank; however, the team will only keep the money if one of its players returns across the bridge before the time limit expires.

3. How Music Got Free – Tuesday, June 11, Paramount+ | Series Premiere

The invention of the compact disc was the best thing to ever happen to the music industry. Significantly cheaper to produce than vinyl albums, this new format led record labels to flourish and artists to grow rich as fans snapped up CDs, including old favourites that they already owned on vinyl. Then along came MP3s and online file-sharing, causing the industry’s business model to instantly collapse like a house of cards. This two-part docuseries details the fascinating inside story of the technology-driven disruption that changed music during the late 1990s and early 2000s, when websites such as Napster provided listeners with the tools to literally steal music.

“An unbelievable story of cunning, illegality, celebrity and innovation, these are the events that changed the music industry forever,” notes the series’ synopsis. Narrated by Method Man, How Music Got Free features interviews with Eminem, 50 Cent, Timbaland, Jimmy Iovine, Rocsi Diaz, Rhymefest, Steve Stoute and more.

4. Keith Robinson: Different Strokes – Tuesday, June 11, Netflix 

The veteran comic returns to the stage with a special filmed at New York’s Sony Hall, wherein Mr. Robinson details how his life has evolved after suffering not one, but two strokes, which left him with serious limitations. Thankfully, his sense of humour remained intact. 

5. Hoda Kotb Interviews Céline Dion – Tuesday, June 11, NBC 

In advance of the upcoming documentary I Am: Céline Dion, the Canadian superstar sits down with Today’s Hoda Kotb for her first interview since revealing her diagnosis of Stiff Person Syndrome, and she opens up about how she’s coping with the debilitating illness.

6. Tour de France: Unchained – Tuesday, June 11, Netflix | Season Premiere

Back for a second season of documenting all the drama within the iconic cycling race, viewers are taken inside the 21 stages of Tour de France 2023, chronicling all the shady scandals, low blows, dramatic falls, historic breakaways and fierce battles to unfold.

7. Presumed Innocent – Wednesday, June 12, Apple TV+ | Series Premiere

Fresh off the record-breaking success of his Prime Video Road House reboot, Jake Gyllenhaal hops to another streamer — with another remake. This one’s not a movie, but an eight-part legal thriller adapted from Scott Turow’s 1987 novel, which was previously made into a 1990 Harrison Ford flick. 

Gyllenhaal plays hard-charging prosecutor Rožat “Rusty” Sabich, who suddenly finds himself on the other side of an indictment when Carolyn Polhemus (Renate Reinsve), one of his colleagues at the district attorney’s office, is found brutally murdered — in a manner that bears unmistakable resemblance to a case the two worked together. The man they prosecuted in that case is still behind bars, and Rusty’s DNA is all over the crime scene — because despite having a wife (Preacher’s Ruth Negga) and two kids, Rusty was engaged in an affair with Carolyn. And all indications are it didn’t end well.

The evidence paints a damning picture. Worse yet, our hero (or, perhaps, our antihero?) has enemies at the DA’s office — most notably the man putting him on trial, Tommy Molto (played by Gyllenhaal’s real-life brother-in-law, Peter Sarsgaard), who may well be letting his grudge against Rusty blind him to justice.

It all makes for a complex, slow-burning drama that spends just as much time delving into the protagonist’s fractured home life and his tortured memories as it does the courtroom — riffing on the notion that, while Rusty may be innocent of murder, he’s no doubt guilty of inflicting a lot of pain and hardship on the people he loves most.

Helming it all is genre master David E. Kelley, a writer who, with prestige potboilers like Big Little Lies and The Undoing on his CV, is well-versed at delving into the myriad ways that the shockwaves from a crime can ripple through a community, and a family.

8. My Next Guest Needs No Introduction with David Letterman – Wednesday, June 12, Netflix | Season Premiere

By the time he aired his final episode of CBS’s The Late Show in 2015, it was clear that David Letterman, the man who reinvented late night in the 1980s and ’90s, was running low on enthusiasm for the daily grind of a nightly talk show. That said, he wasn’t ready for retirement, and in 2018, a refreshed, relaxed and bushy-bearded Letterman popped up on Netflix with a different sort of chat show, conducting interviews with A-list talent at a more leisurely sort of pace — only a handful of hour-long episodes per season. Yet, refreshed though he may be, Dave remains ever the lovable curmudgeon.

Across his first four seasons, his eclectic guest list has included Barack Obama, Billie Eilish, Tina Fey, Ryan Reynolds, Malala Yousafzai, Julia Louis-Dreyfus and more.

Now, a few weeks after Dave’s special one-off sitdown with comedian John Mulaney, season five arrives — though this “season” features only two episodes: one with pop star Miley Cyrus and the other with NBA legend Charles Barkley. In previews for the chats, Barkley can be seen offering Dave some golfing tips (to varying degrees of success), while Cyrus recalls how her breakout role in kid show Hannah Montana almost never came to be.

9. Joko Anwar’s Nightmares and Daydreams – Friday, June 14, Netflix | Series Premiere

Acclaimed Indonesian filmmaker Joko Anwar weaves a bone-chilling, thought-provoking anthology about ordinary people confronted with the extraordinary — grappling with malevolent forces that lurk on the edges of our reality.

10. The Big Bakeover – Friday, June 14, KTLA | Series Premiere 

Television baking competitions have become all the rage, thanks to the runaway success of U.K. hit The Great British Bakeoff (retitled The Great British Baking Show here in Canada). 

The latest of these arrives this week, The CW’s The Big Bakeover, in which baking expert and Great British Bakeoff winner Nancy Birtwhistle travels throughout America on a mission to save struggling bakeries that are on the cusp of going under.