What to Watch This Week: October 31 to November 5

From Halloween decorating to star-studded westerns, we round up our top 10 shows to watch this week

1: Doctor Who: Flux – Sunday, October 31, 4:55 p.m. & Midnight, CTV Sci-fi

The 13th season of Doctor Who begins with this Halloween-night special, in which Jodie Whittaker begins her final batch of episodes before her iteration of the Doctor regenerates into a yet-to-be-revealed incarnation. For Whittaker’s final season, the Time Lord will be taking on a mysterious foe known as the Flux, which brings with it such perennial Doctor Who baddies as the Soltarans, the Weeping Angels and a new enemy known as the Ravages.

2. Halloween Wars – Sunday, October 31, 6 p.m. & 9 p.m., Food | Season Finale

We’re down to the final two teams and with $25,000 on the line, they’ll have to pull out their boldest decorations, pumpkins and treats to emerge victorious from this War. The theme of the episode is “duelling monsters”—totally appropriate for a season-ender that takes place on Halloween night.

3. The Harder They Fall – Wednesday, November 3, Netflix

Of the hundreds if not thousands of westerns throughout the history of cinema, there aren’t many to feature protagonists of colour. While Django Unchained and Blazing Saddles spring to mind, beyond that the list becomes a bit more obscure, featuring such entries as the 1975 “blaxploitation” spaghetti western Take a Hard Ride and the Sidney Poitier-Harry Belafonte flick Buck and the Preacher.

With his new Netflix western The Harder They Fall, director Jeymes Samuel is bucking that trend by assembling a predominantly Black cast, led by Jonathan Majors as outlaw Nat Love. Discovering his mortal enemy Rufus Buck (Idris Elba) has been sprung from prison, Nat rounds up his old gang to seek revenge on the man who murdered his parents. The cast also includes Zazie Beetz, Regina King, Delroy Lindo, Lakeith Stanfield and RJ Cyler. (Rapper/mogul Jay-Z is an executive producer.)

In an interview with Deadline, Samuel admitted he’s a big fan of the genre, but was frustrated by the “really narrow vantage point” of storytelling that almost always focuses on a white guy, the result of white filmmakers’ preferences and not historical accuracy (the Smithsonian Institute estimates that one in four cowboys in the Old West was Black). Samuel also wanted to expand the role of women in westerns, typically depicted as sex workers in saloons.

As the director explains, onscreen representation is important, and matters more than ever right now. He offered a key example referencing one of filmdom’s biggest franchises.

“Just on a shallow level, look how much swag is missing when you delete Black people from the narrative,” he told The Guardian. “Look what happened when they put Lando Calrissian in The Empire Strikes Back! Billy Dee Williams was amazing.”

4. Property Brothers: Forever Home – Wednesday, November 3, 5 p.m. & 8 p.m., HGTV

Drew and Jonathan Scott are back with another season of this renovation spinoff, in which they help people turn their underwhelming houses into forever homes. In each episode, the British Columbian twins show average folks how to unlock a property’s full potential, with lots of smart fixes, sweat equity and, of course, that good old-fashioned Scott Brothers banter we all know and love. (You should also be prepared for a serious case of reno envy).

“It’s one thing to have a beautiful house, but a house is just a collection of studs and windows and décor and things like that,” Jonathan told GoldDerby.com about his mission with this series. “But a home is that safe escape where you can spend time with your family and you can create memories.”

5. The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills Reunion – Wednesday, November 3, 6 p.m. & 9 p.m., Slice

Filming a series during quarantine is always hard. But to film a reality show in which the entire premise is based on a group of catty women living their unapologetically lavish lifestyles during a time when they’re barely even allowed to leave the house? Well, that’s super-hard—not to mention potentially boring.

So we weren’t sure what to expect when the Housewives of Beverly Hills reunited for season 11. As it turns out, this year proved to be one of the juiciest on record.

Between Lisa Rinna really opening up about her daughter’s relationship with Scott Disick, Sutton Stracke being accused of creeping Crystal Minkoff, and those pesky lawsuits that’ve been following Erika Jayne around since her divorce from Tom Girardi, there was plenty of drama to dine out on.

So it’s really no wonder that producer and host Andy Cohen needed four whole reunion specials to dissect it all.

This week, things cap off with the last of those retrospectives—one final chance for this cast to spill the tea and bare the claws before we start speculating who will and won’t return for season 12.

“I think that I asked Erika everything. I mean, the viewers had amazing questions and I feel that we represented the tenor of what the viewers were feeling,” Cohen revealed ahead of it all. “I thought it was fascinating, it was engaging, it was surprising. And we did, we spoke about everything. I mean, name a topic and I’ll tell you if itwas discussed.”

6. One of Us is Lying – Wednesday, November 3, 9 p.m., W Network | Series Premiere

This teen mystery mashup of Gossip Girl and The Breakfast Club focuses on a group of high school students from various socio-economic backgrounds, who are gathered together for after-school detention. When one of them winds up murdered, the survivors become the suspects.

7. Dickinson – Friday, November 5, Apple TV+ | Season Premiere

Hailee Steinfeld is back for the third and final season of this brilliant and unique period sitcom based on the early life of famed writer Emily Dickinson. In the swan song, Emily enters her most productive period as an artist while the American Civil War divides the nation—and an equally fierce battle winds up dividing her own family. As Emily tries to heal the rifts all around her, she wonders if art can help keep hope alive, and whether the future can be better than the past.

8. The Electrical Life of Louis Wain – Friday, November 5, Amazon Prime Video

Cats have been domesticated companions to humans since ancient Egyptian times, yet it wasn’t until eccentric Victorian artist Louis Wain became obsessed with felines that they became cute. In this feature, Benedict Cumberbatch stars as Wain, known to this day for his plethora of paintings depicting adorably anthropomorphized cats hosting tea parties, rowing in boats and engaging in other human activities. In this biopic from director Will Sharpe, Cumberbatch delivers yet another extraordinary performance as Wain, whose creative brilliance is matched only by his social awkwardness. When he hires a governess (Claire Foy of The Crown) to look after his younger siblings, she opens his mind to a world he had never imagined—much to the chagrin of his disapproving sister (Andrea Riseborough). Featuring narration from Oscar-winner Olivia Colman, the cast also includes Toby Jones and Adeel Akhtar, telling the story of a true British iconoclast whose artistic vision continues to resonate.

9. Hello, Jack! The Kindness Show – Friday, November 5, Apple TV+ | Series Premiere

Ever since Jack McBrayer arrived on the scene with his turn as Kenneth the Page on 30 Rock, he’s effectively been playing the same perpetually cheery type of character, but while always a delight as a supporting player, it was hard to imagine him as a leading man without some dramatic changes to his general personality.

Well, prepare to be pleasantly surprised, because Apple TV+ has found a way with Hello, Jack! The Kindness Show, which takes McBrayer’s “infectious positivity and whimsical humour,” as it’s accurately described in the press release for the series, and puts him centre stage as the host of a show for preschoolers.

Mind you, it’s not just for preschoolers: with Paul Scheer (The League) and Sam Richardson (Veep) in the mix, you know this one’s going to be at least a little off-kilter.

10. Narcos: Mexico – Friday, November 5, Netflix | Season Premiere

After three seasons tracking the brutal rise and fall of Colombian drug lords, and three more which have done the same for the Mexican trade, Netflix’s true-crime epic is set to go out with a bang—literally, one imagines.

As we open season three, it’s the 1990s, and the arrest of kingpin Félix Gallardo (Diego Luna) has set the stage for other cartels to fill the void. But with so many gangs, old and new, squabbling over territory, expect things to get real bloody, real quick. As the Guadalajara cartel claims Tijuana, that leaves Juarez up for grabs. Whoever establishes the strongest foothold in these two drug warzones will be in a position to seize an underworld throne rivalling that which was won and lost by Gallardo, Pablo Escobar and the Gentlemen of Cali.

While Félix is most definitely down for the count, the rest of this saga’s surviving dealers and feds are back for the end game. That includes Scoot McNairy as Walt Breslin, our trusty protagonist on the DEA side of things, and José María Yázpik as Narco “Lord of the Skies” Amado Carrillo Fuentes, who aims to soar higher than ever before. The show also welcomes a few newbies, including Luis Gerardo Méndez as a Juarez cop who pays the bills by moonlighting as a stickup man; Luisa Rubino as a firebrand journalist; and rapper Bad Bunny as a member of the infamous “Narco Juniors.”

Another fresh development this year: Agent Breslin cedes his voiceover duties to a surprising new narrator.