Whimsical ‘Door Prize’ Returns, ‘Not Dead Yet’ Finale, Our Changing Planet, So Many ‘Survivor’ Idols
The offbeat Apple TV+ comedy The Big Door Prize returns for a second soul-searching season. ABC’s Not Dead Yet wraps its second season with a workplace crisis. A Changing Planet special explores the Earth’s endangered coral reefs. Survivor is plunged into chaos when multiple immunity idols are revealed.
The Big Door Prize
The mysterious Morpho machine is back in Season 2 of the offbeat metaphysical comedy, teasing the residents of the bucolic and slightly bonkers town of Deerfield with a new challenge: “Are you ready for the next stage?” What does that mean? Nobody knows, including local teacher Dusty (the wonderful Chris O’Dowd), who regards Morpho as “not the most explicit magical device I’ve ever met.” But when the machine elaborates, “To achieve your potential, you must discover who you are,” with occasionally disturbing specificity, the soul-searching truly begins, with Dusty and wife Cass (Gabrielle Dennis) deciding to give each other space for a few weeks, among other social experiments among their circle of eccentric acquaintances. The season opens with three episodes.
Not Dead Yet
With back-to-back episodes closing the second season of the supernatural comedy, Nell (Gina Rodriguez) faces a professional challenge when she learns Duncan (Brad Garrett) is planning to sell the SoCal Independent. With her boss and Duncan’s daughter Lexi (Lauren Ash) sitting this battle out, Nell goes to great lengths to try to save the paper and her job. (Stay tuned afterward for The $100,000 Pyramid at 9:30/8:30c, when Ash plays against her former Superstore co-star Nico Santos.)
Changing Planet
Earth Day is over, but PBS’s “Earth Month” continues with a special from the Changing Planet franchise, now in the third year of a seven-year project to address the Earth’s most fragile ecosystems. The focus turns to coral reef habitats in the Florida Keys and the Maldives which are under threat from climate change, with warming seas causing the corals to bleach and die—in the Keys’ barrier reef, 98 percent of its coral has been lost. The special explores efforts to reverse the alarming trend, including a $100 million reef restoration in a Florida lab that is breeding millions of corals to be replanted on the reef.
Survivor
Remember when an immunity idol was a novelty in this game of strategic survival? Now it’s so ingrained into the process that the camp is once again shaken when multiple hidden idols are revealed, thwarting some castaways’ plans leading to the next tribal council. To earn immunity the old-fashioned way, players must keep their balance. Followed by The Amazing Race (9:30/8:30c), now in Montevideo, Uruguay, where the teams choose between playing the drums with street performers or singing a Spanish song with troubadours before moving on.
INSIDE WEDNESDAY TV:
- The Conners (8/7c, ABC): National Cheeseball Day is a big deal in this family, a happy distraction from Darlene (Sara Gilbert) and Ben (Jay R. Ferguson) trying to sync their work schedules and Harris (Emma Kenney) falling behind with work at the Lunch Box.
- The Masked Singer (8/7c, Fox): Special guests on “Girl Group Night” include former contestants Carnie Wilson (one of the “Lambs”) and “Black Widow” Raven-Symoné.
- My 600-Lb Life: Where Are They Now? (8/7c, TLC): Dr. Nowzaradan checks in with patients from past seasons to see how their lives have changed since bariatric surgery.
- Animal Control (9/8c, Fox): Frank (Joel McHale) and Shred (Michael Rowland) try to control an aggressive swan at a country club where Shred has a meet-cute on the golf course. Elsewhere, Patel (Ravi Patel) asks his dad to help Victoria (Grace Palmer) cram for her citizenship test.
- Chucky (10/9c, Syfy and USA Network): Tiffany (Jennifer Tilly) plots her escape from prison while parapsychologists descend on the White House to try to make sense of the bloody chaos.
- Sister Boniface Mysteries (streaming on BritBox): The crime-solving nun (Lorna Watson) with a PhD in forensic science returns for a third season of light mysteries, two episodes dropping weekly.