THE REMOTE IS our weekly look at upcoming TV highlights.
Across TV and streaming services, we bring you some suggestions for your week’s viewing, based on quality, intrigue, and the simple likelihood that something might end up sparking an interesting discussion. Here’s what you should watch out for this week.
We begin with great news for people who hate culture. Netflix has released a second season of their gameshow show Is It Cake, creatively titled Is It Cake Too.
The premise of the show is based on a short-lived online fad that took off during Covid wherein people would cut into realistic items only to discover they were actually cake.
While it may strike some as disturbing that there’s a whole TV show dedicated to ordinary people and celebrity judges guessing whether something is cake or not, evidently the show has enough of a viewership to seal a second season from Netflix – a company known for cancelling shows at the first sign of weakness. So maybe some of you are watching it. Maybe some of you are excited for its second season. If so, I wish you all the best.
The grand prize for the baker who makes the most misleading cake is $120,000.
In more edifying cake broadcasting, the sixth season of Bake Off: The Professionals will begin on Channel 4 at 8pm on Tuesday. This year’s baking themes will include Safari, Archaeology, Land of the Giants, Life of Amphibians and Reptiles and Mad Science, so evidently we’ve all gotten together and decided that cakes on television can’t be normal anymore.
Paramount+ is certainly not the most established streaming service in Ireland, but this week it launches a compelling German titled A Thin Line, which sees two sisters join a radical environmentalist group plotting acts of terror in order to draw attention to climate change. This will be out from 6 July onwards.
Last week, we predicted that the Oireachtas committees focusing on corporate governance at RTÉ would be a hell of a watch, and despite how boring the phrase “Oireachtas committees focusing on corporate governance” is, we were correct.
"Chief Financial Officer of RTÉ can't tell us what his pay is. I'm supposed to buy that?"
— TheJournal.ie (@thejournal_ie) June 29, 2023
RTÉ CFO Richard Collins told the Oireachtas PAC his salary was a "private matter" and that he didn't know his exact salary before giving an estimate of €200,000 plus car allowance. pic.twitter.com/pIxcdMXNas
Though these things are subject to vicissitudes of politics and executive-level rescheduling, RTÉ will likely be before the Media Committee again on Wednesday to provide further clarity on what more we’ve learned about RTÉ’s secret payments to Ryan Tubridy.
It’s less clear what shape either the committees will take this week, but both Leo Varadkar and Micheál Martin have called on Tubridy to make himself available to appear. As things stand, it is speculated that Tubridy would decline the invitation, but it still makes sense to watch the space — if this week is half as dramatic as last week, it’ll still be fairly eye-popping. Whatever happens will be streamable via Oireachtas TV, and we’ll keep you up-to-date on what’s happening and when.
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