It influenced The Simpsons and sparked the careers of Eugene Levy, Catherine O’Hara, John Candy and many others. Now this extraordinary Canadian series is finally getting its due

SCTV – short for Second City Television – is one of most influential comedy shows ever created. In the 1970s and 80s, while North American comedy fans worshipped at the altar of Saturday Night Live, the comedy nerds loved SCTV. The Canadian sketch show was weird. It was dark. It was multilayered and years ahead of its time.

Dave Thomas, head writer and an original cast member, was there from the start. “Conan O’Brien said that he used to watch and he thought, ‘This show is being written specifically for me,’” Thomas tells me. “There were references in it that he was absolutely sure only he got. We wrote at the top of our reference level. And the idea was to see if the audience would meet us there.”

She plays a depressed fisherwoman. He plays a man made of wicker who is solely dedicated to her pleasure. How did the actors feel about this strange, emotional connection – and what did Colman draw from her own marriage?

Another year, another raunchy comedy-drama in which Alexander Skarsgård is the answer to a social outcast’s erotic dreams. “I fucking loved Pillion so much!” says Olivia Colman, reliably sweary straight out of the gate, as she brings up last year’s British indie hit starring Skarsgård as a leather-clad dom with a timid traffic warden as his submissive. “And when they kissed at the end … Aww.” The 52-year-old Oscar-winner for The Favourite gives a mock-sniffle and a little shake of her frizzy grey locks, then pretends to dab her eyes.

Seated beside her in a London hotel room and wearing a bright orange “I’m With Stupid” T-shirt, Skarsgård tilts his head appreciatively. In Pillion, it was Harry Melling who had the privilege of being ravaged by the 50-year-old Swedish actor. Now it is Colman’s turn in Wicker, an earthy adult fairytale filmed in Budapest and set in a medieval village populated almost exclusively by British comic actors who converse in language both archaically formal (“Happy to transact with you”) and bluntly colloquial (“I’d better fuck off”). Among them is Phil Daniels as a leering butcher and Richard E Grant as a doctor who is even more inept at his job than Grant was as a Celebrity Traitor.

Late-night hosts discussed the president’s weird campaign behaviour and his out-of-touch comments about wealth

Late-night hosts expressed disgust at Donald Trump’s latest racist attacks while also taking aim at his comments about money.

Demi Moore’s haute-couture maven attracts the attention of a gang of contemporary Robin Hood type clothes robbers in Riley’s fashion biz satire

Here is an entertaining, if very exhausting fantasy-caper about the fashion biz from Boots Riley, a madcap mile-a-minute melee of unadulterated ker-aziness. You might need a couple of ibuprofen and a lie-down afterwards. Demi Moore perhaps thought she was here getting a gamey starring role, comparable to her Oscar-nominated turn in the beauty-industry satire The Substance. In fact, the way the film is structured and edited, Moore is hardly more than a returning cameo, though a potent one.

She plays Christie Smith, a billionaire couture designer who has an office in a trendily designed city block which leans over at an experimental angle. Christie is the object of obsessive attention from “boosters”: supercool young outlaw women who, nettled by her arrogance, shoplift her clothes from upscale stores and sell them on at knockdown Robin Hood prices. They are Corvette (Keke Palmer), Sade (Naomi Ackie) and Mariah (Taylour Paige), the latter having the ability to, by holding her breath, turning herself into a white woman who is less likely to be challenged in a store; an interesting metaphor for what Frantz Fanon might have called black skin, white masks.

Colman stars as a depressed and bullied fisherwoman in medieval England. Fortunately, Peter Dinklage’s basketmaker delivers the answer to her dreams – an Alexander Skarsgård made of wicker

The spirit of mystery author Shirley Jackson is interestingly revived in this peculiar folk-horror romance, adapted from a 2006 story called The Wicker Husband by British writer Ursula Wills. It’s almost funny but not exactly, and almost disturbing but not exactly, occupying a strange and intriguing Venn-diagram overlap between macabre horror and sentimentality. Yet devotees of bucolic British screen-scariness will note that it is, after all, about a wicker man.

The scene is a fabular medieval-effect village that could be in central Europe or England, where there are bizarre patriarchal rituals, like the placing of metal collars on new brides. A depressed middle-aged fisherwoman (fiercely and naturalistically played by Olivia Colman) lives alone in a remote cottage and regularly brings her unappetising tench and gudgeon to market, where she is mocked and bullied by the nasty, closed-minded locals, including Richard E Grant as a lazy and incompetent doctor. Chief among her tormentors is the spiteful tailor’s wife, an elegant, sharp-faced woman played by Elizabeth Debicki.

The 29th season has begun to slightly spin its wheels, but this poo-splattered episode suggests an imminent story arc: the release of Grand Theft Auto VI

Are record beef shortages simply not that rich a topic for South Park to riff off? The show’s 29th season had its first outright middling episode this week with a zigzaggy outing that gestured vaguely toward the performative eating of particular foods, nodded slightly at a father-son story development, and wound it all up by repeating and amplifying a funny season-long running gag that increasingly seems like it will actually serve as a makeshift story arc.

But let’s jump back to the beginning, perhaps the most laugh-out-loud moment of the episode: Cartman in a fugue of delight over the impending meal of sloppy joes at the school cafeteria, to which he forms a tribute in the form of a sloppy-joe-themed version of Gary Glitter’s Rock and Roll Part Two – a music clearance reaffirming that Trey Parker and Matt Stone don’t care if a song choice might make people tut-tut (because the singer is a serial sex offender) or just annoyed (because that song sucks). Cartman’s infectious glee is short-lived, however, when he’s informed that the lunch special for the day isn’t a sloppy joe after all, or anything beef-related, but cuy – Guinea Pig on a stick.