Just Wait Til I Brawl With Rip Torn!

I GOT A few phone messages today that I found a bit mystifying until I came across this, in John Doyle's column in the Globe & Mail today.

In the matter of TV and the other bits of the popular culture, we Canadians have a terrifically complicated, tortured relationship with the beast. It's all passive aggressive.

Personally, I don't feel validated by merely being in L.A. and in close proximity to network TV stars. At the same time, I was delighted to see that the hilarious and wacky CBC soap opera MVP: The Secret Lives of Hockey Wives has been getting good reviews in the United States and is doing well on ABC's all-soap SoapNet channel. Some American critics got it, totally - the sexy, broad farce at the core of the show.

In The New Yorker, TV columnist Nancy Franklin wrote: "The opening credits combine funny and sexy better than any show I've ever seen: Synched to the propulsive beat of Sloan's 2006 hit Who Taught You to Live Like That is a quick succession of really close-up shots of gorgeous men getting dressed to play hockey and of gorgeous women getting dressed to go out and get those men who play hockey. The 35-second sequence is as gloriously over the top as can be, and no show could live up to it, but MVP is a good beach read, so to speak, if you need a break from all that Goethe and Plato."

It's a very good notice from a serious magazine that has an excellent eye for the delicious pleasures of pop culture.

Mind you, not everyone in the Canadian TV racket is pleased. In his much-read, daily online piece about TV, Denis McGrath (who writes episodes of The Border and tries to make it sound like he's doing Norman Mailer-esque toil on a really, really important drama) sneered with a cattiness that he couldn't contain. "I love The New Yorker, but come on, that review is like the puckish story they'll run once in a while where somebody writes, 'in defence of championship wrestling....'

Heh heh. The interesting thing is, of course, Doyle and I essentially agree, if not always on the examples, then certainly on the underlying problem. I've nosed around the points Doyle makes today quite a bit lately. And as I've stated before, my only problem with MVP was execution. I just think it didn't go far enough with the Soapy stuff. I stand by that opinion. And anybody who says different can go fight a goddamn bear.

Still, it's nice that apparently ABC SoapNet is pleased. Though I'll be damned if I could find that billboard in Times Square when I was down in NYC two weeks ago. Oh well.

Tomorrow, I start shooting my 2nd Border ep of the season, so blogging might be light til the weekend.

I've been a little nervous the last couple weeks about this script, since it's really an attempt to try and make a "change of pace" episode. It's much funnier and lighter than we've done on the show. Which is, you know...a risk.

But it read great this afternoon -- and the BLUE draft's on its way out and hopefully tomorrow things will go well.

And as an added bonus, the ep is almost a mini-reunion of people from my Across The River to Motor City project: Director Michael DeCarlo and me, plus actors Matthew Deslippe, David Fox and Bruce Hunter.

Should be fun.

Or... I mean to say, I better get a move on. Apparently I have four wives to find, and then I goddamn well better find a way to make that scene work on the day, cause let's face it -- If I can't make it work, then the whole goddamn system collapses and the bastards win...

Mailer-esque sounds like too much work.