Foley? Really?

ONE OF THE semi-infamous moments in the life of this blog was what I've come to call Foley? Really? comment thread .

Click the link and you can read it for yourself, but the basic thrust of it was this -- in talking about Rent-A-Goalie, a comment was made that one of the things that might have made the poster hate it was a lack of Foley.

Foley, for the three or four civilians who might still read this blog, is the act of recreating sound effects in TV shows. When you sweeten the mix with the sound of shuffling papers, or tapping a pen on the table, or having a pin drop or hearing footsteps echoing down the street, most of the time that's not location-recorded sound. It was recreated in a studio.

Now, the point of the Foley, Really? Thread (which also contains a really interesting back-and-forth about girl shows vs. boy shows that I had completely forgotten about) is that it sparked a bit of a bonding with Mark Farrell, who knows a thing or two about the sentiment behind it. He recognized something in the comment, and in my response. And that was the first time I thought, "maybe this thing I've noticed isn't just me?"

What "foley, really?" stands for, for me, is the propensity of a portion of the Canadian viewing audience (and a much larger portion of the production community) to judge our homemade stuff by a nitpicky yardstick that suggests we look to hate and find fault, rather than actually judge something on its true strength and merits, and its true weaknesses. It's like putting a magnet nearby and watching it warp -- you can't really trust the reaction because it seems...churlish.

The internet enabled this on a much lower level for all works. It's always been fun to look for gaffes or goofs, but as the nitpicker community grew with the net, it almost requires you to find fresh fault, and thereby validate your taste over the thing being picked apart.

But this isn't that. This is a particularly Canadian thing. Or at least I think it is. More on that later.

Foley, Really? is what drives the portion of the Canadian viewing audience that defaults to, "Canadian TV sucks," usually without seeing it. It makes people say, "that looks Canadian, I hate it," without really being able to articulate why.

This is a slippery road, I know, because the other, reactive side of this is that some creatives in Canada overpraise or too-lightly-damn things that are quantifiably off: things like a story's pacing, or confusing plotting, bad acting, or a bad set. (One person in the same thread observed that they didn't like how the Rent-A-Goalie set looked cheap. It did, and if you notice, it was pulled apart and vastly redesigned for the 2nd season.)

There's a second level of critique: cliche, camera work, whether something is funny or not, etc, that really is subjective and a raging argument always (any hand held show will always receive complaints from members of the audience who just do not like the style; this is largely, though not completely, a generational thing.) And Foley, Really? doesn't cover that, either.

I don't know where that "Foley, Really?" thing comes from. I don't know why it's such a persistent thread in reaction to Canadian shows. I don't know if it speaks to something ineffably self-critical in the Canadian character. I just know that it holds us back because it tends to overstate problems. If you're judging something by a yardstick where you're looking for it to fail, you will always find that thing.

I glanced off a bit of this in my last interview on CBC Radio's Q. With The Border, one of the incredibly interesting things we ran into was a real, honest to God resistance to portray Canadians as the action heroes of a series. It's a role we rarely see ourselves in, and initially, it seems, some portion of the viewership didn't want to hear about it.

(In a way, I think it's part and parcel of the same kind of willful myopia that makes a lot of Canadians want to hold on to the notion of our troops as Peacekeepers, even when we've been in a combat role in Afghanistan that's killed almost a hundred of our soldiers.)

Besides the action movie thing, there was a couple of amusing complaints that we had "too many Canadian flags" (the ICS building has a Canadian flag outside) and "Tim Horton's coffee cups everywhere." (I've seen the pilot three or four times, and I still haven't seen them, though I'm assured they're there. I guess I was following the story.)

Recently, we even got emails from someone complaining that an Alarm company sticker in a scene "was such an obvious bad product placement" that it "totally destroys one's suspension of disbelief."

(It wasn't a product placement. It was something that was on the door of the location.)

Contrast this looking-to-hate-it thing with, for instance, the way Monty Python lovingly satirized the way British shows used to go from video to film:



I honestly don't know what to do about Foley, Really? Am I right when I ask, "is this a Canadian thing?" Are there Brits, for instance, who reflexively hate British crime shows or other shows because they're not American? Does Australia have a problem like this? Do Italians criticize their dramas for being too...I don't know....Rome-y?

Can you imagine someone writing a letter to NBC saying that they couldn't watch Law & Order because they weren't drinking out of faux-greek coffee cups?

In Canada, we'll get complaints for being Toronto-centric. People will be livid that the scene that was supposed to be set in Petawawa or Vancouver was shot in Ontario! (uh, because U.S. shows never try to make L.A. look like...uh...everywhere else.)

It could just be a fun head-shaker. But like the Capulets vs. Montagues problem, my fear is that this dynamic allows those who'd lie about the success of homegrown programs (cough...Jim Shaw..cough) to get away with their distortions, and exacerbates the problem of trying to get people to sample shows that they'd probably enjoy if they just stopped worrying about the coffee cups and the fucking foley!

But you know, maybe it's just me.

(It's not.)

But it could be.

(It's not.)

Welcome Ken Girotti: Denis Does the Snoopy Dance

I'VE FELT THIS forever, but here it goes, and here it grows: Canadians have gotten a raw and shoddy deal from journos, who are supposed to be guardians of the culture. Yes, even a debased, devalued, and distorted culture such as we have in English Canada.

The only way around this is for there to be more first person efforts that people who were truly interested could tune into.

Let your newspapers recyle cheap wire copy from the AP or Reuters. You can read the people trying to preserve a voice in your culture for something other than the U.S. rerun directly.

Writers started the trend, but for a while I've been hoping to see more Canadian Directors' Blogs. After all, hyphenate Will Dixon can't do it alone.

Well, I'm pleased as punch to say that accomplished Director Ken Girotti has joined the Fray with a new Blog, "Boot in the Pants."

From his description:

My DGA local is New York but my home and family are in Toronto. I've done episodes of Rescue Me, Law & Order: Criminal Intent, 24, New Amsterdam, Love Monkey and my secret personal favorite, Xena: Warrior Princess. Here at home I loved working Regenesis, The Border and a pilot nobody saw called Sabbatical. There's also Mayerthorpe, a TV movie I'm proud of.

Ken is Canadian. I was lucky enough to work with him briefly on The Border. Boy, I hope to get to work with him again. For those of you fully in thrall to the colonized culture, let me remind you, he has U.S. Credits. Drink in the cred.

Head on over to Ken's blog and kick the tires. We're not all full of shit, guys. Give us a bit of love, or don't be so quick to claim us as Canadian when we fuckoff to places that care.

One Pagers Suck, Beavis.

KEE-RYE-SSST. One pagers are the scourge of any TV writer. They're barnacles of development. They're the network-mandated equivalent of a dip in the lake of fire. They're like a trip down Memory Lane with a hoe in your hippocampus. They're like burning, bleeding fingers on guitar strings made of broken glass. They're like a pretty girl who flirts with you all night and then tells you she feels so comfortable with you because you remind her of her brother. They're an actress waking up to discover that she's on the wrong side of 40 in a sexist business where women readily mutilate themselves past the point where they look human for just six more months in the spotlight that never comes. They're like a Coldplay marathon. One pagers are like eight foot snowbanks between you and the parking metre. They're like Paris Hilton winning a Grammy. They're like a debate between political candidates over who loves Jesus more.

They. Fucking. Suck.

Why?

Well, let me put it this way. How about having to send the government your tax return before you figure out your taxes? Or, maybe you'd like to furnish your house before you build it. Oh, wait! Wait! Here's a good one -- ask that girl to marry you when you pick her up for the first date. Yeah! Yeah! See how far you get then!

A one-pager is having to figure out the story before you've broken the story. And they always have to be done fast. And they always suck. It's like an unending prostate exam. They are the Carson Daly of screenwriting.

Gaaaahaahahhhh!

Anyway, in other news, Happy Birthday to the Beavis of the Canadian TV bloggers.

Director. Writer. Educator. Sometime Network Suit. Championship Rope Dancer. Pre-Industrial Hapsburg Military Tactician, and Three time County Wide Fire Swallowing Champion, Ladies and Gentlemen, I give you Mr. Will Dixon.

I want you to look at his picture.

Look at it. Look at that commanding, fierce, yet lost look.

I want you to look at it, and in the comments below I would like you to caption it appropriately.

Me, I've gotta keep scaling the @$#%ing snowbank.

Q-Cast

THE PODCAST from my appearance on Today's CBC Radio Q is up now here. (I'm up about 3/4 of the way through, but I'd advise listening to the whole thing. Jesse Wente on social gaming and author Dan Kennedy especially is a hoot.)

I wish I'd had time to turn it around on Jian a bit and ask him about the conference in Montreal he took part in last week, because the whole thing sounded really interesting. But such are the tyrannies of the clock.

Those of you who are interested in process and how I can possibly spend time writing blog entries while keeping pace with my career might note that this here entry seriously helped to focus a lot of what I talked about with Jian today.

There is one thing I left out of my little anecdote about Eli Stone: it was actually the dialogue from the Stop-Lossed Mom that blew me away: "I appealed to my sergeant and he didn't care. I appealed to my commanding officer, and my President. They didn't care."

Now THAT is not a sentiment that you would have heard on US TV a year ago. That's the thing about TV, it's not just the most influential of our mass reach media -- it's also got it's pulse on the zeitgeist in a way no other media does. And yes, I include the internet in that. It's coming -- but as a wag back in the day used to say, "The future is here, it just isn't fully distributed yet."

Culture Q

OH YEAH, I'll be on Q today in the last half-hour of the show (which I know is not available in all markets...maybe it'll be up tonight on the repeat, or on the podcast.)

Awareness and What Comes Next...

AN INTERESTING ARTICLE went out on the CP wire yesterday. It reports the details of a CP/Decima poll about the new CBC shows.

As of Jan. 28th, one in three people polled had heard about four of the CBC's heavily promoted winter shows: "The Border," "JPod," "Sophie" and "MVP." All of the shows launched in early January.

That hasn't yet translated into large numbers of Canadians tuning into the shows, however - only 10 per cent of those polled had actually seen "The Border," about an elite team of Canadian border-security officers. That's more viewers than the other shows had managed to attract among those surveyed.

But Bruce Anderson, president of Harris-Decima, said the results were promising.

"Prime time is a very tough market, and these shows were only on the air a few weeks before we ran the survey, so I tend to see the numbers as pretty reasonable," he said Sunday. "It's an encouraging start."

Of those polled who watched the new shows, 75 per cent liked them, with "The Border" getting the highest marks and "JPod," a dark comedy about a group of Vancouver video game creators that features a marijuana grow-op subplot, prompting a more polarized response - while it had the largest number of respondents saying they really liked the show, it also had the most reporting that they disliked it.

Now, the results of that poll are clearly glass half something, no matter how you spin it. But when you read between the lines, you can actually glean some interesting lessons in how Canadians respond to homegrown TV culture -- and support for the view that the recent vogue of closely tracking the week to week numbers maybe isn't the way to go.

Word of mouth is a funny thing -- and word of mouth has always been among TV's greatest strengths. Seinfeld, Cheers, The Office (UK) and any number of other eventual hit shows were slow builds -- they didn't catch on right away and needed that extra amount of time to build and have the audience find them.

Buried at the bottom of that survey is what I think is probably the most interesting data: the correlation that those who watched the new CBC shows were significantly more likely to view the CBC as going in the right direction. If you see the shows, you react favorably. And -- and here's the good part -- this is especially true for younger viewers.

This runs directly counter to the grumbling (much of it anonymous) you're going to find on CBC blogs, where the cant is universally, "shows are shit, no one cares, they're obsessed with young viewers, they can't do anything right..."

Well, apparently that's not the real story. So if word of mouth is positive, that means there's a possibility of building audiences down the road. From younger viewers, not just CBC's traditional Mom'nPop over 50 set.

The constant focus on the numbers and the arguments over what's a good number for a Canadian show and what isn't doesn't take into account so many things that are endemic and exclusive to the Canadian industry:

1) When private networks like CTV and Global simulcast U.S. shows, they count the ratings of everyone tuned in to their channel, and everyone tuned in to the U.S. channel (which has its signal substituted for the Canadian channel, thanks to Simultaneous Substitution regs.) This, in essence, gives the net a shot at two channels, not one. You might think that's dodgy logic, but ask yourself how often you've been flipping around and land on a station that catches your eye, and stop.

Two shots = two shots. Pure and simple. If you wanted an honest test, it would be interesting (and more honest) if the Cable co's simply had to "black out" U.S. channels when they were running the same show as Canadian channels.

See, effectively it would be doing the same thing -- protecting the Canadian channel's territorial purchase rights. But go suggest it. See how far you get. Then ask why.

2) One third knowing about the shows resulting in only ten percent sampling shows you just how hard it really is to attract the fickle viewer nowadays. CBC got a lot of notice for how hard they worked to promote THE BORDER this year (and MOSQUE last year,) but what those results show is that that level of promo is the bare minimum you need to get you in the game. Most Canadian shows never even reach that threshold, and so sink beneath the waves with zero awareness, and no chance to build viewership.

Still, with all the money CBC spent (and they did spend a lot -- for CBC) it's a drop in the bucket compared to the vertically integrated, omnipresent saturation of advertising promo and advertorial soft features built around your average U.S. shows.

None of that makes hits. It's just the price of admission. No amount of hype could make Bionic Woman a hit. All you can do is buy the awareness that leads to word of mouth, and that initial sample. To bring it back to the Canadian example, now you have that 10 percent who checked out THE BORDER who have a more positive view of CBC programming. You go through a few more program cycles, and grow that number, and suddenly you're somewhere.

In the shadow of the U.S. giant, the game is simply way more complicated than "how did The Border do against that HOUSE rerun?"

There's no question that it's a hard slog. But the reactionary yahoos with their "CBCgrr waste of tax money/Canadian showz suck/no one wants to watch" -- well, besides being a little pathetic in the self-hating Canadian department -- it simply isn't true.

But what is true is that dumping the shows on the air and expecting people to find them is cynical and foolhardy -- and broadcasters who do that should be called on it.

And also, um, if the shows themselves aren't entertaining, well, you're not gonna get that positive bounce from the sample who do check you out.

There's the side that needs to be taken care of by my people. We need to be better and craft better and better shows. That means training people and letting them have their third and fourth jobs as they build their skillset, rather than expecting some hipster soaking wet out of the CFC or NSI to come up with The Sopranos.

Then there's the promo side. And on that promo side, I think I want to give a shout out to Maureen O'Donnell.

Maureen handles promo for The Border. Maureen worked hard through shooting to make sure we had good art. She worked with the cast to make sure we crafted the message and the narrative of the show to reach people.

Traditionally, that would have meant articles and coverage leading up to the premiere, and then everything falling off a cliff. What makes Maureen's approach a model for what to come is this: she didn't stop there.

No, she's been assiduous in working to make sure that The Border remains in editorial consciousness. That means things like getting this article about Episode seven. (It ran in the print version with a GREAT PHOTO. Also important.) It means getting actors booked on Sports talk shows -- not in week one, in week six. It means trying to get features in Magazines that street in February, not just January. It means going for offbeat promo avenues like the Home section.

In short, it means working that word of mouth.

Bringing the A-Game is hard. But it's the only way -- the ONLY way, to make sure the brief Canadian TV breakthrough of January 2008 is the start of something, and not just a blip.

"Family Values" Streaming Now on CBC.ca

Family Values, Episode 107 of THE BORDER (which they annoyingly refer to by a previous title, "Family Affairs,") is now up for streaming viewing at the CBC site.

It should be available later this week at the Itunes store. Sorry, Canada only.

"Family Affairs?" Brrr. I don't want to imagine what happens when Gray Jackson gets Mr. French in the interrogation chair.

Don't Move, You're Surrounded By Armed Bastards (Wearing Lots of Hair Gel)

SO, DCI GENE HUNT is back. And this time he's taking guff from a bird.

Ashes to Ashes, the sequel series to Life on Mars, debuted last week in the U.K. to seven million viewers.

Ratings dropped in the second week by a million, as more than a few viewers decided the eighties weren't quite as fun as the seventies. Tell me about it, brother.

1973 is out. So's Manchester and Sam Tyler. Our hero now is DI Alex Drake. Taken hostage in 2008, she sees the bullet that will kill her. Now, in her estimation she's a moment from life or a moment from death.

The conceit of Ashes to Ashes (starring the delectable Keeley Hawes from MI:5/Spooks) is that, unlike Sam Tyler -- Alex knows precisely what's going on in her jaunt to the past. We find out that she studied Tyler after his coma. (We see a brief notation on his file: suicide.) During the course of becoming acquainted with Hunt, (who along with Ray and Chris, have relocated to London and the Metropolitan Police) she finds out that Sam Tyler lived and worked with them for seven years. It's only been a year since he drove his car into the water during an operation, never to be found.

This shocks Drake and re-frames her experience: seems that the seven years Sam experienced here were only a moment in the "real" world. She wants to get home, back to her daughter, Molly.

But there's that Gene Hunt...

Ashes to Ashes suffers somewhat by not having the shock of the new about it. Philip Glenister is still aces as Hunt. We don't get much of a sense of eighties Ray, but Detective Chris Skelton gets a nice grace note. He's not the nervous or hapless guy he was with Tyler -- as he says, he's just "cautious."

And maybe that's why the pilot of Ashes To Ashes left me a little flat. Cautious does seem to be the word for it. Hawes doesn't seem as immediately sympathetic as John Simm did, and I guess I have to admit a certain bias. Having been there the first time, the glance at some of those eighties fashions was...disturbing. Especially the women's fashions. The first time we see Drake in a Flashdance-style off the shoulder tshirt number, I kind of entered a sensory fugue state and no amount of Depeche Mode could pull me out.

There's a hint at where they're going in the pilot -- we're going to see the softer side of Gene Hunt. He certainly seems much more open to Alex's psychological-based insights into policing than he ever was with Sam's 21st century techniques. He even allows a moment of doubt: "the time for coppers like me is coming to an end."

There's a hint that things could turn romantic between the two leads, which certainly would take it into less Mars-like territory. But by offering a concrete explanation up front for Alex's experience, and not letting it be vague and open-ended, it feels maybe like a little something's been lost.

Future eps take on the wedding of Charles and Diana, and hopefully the scourge of shoulder pads.

Ashes to Ashes is fun enough. It's good to see Hunt back in the saddle (of an Audi Quattro, this time) but it's not as fun as Life on Mars.

Time will tell if Hawes signed up to be in the bestselling show, or if she's just beating up the wrong guy.

Border Bits: Making "Family Values."

IT WAS AN August morning, hot and sunny, when I found myself in a chair in a dingy little casting office somewhere in the shadow of the Weston bread plant just off Eastern Avenue in Toronto.

We were there to see Suliman's and Ali's. These were two of the key guest roles in "Family Values," my second episode of "The Border," which airs tonight at 9 across Canada on CBC.

Suliman was meant to be a vulnerable, lost and tragic man who shows up in Toronto claiming to be the real father of a teenager that's been adopted by an international movie star. Ali is his son - or is he? See, this being an action-adventure hour, nothing and no one is what it seems.

Including this episode. I've written before about the giddy high of seeing money spent on your work like drunken sailors hitting port with pay in tow, but this was something altogether different. This episode of THE BORDER, the 7th in the order, is meant to be a show where we pay for some of the excesses of the early shows. All shows do this to an extent -- none more brilliantly in my opinion than Battlestar Galactica, which blows the house on huge SFX-laden eps, and then tries to get back on budget with some smaller stories.

This ep will be shot over a seven-day schedule, instead of our usual 8 (and sometimes 9, when the ep is really big.) That means I have very few arrows in my quiver. I have to be in ICS a lot; I don't have room for big action. The only thing I can do is buckle down and try to deliver a big emotional story. If you can't wow'em with the bang-bang, you gotta nail them with the big emotional stakes.

So what I've written is a fairly contained story with some outsized personalities. We'll also see more of our main man Kessler's relationship with his daughter, and a grace note -- hopefully funny -- end to a storyline we've been doing on Slade's dating and heartbreak at the hands of budding computer whiz Sally Doctor.

For the part of the movie star, we've cast Aunjanue Ellis. Aunjanue's a great actor with a wonderful look. I'd seen her in Ray! and was thrilled to have her play our celebrity Mum, Amira. (That name took forever, by the way. I wanted a one word name like Madonna, or Cher -- and there was about two days of randomly yelling out single word names before we landed on one that would clear. If you're planning to be a single-named superstar, you may want to think about your trademark now -- the field's getting crowded.)

But now I'm in this small casting office waiting to see the kid and the Dad. Beside me is Phil Earnshaw, the episode's director. He's a deligthful man who I've really enjoyed working with the last week or so o the script. I know he's also Directed lots of Degrassi and Instant Star, so I'm fairly confident that if we see the right kid, he'll be able to pull a good audition out of him.

It doesn't go well.

We're on about the third or fourth audition where I start to get panicky. One's too young. Another's too fly. We're seeing a bit of the "processed" kid actor, who's mannered and done a lot of commercials -- exactly the wrong kind of polished feel for a part that requires some real depth.

I'm stewing and cursing myself in my seat. How could I do this? How could I write a part that so completely depends on having not just a good kid actor, but a fantastic kid actor. What is wrong with me?

This is not an isolated case of self-loathing. Part of the many problems of casting in this country is that you never know what you're going to get. There's so much good talent, but there's also that lure of L.A., so at any time you may find the really top people off chasing the down south dream. In certain hard-to-find categories, you're really taking your livelihood into your hands when you jump into a casting session.

I'm glumly mulling all this over when Isaiah Grant walks in.

He's tall. Serious. He looks anywhere from 14 to 17 -- so that works for the part. A lot of the kids they sent us were younger -- and just not up to it.

Isaiah starts to read and I sit up. There's something here. Not quite right, but certainly better than everybody else we've seen.

Reading over, Phil quietly talks to Isaiah and suggests an adjustment. Isaiah nods -- he understands what Phil's asking for. He asks for a second...he's really feeling this one, very focused -- not like a child actor at all.

The reader starts. And there, before my eyes, is Ali. I don't feel like I want to give away the store here, so I stab myself in the leg with my pen. I'm so relieved. This is it. This is Ali.

Bayo Akinfemi reads the same day. I like him a lot. He reads a little big on the sympathetic, and truly fearsome in the scenes where he's supposed to be scary. I like his look, too. He looks African, as opposed to some of the other people who gave good reads but who had a more American look. When we decide to go with Bayo a few days later, I'm thrilled. I've got a great guest cast.

I had no idea at the time, of course, how interesting Bayo's story was. He fled Nigeria over a decade ago, after suffering attacks in student protests. Bayo's also a writer and director -- he's presently looking for a distributor for his first completed feature film Eye of the Needle.

How lucky were we to get this guy?

The story of Family Values was heavily influenced by a few books I was reading last summer, including A Long Way Gone, and some echoes of the movie Blood Diamond. The climax required an open-air streetscape, and more out of pique than anything else, I wrote in "Dundas Square."

Dundas Square is the City of Toronto's attempt to engineer a kind of Times-Square meeting place. Largely derided when they first began work on it, it's actually come to be a quite successful gathering place for tourists and art performances. But it's a teeming, busy place -- on one of the busiest retail corners in Toronto, Yonge and Dundas. Never in a million years do I think we're ever really going to shoot there.

I should have remembered the lesson of the plane.

Sitting out in Dundas Square all day, watching them shoot the climax of the ep, I stood in the shadow of Ryerson University, where I went for Radio & TV. Where I first toyed with the idea of being a writer. It feels right to be there.

From the moment I see the cut of the episode I'm really pleased and kind of blown away. All the actors brought it. Jonas Chernick's Slade stuff is particularly hilarious, though its cut down a bit from the business he had in the script -- and which he landed perfectly. Jonas is a man who knows how to work a script.

But McGowan gets to show different colors in the father role -- which will play in the end of the season, but which we haven't seen since the pilot. The Guests step up. The Editor, Chris Donaldson, does some great intercutting in two key sequences near the end -- neither of which was scripted, both which paper over any of my purple excesses in scripting with a degree of panache that makes me extraordinarily grateful.

Oh and Layla! Layla -- this is the epidode where all the stuff that we've been seeding with Layla since Ep 3 finally comes to a head. And Nazneen Contractor does a great job with it.

There is one scene in the show that I had nothing to do with, past the outline. It's the scene with Layla at the psychiatrist's office. I tried a couple of times to nail it but people weren't happy. Having never been in therapy myself, I have very little to argue back with. I mean, I wrote it the best way I knew how. It's at times like this that you have to sublimate your own ego and step aside. Showrunner Janet MacLean contributes a scene that takes Layla to the edge. (Months later I'll watch episodes of "In Treatment" and go ohhhhhh... but for now it's just good to have an able assist from someone who knows what they want.)

In the end, I'm very happy with the script. We don't go crazy with the revisions on this one, if I remember correctly. What gets shot is pretty close to what I envisioned. Phil and I continue to work well together. I actually enjoy being on set.

And then there's my favorite exchange, not between any of the principals in the ep - but a nice little aside between Moose and Maggie as they wait on a stakeout, talking about Ali:

MOOSE
So Ali just walked through airport security.
MAGGIE
Yup.
MOOSE
And he got from one end of the city to the other on his own?
MAGGIE
He's survived a civil war, a Sudanese refugee camp, and six months in London with Amira. I think you overestimate the grand challenge Toronto presents.

Anytime you can sneak a dig in at Toronto, that's a good thing.

The Border airs tonight at 9pm on CBC.

"Family Values," Border-style

TODAY'S TORONTO STAR has an article featuring the thoughts of two of the guest actors on tonight's episode of "The Border," which I wrote, and saw ably Directed by Phil Earnshaw. I'll post my thoughts on the Ep and these fine actors a little later today. But for now, check out the link.

(Mild spoiler warning - the article does kind of reveal a twist at the core of the ep - but it's not that much of a twist, really, and it goes only a little further than this trailer:)