It's kind of a self-aware, almost meta-humorous type of joke, because it's sort of a game between the writer and the audience -- see if they can set up something and find a creative way to contradict it in the very next moment -- and because it often depends on something happening oh-so-conveniently on cue, as in the above joke. When it works, it works really well, though.
Currently, Canuck dramas and kids series are hot, some more so in foreign lands than at home.
Shaftesbury Films' ReGenesis has been sold to 110 countries and is near to bagging a U.S. sale. Its kids series Life with Derek airs worldwide in 137 countries and 10 languages. The show, airing on Disney, has also placed among the top 10 cable series for tween girls in the U.S.
Christina Jennings, chairman and co-CEO of Shaftesbury, says tentpole hits like that open doors in foreign markets. For example, Shaftesbury made The Murdoch Mysteries originally as TV movies for CHUM, then developed it as a TV series with Britain's UKTV.
"There's no question anymore that Shaftesbury could deliver commercial programming that worked in the international market," says Jennings.
LOS ANGELES (AP) - Stan Daniels, the Emmy-winning co-creator and executive producer of "Taxi" and a writer on "The Mary Tyler Moore Show," has died. He was 72.
The Toronto-born Daniels died of heart failure April 6, according to Mount Sinai Memorial Park, where a funeral was planned for Thursday. Daniels won eight Emmys during his long television career, including three for "Taxi" and three for "The Mary Tyler Moore Show."
The talk, in the reportage, was of how the sacrifice at Vimy defined Canada as a nation. This was largely unquestioned as an idea and the image of the majestically large memorial only underlined that idea. Nobody seemed to be appearing on TV questioning the validity of the proposal that blood sacrifice is necessary to define nationhood.This is definitely received wisdom in Canada. The narrative is shaped in one very specific direction: At Vimy, the soldiers from the small nation, Canada, prevailed where the British and the French had failed. Canadians paid a terrible price, and came out the other end as a nation.
This is a multicultural society, not one in which everybody can be assumed to share the same opinion on Canada, Canadian history and the meaning of being Canadian. To some, whose roots are in other societies and who have found refuge here, the acceptance of the idea of blood sacrifice is difficult. The public promulgation of the idea makes them uneasy, and with good reason.
The debate about the meaning of Vimy and the questioning of its accepted meaning happened in newspapers, this one is particular. TV is hopeless on such issues.
To see John Rogers' and Alex Epstein's rather more serious takes, and my friend Rob Sheridan's showstopping zombie crossover, click here.
Sopranos creator David Chase desperately wants to go make movies. If I were him I'd do what Six Feet Under did and go for a ending that can't be undone. That way, HBO won't call about reunion specials.
I'd have a rumpled private detective stumble into Newark. This detective – let's call him Rockford – stumbles across something he shouldn't one night at the Bada Bing. Paulie Walnuts and Christufuh work him over out in the Pine Barrens, but he won't die, because he comes from the era when you just didn't kill the hero on TV. Carm wises up, falls for Rockford. Tony freaks out and disappears. Silvio tells everyone Bruce Springsteen is the new Boss, picks up a guitar, and goes out on tour.
Tony finally turns up in the small village of Cicely, Alaska, where Meadow's taken over as town doctor. He spends the rest of his days telling everyone he's a retired astronaut. In the last shot of the series, he looks up, and sees the ducks. They've returned. All is well.
L of Frame: Episode Director James Dunnison watches the last shot with Executive Producer/Creator & Showrunner Peter Mohan. Peter also wrote Episode 22, "Deep Dark."
and movies about Billie Jean King, Baghdad ER and a young musicians' special.What we're really facing here is the fact that big companies are essentially hopeless when it comes to non-current TV shows on DVD. It's not because the people who work there are big meanies; they're not, and many of them are doing their best. But a DVD set from Fox or Paramount or Warner Brothers has to be mass-produced and mass-marketed. For the most part, they don't do limited releases or special collectors' editions; everything has to be priced and sold at Wal-Mart level prices. The only way to do WKRP or The Wonder Years or a similar music-heavy show is to pay for the music and then make up the costs by jacking up the price of the set, but that's against company policy.
Also, big companies have a heavy amount of overhead, meaning that it's tough enough for a set to make back its cost even without paying for music. Which is why shows with even fairly decent levels of sales get abandoned after one or two seasons.
This is why most of the best TV on DVD releases come from independent or semi-independent companies, like Shout! Factory (which did Freaks and Geeks, SCTV, and the Electric Company best-of sets among many others) or Image (The Dick Van Dyke Show, The Twilight Zone). They can charge more to make back the costs, market the products to collectors and fans rather than trying to break into Wal-Mart, and put people who are actually familiar with the series to work on it.
In the post on Macleans, Weinman shows a clip that fully illustrates what's been lost. And it's heartbreaking.Is 'House' the new 'West Wing'? Writers work in references to creator Shore's hometown
TORONTO (CP) - Is "House" becoming the new "West Wing"?
The late, lamented political drama capturing the day-to-day workings of the White House was rife with references to Canada. "O Canada" was even played - twice - at a White House function in one episode.
The abundance of Canadian references on the former NBC hit only served to highlight the fact that many American shows - even those shot in Canada or with Canadian actors in their casts - rarely acknowledge the existence of America's neighbour to the north.
But the medical hit "House" may be picking up where "The West Wing" left off.
Or maybe the writers of this week's episode, "Fetal Position," were just poking fun at the show's creator and executive producer, David Shore, when lead character Dr. Gregory House barks at an airline booking agent while trying to book a flight to Cambodia.
If you didn't see that one, maybe you saw the version that appeared in the Sun papers:
It took more than three decades and a little doctoring of the script by a hometown hero — but London’s time is prime again.This is the same gee-whiz, slightly cringey thing that happens any time Canada is mentioned in any piece of U.S. entertainment. It actually makes news here. Now, I'm not talking the local angle, like, "Did you know that last weekend's number one box office movie features a native of our own Podunk, Alta?" I'm talking just like above -- a reference, a line, any little bone rates an actual, honest-to-God news story in the papers.In this week’s episode of the hit Fox TV medical drama House, the lead character made a rapid-fire reference to London, Ont.
Now that's a pretty cutting comment. In the thread over at Inside The CBC, I wandered in with my own brand of softheaded hardheadedness -- and immediately started deconstructing not the point Doyle was making, but the comments made about it, which touched off a lot of Canadian tropes.What she said was, "I love the way Canadians love Canada. It's not like Americans love America, it's not that insular, knee-jerk patriotism. Canadians are in love with Canada. It's like a love affair." Now there's a thought.
And I think it's true, in some ways. Because Canadians are in love with an idea of Canada -- the landscape, the multiculturalism, the tradition of tolerance, the health-care system that makes us proud -- they tend to be naive about this country, in the way that people in love can be terribly gullible, soft-hearted and easily fooled.
Emblematic of this mindset, I think, is the state of our alleged satire on TV. We're proud of it, and think it's special to have a small army of jokers on TV making fun of politicians, their employers the CBC, and all things quintessentially Canadian.
The Rick Mercer Report (CBC, 8 p.m.) and This Hour Has 22 Minutes (CBC, 8:30 p.m.) are at the core of our TV satire. Both shows can be amusing and Mercer is undoubtedly clever, but both shows are essentially soft. When they mock our politicians and other leaders and celebrities, they do it with love. They don't mock in rage, they don't attack and put forward skepticism about the powerful on our behalf. They cozy up, crack a few jokes and make sure that nobody actually gets hurt. There's too much love and not enough loathing...
There is nothing iconoclastic about Canadian TV comedy. Received ideas and common perceptions are not eviscerated. The powerful are not cut down to size. Unpopular but necessary and contrary opinions are generated...
So much of what we think of as satire on TV is actually sedate, with a lot of safe jokes about hockey, Tim Hortons, other Canadian TV shows and politicians who are being embraced, not mocked.
We don't have a Bill Maher or a Jon Stewart. We have soft, pseudo-satirists who are in love with Canada and all things Canadian, including the powerful. Under the surface-level jokes, it's about being misty-eyed and lovey-dovey about a country that is in dire need of robustly iconoclast humour. With an election on the near-horizon, will anyone be stepping forward to do the necessary? I don't think so. There's too much love and gullibility.
In that last one we actually get a twofer -- not just a celebration of Canadian sensibility -- but a this is all Toronto's fault -- another fave Canadian trope.It’s true that Air Farce and Mercer don’t have the bite of, say, Jon Stewart.
Could it be that there’s just more to loathe about American politics?This is Canadian humour with Canadian sensibilities, and it’s what Canadians want to watch, and it’s what we are watching in record numbers, so why is Doyle pining for American style humour? At a time when Canadian humour and Canadian comedies are enjoying unprecedented success, and when a discernible Canadian sensibility is emerging, imo, all this guy can write about is to complain that our humour isn’t American enough!? This kind of wannabe Americanism is a very strong part of the Toronto subculture where NYC is held up by many as their cultural Mecca, but it does exist to some degree everywhere in Canada.
Okay, so I didn't see that you wouldn't need a CD. Or that music companies would sue their customers. I mean, how stupid was that idea? Especially after you spent years devaluing your own product by prematurely eliminating vinyl and the single, then getting everyone to re-buy on CD, and then push the idea that tracks mattered not albums by flooding the market with compilations?
McGrath thinks the music industry might engage in backroom
jockeying to kill the medium, like it did digital audio tape (DAT).
Right now, there are a lot of steps in using the net.
Mass popularity requires a handy, inexpensive device that does it all
automatically for the consumer, McGrath says then writes the
digital file to a playback medium, like CD. "The music industry might
very well be in a position to stall or even stop the production of just
this device -- like DAT."
McGrath says music companies have another motive to kill pure
digital distribution, … la the net. "Without physical distribution of
CDs, consumers will ask: how come producing a CD costs $2 yet sells
for $16? It's common knowledge a CD is now cheaper to make than
vinyl was. Right there, alone, record companies are in real trouble."
The Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission has faced seemingly continuous criticism for years, however in May 1999 it released a decision that generated near-universal praise.Michael Geist is seriously awesome. That article he wrote for the Toronto Star (linked above) bears reading because the bottom line is there's discussions going on in Gatineau right now, where broadcasters are trying to screw you, the audience. And sadly, most of the unions and creative guilds in Canada are right on the side of the luddites.
The New Media Decision, which adopted a hands-off regulatory approach to new media (the CRTC's press release overstated the ruling by headlining that the "CRTC Won't Regulate the Internet"), was widely regarded as the right decision at the right time.
Since that ruling, a remarkable array of new media services – including podcasting, Internet streaming and online video sites – have emerged outside of the traditional broadcast regulation model. Despite the success, recent submissions to the CRTC suggest that a growing number of stakeholders are increasingly wary of their unregulated counterparts and may be gearing up for a fresh look at Internet regulation.
While the CAB is right that the Internet is erasing the distinction between geographic markets and that U.S. broadcasters are likely to stream on a global basis in the near future, the likely impact on Canadian content is precisely opposite of what it suggests.
Rather than reducing the production of Canadian content, Internet streaming and new media create incentives for more Canadian productions since profitability in the emerging environment will depend upon original content that can be distributed across all platforms, old and new.
If Canadian broadcasters are unable to rely on cheap U.S. programming, they will be forced to compete by investing in their own original content. This will dramatically alter Canadian content production from one mandated by government regulation to one mandated by market survival.
It is increasingly clear that the blossoming of new media is a threat to old business models, not to Canadian content. Eight years after the CRTC's new media decision, it still stands as the right decision at the right time.
The exact ratings for last year's show are debatable, however, because BBM's numbers differed considerably from those of its then-competitor Nielsen, which put the audience for the 2006 Junos at 1.2 million.That set friend of the blog JB to write in with this comment:
The difference works out to a drop in ratings somewhere between 25% and 46%. BBM and Nielsen have since joined forces.
1.7 million versus 1.2 million? That's a hell of a discrepancy. How is anyone supposed to make any kind of decisions or pronouncements based on ratings when the numbers may or may not be off by 500-thousand viewers? And with BBM and Nielson now being one and the same, the problem of accuracy is just hidden, not solved. Picture the producer who finds out her show is drawing half a million viewers -- would you fault her for protesting that in fact it's getting a million? Would you join her in fearing that, actually, no one is watching at all? Hurts my head.
A couple of years ago, the CBC showed a special that culled all the color footage they had of WWII. It was a real eyeopener. For those of us -- most of us -- who weren't alive on D-Day or VE Day or the day the Germans marched into Poland, that era is consigned to a history place in our minds partly by the nature of the images we've always processed from it: images that have always been in Black & White. Seeing some of the new, color technology marshalled to take images of everyday life, preparation, and battle -- well, it really reshuffled the deck for me. It made me think differently about something I hadn't really thought about before.
Back row (L to R): Rick Drew, Sarah Dodd, Denis McGrath 
Finally, lets play an awesome version of my favorite game: Spot the Actor in the Group of Writers.
