This week on Wipeout Canada, meet some of Canada’s most courageous contestants. The specially themed episode titled “Heroes,” features contestants who put themselves in the line of duty, both on and off the obstacle course. The most heroic contestant will be crowned “Wipeout Canada Champion” and take home the $50,000 grand prize. This week’s contestants include a male nurse from Cornwall, Ont., a paramedic from Jasper, AB and a body guard from Edmonton.

The hosts, Jonathan Torrens and Ennis Esmer offer their laugh-out-loud commentary as they watch contestants tackle the big red balls, dizzy dummy, sucker punch wall and the wipeout zone. Jessica Phillips reports direct from the course and gets to know our heroes.

KING| EPISODE 7 | “CAMERON BELL” SUNDAY, MAY 29 – 9PM ET/PT
When a video of Danny’s partner, Jim Perry, beating his Confidential Informant is caught on tape and televised, Danny and Perry are suspended. Graci has Jess take over their ongoing investigation: the shooting of Scott Flanigan, an innocent bystander caught in gang crossfire at a skating rink. But when Jess discovers that Flanigan was actually the target of the shooting, the case blows open. Digging deeper to find a motive, Jess suspects the killer used the gang’s notorious rivalry as a decoy for a crime of passion.

By Diane Wild of TV, eh?

I’ve lived without cable before. I’ve lived without a television set before. But my decision last month to say goodbye to Shaw came with the expectation that cutting cable wouldn’t significantly reduce my access to content. So far that’s true, for both US and Canadian shows, despite being geoblocked from Hulu and US network sites. Through a combination of Canadian network web streams and iPad apps I’m (legally) watching as much as I ever do. iTunes and Netflix offer additional options, though I haven’t resorted to them for my TV consumption.

The method of delivery has changed, but my habits have changed very little. I’ve fallen in love with the portability of watching TV on an iPad, but for the most part I still watch whatever I want to watch and still on my TV set, either through the Xbox that came with my switch to Telus internet, or with my iPad connected to the TV.

Watching off-network does come with sacrifice. The serendipity of flipping channels is gone, though I haven’t been prone to channel surfing since adjusting to the PVR a few years ago. If I watched a huge amount of television I’d have to worry about bandwidth caps.

Selection is reduced, though so far I haven’t run into a series I watched via basic cable that I can’t watch online now. Pay cable series from HBO Canada and The Movie Network/Movie Central are another matter – as far as I can tell, there’s no legal way to catch current episodes of their series. What happens when Call Me Fitz starts up again? Do I invite myself for dinner every week to the home of a friend who subscribes? I can’t see going from zero to a package that includes those premium channels just for one show.

The biggest downside I can see affecting me is the time delay. Even as a PVR convert, recording everything and watching on my time table, I frequently enough watched shows the same day they aired that I wonder: with Twitter discussing shows as they’re broadcast, friends posting opinions to Facebook, maybe even real-world chatter with friends and colleagues, will I want to wait for the latest episode of my favourite series to show up online, even if it’s just the next day?

My TV, eh? webmaster license should be taken away for saying this, but the real test will be when the fall season of US programming begins. Summer is the time for many Canadian shows, but I have yet to be spoiled or even engaged in a “did you SEE that episode last night?!” conversation over any of them. So stay tuned for how my willpower holds up over time.

In the meantime, here’s an overview of the cable-cutting experiment so far, focusing on Canadian shows on the major Canadian networks.

Continue reading Cutting the Cable, Rating the Canadian Options →