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Featured, Web series

CBC Gem’s Something Undone a genuine scare-fest

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I like my horror/scary projects to be atmospheric. A jump scare is OK, but I prefer a general feeling of unease coupled with a tinge of a slow burn. It’s why I love Something Undone.

Debuting Friday on CBC Gem, Something Undone—created by and starring Madison Walsh and Michael Musi—manages what I thought was unthinkable: a genuinely spooky piece of work encapsulated in a six-episode web series.

And, it was written, produced and filmed during the pandemic. Created through funding from CBC’s Creative Relief Fund, which provided $2 million in development and production funding to a diverse range of original Canadian projects in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, the CBC’s hook was projects had to be produced under strict COVID-19 guidelines.

“Mike and I started brainstorming,” says Walsh during a recent call. “We thought, ‘What can you maintain the quality and enjoyment of with restrictions on visuals? If we can’t have that many actors, what can we do? If we could only have one location, what could we do?’ That’s when we started to think about sound.” The result is Something Undone.

In the first episode we meet Jo (Walsh), a foley artist and her partner, Farid (Musi), who are the successful hosts of a Canadian true crime podcast. After her mother passes away Jo returns to her small Ontario town to sort through her mother’s things while continuing her foley work on the podcast. With Farid in Newfoundland and only available over the phone, a sense of desolation, loneliness, and unease begins to permeate Jo’s life. A disturbing sound Farid hears in one of Jo’s tracks leads her on a creepy, spooky path. Did the house, or something in it, cause her mother’s death?

“I was doing research about sound and learned that we, as human beings, perceive sound so realistically that we can make them up and hear them almost as if they were actually there,” Musi says. “I think that’s why watching a horror movie in our home is such an amazing experience. It doesn’t end when the movie ends. It stays with us.”

With strict safety guidelines in place early in 2020, Walsh and Musi headed off to write Something Undone in a spot many would consider a scary setting: a cottage in the middle of nowhere with no heat. There, they wrote for 10 days, fleshing out what they had established in the pilot into one big chunk and then found ways to break it up into six episodes with a cliffhanger for each.

And while you can certainly watch Something Undone on your TV via the CBC Gem app—the colour palette, visuals and set decoration are wonderful—watching it with headphones on my laptop revealed a whole other level to the horror. Every little creak and clatter can be heard.

“We spoke to our sound designer and he spent extra time really juicing the sound for direction and to make that audio experience with your headset,” Walsh says. “Because it is sound-based, yeah, go for your headphones.”

Something Undone debuts Friday on CBC Gem.

Images courtesy of 4AM Film Studios.

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Featured, Web series

CBC Gem’s The Communist’s Daughter a funny peek at the 80s in all its excess

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My formative years were spent in the 1980s. Though I didn’t know it at the time, the 80s celebrated consumerism and excess. I was, however, aware of the media’s portrayal of Communism—and the Soviet Union, specifically—during that decade through movies like Rocky IV, Red Dawn and then-WWF wrestlers Nikolai Volkoff and Boris Zhukov. And I was aware of how it all came to a head in 1989 when the Berlin Wall tumbled, signifying the fall of Communism in Eastern Europe.

That time, and the tumult that came with it, is explored in the new web series The Communist’s Daughter. Available now on CBC Gem, the eight first-season episodes are the creation of head writer and director Leah Cameron (Coroner), who has first-hand knowledge of the subject matter.

The Communist’s Daughter is loosely based on Cameron’s childhood: her father was a Communist during the 1980s. As a result, the family car was a Lada, Soviet Life magazine was delivered to the door, and family vacations were to Cuba to support the economy. In the first episode, viewers are introduced to Dunyasha McDougald (Sofia Banzhaf), a 15-year-old living in Toronto in 1989. Happily upholding the beliefs of her father Ian (Aaron Poole) and mother Carol (Jessica Holmes), Dunyasha finds her support of Communism challenged by her first day at high school when she meets Jasmine (Nadine Bhabha) and Marc (Kolton Stewart). (Look for Chris Locke, George Stroumboulopoulos and Neema Nazeri in funny supporting roles.)

It’s been a long road for The Communist’s Daughter. I first spoke to Cameron back in 2018, when she applied to the Independent Production Fund to produce the series. Now, with the debut close at hand, how did she tackle writing the web series?

“By the time I got to shooting the [IPF] teaser, I had a sense of, tonally, what I wanted the show to feel like in terms of comedy and casting,” Cameron says. “I had originally conceived of it as a half-hour comedy, so it was more a process of refining some of the characters and paring things down.” The first TV episode was broken down and served as Episodes 1 and 2 of the web series and a rough season outline followed. Cameron knew she wanted The Communist’s Daughter to be serialized and take place over time, using the frame of Ian running for a local election and Dunyasha beginning her school year in September and the fall of the Berlin Wall in November of 1989.

“It’s a time when the family’s values couldn’t be more out of sync with what’s going on,” she says. “The Reagan 80s are a super-consumerist time, a super-conservative time and a time when I, growing up, said that my dad was a Communist and everybody thought that meant he was an evil person.”

Executive producer Lauren Corber—her LoCo Motion Pictures are behind Detention Adventure and How to Buy a Baby—is always looking for stories that speak to her, an audience for a project and if a creator is bringing something new to the table. She found all three in The Communist’s Daughter.

“Leah and [producer] Natalie Novak did an excellent job with their proof of concept video,” Corber says. “I had worked with Natalie before and was excited to work with her again. Leah came to the project with such a passion for the story. It was just undeniable that she would bring something special to the production.”

The Communist’s Daughter is available now on CBC Gem.

Images courtesy of Conor Fisher for Pinko Productions Inc.

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Featured, Web series

Season 2 of Detention Adventure a slam-dunk with new mystery and characters

At the end of its first season, Detention Adventure teased a new quest to be tackled by our heroic foursome: a map hinting at the lost treasure of Ignatius Cockshutt.

The time for that quest is nigh, as Season 2 of Detention Adventure returns to CBC Gem on Friday.

But Raign (Simone Miller), Brett (Tomaso Sanelli), Joy (Alina Prijono), and Hulk (Jack Fulton) aren’t alone this time around; quick and quirky Kelly (Lilly Bartlam) joins the fray and adds a new dimension to the web series.

“We wanted to have a history expert this season,” says co-creator, co-executive producer, co-writer and director Joe Kicak. “Having Kelly in there really became the catalyst for this season. And, as you’ll see, she very much becomes part of the story arc.”

A big part of what makes the second season of Detention Adventure so enjoyable—aside from the nods to Brantford, Ont. (my hometown) and the addition of Workin’ Moms’ Sarah McVie—is the personal stories attached to the four main characters. From dealing with divorce or the death of a parent to feeling like the odd one out or an underachiever, Raign, Brett, Joy and Hulk face reality when they aren’t hunting for Cockshutt’s treasure.

“We wanted them to feel very real,” says co-creator, co-executive producer and co-writer Carmen Albano. “The emotional arc of our characters is important, so it had to be genuine.”

Detention Adventure serves up genuine scares too. Several scenes shot in a darkened church result in very creepy moments, making this adult wonder if it was a little too scary for kids.

“CBC told us to just go for it,” Kicak says with a laugh. “We shot one scene and they said, ‘We didn’t really get a jump scare,’ so we made it even worse. Then they said, ‘OK, maybe you went a little too far.’ It might scare some kids but, at the same time, you might have other kids who really enjoy the ride.”

Climb on board the ride this Friday.

Season 2 of Detention Adventure is available on CBC Gem this Friday.

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Featured, Web series

Dramatic actors take a comic turn in Hospital Show

I’d been excited to see the web series Hospital Show ever since the project received support from the Independent Production Fund in June of last year. The chance to see dramatic actors like Sara Canning, Adrian Holmes and Jordan Connor in comedic roles got me jazzed.

Now, the wait is over. Hospital Show, created, written, directed, produced and starring Adam Greydon Reid, debuts today on YouTube with the first two episodes—subsequent instalments roll out one per week—on the platform. Charlie (Canning) is a med school dropout turned actor who plays one in a medical drama called Critical Condition. Alongside Charlie are the big-hearted Rich (Holmes), Instagram lover Vince (Connor) and alcoholic Will (Reid).

We spoke to Adam Greydon Reid ahead of Hospital Show‘s debut.

How did the idea for Hospital Show come about in the first place?
Adam Greydon Reid: I’ve been an actor since I was a kid. I started off on, You Can’t Do That On Television. I’ve always wanted to explore the world of actors because I’d been an actor all my life and I actually see it as very non-glamorous. It never felt real to me. I wanted to create a comedy that just felt like a workplace comedy, except these people, who all feel like people you went to high school with. Totally normal human beings who all have problems and foibles and weaknesses, happen to wear white coats for a living and pretend to be doctors.

The next step was, ‘OK, well what kind of set do I want it to be on?’ When you look for a premise, you often try to look for something that’s ironic. I just liked the idea of setting it on a hospital show because here we have these broken, diluted, addicted if lovable people who are pretending to be healers when they need the healing.

How long have you had this idea kicking around?
AGR: Oh, a long time. Over five, at least five or six years, maybe more. I think as a result the characters feel very rich. The world feels very rich. I always thought if I looked at it as sort of the archetype of The Wizard of Oz and Dorothy is Charlie. Charlie is sort stuck in this world that she kind of belongs in, but doesn’t really belong in. She should be a real doctor instead of pretending to be one. The rest of the characters kind of fill out from there. Rich is The Cowardly Lion. And I would be The Scarecrow.

Carol-Ann is really enjoying her amorous activities at the moment. She’s a widow, a mother of two and so I see her kind of like The Tin Man. Looking to find heart, find love again, find something to fill a void that’s inside her. And then, of course, Oz being the all-seeing eye, the showrunner that’s not really there but can see everything. Kind of like the God figure.

Now that you’ve given me this whole Wizard of Oz angle, I totally see it now. Is it supposed to be there for people to pick up? 
AGR: No one will see it. No, no one would see it or figure out. It’s just for me. Just for me and people like you who I can tell, but honestly, they’ll feel it. When you’re dealing with archetypes, it’s completely transmitted on an unconscious level.

Sara Canning, Jordan Connor and Adrian Holmes all star in Hospital Show. How did you land them?
AGR: We all kind of know of each other and sometimes we’ve gotten to work with each other. I actually did not know Sara at all. I think we’d met maybe once, but I knew of her, of course, and I immediately imagined her as Charlie. There aren’t a lot of people that have the right energy to play someone that you believe is that smart. She’s so sharp. And I believe that she could be a doctor.

I knew Adrian from before. I’ve known him from other stuff. I just ended up being at the airport with him. We shared a cab home one day and I said, ‘Hey, you ever thought about doing comedy?’ He said, ‘Yeah, man. I’d love to, I’d love to do comedy.’ That’s the thing about the cast. Sarah, Jordan, Adrian and even Kristin [Lehman]. These are people who have basically made their careers doing dramatic fare. I think the chance of doing a comedy was really appealing to them because they just don’t get the chance to do it.

What kind of a writer are you? Are you the type that needs to have a quiet room to write?
AGR: Well, for this process, I tapped my actors for ideas. I had a general overall kind of thing going already and it had many rough drafts of it, but there were things that I wanted to spice up and I wanted to add to it. So, probably on the fifth draft, I started that once I had my cast together. I was like, ‘So, tell me about some of your experiences.’ And some of Kristin’s experiences are already in the show, they’re just exaggerated. And with Sara, who actually did Remedy. She says, ‘Well, probably one of the weirdest things in that was we had to practice. We really had to do suturing and we had to practice on bananas.’ And I’m like, ‘Oh my god, that’s going in. That is for sure going in.’

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Featured, Web series

Preview: Save Me doles out excellent new episodes on CBC Gem

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I was instantly enthralled with the first season of Save Me. Created, written and directed by Fab Filippo, the dark comedy follows Toronto EMT Goldie (Filippo) and his assorted partners (Amy Matysio and Suresh John are two), as they arrive on the scene of 911 calls.

The twist in the storytelling is Goldie et al. are the through line connecting those making an emergency call rather than being the mains. That’s not to say we don’t get some back story into Goldie and his fellow EMTs lives, but they’re not the focus.

The second chunk of new episodes have landed on CBC Gem—produced by Lisa Baylin—and they’re as strong as the first. The Canadian Screen Award-nominated program is in fine fettle, boasting not only great scenarios for EMTs Goldie, Dogf***er (John), Kevlar (Matysio) and Bizemmingway (John Bourgeois), but a plethora of guest performances by Schitt’s Creek‘s Emily Hampshire, Frankie Drake Mysteries‘ Rebecca Liddiard, Bad Blood‘s Lisa Berry, Kim’s Convenience‘s Andrew Phung, Hudson & Rex‘s Kevin Hanchard, Scott Thompson and Nicholas Campbell.

In the first instalment, it’s all hands on deck as the EMTs—including rookie Hubcap (Heartland‘s Kataem O’Connor)—are called to the scene of multiple ecstasy overdoses suffered by aging couples looking for some fun. Watching Thompson, Hanchard and Fiona Highet tripping out is something to behold. But where there is comedy, tragedy follows, and how each of the paramedics deals with it is also what makes Save Me so engaging. In just a few short minutes in each episode, the web series is able to jump from laughter to tears, while exploring the PTSD first responders experience.

In Episode 2, two men choose to trim some hedges using a lawnmower. It has the predictable, bloody, result, but also reveals a shift in the tale I didn’t see coming. You never know what’s going on in the lives of the folks calling 911; Save Me goes there with spectacular results.

Season 2 of Save Me is on CBC Gem.

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