Prior to becoming a television critic and owner of TV, Eh?, Greg David was a critic for TV Guide Canada, the country's most trusted source for TV news. He has interviewed television actors, actresses and behind-the-scenes folks from hundreds of television series from Canada, the U.S. and internationally. He is a podcaster, public speaker, weekly radio guest and educator, and past member of the Television Critics Association.
Top Chef Canada, the #2 program on Food Network Canada last spring and growing significantly year over year*, makes its triumphant return April 19 at 10 p.m. ET/PT on Food Network Canada. The ninth season welcomes 11 fearless professional chefs from across the country, each bringing an unbelievable range of culinary styles, technical skill, and diverse breadth of flavours. This season’s competitors have their sights set on earning the title of Canada’s Top Chef, along with a cash prize of $100,000 provided by Interac Corp. and a luxurious Lexus RX Hybrid Electric SUV.
In the past year, the hospitality industry has faced adversity, forcing businesses to adapt and innovate quicker than ever before. This year’s competitors emerge with strong, fresh perspectives, and this incomparable season confronts and rises above the obstacles. The chefs contend with the pressure of the competition while facing weekly challenges featuring plant-based cuisine, celebrating local and seasonal ingredients, and a new twist on long-standing Top Chef Canada challenge Restaurant Wars, pivoting to Takeout Wars.
This season introduces a roster of new culinary voices with diverse backgrounds, all possessing a shared fiery passion for food. The professional chefs set to compete for the title of Canada’s Top Chef are:
Visit foodnetwork.ca/shows/top-chef-canada for full biographies and exclusive cast videos.
In order to cook another week in the competition, the chefs must impress the revered Top Chef Canada judging panel comprised of chef, cookbook author and host Eden Grinshpan, chef and owner of The McEwan Group, head judge Mark McEwan, and resident judges: powerhouse restaurateur Janet Zuccarini, food writer and personality Mijune Pak and renowned food journalist and critic Chris Nuttall-Smith.
During this season’s high-adrenaline Quickfire and Elimination Challenges, culinary personalities and Canadian icons joining the Top Chef Canada judging panel are: entrepreneur, chef and owner of Impasto, Stefano Faita; media personality and host of STROMBO Radio on Apple Music Hits, George Stroumboulopoulos; chef and owner of Kamuy, Paul Toussaint; Grand Slam Tennis Champion and Olympic Gold Medalist, Daniel Nestor; chef, author and social advocate Suzanne Barr; chefs and owners of Pai Northern Thai Kitchen and Kiin, Nuit Regular and Jeff Regular; chef and owner of Feast CafeÌ Bistro, Christa Bruneau-Guenther and many more.
Top Chef Canada is the homegrown version of the hit Emmy® Award-winning NBCUniversal Series Top Chef and is produced by Insight Productions Ltd. in association with Food Network Canada. Executive Producers are John Brunton and Mark Lysakowski, and Executive Producer and Showrunner is Eric Abboud.
I distinctly remember where I was when I read my first Hardy Boys book. It was The Tower Treasure, the first in the series, and I consumed it during a visit to my grandparent’s home in Cochrane, Ont. I was hooked and blew through a pile of others. Just in time for my TV-loving late 70s youth came The Hardy Boys/Nancy Drew Mysteries on ABC with Parker Stevenson and Shaun Cassidy. So, when YTV announced it had picked up Season 1 of the Canadian co-production, I was excited.
Debuting Friday at 9 p.m. ET/PT on YTV, this interpretation of The Hardy Boys is dark and wonderful. Set against the backdrop of the 80s and all of its music and fashion, Frank Hardy (Rohan Campbell), 16, and his brother Joe (Alexander Elliot), 12, move from the big city to their parent’s hometown of Bridgeport. There, the brothers’ quiet summer quickly comes to a halt when they discover their dad, detective Fenton Hardy (James Tupper) has taken on a secret investigation, leading Frank and Joe to take it upon themselves to start an investigation of their own.
We spoke to executive producer and lead director Jason Stone about how this classic was updated for TV, and how it sets itself apart from the sleuthing brothers before it.
How did you end up getting involved in The Hardy Boys? Jason Stone: The Hardy Boys was actually my first book report I ever wrote as a kid in Grade 2. I wrote my first book report on The Tower Treasure. I still have it in some box at my parents’ house. Cut to 25 years later and I was in Toronto over the winter. I had gone on a general meeting with Kathleen Meek [Manager, Original Content, Drama and Factual] at Corus and we hit it off. She had mentioned at the end of the conversation that they were working on this adaptation of The Hardy Boys and my ears perked up.
I was like, ‘What kind of adaptation?’ She’s like, ‘We’re still figuring it out. Would that be something of interest to you?’ I was like, ‘Yeah, I love The Hardy Boys.’ It’s such an iconic brand with such a deep history. I remember hearing stories about how the books were all ghostwritten by other writers, some of them Canadian even, and that it was all kind of put under the Stratemeyer Syndicate. And it was all just fascinating intrigue both behind the scenes of the books and how they were written and the stories I remember reading.
Kathleen connected me with Joan Lambur, who was working with Nelvana in putting the pieces together to make the show. Joan and I met in her office on a crazy, snowy, frozen January, and totally hit it off. She asked if I would be interested in coming aboard and I jumped at the opportunity. At the time, they had just been developing it as a 30-minute episodic show. Soon after that, we pivoted to a longer format of a one-hour, slightly older leaning, but more serialized as a slightly darker, more adventure, little bit less case of the week and more of a larger one big mystery as the smaller mysteries sort of throw us into each episode each week.
Why the decision to set it in the 80s? JS: The biggest reason was that it just felt like if we’re going to have stories about teenagers and young adults sleuthing and solving mysteries, we wanted to remove the crutch of being able to just do it all on the Internet. Getting rid of Google and cell phones was just going to make for a more exciting story, because nobody wants to watch a bunch of kids sit on their computers all day long, solving mysteries.
And just reminiscing to the time when myself and the writers and a lot of the crew were in our formative years, in our teens. We used to talk about getting on your bikes and going out for the day and basically, your parents would just wave on your way out and you’d see them after dark. Who knows what you got up to, and the amount of trust and adventure. That freedom when you’re a kid was really palpable and potent to me as memory and something that I really thought would be a good sort of touchstone for the show and really giving that sense of empowerment that these teenagers would be able to take their own fate and their own destiny into their own hands and be the masters of their own domain. It felt really like a good way to do it. And, the less technological influence there is the better, at least for storytelling.
It appears as though the series deals with one case through the arc through the season. Why did you do that instead of doing a different case every week? JS: We wanted to do something that had a little more scope to it. At the end of the day, what the networks were looking for started to evolve and move into something that was less episodic. So when we moved from the 30-minute to the one-hour, it felt like a natural sort of pivot in terms of the storytelling. When you move into one hour, it really does allow you to do a different kind of thing. You get to spend more time in kind of mining the characters in a different way, and also letting each thing build to a climactic conclusion. If it’s episodic, it’s like standalone. So whether it’s like Law & Order or CSI, which is an adult mystery show, there would have been that version, but it would have been like we’re just watching little cases break, and maybe there’s some character development, but it’s hard to show a larger arc of characters.
We wanted to really push our characters into situations that allowed them to stretch themselves, who they were, discovering who each other were, and learning lessons about themselves and the world around them, and really getting to feel like the scope and the world and the stakes were growing as the season progressed.
A question about the colour palette. There’s that kind of hazy, brownish, 80s kind of look. I guess that was the intention? JS: Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. Me and Fraser [Brown], the cinematographer, and Brian [Verhoog], the production designer, and the colourist, Mark [Driver], we all are a part of that conversation. I had a very specific aesthetic that I was aiming for at the beginning. That always evolves and develops as you bring new collaborators in and new eyes in and getting the feedback from Joan and the network, everybody has input that they lean towards. But it didn’t really change all that much. The references that we were doing and the colour palettes were based on look books and photos, paintings that I would pull and work with the designers and cinematographers to dial in the look, and the costume designer, for that matter as well, Judith [Ann Clancy].
Whether it’s about renting furniture or building clothes or the way the lighting comes through the windows, or the kinds of props that are used, we all had a very cohesive plan that we wanted to stick to, to keep the look really specific without being overly stylized. We wanted it to feel very natural and not in your face that it was being handled unless you’re looking for it. It still gives you a sense of time and place, even though both of those were deliberately ambiguous.
The Hardy Boys airs Fridays at 9 p.m. ET/PT on YTV.
Kudos to the folks at HGTV Canada for debuting two new—and noteworthy—renovation series in the past several weeks. The first, Rock Solid Builds, follows a family-run business in small-town Newfoundland. The second debuts Wednesday.
Farmhouse Facelift, bowing Wednesday at 10 p.m. ET/PT on the specialty network, catches up with siblings Carolyn Wilbrink and Billy Pearson as they update farmhouses in Southern Ontario. Not only is it nice to see homes being worked on outside of the Toronto area—Paris, Canning, St. Thomas, and Zorra are among the locations in Season 1—but Wilbrink and Pearson are charming and know their stuff.
Wilbrink, who owns CW Design and Co. with her husband, focuses mainly on the interior designs while Pearson wields the hammer on the projects, though both tackle many jobs.
“Billy and I collaborate on a lot of our work,” Wilbrink says during a phone interview. “And when we go in I always look at a space as a whole. Whatever I do is such a blend of keeping the old with the new. If we tear down a wall, Billy is peeling off all of the trim, hardware, and everything else to put it back up on the new walls.”
That’s evident in Episode 1 when Pearson re-uses old trim in a farmhouse kitchen to highlight a new pantry and repurposes materials for a drop-dead kitchen island.
“If something has lasted 150 years—and a lot of these houses are 150 years old older—why would you throw it out when you can re-use it and keep it beautiful and update with paint?” Pearson says. “People buy a farmhouse based on that charm and character and they don’t want to lose all of that history in a renovation.”
Farmhouse Facelift airs Wednesdays at 10 p.m. ET/PT on HGTV Canada.
[Spoiler alert: Do not continue reading until you have watched “The .38 Murdoch Special.]
Named on of Playback magazine’s 10 to Watch in 2020, Caleigh Bacchus is a new member to the Murdoch Mysteries‘ writer’s room. She, along with Simon McNabb, penned Monday’s instalment, which investigated murder, racism and more.
We spoke to Caleigh Bacchus via email about the key storylines and what fans can expect as Season 14 closes out.
Welcome to the Murdoch Mysteries team! You’re a former track and field athlete. How did you end up working in Canadian television? Caleigh Bacchus: I’d always been interested in storytelling, but it took me a while to figure out the best medium to do so. It wasn’t until I moved to Toronto that I saw film crews all around the city and I considered screenwriting. So I decided to go back to school for film and it was the best decision that I ever made.
And how did you end up in the Murdoch Mysteries writing room? CB: I interviewed for MM in 2019, but I didn’t get the job that year. They remembered me the next year (2020) and offered me the script coordinator position.
You previously worked on Diggstown with Floyd Kane. What did you learn from him – about storytelling, the craft of TV or anything else – while working with him? CB: Diggstown was a great experience and it was where I first learned how to break story and really break down a script. After that I was able to go back and apply what I’d learned to my own work. I also learned from Floyd that it’s important to have some ownership over your projects. To take the risk and invest in your work so that you truly have a stake in it.
How did the idea for the main storyline come about, regarding the opium den? Was it discussed in the room first and then fleshed out? What was the inspiration for it? CB: We started breaking this story during the summer of 2020 while the BLM protests were happening worldwide and we thought that it was important to join in on that conversation of racial injustice. Upon researching the topic, we discovered the Vancouver anti-Asian race rots of 1907 and the Opium Act of 1908 which was also seen as an anti-Asian law. It was a great opportunity to highlight this bit of history so we decided to focus the story there.
It was interesting to get a little history on opium via Brackenreid, Murdoch and Watts. What was it like researching it? CB: I didn’t personally know all of the history around the opium laws and anti-Asian sentiments in Canada so the research was both informative and heartbreaking.
What about the history of mayonnaise? I didn’t expect that little tidbit. CB: While mayonnaise had been around since the 1700s, it wasn’t jarred and sold until 1907. So we thought it would be fun if Murdoch and Ogden tried it for the first time on the show.
How did the writing process work between yourself and Simon McNabb? Did you write first, and then pass it to him? CB: Writing with Simon was a very smooth process. We would split the writing work 50/50 then put our halves together and then we would each do a round of edits to the entire document.
What was the idea behind not showing Miss Hart’s wedding? Was it just due to the shortened episode order? CB: We thought it would be in character for Miss Hart to have her wedding without inviting any of her colleagues.
The addition of composer Samuel Coleridge-Taylor as a historical reference was neat. CB: Yes. A wonderful black historical figure.
Watts going to Ogden, seeking hypnosis as a “cure” was so heartbreaking. What has it been like to follow Watts’ journey this season? CB: It’s been quite an emotional journey watching Watts’ plight. It’s good to see how far we’ve come as a society but also a reminder that there is work still to be done because, unfortunately, we can still draw too many similarities from Watts’ story and apply them to the issues facing the LGBTQIA today.
Racism has always been a part of Murdoch Mysteries’ storylines, in particular against the Black community. What has it been like telling Black stories like Momo and Nomi’s on Murdoch this season? CB: I was really glad to be a part of telling this story and portraying some of the issues that the Black community faced and still face to this day through the characters of the world.
I feel like Brackenreid has put himself in danger with his revealing Nomi is his daughter. Should I be concerned? CB: You’ll have to wait and see :)
There are just two episodes of Murdoch Mysteries left this season. What can you say about them without giving any secrets away? CB: They’re a whirlwind. Prepare yourself for a lot of jeopardy and some heart wrenching twists.
