All posts by Greg David

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.
Featured, Workin' Moms

CBC’s Workin’ Moms spotlights the raw honesty of being a mom

Right out of the gate viewers will notice Workin’ Moms isn’t a typical comedy series, and certainly not the usual for the CBC.

In Tuesday’s debut at 9:30 p.m., a trio of moms sit at daycare, holding their infants and bemoaning how childrearing has ravaged their bodies, particularly their breasts. They speak of sagging, drooping and other changes while looking down. Then, suddenly, a wide shot of the ladies with their breasts totally exposed for primetime television. No editing, now pixelating, no black bars. This is Workin’ Moms, lumps and all.

“Bringing up a child, you lose a certain amount of privacy with your body and what happens to your body is incredibly humbling,” series creator, executive producer, writer and star Catherine Reitman says during a CBC press day. “To create a show about a mom where you don’t witness what happens to a mom’s body felt inauthentic to me … to not show it in a raw and honest way. It’s funny, but I also find heart and truth in it.”

Reitman—who appears sans top alongside her co-stars Dani Kind (The Good Witch) and Juno Rinaldi (The Killing); all have two boys in real life—has used her own experiences as a mother as the basis for Workin’ Moms. Reitman’s Kate is headed back to work at an advertising firm after maternity leave and struggles not only to spend hours away from her son but find her place in an office environment she left for months. Yes, there are funny moments in Kate’s days—reluctantly leaving her cherub with the nanny and she has to pump her breasts the bathroom, with the squirting results you’d expect—but there are sobering, serious moments that reflect on what it means to be a mother. The most poignant may be when Kate breaks down crying in the middle of a meeting with her male co-workers.

(l-r): Jessalyn Wanlim, Dani Kind, Catherine Reitman, Juno Rinaldi

“I think that’s part of being a mother and a parent,” Reitman says. “There are moments of comedy and moments of pain. But, usually, in those moments of pain you have to laugh.” She recalls how when her first son was born (he’s now three), she went back to work after just a couple of weeks and was wracked with post-partum depression. Like Kate, Reitman was joking around with male friends. The jabs went too far and before she knew it, she was crying and the men went silent, awkward and unsure of what to do. When Reitman got home, she told the story to her husband Philip Sternberg—he’s executive producing and co-stars on Workin’ Moms—who told her to get out her laptop and write it down.

“Catherine’s writing has a real floor to them,” Sternberg says. “These are real experiences, so you relate to them, and when the humour comes out, it really works and hits hard. I don’t think it would hit so hard if you didn’t believe the characters and the struggle.” He’s right. All of the ladies are dealing with something. Rinaldi’s Frankie Coyne is a successful real estate agent who in one moment makes a flippant remark about post-partum depression and in another is sticking her head in a swimming pool, dreaming of drowning. Kind’s Anne Carlson is just getting into the swing of things with her baby when her doctor tells her shocking news, throwing her life into uncertainty.

And while, at first glance, CBC may not have been the most obvious home for Workin’ Moms, Reitman couldn’t be happier because it meant her vision would stay intact and not turned into a broad comedy or watered down.

“We got here, and we realized it was nothing but working mothers,” Reitman says. “I’ve never seen a network where I literally shook hand after hand of working mothers. [CBC general manager of programming] Sally Catto watched it, and it struck so deeply with her as a working mother that we knew she would do it justice.”

Workin’ Moms airs Tuesdays at 9:30 p.m. on CBC.

Images courtesy of CBC.

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Featured, Schitt's Creek

Daniel Levy on the “most exciting season” of CBC’s Schitt’s Creek

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For two seasons, the Rose family has been desperately trying to leave Schitt’s Creek. But Johnny’s (Eugene Levy) plan to sell the town (hilariously) fell through, Moira’s (Catherine O’Hara) attempts to distance herself from the locals has failed and Alexis (Annie Murphy) and David (Daniel Levy) have slowly been accepted into the community.

Now, in Season 3—returning for 13 episodes beginning Tuesday, Jan. 10, to CBC—the Roses have more or less embraced Schitt’s Creek and all that comes with it, including Roland Schitt (Chris Elliott), Jocelyn Schitt (Jennifer Robertson), Mutt (Tim Rozon), Twyla (Sarah Levy) and Ted (Dustin Milligan). We spoke to co-creator, co-executive producer and writer Daniel Levy about what fans can expect in Season 3.

I’ve seen the first episode of Season 3 and the Roses are going through some transition in their lives.
Daniel Levy: Yes, they are. This whole season centres on the premise of transition and just digging a little deeper into the town.

I did wonder where you can go in a third season. I guess the answer is, throw him into a three-way relationship between Stevie (Emily Hampshire) and a guy named Jake (Steve Lund).
{Laughs.] One of the mandates from season to season is, ‘What haven’t we done before?’ And that was definitely a fun little arc to play with.

Is Jake around for a full season or a recurring character?
He plays a pivotal role in the first two episodes. Steve was in the final episode of Season 2 and it’s an interesting casting choice because he does play a sexually fluid character and something Steve brought into the room felt right. We thought he did such a good job at the end of Season 2 that it could be fun to bring him back. And, again, we’re playing off the complexity of David and Stevie’s relationship that David identifies and pansexual and how much fun you can have with the idea of a ‘throuple.’ [Laughs.]

As funny as those scenes are between Stevie and David, there is that undercurrent of serious feelings they have for each other. It’s an added, emotional layer.
Going back to your earlier comment about where you go in a third season, for us, it was taking the focus away from the circumstance and shining the light on the characters in a slightly more dimensional way than we have in the past. For two seasons, it was really important in terms of the narrative, to really substantiate the scenario, the premise of the family adapting to this town. For Season 3, we’re really peeling back the layers of the four protagonists and also with Stevie and Roland and Jocelyn.

To me, this is the most exciting season that we’ve done, and hopefully, rewarding to the fans of the show because we’ll see these people in new and dynamic situations they’ve never seen them in before.

I’ve almost forgotten they’re trying to get out of the town. That’s not part of the narrative anymore, really. Moira is part of the town council and rather than trying to get out of it, has made the best of it.
She’s going to make it about her, basically. Now that they’re not getting out, how are they going to make the best of their time there?

When you say this is the best season ever, have you been working towards this season via the last two?
When I go into each season, it’s not with an end goal in mind when I go into the room. There are emotional beats and emotional places where we want to find our characters at the end of every season. But, to be honest, on a lot of shows the premise wears thin. Being able to dig deeper is a relief, to say the least. But that’s also because of the strength of our actors. They have substantiated these characters in ways that far surpassed all of our expectations and, in a way, have allowed us to tell stories that are uniquely tailored to their skills.

Schitt’s Creek airs Tuesdays at 9 p.m. on CBC.

Cast image courtesy of CBC.

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Featured, Pure

Mennonite mafia adds Pure drama to CBC’s midseason

St. Jacobs, Ont., is a mere 90-minute drive from Toronto, but it can feel like a world away. It’s where a large community of Mennonites live surrounded by small towns and rolling farmer’s fields. It’s also the setting of CBC’s new—and unique—drama, Pure.

Created by Michael Amo (The Listener) and debuting Monday, Jan. 9, at 9 p.m., the premise sounds laughingly outrageous: Mennonite communities in Mexico use communities in Canada to transport drugs over the border into the United States and vice versa, as a way to keep their farms going. The reality is, it’s happening.

“It amazed me,” Amo says during a set visit for media in Halifax. “I was always interested in doing a story about the Mennonites and I love to use any project that I have as an excuse to do research and learn stuff.” Amo’s grandparents on his mother’s side were Mennonites, the first of their community to move into the city and stopped using low German as their language. Pure represented as much an opportunity to visit part of his family’s history as it did to tell the tale of drugs being run into the U.S. via small-town Canada. Amo first read about the Mennonite mob in a magazine article and renewed the option on it for years before writing the pilot on spec. No networks in Canada or the U.S. were interested in his six-episode one-hour drama until True Detective and Fargo came along. Pure then spent over two years in the works at Shaw before the CBC picked it up.

Pure stars Ryan Robbins (Continuum) as Noah Funk, a newly-elected Mennonite pastor who rids his community of drug traffickers … and then comes under the scrutiny of mob leader Eli Voss (Peter Outerbridge, Orphan Black). This pulls Noah and his family—wife Anna (Alex Paxton-Beesley, Murdoch Mysteries), brother Abel (Gord Rand), son Isaac (Dylan Everett) and daughter Tina (Jessica Clement)—into a dangerous web with seemingly no way to escape. That is, until Noah finds an unlikely ally in Bronco Novak (AJ Buckley, Justified), a washed-up cop whose investigation into a burned-out car leads him to Noah, and DEA agent Phoebe O’Reilly (Rosie Perez), who has been tracking Eli for years.

“The Mennonite people speak their own language, Plautdietsch or low German,” Robbins says during a break in filming. “So, even if the police were on to somebody they don’t have anybody to translate those conversations. That’s how people were able to get away with it for so long.” Noah, Robbins explains, is an old-school Mennonite, with no electricity and a horse and buggy to get around in. A pious man, he’s challenged to keep his faith while betraying members of his colony and justifying his decisions in the name of God.

“Michael writes his characters very differently,” Robbins says. “They’re not cookie-cutter archetypes. Each character has quirks and they cast accordingly so that strengths will be brought to those characters.” The Vancouver-based actor “blasted through” Season 1’s six scripts quickly and marvelled at how he’d never heard or read anything like it before.

“I think a show like Pure could change the game for the CBC and for Canadian television,” he continues. “There is nothing like this on TV. I hope this show wows people. It wows me.”

Pure airs Mondays at 9 p.m. on CBC.

Images courtesy of CBC.

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Featured, Hard Rock Medical

TVO’s Hard Rock Medical embraces North Bay in Season 3

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Derek Diorio uses the word “talent” a lot when talking about North Bay, Ont. The city, almost four hours up Highway 11 from Toronto, was the new home for Season 3 of TVO’s Hard Rock Medical.

Returning on Sunday, Jan. 8, at 8 p.m. ET on the network, Diorio not only sings the praises of the city and its environs but the folks who live and work there too. After two seasons of filming in Sudbury, Ont., the medical drama decamped for a couple of reasons, one of which was a partnership with Canadore College.

As with previous seasons, these new nine instalments follow the adventures of medical students enrolled in the fictional Hard Rock U, loosely based on Lakehead University and Laurentian University’s Northern Ontario School of Medicine. Sunday’s debut and the second episode boast some intriguing storylines: Gary (Mark Coles Smith) and Charlie (Stéphane Paquette) are embedded with an EMS team, Eva (Andrea Menard) and Melanie (Melissa Jane Shaw) are placed on a First Nations reserve, and Dr. Healy (Patrick McKenna) begs to return to work. We spoke to Hard Rock Medical co-creator Diorio about the move to North Bay and what fans to expect from Season 3.

Season 3 was filmed in North Bay, Ont., after being in Sudbury for two seasons. Why the change?
Derek Diorio: There is always a bit of a gap in production of about 18 months. And in the interim, Sudbury really got hot. The Northern Ontario Heritage Fund Corporation has put funding into a lot of productions and just as we were about to go into production, they also financed Cardinal. That was a big, huge, production and they sucked up a lot of the local resources and shooting days. If they were shooting for 50 days we were shooting for 30.

In previous seasons, I had built a relationship with Canadore College and the students in two of the programs there, Television and Digital Cinema. It was such a great experience working with the kids in the program. Conversations took place and I was asked if I would move production to North Bay. It was an ideal fit. I cannot say enough good things about the people running the program at Canadore. There are really good programs in Toronto at Ryerson and here in Ottawa with the Algonquin program, but there is something special going on in North Bay. The people who are there really care about what they’re doing and there is money because of the NOHFC and an industry. We had so much talent there, and it raised the game of the show.

I love the fact that, through this partnership with Canadore, the students are not only getting paid to do the work but are getting a hands-on education working on a television series.
What I keep stressing is that Canadore is unique. You can attend their programs and you can graduate with a television or film credit. I don’t think there are any other programs in North America that come close. It’s a small college, but it has a really good program.

We’re a small production and our budget is extremely low. There are lots of great actors in Toronto that I don’t really have access to because I can’t bring a day player in from there because it costs me $3,000. We designed the show, very heavily this year, around actors that were available to us in the North Bay area. I think we put 45 actors from North Bay in continuing roles. And the music that we use in the show are from acts in the area; our music is composed by a guy from North Bay. I think the area has improved the show.

A storyline that struck me in Episode 1 was Eva and Melanie out on Nipissing First Nation and a patient with cancer. It’s a very timely storyline.
There are two things we try to do with the show. Every year we loosely follow the curriculum of the Northern Ontario School of Medicine. It’s great because it gives us structure. We also look at what the school does and come up with our own premise or torn from the headlines stories. The whole First Nations storyline began torn from the headlines and we drifted off into a completely different storyline. We’re writing for the environments that are easily accessible to us, so 80 per cent was shot in and around Canadore and the edge of Nipissing First Nation is about five minutes from the campus. We were driven a lot by location and made it Eva’s reservation. And then you just start exploring what can happen on a reserve. The idea of bringing Melanie into the storyline was very much a fish out of water. Part of our theme for Eva this year is that it’s tough to go home. She has the ambitions to do it, but it turns out to be a lot harder than she thought it would be.

Gary and Charlie are embedded with the EMS. I was surprised to see Charlie break down following the scene of a car accident.
Charlie is the least likely to succeed and he’s our comic foil as well. We want to show his scope and the reality of students who have three or four kids and decide to go back to school. The pressure is unbelievable and one of the things that comes up is marriages are really tested by medical school. Most people who enter medical school are doing it coming out of university and are footloose and fancy-free and very few are connected. But what happens with Charlie is actually pretty funny too.

So, it’s just you and co-creator Smith Corindia doing all of the writing?
That’s it. We don’t have a choice, dude. But there is a huge advantage to that. We pound out a story arc for a character or two characters and go through all of the episodes. And then it’s lather, rinse and repeat for the rest of the characters. And then you assemble them all into the episodes and you find that one episode has 40 scenes in it and other has 15 and you adjust. You adjust the outlines and then you go to script and it’s actually quite a fast process.

Hard Rock Medical airs Sundays at 8 p.m. ET on TVO. All of the episodes will be available on TVO.org beginning on Jan. 9.

Hard Rock Medical airs Wednesdays at 8 p.m. ET on APTN beginning on Feb. 8.

Images courtesy of TVO.

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Degrassi, Featured

Degrassi: Next Class returns for “darker” Season 3

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Degrassi: Next Class executive producer Sarah Glinski has a warning for fans: things get dark in Season 3. The teen drama returns with new episodes on Monday, Jan. 9, at 9 p.m. ET/PT on Family Channel (and Netflix around the world) in dramatic fashion, as we find out who survived the Season 2 bus crash and how the experience affected them.

Add to the mix storylines involving Syrian refugees, abortion and mental health, and high school has never been more challenging. We spoke to Glinski ahead of Monday’s return about where the show is headed in the next 10 episodes.

How long have you been with the Degrassi franchise?
Sarah Glinski: I started on Season 8 of The Next Generation.

How do you feel this upcoming season of Next Class stacks up against the Degrassi seasons you’ve worked on?
Oh, they’re all so different. I would have trouble picking my favourite. There are some seasons when we did 45 episodes and there are some seasons when we did 28, some when we did movies of the week; they all have different personalities. But Season 3 of Next Class is a little bit darker than we have done for awhile. We have the combination of great stories and incredible actors performing in those stories that makes this season pretty special.

You’re right. Things start out very dark. What’s been the support like from your Canadian broadcaster, Family Channel? 
The have been wonderful and have encouraged us to tell the stories we want to tell the way we want to tell them. They trust us to talk to teens about the things teens are talking about.

I thought going to high school when I was a kid was tough, but nowadays because of social media, it’s even more difficult due to online bullying and instant messaging. In Episode 1 you have the issue between Lola and Shay; it’s a real problem.
There used to be a separation between home and school and now there isn’t. Everyone has their phones and they’re the first thing you grab when you wake up. You don’t really get a break from it, and your entire history is online, so it’s hard to move on and reinvent yourself.

You start Season 3 with the repercussions of the bus crash from the Season 2 finale, Syrian refugees, abortion and mental health. Anything else you want to let fans know about?
Another thing we look at is gender. We’ve gone into it a little bit before, but we look at gender fluidity and what’s a girl or a boy and when you don’t feel like what society defines them as. We look at that from a couple of different perspectives. What if you don’t want to wear a dress and makeup? What does that mean to you as a girl? Also, one of our characters is a lesbian and more feminine. What does that mean? Is it harder to come out when you wear lipstick, have long hair and wear dresses?

Degrassi has always covered today’s topics. When something like Syrian refugees pops up, does the writers’ room get excited?
Season 3 explores different ways of dealing, post-trauma. For a number of characters, that’s the opportunity to see something really positive. Having Syrian refugees come into the school seemed very natural.

Let’s talk about Tristan and how the bus crash affected he and Miles. Can you discuss anything to do with that storyline?
There won’t be closure on that storyline until Episode 10. There are a lot of twists and turns along the way. We explored the physical trauma of the bus crash [with our characters] and the mental trauma.

Can you talk about the new characters that are joining Degrassi this season?
We have two new characters and they’re Syrian refugees in Rasha and Saad. Rasha is very cosmopolitan, from the big city, speaks English and is very well-educated. She missed out on high school because of the war and wants to grab high school by the reins and is excited to be here, wants to be part of every club and make new friends. She lives her life vicariously through movies and TV.

Saad is from a smaller town and his English isn’t as good. Life is a little bit harder for him and we take a look at his experience as well.

When Zoe and Rasha are introduced, Rasha gives her a little look. Can you comment on that?
They are going to become very, very close friends.

In the beginning of our chat you said this was a darker season. What can fans expect when they tune in?
Even though it’s a bit of a darker season, there is hope and optimism. If you have friends and family, you can make it through. Making it through is the theme of the season.

Degrassi: Next Class airs Monday to Friday at 10 p.m. ET/PT on Family Channel until Jan. 20.

Images courtesy of DHX Studios.

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