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.
Regardless of who the next President of the United States is, The Beaverton has got it covered. The televised adaptation of the satirical website The Beaverton debuts Wednesday night on The Comedy Network with two possible lead stories. In one? The end of the world. The other? Bill Clinton is the First Husband. [Update: Armageddon it is.]
We were one of the over 100 sitting in the audience watching The Beaverton record its second-to-last Season 1 episode last week and it made for a fun night. Each of the 13 episodes finds anchors Emma Hunter (Mr. D) and Miguel Rivas (Meet the Family) and correspondents in news reporter Aisha Alfa, provocateur Donavon Stinson, financial correspondent Laura Cilevitz and foreign correspondent Marilla Wex skewering world topics.
Co-created by Luke Gordon Field and Jeff Detsky as well as website editors Jacob Duarte Spiel and Alexander Saxton, Pier 21’s Lazlo Barna and Melissa Williamson are executive producers.
“TV was always the dream,” Field says of creating an offshoot of the website for television. “I grew up on satirical television shows like The Daily Show … they were always my favourite shows. When I started writing political satire comedy, it was always in the back of my mind that it would be fun to create a TV show. I didn’t know that The Beaverton was ever going to have that opportunity and wasn’t working towards it. We were just building our name.”
Enter Detsky (Orphan Black), who noticed his Facebook friends were posting Beaverton stories on their news feeds. He immediately recognized the unique voice the site had and its reach (more than six million views in 2016) and knew it was a natural transition to television. Production on Season 1 happened in a nondescript warehouse shared by a church and the upcoming Top Chef Canada All-Stars, with Field, Detsky and 16 writers—most recently Kurt Smeaton, Scott Montgomery and Rupinder Gill—creating, doing table reads, punching up scripts and filming external bits in the week leading up to Thursday night tapings and production that has been rolling since late spring.
This is not The Daily Show. The Beaverton isn’t reacting to what happened in America, Canada or globally the day before. That, Field says, forces them to create original content not necessarily based on a headline. That frees the team up to cover stories that are always on the peripheral, like the Loonie, at a 20-year low, being swapped out in favour of Canadian Tire money.
And while Hunter and Rivas have extensive experience in sketch comedy writing, neither contribute to The Beaverton room. Instead, they’ve focused on delivering the stories and creating their on-screen personas. Rivas is buttoned-up and stiff, so unlike his actual personality, and Hunter is arrogant and braggy, totally opposite her self-deprecating humour when cameras aren’t rolling.
“We both approached it as, ‘What would make the best dynamic behind the desk and what’s original?'” Hunter explains. “Stereotypically, the story is the guy is a goof and super-funny and the girl checks him. This organic thing happened [between us] from the audition where we had this wonderful rhythm of give and take of being the straight man or having a moment and the characters evolved from there.”
“As a man, I agree with everything she just said,” Rivas says with a laugh.
The Beaverton airs Wednesdays at 10:30 p.m. ET/PT on The Comedy Network.
Like many Murdoch Mysteries fans, I’ve been anxious to have some serious storyline time devoted to Rebecca James. Yes, we did get some backstory about her in “Colour Blinded,” but we wanted more. Thankfully Monday’s newest, “Jagged Little Pill,” sated our thirst for Rebecca, as she was front and centre doing a little investigating of her own after a schoolmate at the Ontario Medical College for Women turned up dead.
Though Dr. Ogden and the police considered it a suicide, Rebecca wasn’t sure. Upon more digging, she not only uncovered a secret about her friend Sarah, but her case intersected with Murdoch’s hunt for the killer of a rich man.
We spoke to the episode’s writer, Carol Hay, about the storyline, the real history behind the Ontario Medica College for Women and, well, syphilis. Also? We get a sneak peek into next week’s episode, “Bend it Like Brackenreid.”
How do you walk that line developing a character like Rebecca while staying true to what Murdoch Mysteries is?
Carol Hay: You develop character through story. In the most successful drama you inform who the character is and you explore who the character is by how they act. Rebecca not only took something on, but was going against Dr. Ogden. She was actually in her own way trusting her instincts about her friend and saying, ‘I don’t think she killed herself.’ It’s very interesting because, in my first draft, I had a much stronger scene with Ogden where Ogden basically says, ‘You’re wrong, move on.’ And everybody felt I was being too harsh because Rebecca had obviously lost a friend.
I was very happy we did a story about the Medical College and it was natural to have Rebecca stepping into her own world.
Rebecca has great enthusiasm when she’s talking about putting McInnis’ liver and kidneys into bottles.
That’s something we did in terms of character development. I liked that we introduced her very tentatively. It was period accurate. I liked that we brought her in as the cleaner in the morgue and Ogden spotting something in her and fought for her to come and work in the morgue. The idea was, when we moved to this season, she feels comfortable and can make jokes. It’s a sign of her maturity and sign of her growing confidence.
After 10 seasons of adding little bits of development to the other cast, it must be fun to create Rebecca because she’s a clean slate.
Yes, absolutely. It’s always difficult to add a new character because it’s another character to serve. It’s finding her a place in the stories that doesn’t take away from Ogden. Rebecca is very ahead of her time. She’s young and has the youthful energy, and that attitude has been really fun to write.
We also got a little bit of a history lesson with regard to the Ontario Medical College for Women and its beginnings as Women’s Medical College and its ties to Dr. Emily Stowe. It was also neat to have Emily’s daughter, Augusta, teaching at the school.
It’s true. Augusta Stowe-Gullen was at the medical college at that time. It was terrific to look into all of that. We take liberties, obviously, with the actual history. That medical college really did exist because it was thought that men and women shouldn’t be taught together. One of the scenes I wanted to explore in this episode was the medical establishment’s attitude toward women and whether they were capable of the challenges of being a doctor.
All the stuff about the coming together of the two cases, the research into syphilis and the sleeping sickness is visually all historically accurate. There was a brilliant scientist in Germany at that time who was researching the sleeping sickness at the same time as other scientists were looking at a cure for syphilis. It really was a coincidental thing.
Before Hemphell is revealed as the killer, he was showing respect to the ladies in his class. He wasn’t talking down to them.
He wasn’t a flirt, but he enjoyed teaching the women. We wanted to show that his sexism was a little more buried. It would have been easy to make him a jerk from the beginning and everyone would know was the villain.
Do you recall where the medical school scenes were filmed?
It was at a medical college in Guelph, Ont.
Julia was offered a teaching position at the college. Can you comment on how that turns out?
It’s something we pick up in a future episode. I’ll leave it at that.
Thank you to whoever added ‘automatic dishwashing cupboard’ and ‘standing bath’ to the script.
[Laughs.] That was likely Paul Aitken.
What can you say about next week’s episode, “Bend it Like Brackenreid”?
It takes place in the world of soccer and features the Brackenreid’s prowess on the soccer field. A friend of Brackenreid’s is coaching the game to decide who represents Canada at the 1904 Olympic Games. It’s between U of T and Galt, which is completely historically accurate.
Christmas cheer returns to Station House No. 4 once more with the second annual MURDOCH MYSTERIES holiday special, “Once Upon a Murdoch Christmas,†premiering Monday, December 12 at 8 p.m. (8:30 NT) on CBC with an encore broadcast on Christmas Day, Sunday, December 25, at 5 p.m. (5:30 NT). In the standalone two-hour special, Murdoch (Yannick Bisson) and Brackenreid (Thomas Craig) find their jobs at risk as they investigate a series of brazen robberies targeting Toronto’s wealthiest businessmen just days before Christmas. In keeping with the festive spirit, the special also includes a unique scripted integration with The Salvation Army, featuring the historic brand’s presence and message of giving written into the storyline. Commissioned by CBC and produced by Shaftesbury, “Once Upon a Murdoch Christmas†is written by Paul Aitken, Carol Hay and Michelle Ricci and directed by T.W. Peacocke.
Nearly two million (1.969M) Canadians enjoyed the gift of last year’s inaugural two-hour holiday special, making it the highest-rated MURDOCH MYSTERIES ever. Overall, it reached 3.5 million Canadians – or 10% of the population – over the course of the two-hour broadcast.*
Last week on Travelers, Philip put the team in jeopardy when he attempted to save the life of a young boy named Aleksander. In Phil’s eyes, they’d been sent back to save the world, so why not save some extra folks along the way? Trouble is, that’s contrary to the mission, something The Director sternly warned them about. For the second time. By episode end, Trevor realized one of the names Philip wrote down on the hideout’s wall was one he knew. So, was it one of his parents? Girlfriend Rene? Best bud Kyle?
Here’s the official episode synopsis for Monday’s new episode, “Hall,” written by Pat Smith:
MacLaren’s leadership is challenged when he’s directed to assist a more experienced team of travellers that wants to join forces.
And here are a few more non-spoilery tidbits we can tell you:
Louis Ferreira alert!
Fans of Stargate Universe, Motive and This Life rejoice! Mr. Ferreira appears as a shady individual named Hall that Grant and Forbes (Arnold Pinnock) are keeping tabs on when a deal of some kind goes bad. One of the men on the scene—a traveler—gives Grant a message that sends them off-mission.
Our team works with another group
Remember how we were told there were thousands of travellers on earth all working separate missions? That’s the case tonight, as Grant et al. aid another. Also? It turns out that, like Philip, not every traveller is interested in the mission they’ve been given; some go rogue. That makes things very complicated for everyone and Marcy’s past, er, future comes back to haunt her.
Trevor has more fun in his new body
He’s enjoyed fresh air, hamburgers and morning erections; no Trev hits the track to give his muscles a workout. And his family meeting with Ms. Day about his marks? Classic.
Jeff tries to work himself back into Carly’s life
It’s a one-sided conversation, but Carly really shouldn’t ignore just how dangerous her baby daddy is. After all, he did see the security footage of Marcy and he’s a cop.
Travelers airs Mondays at 9 p.m. ET/PT on Showcase.
Canada is a brutal, wild place and the folks that inhabit it are pretty much that way too. That’s what we’ve learned after Sunday’s debut episode of Frontier.
“A Kingdom Unto Itself,” written by co-creators and executive producers Peter and Rob Blackie and Perry Chafe, served not only to introduce viewers to the key players in Season 1Â but to get the storylines going at a frenetic clip.
By the end of Episode 1, Michael has been successful in locating Harp for Benton, but the young lad was on the verge of becoming another pelt in Harp’s collection. We spoke to the Blackie brothers about Frontier and where the show will go in Season 1.
Peter, congratulations on Season 1 of Frontier and on Season 2 being ordered already. Was it always in the back of your minds to have Frontier last multiple seasons?
Peter Blackie: For sure. That was always our hope. You always go into a scripted series wanting to do a number of seasons if you can. But the real telltale is if they don’t like the first the season you’re probably not going to get another.
Rob Blackie: We’re actually in production on the second season right now, so this is a huge sign of confidence from Discovery Canada and Netflix.
Frontier is incredible visually, character and story-wise and wardrobe-wise. You’ve successfully introduced all of these characters and yet it doesn’t feel bloated or cluttered. It must have been difficult to have so much contained in six episodes and not feel bogged down.
RB: Pilots are interesting because they are burdened down with all of these required introductions. We spent the vast majority of our time working with our writing team and producing partners and director for the pilot, Brad Peyton, and making sure the ‘introductory elements’ have their own story engine so that when you watch them as a viewer they feel like a forward-moving story. It’s much more difficult to do it that way but we had a lot of people working hard on it for a very long time.
PB: Another thing that helped make it work, in particular for the pilot, was having actors in the show of a Shawn Doyle calibre who are able to really elevate everything because of their abilities.
There are several storylines going on in the first episode, but it feels very much like we’re seeing this world through Michael’s eyes and that he is our guide. Is that true?
PB: We refer to him as our protagonist. The show is set up to do multiple perspectives and kingdoms, but he functionally is the way into the show.
RB: And Declan Harp is our antihero. He’s the major star of the show and is introduced in the pilot in a very dark way. We are experiencing Declan Harp’s dark view of the world from Michael’s perspective.
Jason Momoa is listed as an executive producer. What did that title entail? Was he involved in day-to-day decisions?
RB: He didn’t have any day-to-day line producing or anything like that, but someone like him plays such an integral function in the profile and promoting of the show. He’s very, very interested in the arc of the show and the arc of his character and participates heavily in that part of the process. It’s a common practice for a someone like him who shows a tremendous amount of interest. He’s a filmmaker at heart and has directed his own material and has his own production company. We produced a small feature film with his production company last winter in addition to doing Frontier and he is an absolute film artist at heart and that makes his a really good fit for our team.
(l-r) Peter and Rob Blackie (Photo credit: Duncan de Young on the set of Frontier)
Why did you decide to start Frontier with the Hudson’s Bay Company crumbling rather than show how it began?
PB: That’s a great question. Rob and I spent a lot of time at the very beginning wrestling through where we wanted to be, specifically, and why. The reason we picked the general era that we picked it is about a century after the monopoly was granted to the Hudson’s Bay Company and their dominion started to falter. The only company in history that ever properly did rival the HBC in the New World was the North West Company and it, essentially, was an amalgamation of a bunch of separate companies with smaller interests, predominantly run out of Montreal. They ultimately realized they were not able to complete as separate entities and were forced to combine their energies and formed a company that was, scale-wise, able to compete with the HBC. We picked this era because it’s sort of the David and Goliath scenario.
Are any of Frontier’s characters named after any real-life people from history, or are they all a mix of real folks made into fictional ones?
PB: Everybody who is in the show is, at most, amalgamations of different characters from different times or characters we completely created from scratch.
RB: Earlier in the process we had taken a run at including ‘real characters’ from history and we found that, with the amount of historical fiction, it started to feel more limiting, and putting words into the actual mouths of people from history didn’t feel right to us. So we went with fictional characters and drew from as much research as we could from history and real people from history. The real people from history have the craziest stories.
Can you talk a little bit about the research you did into the canoes, wardrobe and discussions you had with First Nations people to get this right?
PB: We did, and we relied quite extensively on help from experts and people from within the communities. It’s been an interesting learning process for us. The deeper we went the more we realized how easy it is to make basic mistakes and we learned just how complex the socio-political landscape this country was like pre-contact. Once you introduce the idea of Europeans coming in, the complexity rolls over onto itself. We found ourselves in a spot where we didn’t have the tools to do the basic things and we reached out in a bunch of different directions to get help, including and not limited to wardrobe, language and representation.
We had very patient, thoughtful, smart people who have committed to us not making mistakes and inspiring us to dive in and tell these stories.
Frontier airs Sundays at 9 p.m. ET/6 p.m. PT on Discovery Canada.
