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, Vikings

Disaster and distrust on Vikings

“Up unto the overturned keel, clamber with a heart of steel. Cold is the ocean spray, and your death is on its way.”—Rollo

“This is how you repay me? Everyone wanted you dead. I kept you alive. And this is how you repay my love!?!”—Ragnar

We’re so not used to seeing Ragnar this way. Addicted to drugs, making quick decisions, doubting himself. And worse, having everyone around him wondering if the great king is off his darned gourd. We’re also not used to seeing the vikings defeated so handily. Yes, Paris’ soldiers repelled Ragnar last season, but he got the last laugh with that Trojan horse move. This time around he was soundly, horribly beaten by Rollo and Count Odo, mainly because the former knows exactly what his brother has planned and can counter those moves. There’s no way Ragnar could have expected a chain would be hoisted between the forts to stop the longboat advance, but that didn’t make the situation any better. Throw in a well-placed bog to slow down Lagertha’s rear attack and a throng of French soldiers riding into he viking camp and the whole invasion was a disaster.

Floki, meanwhile, is at a crossroads. Helga was gravely injured in the camp attack but he was saved from drowning by Ragnar. Will he once again align himself with his old friend, or continue to support the rival King Harold?

As a matter of fact, the only bright spot in “The Profit and the Loss” was Ecbert being handed Mercia—and its crown—by the Prince, who was tired of battles and wanted only to present himself to the Pope as a peasant. Unwilling to hand over power to Kwenthrith, he’s just made Ecbert the most powerful man in England.

And let’s just pretend that weird scene between Floki, Aslaug and Harbard didn’t happen, OK?

Vikings airs Thursdays at 10 p.m. ET on History.

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Slasher

Link: Ontario-shot TV series ‘Slasher’ aims to be the next ‘Canadian Horror Story’

From Bill Brioux of the Canadian Press:

Ontario-shot TV series ‘Slasher’ aims to be the next ‘Canadian Horror Story’
Aaron Martin wanted to throw a scare into himself. He was tired of writing and producing TV shows that were, as he calls them, “very relationship driven, very soapy.”

After a stint at “Degrassi” — Canadian television’s finishing school — the Brantford, Ont., native and Canadian Film Centre grad was in on the creation of such homegrown series as “Being Erica,” “Killjoys” and “Saving Hope.” Continue reading. 

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Canada's Smartest Person, Dragons' Den, Heartland, Industry News, Michael: Tuesdays and Thursdays, Mr. D, Murdoch Mysteries, Rick Mercer Report, Schitt's Creek, Still Standing, The Romeo Section, This Hour Has 22 Minutes, This Life, When Calls the Heart, X Company

CBC announces new and returning series for 2016-17 season

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From a media release:

CBC today announced five new original programs to its 2016-17 lineup of Canadian hits, along with the renewal of another 10 returning titles. Among the new titles are The Council (working title), a crime drama set in an isolated arctic outpost; observational series The School (working title); Northern-Canadian docu-series True North Calling; comedy series Four In The Morning; and Caught, a dramatic miniseries based on Lisa Moore’s novel of the same name. Series renewed for new seasons as part of the CBC-TV lineup include Murdoch Mysteries, Heartland, The Romeo Section, Hello Goodbye, Canada’s Smartest Person, This Life, X Company, Exhibitionists, Interrupt This Program and Crash Gallery.

NEW SERIES:

CAUGHT – New
6×60 (Winter 2017) – Take the Shot Productions and Entertainment One Television (eOne Television)
Adapted from the book by acclaimed author Lisa Moore, Caught is a riveting tale of bravado and betrayal, of complex characters and treacherous seas, of love, loss and last chances. Allan Hawco stars as David Slaney, who after six years incarcerated in a Nova Scotia prison for smuggling marijuana, has escaped. Slaney sets off on an odyssey that takes him deep into Latin America to reconnect with his once best friend and partner-in-crime who left him holding the bag years earlier. Slaney tastes freedom, but trusts no one and sees cops everywhere he goes.

 THE COUNCIL (working title) – New
10×60 (Fall 2016) – Lark Productions and Keston International Productions
The Council begins on the edge of the Arctic frontier during the endless days of the polar summer when a young woman, a renowned environmentalist, is found ritualistically murdered near the Canadian hamlet of Resolute. An investigation is mounted by the local RCMP inspector Mickey Behrens, an outsider and new-comer to the north who is running from a derailed personal and professional life, and her partner, officer Jo Ullulaq. A soulful counterpoint to Mickey, Jo is torn between the duty to his job and loyalty to his Inuit culture. The pair quickly discovers that the mystery extends far beyond the borders of the town and to the backrooms of Canadian parliament in Ottawa, the dark corridors of U.S. intelligence in Washington, D.C., the committee rooms of the Arctic Council in Copenhagen, the airbases of world powers, and the migrant conflicts at the border of Norway and Russia.

FOUR IN THE MORNING – New
8×30 (Summer 2016) – Serendipity Point Films
Four In The Morning is an edgy comedy that follows four friends in their twenties as they navigate life at the unpredictable, emotional and bewitching hour of 4 a.m. Dealing with themes of life and death, love and heartbreak, friendship and betrayal, it’s a series about self-discovery, disappointment and clawing after dreams that always feel out of reach.

THE SCHOOL (working title) – New
6×60 (Fall 2016) – Paperny Entertainment
The School is an intense, surprising and intimate series that, for the first time, looks deep into the incredible dynamic existing today between students and their teachers at a typical Canadian high school. Based on the award-winning UK format, The School offers unprecedented access into the day-to-day goings on at South Kamloops Secondary School in Kamloops, BC. Facing daily pressures at school, at home and in the world, today’s teens deal with seemingly insurmountable challenges. The School explores themes of teenage life and those all-important student-teacher relationships, which lie at the heart of everyone’s formative years. Fitting in, falling out, exam pressure, peer pressure, first love and last chances—The School uses warmth and humour to describe steps on the journey towards self-knowledge, at a time when both the present and the future remain uncertain.  The School is distributed by Endemol Shine and will premiere on CBC in fall 2016.

TRUE NORTH CALLING – New
7×30 (Winter 2017) – Proper Television
True North Calling will reveal the north to audiences in an entirely new, modern and surprising way. The series follows one season in the lives of several young, dynamic Arctic dwellers carving out a life for themselves and their families on the frozen tundra. We follow the daily dramas as each deals with unforgiving terrain, and unpredictable weather, hunting, guiding, fishing and farming, travelling by snowmobile and dog sled, mixing traditional ways with modern technology, all while making a living in Canada’s most spectacular and treacherous environment.

These newly announced series will debut during the 2016-2017 season, along with previously announced new shows, including: Shoot The Messenger; Workin’ Moms; Kim’s Convenience; and Baroness von Sketch Show.

RETURNING TITLES:

CANADA’S SMARTEST PERSON – Season 3
6×60 (Fall 2016) – Media Headquarters
Canada’s Smartest Person is an original competition series that inspires and entertains Canadians. Each week, competitors go head-to-head in a series of mind-bending challenges that redefine what it means to be smart. Based on the Theory of Multiple Intelligence, the series explores six categories of smarts including linguistic, physical, musical, visual, social and logical.

CRASH GALLERY – Season 2
5×30 (Winter 2017) – Lark Productions
Hosted by Sean O`Neill of the Art Gallery of Ontario, Crash Gallery is a high energy, immersive television series that brings art to life.  In each episode, three talented artists face-off in a real-time creative arena, giving the audience a front row seat and the opportunity to share in the creative process.

EXHIBITIONISTS – Season 2
26×30 (Fall 2016)
Exhibitionists is a vibrant series that pulls back the curtain on people who create, and why they do it. Hosted by actor, writer and educator Amanda Parris, this weekly show features Canadian artists as they reshape our country’s artistic landscape. Topical, innovative and entertaining, Exhibitionists explores the most exciting cultural happenings across Canada through a passionate lens.

HEARTLAND – Season 10
18×60 (Fall 2016) – Seven24 Films and Dynamo Films
Heartland continues the saga of a Western family as they chase big dreams and manage life’s setbacks, while holding on to what matters most: courage, love, family, and a home you can always come back to. Starring Amber Marshall, Graham Wardle, Alisha Newton, Michelle Morgan, Shaun Johnston and Chris Potter.

HELLO GOODBYE – Season 2
13×30 (Fall 2016) – Pivotal Media and Forte Entertainment
Bustling airport arrival and departure terminals see thousands of people every day, and each and every traveller has a unique story to tell. Host Dale Curd meets people from all walks of life who are in the midst of welcoming home or saying goodbye to their loved ones. He witnesses heartwarming, emotional moments that demonstrate the universal themes of love, loss, family, friendship, grief, and joy through each intimate story of arrival and departure.

INTERRUPT THIS PROGRAM – Season 2
5×30 (Winter 2017) – Noble Television and Storypark Inc.
Interrupt This Program returns with new episodes revealing the surprisingly vital cultural underbellies of unsettled, global cities. In each compelling episode, passionate young artists display art as a form of protest, as a means of survival and as an agent of change. Viewers are guided through parts of the world they have most likely never seen and experience the creativity and vitality of some of the planet’s most intriguing, resilient cities.

THIS LIFE – Season 2
10×60 (Fall 2016) – Sphere Media
Based on the original Radio-Canada hit, Nouvelle adresse, This Life is a family saga set in Montreal that focuses on Natalie Lawson (Torri Higginson), an accomplished columnist and single mother in her early forties whose terminal cancer diagnosis sends her on a quest to prepare her teenage children for life without her. Her tight-knit family – sister (Lauren Lee Smith), two brothers (Rick Roberts, Kristopher Turner) and parents (Peter MacNeill, Janet Laine Green), do the best they can to help her, while coping with their own responses to this revelation.

MURDOCH MYSTERIES – Season 10
18×60 (Fall 2016) – Shaftesbury Films
Season 10 of Murdoch Mysteries, marking 150 episodes of the series, will continue to follow the heroes at the Toronto Constabulary as they solve crimes inspired by Canadian history and international celebrities of the early 20th century. Detective Murdoch (Yannick Bisson) will continue to use his cutting-edge forensic methods and scientific inventions to catch criminals and find unexpected adventures in his home life with wife Doctor Ogden (Hélène Joy) and his colleagues at Station House Four, while last season’s newcomer Miss James (Mouna Traoré) takes on more responsibilities at the morgue.

THE ROMEO SECTION – Season 2
10×60 (Fall 2016) – Haddock Entertainment
Season 2 of The Romeo Section finds freelance intelligence agent Wolfgang McGee (Andrew Airlie) tasked with a covert investigation of a terrorist incident. The trail leads him forward into the dark side of intelligence services and backwards into his own past history of serving in that realm, and its tragic personal and social consequences.  Meanwhile, Lily Song (Jemmy Chen) is now a recruit for the Intelligence Service and working her way up the ladder, while taking drastic action to prevent her discovery as a double agent. Up and coming drug gangster Rufus (Juan Riedinger) gets caught in an escalating city-wide turf war which upsets the gangster hierarchy and triggers an attempted coup d’etat at the top of the heroin food chain.

X COMPANY – Season 3
10×60 (Winter 2017) – Temple Street Productions
Inspired by remarkable true events, X Company is an emotionally driven character drama set in the thrilling and dangerous world of WWII espionage and covert operations. During World War II, a real life spy training school existed on the shores of Lake Ontario. The series follows the stories of five highly skilled young recruits torn from their ordinary lives to train as agents at an ultra-secret training facility, Camp X.

These renewed titles join an impressive list of returning series that have already been announced, including: This Hour Has 22 Minutes (Season 24); Rick Mercer Report (Season 14); Schitt’s Creek (Season 3); Mr. D (Season 6); Dragons’ Den (Season 11); Still Standing (Season 2); Michael: Tuesdays & Thursdays (Season 2), and When Calls The Heart (Season 2).

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Featured, Slasher

Slasher’s creator details the long road to creating killer TV

Slasher‘s filming may have completed just a few months ago, but the series has been in the works for several years. The idea? It came even further back than that for creator Aaron Martin.

“When I was a teenager, we’d go to each other’s houses for sleepovers and watch those movies,” he says. “I always liked them and thought they were fun.” That fun has evolved into Super Channel’s newest series—debuting Friday—an eight-part, blood-soaked horror tale about Sarah Bennett (Katie McGrath), a young woman who returns to Waterbury, the small town where she was born under horrific circumstances. Part mystery, part thriller, Slasher features a who’s-who of cast, including Brandon Jay McLaren as Sarah’s husband, Dylan; Steve Byers as local cop Cam Henry; Patrick Garrow as Tom Winston; Dean McDermott as Police Chief Iain Vaughn; and Erin Karpluk as Heather Peterson.

With Slasher‘s debut nigh, we spoke to Martin about the series, the cast and what sets his series apart from others in the genre.

The long, long road to Slasher
“I had spoken to both of my agents, here and in the U.S., about doing a Scream, slasher-type series but also an Agatha Christie-type series. This is really a mix of a slasher film and an Agatha Christie novel. Everyone told me it would be a really tough sell, ‘That’s not in your background.’ And all of that made sense. I worked on Saving Hope and learning all of that medical stuff was great because I learned how the human body works. When I finished Saving Hope, I decided to just write Slasher because I had some time on my hands. I decided that if I wrote it, then I could pitch it. I wrote it on spec and it was floating around and everyone liked it, but this was before American Horror Story, so horror hadn’t really hit and there wasn’t really a home for it.”

“Then Shaftesbury optioned it and we took it around and Super Channel jumped on board and said, ‘Let’s do eight episodes.’ Chiller came on board after that, followed by international sales and all of a sudden we were able to go up north and film.”

Slasher_EP102_363
Steve Byers

A fascination with frights
“I find serial killers fascinating and creepy because they’re actually real. They actually exist out there. There are serial killers out there, right now, actively killing people. For me, the fear—and I think that’s why it attracts me—is that it’s something that could actually happen to you.”

That super channel
“SuperChannel supported us from Day 1—and by that I mean, they supported our unconventional way of shooting this series.  Everything from the fact we only have one writer and one director, to the look that we’re going for, the fact we’re shooting entirely on location, and that the season is self-contained and highly, highly serialized. We’re approaching Slasher like it’s one long movie broken up into eight parts—which is a very different way of making a TV show.  Super Channel have been not only great cheerleaders, but they’ve provided thoughtful, intelligent, and supportive feedback every step of the process. It’s really been a dream, working with them.”

Killer Katie (McGrath)
“Katie has a great, gothic look that really fits with the genre. We sent her the script and she really responded to it. She liked the pilot and by that point, when we approached her, we had another three or four scripts written, so we kept sending them and she kept liking them. It was sort of perfect for her, because she had a break in shooting and didn’t have to come back for Season 2 because it’s a new storyline every season.”

“Our whole cast is incredible and we were able to get them because we’re block shooting and they can come in and really concentrate without this interfering with their other projects.”

Caring for the characters
“All of the characters, including Sarah, have dark sides and good sides. A lot of the people who die in the show aren’t just evil, bad people. I’m hoping they are three-dimensional people who have done bad things and good things. In that way, you care more when they die. We were watching one of our actresses be killed and she was so great I thought, ‘Don’t kill her! Wait I minute, I wrote that, she has to die, that’s ridiculous.'”

All about the atmosphere
“When [director] Craig [David Wallace] came in for his interview he said, ‘For me, this show lives between the day and the night.’ What is beautiful during the day can, when the right lighting is put on it, can be terrifying at night.”

Slasher airs Fridays at 9 p.m. ET on Super Channel.

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