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Featured, Masterchef Canada

Set visit: MasterChef Canada cooks up Season 3

A cardinal rule in a reality is never, ever come off as cocky or over-confident in front of someone who is judging you. Two MasterChef Canada contestants learned the hard way when they received a dressing down from Michael Bonacini, Alvin Leung and Claudio Aprile during the first day of production on Season 3.

CTV’s culinary competition—set to return in early 2016—started rolling on two months of production with plenty of drama. Myself, along with longtime film and television critic Chris Jancelewicz, spent several hours in the series’ super-secret set hidden just west of Toronto and it was a pretty impressive sight. One corner of the expansive building is devoted to shelves piled with pots and pans, another area is set up for confessional one-on-ones and a conga line of fridges are labelled with daily ingredients. Once a warehouse, Proper Television transformed it, putting in the water, power and gas lines needed to create stations for each of the finalists to prepare their dishes for judging.

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It’s one thing to watch the finished product on television; it’s quite another to witness the raw emotion in-person. One after another, competitors hoping to move past the auction round had an hour to prep their signature dish in front of their fellow contestants and show producers before rolling their cart in front of the judges for a final five minutes of finishing touches and plating. Devoid of a music track, those minutes with Claudio, Alvin and Michael were a study in stress. Peppered by the trio’s questions about who they were and what the heck they were doing, sweat beaded on foreheads and stammering began. I squirmed as the chefs stepped forward for tasting, delivered their remarks and abruptly turned their backs on the contestants and walking away. Claudio was especially good at this; he’s developed quite the withering stare for Season 3.

Were aprons awarded while I watched? Yes, though fewer than I imagined. I can’t tell you who advanced and who didn’t yet, but I can say that Season 3 of MasterChef Canada promises to be the most challenging yet.

MasterChef Canada returns in 2016 on CTV.

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Featured, Podcast, Schitt's Creek

TV Eh B Cs podcast 31 – Annie Murphy Rocks the Fire Tornado

Annie1Annie Murphy is a graduate of both the Canadian Film Centre Actors’ Conservatory and the Theatre Performance Program at Concordia University.

Her projects have included Beauty & The Beast, Rookie Blue, Flashpoint, Good God, The Story of Jen and Blue Mountain State. Murphy has also spent time on stages in Montreal and Toronto.

She is currently starring in Schitt’s Creek for CBC as Alexis Rose, and the day we recorded, her new CBC web series The Plateaus hit the web with the first five episodes of a story about a band of brother, sister, best friends, lovers, and lastly, musicians.

Listen or download below, or subscribe via iTunes or any other podcast catcher with the TV, eh? podcast feed.

Want to become a Patron of the Podcast? We’ve got a Patreon page where you can donate a small amount per podcast and get a sneak peek of each release.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

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Featured, Slasher

Dean McDermott gets back to basics with Slasher

Dean McDermott wears his family on his sleeve. Literally.

The Toronto native’s entire right arm is a story in tattoo ink, from the top of his shoulder and the McDermott family crest to the tiger representing himself and brightly-coloured fish standing in for wife Tori and each of their four children. The ink is a constant reminder of where he came from and who he is: father, protector and husband.

But McDermott is an actor too, and he’s returning to those roots in Super Channel’s horror series Slasher. Set to debut in 2016 on Canada’s pay cable station and Chiller in the U.S., Aaron Martin’s twist on Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None stars McDermott as Iain Vaughn, police chief of Waterbury, a small town where bad things are happening. How bad? How about grisly murders every few days and a mounting list of suspects?

“I’m starting over again and I’m going to show you stuff that I think will blow you away.”

“I read a lot of scripts and some of them are hard to get through,” McDermott says during a break in filming on location in Parry Sound, Ont. “This was just a page-turner. I just couldn’t put it down. It’s so funny having someone like Aaron, who worked on Degrassi, create this. I thought, ‘Wow, this guy can really write.” Though McDermott and Slasher‘s production company, Shaftesbury, want to keep much of the show’s secrets hidden until the debut, we can reveal the series’ killer cast. As previously announced, Merlin‘s Katie McGrath stars as Sarah Bennett, who returns to her childhood home years after her parents were murdered. Upon her arrival, copycat killings begin and everyone is a suspect … or a casualty. Among them are Katie’s husband Dylan (Brandon Jay McLaren), her grandmother Brenda Merritt (Wendy Crewson), and family friend Cam Henry (Steve Byers). Co-stars include Mary Walsh, Enuka Okuma, Erin Karpluk, Christopher Jacot, Jefferson Brown, Mark Ghanimé and Rainbow Sun Francks.

Slasher represents an important step in McDermott’s career, a return to acting that has rejuvenated him creatively. After regular roles in Due South, Power Play, Tracker and 1-800-Missing, and guest gigs on Kojak, NCIS, CSI, Without a Trace and The Closer, McDermott became more known for opening up his private life via Tori & Dean: Storibook Weddings, Tori & Dean: Inn Love and True Tori. He’s in the midst of Slasher‘s eight episodes, but McDermott sent out tapes in hopes of landing roles in CTV’s Saving Hope and Discovery’s first scripted series, Frontier; being on set has gotten him pumped for more varied roles.

“I’ve gotten my life in order and I realized that I am an actor,” he says, sitting forward. “That’s what I want to do and it’s what I’ll always do. I’m starting over again and I’m going to show you stuff that I think will blow you away.”

Slasher will air in 2016 on Super Channel.

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Continuum, Featured

Interview: Continuum’s Rachel Nichols says goodbye to Kiera

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Rachel Nichols is grateful to the city of Vancouver. Not only was the west coast locale her transplanted home for four seasons of Continuum, but she met her husband there. With just four more weeks until the series finale, we sat down with Nichols to chat about this sci-fi roller coaster ride.

I’m sad to see Continuum end.
Rachel Nichols: I am too, but we’ve been given six episodes to bring it all to an end and I’ve never had that opportunity before. It is bittersweet because you do those final six episodes and you know it’s the end and that end comes so quickly. But, at the same time, we get to tie up some of the loose ends—it wouldn’t be Continuum if tied them all up—and we have this family between he cast and the crew. We’ve all been here together for the last four years.

I lived in L.A. before and came up here for the first season. And I came up here for Season 2 and met the man who is now my husband. I have so many things to be grateful for. The fans were so incredibly supportive and demanding of answers and wanting another season and wanting an end to the show. I wholeheartedly believe we wouldn’t have gotten a fourth season without them, so this season if for the fans.

It would have been awful if our final vision had been the Season 3 finale.
It would have been horrible!

What was it like to read through that final episode script?
I usually go on a script by script basis so I don’t read a lot in advance, primarily because I think it would scramble my brain and I need to focus on one block of episodes at a time. I had been hearing rumblings about the last episode and I thought at one point, ‘What if they kill Kiera? What if Kiera goes back to the future and dies?’ So, when I got the first draft of Episode 6, I went right to the end to see if Kiera was still alive. There are a lot of twists and turns this season.

Continuum2

It’s been hard to see the relationship between Carlos and Kiera, and Kiera and Alec erode somewhat over the last season.
It’s hard for Carlos because he’s taken over Dillon’s position. He’s an Inspector now. I’m happy to say that Kiera and Alec are back on track. Kiera was very much a lone wolf last season and trying to figure out how to manipulate the situation as best she could. Carlos is that loving, Type-A, football-watching, beer-drinking high moral standard type of guy. He’s never going to change. She doesn’t like lying to him, but sometimes leaving him out of the truth is the most helpful thing for him.

Things have also gotten complicated with Brad.
Oh yeah. We’ve quickly found out that the soldiers are Brad’s people. He’s come from a time where Kellog is a warlord, so the relationship becomes much more complicated. Plus, this season has become more about getting home and I always joke, ‘What am I going to do, show up back home with my new boyfriend and tell my husband to go and kick rocks?’ Brad and I were people who had lost so much and found this bond because of everything they’ve been through … that takes a back seat to Kiera not wanting to stay anymore. She’s done. Liber8 has been disbanded.

You’re a producer on Continuum. Does this set up groundwork for you moving forward on your own projects?
I don’t know at this point. I want to learn as much as I can and be involved in the day-to-day things as much as I can. I want to direct and add another piece to that IMDB page that says you’ve done this before. I’m very protective of the crew and making sure they’re being treated fairly. Simon has been very gracious about the words and letting me make the words more natural. I’m the lead and I want everybody to want to come to work every day and be sad that it’s going to end. My dad woke up every day happy to go to work and I want that for everybody who works on the show.

I’ll probably direct a short film first and call on a lot a favours and ask a lot of questions. [Laughs.]

Continuum airs Fridays at 9 p.m. ET/PT on Showcase.

Look for more interviews with Continuum stars Victor Webster, Erik Knudsen, Stephen Lobo and Roger Cross, and creator Simon Barry, in the coming weeks.

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