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Amazing Race Canada, Featured, Satisfaction, Saving Hope, The Listener

The Listener, Saving Hope, Satisfaction and Amazing Race Canada in CTV summer lineup

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From a media release:

On Your Mark, Get Set, Go! CTV Sets Amazing Summer Lineup

  • Canadians get in the game with the premiere of THE AMAZING RACE CANADA, July 15
  • New CTV comedy SATISFACTION couples begins June 24
  • Fan favourite THE LISTENER returns for its fourth gripping season, May 29
  • Last summer’s #1 drama SAVING HOPE returns June 25

It’s shaping up to be an eh-mazing summer on CTV as the network unveiled the first wave of its summer lineup today. As announced yesterday, Canada’s must-see reality TV program of the year anchors a new must-see Monday lineup on CTV as adventure-seekers across the country go head-to-head on THE AMAZING RACE CANADA (@AmazingRaceCDA). With new programs still to be announced, CTV’s summer schedule already features a lineup of returning hits such as SAVING HOPE (@SavingHopeTV) and THE LISTENER (@listenertv), along with the premiere of the all-new comedy SATISFACTION (@SatisfactionTV), as well as encore broadcasts of this season’s newest hit MOTIVE (@MotiveTV).

CTV’s new Monday night destination lineup kicks off the week with laughs and thrills starting with the debut of SATISFACTION (June 24), a hilarious exploration of romantic woes and wins, life crises, and personal ambitions starring a sexy young cast. Mondays will then thrill audiences as THE AMAZING RACE CANADA starts to make its way to the finish line.

Dramas hitting the summer schedule on CTV include the return of CTV’s hit original series THE LISTENER (May 29), back for an action-packed fourth season, as telepath Toby Logan (Craig Olejnik) goes up against increasingly dangerous criminals. As well, last summer’s most-watched drama series SAVING HOPE (June 25), starring Erica Durance, Michael Shanks, and Daniel Gillies, joins the Tuesday lineup for its highly-anticipated second season.

Completing CTV’s unstoppable summer lineup is MOTIVE (May 20), the #1 new Canadian series of the 2012/2013 broadcast season, which returns with encore presentations in simulcast with ABC.

NEW SERIES

SATISFACTION – Mondays at 8 p.m. ET/PT on CTV beginning June 24
CTV original comedy SATISFACTION takes a humorous look at a group of friends who are completely uninhibited as they share their relationship woes and romantic wins, life crises, and personal ambitions. Dedicated single man Mark (Ryan Belleville, THE L.A. COMPLEX) hustles the dating scene while his best friends and long-term couple Jason (Luke MacFarlane, BROTHERS & SISTERS) and Maggie (Leah Renee, BLUE MOUNTAIN STATE) work at keeping the sparks flying as they face the day-to-day challenges of being in a committed relationship.

THE AMAZING RACE CANADA – Mondays at 9 p.m. ET/PT on CTV beginning July 15
Get ready for the race of the summer! THE AMAZING RACE CANADA is set to give Canadians the opportunity to race around Canada and discover the country they love in a once-in-a-lifetime adventure. Teams will race to the finish line, criss-crossing up to 9,000 kilometres. A stunning depiction of the Canadian fabric, the teams will travel through both the country’s urban centres as well as the most remote outposts in the land, all while exploring its broad cultural and ethnic diversity, wildlife, and iconic landmarks.

RETURNING SERIES

THE LISTENER – Wednesdays at 10 p.m. ET/PT on CTV beginning May 29
Season 4 of CTV’s hit original series THE LISTENER, sees telepathic former paramedic Toby Logan (Craig Olejnik, The Timekeeper) working hard to sharpen his police skills, as he becomes involved in the Integrated Investigative Bureau’s (IIB) cases as a Special Consultant. His personal life also heats up as he deepens his relationship with crime reporter Tia Tremblay (Melanie Scrofano, BEING ERICA), who is inexplicably the one person he can’t read. Life will be no less dramatic for Toby’s colleagues, as Sgt. Michelle McCluskey (Lauren Lee Smith, CSI) navigates a complicated marriage with her husband, and IIB head Alvin Klein (Peter Stebbings, MADISON) attempts to protect himself and his team from the political manoeuvrings of the ambitious new police superintendent Nichola Martell (Ingrid Kavelaars, LIVING IN YOUR CAR). Meanwhile, new director of emergency services Oz Bey (Ennis Esmer, THE L.A. COMPLEX) realizes that being the boss isn’t as easy as he thought it would be.

MOTIVE – Airs Monday, May 20 at 10 p.m. ET/PT on CTV, moves to Thursdays at 9 p.m. ET/PT on CTV beginning May 23
MOTIVE, the #1 new Canadian series of the 2012/2013 broadcast season joins the summer schedule, with encore presentations airing in simulcast with ABC. The CTV hit original series is a captivating one-hour crime drama that follows spirited female homicide detective Angie Flynn on a backwards chase for clues to a killer that has already been revealed to viewers. An unconventional way to watch a crime unfold, the “whydunit” stars Kristin Lehman (THE KILLING), Gemini Award-winning Louis Ferreira (SGU STARGATE UNIVERSE), and Lauren Holly (NCIS).

SAVING HOPE – Tuesdays at 10 p.m. ET/PT on CTV beginning June 25
Last summer’s #1 Canadian drama SAVING HOPE returns for a compelling second season with former Chief of Surgery, Dr. Charlie Harris (Michael Shanks, STARGATE SG-1) awake from his coma and reunited with his fiancée Dr. Alex Reid (Erica Durance, SMALLVILLE). This season, Alex and the other doctors of Hope Zion Hospital – including Alex’s ex-boyfriend, Dr. Joel Goran (Daniel Gillies, VAMPIRE DIARIES) – continue to handle gripping medical cases full of twists and turns, while Charlie struggles with a secret that could jeopardize his career and his relationship with Alex: he can still see and communicate with ghosts. Gemini-nominated actor Jason Priestley (CALL ME FITZ) and Gregory Smith (ROOKIE BLUE) are each set to direct an episode this season, joining directors David Wellington (THE ELEVENTH HOUR, WOULD BE KINGS, ROOKIE BLUE) Ken Girotti (BOMB GIRLS), John Fawcett (ORPHAN BLACK), and Jeff Woolnough (Jack). Plus, Gemini Award-winning actress Erin Karpluk (BEING ERICA) joins SAVING HOPE for a recurring guest starring role this season, playing a single mother and one of Dr. Joel Goran’s (Daniel Gillies) patients.

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Featured, Industry News

A dare to Canadian broadcasters: Walk the talk

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Lately I’ve been thrilled to see senior executives at the major Canadian broadcasters publicly declaring their desire to support Canadian content. I’d be slightly more thrilled if they gave some basic support to their Canadian content.

Barbara Williams, Senior Vice President of Content at Shaw Media, is co-chair of the working group that so piqued my interest with their ideas about celebrating the success stories in Canadian on-screen content. A recent example is that Shaw successfully cancelled Bomb Girls for low ratings that dropped after Global pulled it off the air and changed timeslots mid-season to make way for an American import.

Kevin Crull, President of Bell Media, says he wants to duplicate the star system of Quebec in English Canada, and acquiring Astral apparently will help him do that. The Montreal Gazette explains: “Crull didn’t give any details of Bell’s plans, though he did tell members of the academy that Bell’s strategy of putting Canadian TV shows in popular prime-time spots, keeping them there and heavily promoting them are keys to their success.”

Ah yes, regular timeslots and promotion — two of the most basic ways to build an audience. Which include, for instance, not programming Motive, your only Canadian scripted series on CTV, on Sunday nights so that you have to move it when ratings sag amid the killer competition.

To give Bell credit, they wisely launched Orphan Black after Doctor Who on Saturdays, where there was a well-primed audience free from most other TV-related distractions. If I were feeling magnanimous I wouldn’t point out that BBC America chose that timeslot and Space followed suit.

Crull’s colleague Scott Henderson, Vice-President of Communications at Bell Media, was a panellist at this week’s Academy of Canadian Cinema and Television’s event Getting Canadians To Watch Canadians. “How do you get Canadians to watch Canadian television?” the blurb reads, promising that executives from the major networks would “share what they are doing to capture and increase this audience.”

Let me share what they’re doing. The same week that Henderson spoke about this topic, his two homegrown scripted shows — Motive and Orphan Black — had nothing on their homepages to indicate that a new episode would air that week. No promo, no episode description, no information even that the episode would be new. The episode descriptions in the usual programming highlight media releases were AWOL too.

The CTV media releases — generally sent out bimonthly with descriptions of new episodes — were missing the May 2 Motive airing. One release listed shows until April 30 while the next began with May 3.

In the coming apocalypse, Space is clearly betting on zombies over clones. Their programming highlights media release has been condensed, eliminating Orphan Black episode descriptions, but if you want to know the details of Abraham Lincoln vs Zombies, or their zombie mini-series import In The Flesh, you’re in luck.

The episode descriptions are now only located on the walled media site, but that change was not communicated and relies on the media actively seeking the information. If their shows were in witness protection Bell couldn’t do a much better job of protecting them from prying eyes.

Both Motive and Orphan Black launched well, the former garnering over a million viewers and the latter breaking original series premiere ratings for Space. I have genuine respect for Bell for their initial promotion and for giving Motive the post-Super Bowl premiere.

But both shows have declined from their premiere ratings. Orphan Black has already been renewed and I’m confident it will continue to go strong. While it loses its Doctor Who lead-in soon, besides the engaged fans there’s at least the BBC America promotion seeping over the border.

Motive shows more troubling signs of softness that can be strengthened with consistency and promotion. It had recovered from the natural viewer erosion after the (wise) timeslot shift, but its ratings still fluctuate down to Bomb Girls levels now after reruns.

I don’t expect Bell to pull a Shaw and cancel Motive, but they have no other original series to promote right now. They should be aggressively promoting what they have.

Or at the very least, broadcasters should stop telling us about their successes and their valiant efforts to get reluctant Canadians to watch Canadian TV until they demonstrate a true desire to succeed with their Canadian shows.

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Awards, Featured, Less Than Kind

Less Than Kind’s Kim Coghill on her WGC Award

Kim Coghill WGC pic 2013

Last week the Writers Guild of Canada handed out their screenwriting awards, including the TV Comedy award to Kim Coghill for the “Jerk Chicken” episode of Less Than Kind. TV, eh?‘s Rachel Langer quizzed her on the award, the episode and lessons learned.

What does the WGC Award win mean to you? 

I’m honoured that my fellow writers have judged me not only funny enough, but also strong enough to lift this award, which I believe weighs 175 pounds. Because a lighter award wouldn’t mean nearly as much. I mean, you could actually kill someone with this thing. I’m not saying anyone did. Or would. Or thought about it. I’m just saying you could. It’s just a fact. Facts aren’t illegal.

What was it like to be nominated alongside your then-fiance, now-husband Denis McGrath (Congrats!) and the showrunner of LTK, Mark McKinney? Did that change the experience of winning for you? 

I was thrilled to be nominated, but not really sure how they’d take it when I won. Denis seems fine so far – he cries, but mostly at night. Mark sends hate mail scrawled on old Slings & Arrows scripts, but that’s cool too, because it’s kinda like being threatened by Shakespeare, which is pretty flattering… So, um, I think they’re fine with it.

Tell us about your episode of Less Than Kind, and what the best and worst parts of writing it were? 

In this episode, Sheldon, the awkward teenaged son, tries to turn himself into one of the “jocks,” best friend Miriam tries being a coquette, and pal Danny wonders why everyone’s turning into someone else. It all spirals out of control when Sheldon throws a jock party, and Danny and Miriam crash with a vengeance.

Worst part: reliving my adolescence.

Best part: reliving my adolescence through these incredibly complex and funny characters, especially with a show set in my hometown of Winnipeg.

If you had to share the award with one other person, who would it be and why? 

Just one? All the other writers on LTK, rolled into one enormous aggregate individual containing tiny pieces of each person’s funniest bits. And if I couldn’t do that, I’d share it with my new husband, because he already has one, so now we have matching bookends.

If you could pick one lesson from working on LTK to bring with you to your next writing room, what would it be?

That “comedy” and “drama” aren’t opposites; a show doesn’t have to be one or the other. Good comedy is most powerful when it plays out against real emotions – anger, sadness, fear – because that’s how we experience humour in real life.

Also, when you need a cheap laugh, there’s nothing like the word “boogers.”

Speaking of your next project, could you tell us a little bit about what you’re working on now? 

I’m writing a couple of new pilots that are in that ‘comedy-with-drama’ vein.

If you could step into the writers room on any past Canadian Comedy, what would it be, and why? 
My smart-ass side would pick Made in Canada, because it was so wonderfully snarky. But my playful side would pick SCTV – I adored those characters, ever since I was a kid. There’s nothing like watching a great character, written and performed with love.

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Featured, Industry News

Industry Update – CRTC: Mandatory Carriage vs. Channel Drift

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On April 23, 2013, the CRTC began a public hearing on “distribution orders under section 9(1)h) of the Broadcasting Act” – in other words, mandatory carriage orders. Mandatory carriage automatically adds a service to a cable/satellite/IPTV provider’s basic package, and – unless the service is distributed for free – requires distributors to pay that service a wholesale fee per customer. This is a privilege ten services currently enjoy. A new or existing service granted mandatory carriage is the CRTC equivalent of winning pole position in a horse race. It practically guarantees that service some form of subsidy.

New and/or unlaunched services applying for mandatory carriage, such as Starlight: The Canadian Movie Channel, ACCENTS, and FUSION, are forward-looking statements in search of stable funding. Starlight, in particular, has made some noise in the media about its commitment to Canadian film. Existing services, such as Sun News Network and Vision TV, see mandatory carriage as the way to secure their futures.

At the other end of the spectrum, there’s a Steve Ladurantaye Globe and Mail piece about four services — Blue Ant Media’s Travel + Escape, OUTtv Network Inc.’s OUTtv, Stornoway Communications’ ichannel, and ZoomerMedia’s ONE – asking the CRTC for licence amendments. To that end, the Independent Broadcast Group — the four previously mentioned broadcasters, plus APTN, Channel Zero, Ethnic Channels Group, TV5 Quebec, and ZoomerMedia — lobbies to protect the independent broadcasters’ interests.

ichannel, OUTtv, ONE, and Travel + Escape’s renewals are part of the same CRTC Broadcasting Notice of Consultation as the applications for mandatory distribution orders. To demonstrate what a new “basic” service could become in the future, I point to two current services on differing prosperity levels — OUTtv and Vision TV — as they have at least one thing in common.

OUTtv debuted as lesbian/gay/bisexual/transgender (LGBT) service PrideVision, and struggled to attract viewers in its early days – it aired pornographic content in the late night hours, and lacked a West Coast feed. Shaw Communications, in particular, resisted PrideVision. Headline Media Group (later Score Media Inc.) sold the service in 2004, to a consortium led by broadcaster William Craig.

PrideVision, by then doing business as HARD on PrideVision, briefly aired porn between 9:00 PM and 6:00 AM. In 2005, HARD on PrideVision spun off into a separate service (now Playmen TV), making the “new” OUTtv a full-time, general-interest LGBT service. Today, OUTtv is almost fully owned by Shavick Entertainment (Re:Source Media owns 4.16%), and has 939,200 subscribers as of 2012. Arguably, it took a decade, two ownership changes, and the “spinoff” of a questionable program block for OUTtv to find its footing.

Vision TV began in 1988 as a multi-faith religious service, initially owned by a company that evolved into S-VOX Foundation. ZoomerMedia acquired the service in 2010. Under ZoomerMedia ownership, Vision TV is more of a general-interest service for older audiences. ZoomerMedia’s chief argument is that cable and satellite companies want to remove Vision TV from their basic tiers, in part due to Vision TV straying from its original mandate. In the event Vision TV is bumped off basic cable, ZoomerMedia will attempt to amend Vision TV’s licence.

Where OUTtv and Vision TV intersect is their desire to amend their licences, and reduce Canadian content levels. This is why I don’t see a future for Starlight, EqualiTV, Dolobox TV, or other unlaunched services vying for mandatory carriage. The history of Canadian specialty services suggest that a service will rebrand, and/or amend its broadcasting licence, at some point. Even well-established, profitable services like The Comedy Network want to reduce their Canadian content levels.

Canadian television is littered with services that failed – C Channel, WTSN, The Life Channel, Edge TV, Cool TV, X-Treme Sports, Fox Sports World Canada, etc. Other services have new storefronts – Drive-In Classics is now Sundance Channel, TV Land is now Comedy Gold, mentv/The Cave is now H2, and so on. Services might wrap themselves around noble goals – engaging youth, reviving the Canadian film industry’s fortunes, appealing to underserved minority groups. What matters is whether the services are managed well enough to survive on their original mandates, and whether channels will still be maintained, if their preferred source of funding doesn’t materialize.

In the end, I don’t think CRTC’s current mandatory carriage hearings will produce much of value. In 2013, there are too many examples of services that meant well, but gave in to the pressures of commercial broadcasting. I rarely see a CRTC licence amendment that increases Canadian content, or strengthens a service’s mandate – maybe AUX’s 2011 application to play more music videos, which the CRTC denied.

I neither want to see overfunded services that can’t sustain themselves, nor services using mandatory carriage orders as a substitute for venture capital. In the wake of CRTC’s second round of Bell-Astral hearings, there are more pressing matters in Canadian television.

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