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Poll: Which returning Canadian TV shows are you most excited about watching this fall?

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It’s the most wonderful time of the year. Evenings grow crisp, trees explode into vibrant colour and the new fall Canadian television season launches. We here at TV, Eh? are as excited as you, with all of our returning favourites hitting the small screen between now and the end of November.

So, to have a little fun—and celebrate the coming season—we’ve put together a poll where you pick the three returning Canadian-made shows you’re most looking forward to seeing this fall. Wondering exactly when those projects will be back? Check out our handy calendars and mark yours! The poll closes next week, so have fun!

Instructions: Click on the boxes next to your three choices and then register your votes by clicking the Vote box (on some browsers it’s greyed out) just to the right of Unusually Thicke.

Which three returning Canadian TV shows are you most excited about watching this fall?

  • Murdoch Mysteries (37%, 1,876 Votes)
  • Lost Girl (9%, 485 Votes)
  • Rick Mercer Report (9%, 449 Votes)
  • Heartland (6%, 318 Votes)
  • Canada's Worst Driver (4%, 218 Votes)
  • Property Brothers (4%, 198 Votes)
  • Saving Hope (4%, 196 Votes)
  • The Nature of Things (4%, 185 Votes)
  • 22 Minutes (3%, 169 Votes)
  • Love It or List It (3%, 157 Votes)
  • Dragons' Den (3%, 147 Votes)
  • Continuum (3%, 140 Votes)
  • The Fifth Estate (3%, 138 Votes)
  • House of Bryan (2%, 102 Votes)
  • Marketplace (2%, 100 Votes)
  • Highway Thru Hell (2%, 87 Votes)
  • Canada's Smartest Person (1%, 42 Votes)
  • Fugget About It (0%, 19 Votes)
  • Sunnyside (0%, 18 Votes)
  • Hockey Wives (0%, 15 Votes)
  • The Next Step (0%, 14 Votes)
  • Custom Built (0%, 14 Votes)
  • Fool's Gold (0%, 8 Votes)
  • Unusually Thicke (0%, 7 Votes)
  • Gaming Show (0%, 6 Votes)

Total Voters: 2,663

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Featured, Reality, Lifestyle & Documentary

Food’s Chef In Your Ear the ultimate in culinary improv

Simply put, Chef In Your Ear is unlike any culinary competition on television today. In it, unskilled cooks prepare a restaurant-quality dish in one hour with help from a professional Canadian chef. The hook? The chefs are ensconced in remote booths, directing competitors orally through earpieces while observing them via a bank of monitors.

“It’s like an improv performance,” says series executive producer Daniel Gelfant. Developed from an idea by Justin Scroggie and Ricardo Larrivée, Gelfant’s final product—debuting on Food Network on Monday at 10 p.m. ET/PT—Chef In Your Ear (hosted by Second City’s Greg Komorowski) is a wild mix of laughs, excitement, a little embarrassment … and a huge learning experience for chef Cory Vitiello.

“We lose three of our most important senses in taste, smell and touch,” Vitiello says on the phone from his latest Toronto restaurant, Flock. “But because we lose that, I found I paid attention to so many other little details than I would if I was actually down there. Watching through five monitors, I’m able to see a pot boiling on the back, or bones being left in meat.” Vitiello and fellow Canadian chefs Jordan Andino (Harlow Sag Harbor), Devin Connell (Delica Kitchen), Craig Harding (Campagnolo) and Rob Rossi (Bestellen), have to call on their skills as coaches, mentors and psychiatrists to guide their charges through to success with recipes for pork schnitzel, eggs Benedict, spaghetti and meat balls and eggplant Parmigiana.

Vitiello and Rossi are in tough in tonight’s first episode of 26, “The Big Bang”; the former is paired with violin superstar Rosemary while the latter teams with toymaker Nick. At first, it seems like a recipe for disaster, especially since Rosemary screams when she’s under pressure. Suffice it to say, there is a lot of screaming from her side of the kitchen and Vitiello struggled early on to keep her focused.

“I think every one of us started each episode saying, ‘There is no way this is going to work,'” he says. “But then you build some trust and some confidence and there is a point where it just clicks and you work together. You can see the transition on the floor, where they realize, ‘Oh my God, I can do this!'”

Chef In Your Ear airs Mondays at 10 p.m. ET/PT on Food Network.

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Featured, Reality, Lifestyle & Documentary

Discovery’s Daily Planet kicks off Season 21 in style

It seems like just yesterday that Daily Planet debuted. With Jay Ingram at its helm, the show—then called @discovery.ca—launched with a goal to explore the scientific angle to current events. Twenty-one seasons later, Daily Planet continues on that path when the show returns to Discovery on Monday with “Extreme Machines Week.”

“We have people on the team who have been with the show since the very beginning,” says Dan Riskin, who has been co-hosting Daily Planet with Ziya Tong since Season 17. “We’re really proud to be representing them.”

Daily Planet shows no signs of slowing down, ratings-wise. Season 20 was the most-watched yet, the third year in a row a viewership benchmark was beaten. Tong, who has been at the helm since 2008 when she joined Ingram, thinks she knows why.

“We have all of these specialty theme weeks that we didn’t have in the past when I started,” she says. “We go off to the Consumer Electronics Show every year, we’ve got Shark Week now and we have a wonderful interactive audience that’s growing with us. It’s a very different show than it was 20 years ago.” She’s right. With themed weeks devoted to toothsome fish, high-tech toys, tornados, future tech and extreme machines, and reporting done at a fast-paced, almost fever pitch, Daily Planet has evolved alongside the science it reports on.

“It’s like learning with a wow factor,” Tong says. That fast pace extends behind the scenes too. Tong describes how seasons are planned well in advance, with on location filming of future segments happening during the summer. Those doc-style bits are intercut with the stuff the team learns about, writes up and reports on every day of broadcast. Deadlines are so tight, Riskin reveals, some floor segments are still being filmed when that night’s broadcast is underway.

“Extreme Machines Week” launches Season 21 with several interesting segments, including tech correspondent Lucas Cochran mounting a pogo stick on steroids, a gyrocopter pilot who aims for a world record and a unique job in Amsterdam: bicycle fisherman. Riskin jetted to the Netherlands’ capital to catch up with Richard and Tom, two dudes who pilot a crane and barge contraption that travels Amsterdam’s canals pulling discarded bikes out of the water. If the pair don’t keep up their task, the accumulated rusting metal—up to 15,000 bikes a year—will clog up the waterways. The segment also shows the duo pulling the hulk of the car out of the murk, leading one to wonder if other, more ominous, items have been discovered.

“The question everybody asks is, ‘Do you ever find dead bodies?'” Riskin says. “Yes, they do. It often happens in winter when somebody has to take a leak and they fall in. It’s hard to find a way out of those canals when it’s dark and you’re drunk.” Ah, science.

Daily Planet airs Monday to Friday at 7 p.m. ET on Discovery.

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Featured, Reality, Lifestyle & Documentary

The Social’s Jess Allen: Six things I’ve learned being on TV

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Season 3 of The Social returns to CTV next Monday, Aug. 31. Co-hosted by Melissa Grelo, Cynthia Loyst, Lainey Lui and Traci Melchor, The Social also includes digital correspondent Jess Allen. We got the multi-tasking, multi-faceted dynamo to write a guest column about her experiences on the series so far. Take it away, Jess:

Right before The Social premiered two years ago, I remember my bosses asking me if I would be comfortable occasionally being on TV. “Sure,” I said. How hard can live television be?

I was fairly green—as in zero television experience. I’d done on-camera work in the form of videos. But the thing with that medium is something called “editing.” It’s a miracle thing, really, that can remove blunders, stutters, snorts and awkward pauses with a few swift keystrokes.

Here is what I’ve learned in the meantime:

  1. Don’t make fun of Liza Minnelli. Even if she shows up at the Golden Globes not wearing a bra. People will be angry with you and may even send the show emails about how insensitive you are towards a living legend.
  1. The things people love about you are the same things people hate about you. For example, people seem to enjoy me because I over share—except for people who think I share too much: like the sincere young woman who told me that I shouldn’t have talked about picking my nose on television. I reminded her that the story I told was of me picking my nose when I was four years old, thinking that might soften her disappointment. (It didn’t.)
  1. Don’t over-analyze the opinions you share on live TV because you can’t always predict with precision what will offend. I could say that I think Donald Trump has some pretty good ideas and there’d be the sound of crickets. In the next breath I could confess that I don’t believe in ghosts and people might gasp in horror. You will never please everyone, which I know seems so obvious but it’s still a difficult concept to accept when you’re a born people pleaser. Make a (terrible) joke about how I wish unicorns would go extinct already because duh, they’re racist, and a unicorn-truther would be upset. Just be true to you.
  1. I’ve also learned that I should dress sexy, even though I’m not comfortable wearing form-fitting outfits; that I should wear whatever makes me comfortable; that every person’s definition of what marmy-type clothing is different; that every person’s interpretation of fashion-forward is different; and that I should dress like a marm (and not sexy) if I like it. Confused yet? Me too. The lesson? A stylist is the best friend a girl on the tube can have.
  1. Remember in the HBO show The Newsroom how MacKenzie, the show’s executive producer, would be talking in the ear of anchor Will McAvoy via an IFB? Will is always so chill—even if MacKenzie is telling him that the world is about to end. He makes it look so easy. Well, it’s not easy to have someone talking in your ear while you’re trying to talk about how unicorns are racist and that’s why they should go extinct. It’s really, really hard. And I will never be as good as Will McAvoy. (Or Melissa Grelo.)
  1. An IFB is a little thing that goes into your ear and acts like an intercom between you and the control room. Also, it makes you feel like an FBI agent. And that is a beautiful thing.

The Social airs Monday-Friday at 1 p.m. ET on CTV.

 

Jessica Allen is excited to be returning this season as THE SOCIAL’s Digital Correspondent, and looks forward to writing more stories for the show’s website on everything from food, films, and books to science and history (You can read her latest pieces under The Jess Files). She will also appear as the fifth chair on Fridays with THE SOCIAL’s co-hosts, and whenever anyone tells her to.

Before joining the team at THE SOCIAL, Jessica was an assistant editor at Maclean’s where she wrote arts and culture-related stories for the website and magazine. After work, she maintains her personal food blog, Foodie and the Beast. It’s actually a relationship blog masquerading as a food blog, because really, when you get down to brass tacks, the good stuff happens – and will continue to happen – around the dinner table.

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Reality, Lifestyle & Documentary

W Network sets return dates for Property Brothers & Hockey Wives

From a media release:

This Fall, W Network continues to deliver a slate of fan-favourite original series including Property Brothers, the Love It or List It franchise and Hockey Wives, which has made W Network the top-rated specialty network for women in Canada. The schedule is packed with real estate focused series including new seasons of Property Brothers, new episodes of Love It or List It as well as the premieres of  the new W Network original series Real Houses Of… and Love It or List It U.K. In October, Hockey Wives returns with a brand new season featuring the WAGs of Canada’s national pastime, and Candace Cameron Bure (Full House) returns in the next instalment of the movies based on the books by Charlaine Harris (HBO’s True Blood), Real Murders: An Aurora Teagarden Mystery.

 

SEPTEMBER PREMIERES

Real Houses Of…. premieres Tuesday September at 8 and 10:30 p.m. ET/PT (New Series)

Real Houses Of… (15×30) invites viewers into some of the most incredible homes in North America. You won’t find “cookie cutter” here. These fabulous spaces are one-of-a-kind, custom-designed to fit the needs and lifestyles of their remarkable owners. From historic east coast manors to ultra-modern Pacific pads, these Real Houses push wow factor to the max. With luxurious bedrooms, resort-worthy pools, spectacular bathrooms, million-dollar views and kitchens hot enough to make a French chef swoon – this series is guaranteed to astonish and inspire. View a preview here.

Property Brothers Season 5 premieres Monday, September 14 at 9 p.m. ET/PT (New Season)

The brothers are back and this season marks the 100th episode of the hit series. Named People Magazine’s Annual Sexiest Man Alive List and HELLO! Canada’s 50 Most Beautiful List, the boys are return with all new homes and amazing transformations. Real estate agent Drew Scott and his twin brother, contractor Jonathan Scott return with brand-new episodes of the popular series Property Brothers (11×60) this fall. This real estate/home renovation series gets buyers into their dream homes without busting their budget. The series follows Drew and Jonathan as they help couples find, buy and transform extreme fixer-uppers into the ultimate dream home. Each week, with the help of CGI technology, the brothers show buyers the underlying potential in two rundown properties. Once the clients choose the property they like best, Drew begins negotiating the purchase price while Jonathan starts planning the transformation. The 100th episode will air Monday, November 9 at 9 p.m. ET/PT.

OCTOBER PREMIERES

Love It or List It premieres Monday, October 5, at 10 p.m. ET/PT (New Episodes)

Hilary and David return in October with a new season of W Network’s hit real estate and renovation series Love It or List It (8×60). Featuring interior designer, Hilary Farr and real estate agent, David Visentin. Hilary attempts to win over the homeowners by renovating their current home, real estate agent David tries to find them the home of their dreams. Once all work has been complete and all potential homes have been viewed, couples must decide whether to love their homes or list them.

Love It or List It U.K premieres Tuesday, October 6 at 9 p.m. ET/PT (New Series)

Love It or List It U.K. takes the hit franchise across the pond (6×60). Designer Kirstie Allsopp and realtor Phil Spencer, U.K.’s top property duo help English homeowners divided over renovating or a fresh start somewhere new. Kirstie is heading up Team Love It and believes that with clever design and spending wisely, it’s possible to fall in love with your home all over again, while Phil is captaining Team List It and feels that dream homes are within reach.

Hockey Wives Season 2 premieres Wednesday, October 28 at 10 p.m. ET/PT (New Season)

Hockey Wives Season 2 will continue to have unmatched access to the off-the-ice lives of the women who are the captains of their families, careers and relationships. Following the success of the first season the series will continue to delivers a rare opportunity for fans to meet accomplished “captains” off the ice and explores the meaning of being married to the game. With an exclusive look into the high-stakes lives of WAGs (wives and girlfriends) of professional hockey players, the series reveals that it takes an incredible woman to manage fulfilling personal careers and stick handle life off of the ice with some of today’s top pro athletes.

Being married to the game comes with its fair share of perks, but make no mistake the hockey life isn’t for the faint of heart.  Balancing family, career and personal aspirations against a backdrop of the pressures of being traded, injury, career uncertainty, long periods of separation is a constant juggling act. And, if you happen to be in one of the country’s biggest hockey cities, it’s like living in a fishbowl.  Meet the off-ice Captains – sexy, savvy, jet-setting women, stick handling life through another grueling hockey season. From wives who are rookies, to those who are facing free agency or whose partners are Stanley Cup winning superstars, these women form a team of their own, supporting and encouraging one another through personal and professional highs and lows.

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