I’m so used to watching series featuring gals dispatching biker demons, Second World War spies, vikings attacking Paris and serial killers slaughtering small-town folk that Sensitive Skin made an immediate impact.
Returning Sunday on HBO Canada for Season 2, the Kim Cattrall-led drama doesn’t feature a gun owned by Wyatt Earp, Nazis or longboat battles. It’s a slow, spare character analysis of a woman trying to find her place in the world. The first season ended with Davina Jackson (Cattrall) at a crossroads in her life. Unhappy in her life and marriage to Al (Don McKellar), things were shaken up when Al suffered a heart attack and then flatlined in the season’s closing moments.
Several segments in Episode 1 are very much about words left unsaid. Rather than fill a scene with conversation, head writer Bob Martin’s scripts boast precious seconds slowed down and set to a simple horn and strings as Davina quietly contemplates her next life move. She caresses a kitchen counter here, stares out a ceiling to floor window there; you can see the internal discussion going on in Davina’s head without her having to say the words aloud. It sets Sensitive Skin apart from other series, and I like that. A lot.
Sensitive Skin airs Sundays at 8:30 p.m. ET/MT on HBO Canada.
Jeff, the very best to you in the next transition in your life. I retired two years ago, but before that, I woke up to the AM gang. Loved it, the laughs, the classy ways of all of you. Bev and Marci must feel like their brother is leaving. I’m trusting you that you aren’t hiking off to live with Kelly Ripa to replace Michael! KIDDING. Enjoy. —Beverley
One of the reasons I watch Canada AM is because of Jeff’s genuine character, sense of humour and all around likability. He gets my day off to a happy start. I am happiest when he, Bev and Marci are all there together—you can tell they have a wonderful relationship. He will definitely be missed, but who could deny him a well-deserved retirement? I wish him all the best and hope he’ll drop by Canada AM on Skype or in person, now and again. Happy everything, Jeff! Enjoy every minute in good health. —Sharon
I think Kristian Bruun is spectacularly talented, just like Maslany, and is getting a chance to showcase it on this show. It’s so fun to watch more and more of this couple because they are such a spectacularly dysfunctional, want-to-look-perfect suburban couple. When I first saw the fertility clinic scene, I knew he was going to call her and they would do some role play over the phone. They are so into each other in these weird ways, she really gets off on his neediness … did you catch the admiring glance they threw each other when he said, “Clear, concise, and colour coded, well done.†I thought that was a kind of foreplay for them! Then when he said Air Italia, I thought, ‘Oh, they’re into accents?!!!!’ ROFLMAO. More serious aspects of show aside, this was just wonderful, as good or better than the money-in-the-bedroom scene. The two lead actors are probably letting improv dictate this chemistry, and the results are fantastic. You get plenty of literary references, both are college educated, they have adopted children of colour specifically. So now we can predict that with Donnie asking Helena to be understanding of his wife’s envy, that Helena will go out of her way to make Alison feel very included in her pregnancy. Hand on belly and everything. They better do this. It’s what you do for a sestra, innit?
I LOVE this show and the actors they’ve assembled are amazing (Jordan, too). I’m seriously thinking of writing my own weekly blog on this show and a few other semi-sci-fi (highly speculative fiction!) shows I love. I think we will get to see Donnie and Alison get to experience pregnancy through Helena—we saw an inkling of this when Donnie and Helena went to the ultrasound together—they both are giving each other something the other never had: families, and babies. How beautiful is this show on some cosmic level? Amidst all this ugly manipulation, for-profit-minded genetic tampering, and weird subcultures (bifurcated dicks and sister-kissing, no less), there is this amazing undercurrent of love, and of challenging of notions about what constitutes “kin.†This is what I believe this show is all about on an emotional level. And the biotech angle is just whipped cream on the cake … hey there is an idea for Donnie and Alison to explore! —Heather
I have no idea how some of you could talk about Jen’s Live Eye segments as if they were a waste of time. They made the show worth watching. She will be missed greatly by so many of us long time BT viewers for a reason: she was simply fantastic! Charming, funny, enthusiastic, full of energy, personable, beautiful and so on. Good luck Jennifer V. No, I will not be watching BT very much at all anymore. Idiotic decision by The Rogers Corp. to let her go. —Todd
I am so sad to hear that BT let Jen go. Well, no more BT and CityLine. Back to Canada AM. —Mary
Got a question or comment about Canadian TV? greg@tv-eh.com or via Twitter @tv_eh.
With Slasher‘s season finale airing next week, there are still a lot of unanswered questions lingering for the terrorized town of Waterbury.
We still don’t know who The Executioner is and why he’s killing everyone, except it has ties to Ariel’s disappearance. The latest victim, Chief Ian Vaughn, was revealed to have been keeping Ariel (and her son via Vaughn) captive in his basement and was burned alive in a coroner’s incinerator. (What a way to go.)
Super Channel teases Friday’s new episode, “In the Pride of His Face,†with the following logline: “Sarah learns that Dylan knew about her past before they met. Tom Winston escapes from prison, convinced that Sarah is going to be The Executioner’s final victim.”
We can do a little better than that, but we won’t spoil everything.
Officer Sharma is freaked out
Sharma, who was strangled by The Executioner while he stood vigil in front of Sarah’s house earlier this season, makes a major discovery in the case that ties the suffocation deaths of the Vicker family to the present-day occurrences. A creepy memorial to the Vicker clan—and sketches of the six sins—results in one character revealing themselves to be the killer.
Flash back to 1988
No surprise that what viewers saw happen on Halloween night in 1988 back in Episode 1 wasn’t the whole story. Now that Tom has confessed to being her father, Sarah confronts him and demands to know why he murdered Rachel and Bryan. We learn there was another side to the married pair, one that affected Tom so much he turned to extreme violence.
Dylan’s secret comes out
We’ve known about Dylan’s obsession with Tom, but someone else finds out too. The results are devastating.
Slasher airs Fridays at 9 p.m. ET on Super Channel.
Music is a huge part of a television show. Dramatic scenes have them, they’re a montage staple, and help launch an episode through the all-important opening theme. Andrea Higgins has been accenting Canadian TV moments in current shows like Wynonna Earp, Heartland, Killjoys, X Company and Murdoch Mysteries, and past programs in The Listener, Bomb Girls, Flashpoint and Durham County, finding the perfect tune to amp up the feels in your favourite programs.
We spoke to the head of music supervision at Arpix Media about her career working with on-staff composers who create original music and hunting down the perfect song for a scene.
How did you get into this gig?
Andrea Higgins: It’s been a journey. I’ve been at Arpix for almost 15 years, which is crazy. I listened to music growing up and I was in bands and I was obsessed with movies and TV and music. I was always kind of star-struck with the behind-the-scenes of the music industry and in high school thought, “I want to be an A&R person that scouts bands.” I’m from Hamilton, Ont., so I moved to Toronto and went to the Harris Institute, which is a recording arts school. There are two different sides to the school—the producing and engineering side and the music management side—and I took the management side and learned a lot about the industry, marketing and publishing.
Andrea Higgins. Image courtesy of Arpix Media.
I interned at some record companies and I hated it. It felt very corporate to me and I didn’t like the music they were pushing out into the world. I started hanging around film school kids, going to  movies and somehow discovered, “Oh, that’s a job!” The way I got into music growing up was via soundtracks and musicals and Tarantino soundtracks. I had an epiphany moment and decided to find the person that did that job and work for that guy. A week later, I was in this class called Music and Film, taught by this guy named Ron Proulx. We clicked instantly and I’ve been working with him for 15 years. I started out alphabetizing CDs and faxing things and making coffee. Then I started going to meetings and learning, through osmosis, how to negotiate deals with rights holders.
What I do now really all started with Heather Conkie. One of the first shows that I ever worked on was Dark Oracle. Heather and I hit it off instantly and were always in sync. I was very young, but she clearly saw something in me. So, when Heartland came along she said, ‘I want to do this with you.’
Walk me through the process you go through every week. With Heartland as an example, do you get all of the scripts? Typically, we have our one staple song in the show, the end montage to kind of wrap it all up and that helps me get what the tone and the emotion is. Is it a sad ending? Is it a happy ending? Is someone breaking up or making up with someone else? Then I kind of pull some ideas for the emotional theme, but I’m a visual person. I need to see the way the camera is moving, the pacing of the scene. There are songs that are scripted, like Georgie is at the father-daughter dance and they are dancing to a song on-camera so they can film it. Or more recently, there was a scene with Lou and Mitch dancing and it was really important to Heather to have a song for filming. I sent her a couple of options that fit lyrically and tonally and it worked out.
Do you have a bunch of bands and their songs lined up for possible use? Are you always on YouTube or the radio, listening to music for use in shows?
It’s a mixture of things. I have several labels, publishers and managers sending me music and singer-songwriters sending me music every day. I dig through blogs, I’m a word-of-mouth person. There is so much music out there, you can’t know about everything. I’m also lucky enough to be invited to music festivals. I am also lucky enough to be invited to music festivals all around the world. I’ll hear something and I’ll make a quick note: “Heartland.”
Can someone get into the music industry by having their song featured on a TV show?
Absolutely. A lot of the music you’re hearing on these shows are unsigned artists. Some are signed, some are signed to indie labels, some have a publisher and some don’t. I think it’s an amazing way to at least get heard and be able to say they’ve had their song featured on Heartland. It’s amazing to see all of the feedback we get regarding the music on these shows.
Let’s switch gears and talk about Wynonna Earp. Who wrote the theme, “Tell That Devil”? The song is by an artist named Jill Andrews. We had a conversation with Emily Andras and the producers. We wondered if we should get a big song, an indie artist cover a well-known song … we had all kinds of ideas. I’d been gathering a ton of music that felt right for the show early on and there was this one that I kept playing over and over and over. It was “Tell That Devil.” I had put together a playlist and I told my co-worker Kyle Merkley, “This is the one.” I sent them the playlist with an asterisk next to it. Emily loved it, the producers loved it and everyone on the crew responded to it. There was just something special about that one that grabbed all of us.
Who composes the instrumental music for Wynonna Earp?
It’s Robert Carli and Peter Chapman. We thought they’d be a really interesting pair because Rob has an orchestral, more traditional background, and Peter is kind of a young composer with a video game background. He worked on Durham County, which is dark and very sound design-y, with a lot of improvised sounds. We wondered what it would be like to pair them together. Emily wanted an orchestral score from the very beginning and wanted it to sound cool.
What are you working on now?
Right now it’s Wynonna Earp and Killjoys. Heartland is starting back up again, but I won’t dive back into that until summer when we start seeing some picture on that.
Wynonna Earp airs Mondays at 9 p.m. ET on CHCH. Killjoys returns for Season 2 on Friday, July 1, at 9 p.m. ET on Space. Heartland returns in the fall on CBC.
Being a home cook on MasterChef Canada is tough. Not only have they left the comfort of a regular life behind to enter the competition, but they’re prepared dishes for three bona fide chefs in Michael Bonacini, Alvin Leung and Claudio Aprile. As if that wasn’t difficult enough, the contestants experience victories and defeats via Mystery Box and Pressure Test challenges in the studio and complex, intricate tests in numerous on-location tests.
Those challenges, designed to apply pressure to the contestants on the road to crowning a winner, are the responsibility of MasterChef Canada executive producer Cathie James, who reveals the details behind the tests and the challenges they have to make them work.
Certain home cooks get more airtime on the show than others. Is that because they are quote-worthy? How do you decide who to focus on week-to-week?
Cathie James: In other shows that I’ve worked on, you make those decisions based on who is the most charismatic. With MasterChef, what’s happening on the show with regard to the food and the cooking really pushes your decision in the edit because, in some respects, we edit the show backwards. Whoever wins the Mystery Box, for example, you want to see how it came together … the person who is eliminated at the end, you want to make the audience care about them so they may get a little more attention in the lead-up to their elimination. And if there is a jeopardy moment with a contestant—something goes badly wrong—we often cliffhang the action and focus our energies on it.
The storytelling really comes together in the editing suite.
This year, there were 14 people who make it into the competition and there are 10 cameras, so the amount of tape for day of filming was absolutely overwhelming. The decisions that are made in the editing really do shape the episode. That’s the case for any non-scripted television. And just because you construct the situation—flying 40 people in for auditions and putting them through a series of challenges—doesn’t mean what happens to those people and their reactions to them, isn’t authentic.
For the show to resonate with you, me and the viewers, what you see has to be genuine.
A huge part of MasterChef Canada are the challenges you put the home cooks through. I’m fascinated by the work that goes into the on-location tests. Can you walk me through the process?
They’re really hard to come up with and have worked with some really strong brands in Kraft and Unilever, so often they want to be a part of things. Not only are you looking for a location that’s beautiful and exciting and plays to a particular type of food or a theme … you’re looking to give the audience something that is really different and captures a type of cooking. We usually come up with six off-site challenges every season, so we start the summer collecting ideas and will come up with 10-15 ideas.
I have a challenge team that are logistical wizards. Once an idea has been approved by the network, the team takes it and makes it happen. The big creative process is, how are we going to reveal the winner? So we have the model on the runway with ether the red or blue dress or the pyrotechnic thing. Some work better than others. The pyrotechnic reveal, where the judges lit a fuse and it was supposed to go around the MasterChef symbol … that fuse was supposed to go around the symbol 100 times faster than it did. [Laughs.] We cut it, so it didn’t look so bad. You’re always flying by the seat of your pants with this and you can’t go back and re-shoot. We get what we get.
With 10 cameras, it’s impossible to see what’s really going on until we go through the footage. And then you have the confessional interviews with the contestants, where you get their perspective on what was happening at the time.
You’re three seasons into MasterChef Canada. Are you still surprised by the skill level of the home cooks?
I’m absolutely amazed and they keep getting better. This season, the food is better than it ever has been.
MasterChef Canada airs Sundays at 7 p.m. ET on CTV.
