Tag Archives: Letterkenny

Featured, Letterkenny

Letterkenny’s K. Trevor Wilson teases Season 2

It sounds like the type of thing that would happen in a Letterkenny storyline at Modean’s, but K. Trevor Wilson’s experience in a Montreal bathroom is fact. He scored a Jan. 4 booking on Jimmy Kimmel Live! moments after relieving himself.

“I was invited to be the Canadian participant in the Jeff Ross Presents Roast Battle tournaments at Just for Laughs and went up against Tony Hinchcliffe and the judges were Seth Rogen and Jimmy Kimmel,” Wilson recalls. “After, I had a very good chat with Jimmy in the men’s room. I was leaving and he was coming in. I found myself locked in a conversation with a man who was peeing. Great chat, but always awkward when one of you has their penis in their hand.” The next day, he was contacted by the show and the ball started rolling on his late-night TV gig.

And while we’ll be tuning in on Jan. 4, it’s what’s happening on Dec. 25 that has us really pumped. That’s when the six Season 2 episodes of Letterkenny drop on CraveTV, spotlighting the hicks, skids and hockey players living in a small town where drinks are consumed, smokes are tossed, fights are brewing and chirping is an art form. In fact, the first two minutes of Episode 1, “A Fuss at the AG Hall,” are spent following Wayne (Jared Keeso) as he spouts insults into the camera while Daryl (Nathan Dales) rates them. (Check out the footage below.) Wilson reprises his role as “Squirrelly” Dan, an overall-wearing hick who has an interesting way of speaking. Adding an “s” to most of Dan’s dialogue was something Wilson came up with on his own, and series creator and co-writer Keeso insisted he keep doing.

“It was in there, in the writing, that Dan was in there with the other hicks,” Wilson says. “I wanted to do something that Jared and Nate weren’t already doing with their characters and something I noticed while touring small towns doing standup was there was always a guy who turned things into a plural and doesn’t quite know all of the pronunciation. Jared came up to me afterwards and said, ‘That’s what I want you to do. Keep messing up the words.'”

Season 2 of Letterkenny witnesses several characters at a crossroads in their lives. Wayne is looking for romance, head skid Stewart (Tyler Johnson) is dating Wayne’s sister, Katy (Michelle Mylett), putting him at odds with fellow skids Devon (Alexander De Jordy) and Roald (Evan Stern). Wilson says Wayne’s journey means the Dan and Daryl dynamic is explored and the pair get into some ridiculous situations. Meanwhile, hockey players Jonesy (Dylan Playfair) and Reilly (Andrew Herr) joined the senior hockey team and find themselves targetted for the sort of abuse they’re used to doling out.

McMurray (Dan Petronijevic) returns in a more expanded role in Season 2, accompanied by his wife, Mrs. McMurray (Melanie Scrofano); the pair go head-to-head with Wayne in Episode 1 over who should be in charge of Letterkenny’s agricultural society.

With Season 3 set to begin production in February, Wilson’s standup career means he’s been on the front line and experienced immediate feedback when he’s been approached by Letterkenny fans after standup gigs.

“Now people are trekking long distances to see the show because they’ve discovered me from Letterkenny,” he says. “I did a show in Ottawa and a family drove in from New Brunswick. They were going to drive in to see the capital and the guy from Letterkenny do standup.”

Season 2 of Letterkenny debuts Sunday, Dec. 25, on CraveTV.

Images courtesy of Bell Media.

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Letterkenny

Link: Letterkenny is as Canadian as it gets

From Debra Yeo of the Toronto Star:

Link: Letterkenny is as Canadian as it gets
“I’m kind of living the dream there; I get to make a TV show and cast all my buddies.” Continue reading. 

From David Berry of the National Post:

How Letterkenny puts the mythos of the Canadian dirtbag to bed
Season two of Letterkenny opens with a bit of alphabetic acrobatics as our heroes Wayne (Jared Keeso) and Daryl (Nathan Dales) run down what transpired after the season-one-ending fight that left Wayne on the asphalt. The systematic descriptions of Wayne’s ensuing victory cycle through a thesaurical torrent of choice phrases— “Punched the prick out, played the peasant, pushed proper pugnacity on the pinhead, left him praying for peace while Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers” is one of the cleaner vignettes – and amount to a distilled dose of the incredible verbiage that is the absolute best thing about Letterkenny. Continue reading.

From John Doyle of The Globe and Mail:

The best gift this Christmas is the return of Letterkenny
The best gift of all is something good to watch. You’re darn tootin’ on that one. Letterkenny returns to Crave TV on Dec. 25. That’s a gift for Canada. A truly meaningful one. And I mean that sincerely. Continue reading.  

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Letterkenny

Season 2 of CraveTV original series Letterkenny to launch Christmas Day

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From a media release:

As revealed last night during TSN’s 104th GREY CUP broadcast, Season 2 of CraveTV’s smash-hit original comedy LETTERKENNY launches Christmas Day with a brand new six-pack ready to stream. That’s a great day for binging on appies and TV, bud. In keeping with tradition, CraveTV released this beauty of a Season 2 cold open today.

Created and co-written by Jared Keeso of Bravo’s hit Canadian Screen Award-winning original drama 19-2, Season 2 sees the return of hick-with-a-heart-of-gold Wayne (Keeso) and the rest of small-town foes The Hicks, The Skids, and The Hockey Players.

Season 2 of LETTERKENNY proves all is fair in love and politics with a power struggle in the Agricultural Hall, the Hockey Players getting knocked down a peg both on and off the ice, and some interesting inter-group romantic tanglings.

Already confirmed for a third season, LETTERKENNY is produced by New Metric Media in partnership with DHX Media. Season 3 is set to begin production on another six pack on location in Sudbury, ON in 2017. Season 1 is currently streaming on CraveTV.

LETTERKENNY revolves around the dustups Wayne and his buds get into with their small-town Ontario rivals. Back to cause a whole lot of ruckus out of a whole lot of nothing, The Hicks, The Skids, and The Hockey Players get at each other about the most mundane things, often ending with someone getting their ass kicked. Wayne, his best bud Daryl (Nathan Dales, Goon: Last of the Enforcers), Wayne’s free-spirited younger sister Katy (Michelle Mylett, FOUR IN THE MORNING), and Wayne’s buddy, Dan (K Trevor Wilson, JEFF ROSS PRESENTS: ROAST BATTLE) are all Hicks. McMurray (Daniel Petronijevic, 19-2) is a Hick but has been outcast due to his inability to relax. He also runs the Agricultural Hall with his loving wife Mrs. McMurray (Melanie Scrofano, WYNONNA EARP). Dylan Playfair (HATERS BACK OFF) and Andrew Herr (Mr Hockey: The Gordie Howe Story) reprise their roles as Hockey Players “Jonesy” and “Reilly”. Tyler Johnston (MOTIVE) stars as lead Skid, Stewart, and Stewart’s “Sideskid” Devon is played by Alexander De Jordy (19-2). Evan Stern(RoboCop) stars as Third-Skid-in-Command, Roald. Lisa Codrington (COPPER) returns as Modeans bartender, Gail, and Jacob Tierney (The Trotsky) as the Christian leader Glen.

Season 1 of LETTERKENNY continues to reign as the biggest debut of any series on CraveTV since the premium TV streaming service launched in 2014, with more CraveTV users watching LETTERKENNY than any other series or title on CraveTV. LETTERKENNY is based on the Internet sensation Letterkenny Problems, a series of shorts which have raked in more than 21 million views.

LETTERKENNY is produced by New Metric Media (What Would Sal Do?), in partnership with DHX Media in association with Bell Media, with the participation of Canadian Media Fund, OMDC Tax Credits and the Canadian Film or Video Production Tax Credit and the Northern Ontario Heritage Fund. Jacob Tierney is executive producer, director, and co-writer. Patrick O’Sullivan and Mark Montefiore are executive producers for New Metric Media.

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Featured, Four in the Morning

Ira Parker’s “magical realism” comes to CBC’s Four in the Morning

Ira Parker’s budding writing career couldn’t be more different. Last year saw him writing and co-producing the DirecTV drama Rogue. This year? He’s not only part of the writing and producing team of The Last Ship, Michael Bay’s explosive end-of-the-world adventure headed into a fourth season, but his own project, Four in the Morning.

But where the characters on The Last Ship are larger than life, those in Four in the Morning are totally relatable. Debuting Friday at 9 p.m. on CBC, the eight half-hour instalments catch up with a quartet of twentysomething friends who discuss life through the alcoholic haze of early-morning, where answers are simple, succinct and brilliant. Because alcohol. Starring Michelle Mylett as Jamie, Daniel Maslany as Bondurant, Lola Tash as Mitzi and Mazin Elsadig as William, Four in the Morning fits perfectly in CBC’s primetime lineup, an unconventional comedy with twists of the absurd, something Parker calls “magical realism.”

Four in the Morning couldn’t be any more different from The Last Ship.
Ira Parker: It’s true. I always thought that my first show coming out of grad school would be a comedy. And then I got on to Rogue, which is maybe the least comedic series in the history of the world. All of a sudden, this drama thing started taking off. Then I got a call from Serendipity Point Films, saying CBC loved the show and we were going to make a first season. I was like, ‘Cool, I guess we’re going back to this.’ I wrote the pilot script for Four in the Morning, like, four or five years ago. I wrote that in grad school and it was great to sit down and dig back into that world.

It must have been interesting to go back and revisit those days, days when your mindset was in a very different place.
It was different. I think, certainly, having some space away from it gave me some perspective and informed the writing going forward. But I had a season mapped out in my mind a long time ago. I knew I was in good hands with the producers, who were on board with this odd little feature. Writing on The Last Ship is very navy intensive and requires a lot of reading and research; with Four in the Morning I get to just sit down and write what naturally comes out of me.

I’ve watched the first two episodes of the series and I really liked it. A friend of mine described it as Woody Allen-esque whereas I thought it presented very much like a play. Was that what you were going for?
It’s funny that you say that the first episode was like a play, because that was the goal of the pilot episode, to make it feel like a play. We started with 15 pages in the diner, and then a long walk and talk. Episode 2, to me at least, feels almost like our most standard episode, but we do have a long intro that is heavy on dialogue in the diner.

(l-r) Michelle Mylett, Mazin Elsadig, Daniel Maslany, Lola Tash

Were you in your 20s when you wrote the initial pilot?
I wrote this when I was in my mid-20s. In Episode 2, we talk about life and death, the existential crises that we all get into arguments about at that time of the morning. In Episode 1, we talk about jealousy and letting that fester until it comes out later on. Each episode is really about that rather than specific moments and things that happened to me over many, many long nights at four o’clock in the morning.

Let’s talk about the writing process. Did you do it all on your own and what were the challenges of bringing to life four very different voices?
Yes, I penned all the episodes on my own, but I also had Daniel Goldfarb—who is a playwright in New York City, worked on Rogue and is a dear friend of mine—who came in and we spent a week together. Once we got picked up, we were on this incredible timeline, so we spent a week together breaking the stories for the whole season. That was very, very helpful to me.

Delving into the characters … each one of them is based a little bit on me or friends I have. Putting it all together came out of moments and situations that we put them in.

What do you want viewers to come away with when they tune in to Four in the Morning?
Twenty-two minutes of entertainment. There’s nothing else that I’m going for here. Everything that needs to be said about people in the 20s has been said very well by a lot of TV shows. Creating something that is entertaining to people is the ultimate goal of this.

Four in the Morning airs Fridays at 9 p.m. on CBC.

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