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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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Letterkenny

Link: Letterkenny’s love affair with Sudbury

From Jim Moodie of The Sudbury Star:

Link: Letterkenny’s love affair with Sudbury
“Blocking, quiet please,” says Megan Banning, first AD.

She’s standing at the open door of a barn near Hanmer, where Letterkenny, a cheeky bumpkin comedy airing on CraveTV, is shooting a scene for its second season.

Actors Jared Keeso, Nate Dales and K. Trevor Wilson are seated inside the barn on lawn chairs, rehearsing lines, with bottles of Puppers Premium Lager (7.2% alcohol) close at hand. Continue reading. 

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Letterkenny

Letterkenny’s huge launch on CraveTV fuels second season order

From a media release:

As announced moments ago on Twitter, CraveTV together with The Comedy Network, has ordered a second season of LETTERKENNY, CraveTV’s first ever original series which debuted on February 7. Produced by New Metric Media in partnership with DHX Media in association with Bell Media, a second season of the smash hit comedy series is set to shoot this spring in Sudbury. The announcement was confirmed by Mike Cosentino, Senior Vice-President, Programming, CTV Networks and CraveTV, at today’s Banff World Media Festival’s Content Industry Connectduring Canadian Screen Week. Today’s announcement comes ahead of LETTERKENNY arriving on The Comedy Network schedule later this year.

As part of today’s announcement, CraveTV revealed that LETTERKENNY had the biggest debut of any series on CraveTV since the premium TV streaming service launched in 2014, with more CraveTV users watching LETTERKENNYthan 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 14 million views. Created by Jared Keeso of Bravo’s hit Canadian Screen Award-nominated original drama 19-2, LETTERKENNY is executive produced, directed, and co-written by Jacob Tierney (The Trotsky), who returns for Season 2.

Supported by a massive cross-platform promotional and publicity campaign, all six episodes of Season 1 of LETTERKENNY debuted on CraveTV Super Bowl Sunday (February 7) where the series became an instant hit. It finished the day #1 amongst all titles with more views per episode than any other series. The series has been #1 ever since, making LETTERKENNY the most successful title to ever launch on CraveTV. To date, already nearly one in three CraveTV users have watched LETTERKENNY.

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