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Review: Open Heart goes for the heart

It’s been four weeks since the debut of Open Heart on YTV, and after being impressed with the first double-dose of episodes on Jan. 20, I decided to sit down and revisit the series. Not that I haven’t been watching—I have a day or two after the fact via PVR—but I wanted the series to simmer for a bit, for the characters and story to evolve before breaking it down and analyzing it. Are the characters still compelling? Is the mystery still interesting? Is anyone getting on my nerves? Has Open Heart kept up the drama it promised in Night 1?

Absolutely.

“In Plain Sight” picked up seconds after last week’s instalment, with Dylan making a quick list of the people who most likely knew about the drugs her father was taking. It was a short list: Nana, Papa, Mom and a big question mark after London. (Can I take a second to throw some kudos towards the on-screen messages that flash up every time Dylan is on a computer, tablet or cell phone? It’s an ingenious way of storytelling without wasting a camera shot over her shoulder all the time.)

What a doozy of an episode to pick to review. By the time the half-hour had closed out Dylan and London confirmed Richard was schizophrenic, taking meds and seeing a psychiatrist, they learned their mother was sleeping with Dr. K and Wes told Dylan he loved her.

It was a lot for Dylan to take in and I can’t help but worry for the girl’s health, both mental and physical. Discovering she could inherit her dad’s issues was bad enough, but uncovering his secret place—jammed with maps, sketches of a soldier, numbers, keys and the name Agent Sheppard scrawled over and over again—clearly rattled her. Luckily, London was there to support her both in the storage locker and when they confronted Jane about what she knew.

Speaking of London, I didn’t take any pleasure in her decking Dr. K. He had, after all, asked Jane to reveal their relationship to the girls. K just happened to be there at the wrong time and bore the brunt of London’s rage.

And while I’m happy Wes revealed his feelings to Dylan, I think Mikayla was too hasty when she told him to do it right away. With so much on her plate right now, Dylan could push Wes away until she can fully process her feelings toward him. Don’t get me wrong. I was thrilled that he built up the guts to do it—with some help from those cute seniors and Casablanca—but I worry she’ll spurn him and he’ll back off completely.

Notes and quotes

  • Despite initial reservations (I thought he was too geeky), London and Seth have turned into a fantastic couple.
  • I may be a little out of touch, but I’m pretty sure Mikayla was wearing Nikki Sixx’s pants from Mötley Crüe’s Theater of Pain tour.
  • I cried a little bit when Mikayla and Wes didn’t know what a VHS tape was.
  • “What happened to ‘Eat all the fries London?'”
  • “What in the hell?” I’d been waiting for that reaction from Dylan ever since Jane’s phone said she was at a hotel.

Open Heart airs Tuesdays at 9 p.m. ET on YTV.

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Featured, Open Heart

Buckle up for Open Heart’s wild ride

Creating a flawed television character isn’t easy. Make them too likeable and a drastic change can alienate viewers. Too much of a jerk and nobody cares what strife you put in their way. Playing that character is a whole other thing, especially for a relative newcomer to the business. And yet Karis Cameron does it as Dylan Blake in YTV’s newest scripted drama, Open Heart.

Debuting Tuesday night with two back-to-back episodes, Epitome Picture’s Open Heart doesn’t just spotlight Dylan, but puts her at the centre of a show that’s equal parts focused on medicine, the angst of teenage life and a family mystery.

“We really wanted a new approach to telling a teen story that wasn’t really focussing on high school or college elements,” says creator, executive producer and scribe Ramona Barckert, who has written for Epitome’s landmark Degrassi. “We thought, ‘What stories can we talk about in a different way?'” Different meaning, not just tales of fights with Mom and the tropes, twists and turns the viewership has already seen in countless projects.

The answer? Open Heart, which places Dylan Blake, a strong-willed 16-year-old who is arrested and placed in court-ordered community service at Open Heart Memorial, the very hospital where her mother Jane (Jenny Cooper, 24) and sister London (Tori Anderson, The L.A. Complex) are working. Dylan quickly bonds with fellow teens placed there, including Mikayla (Cristine Propseri, Degrassi) and Wes (Justin Kelly, Degrassi). Dylan is the black sheep of the family, the girl who only really related to her father, Richard (Jeff Douglas, Canada’s Smartest Person), but he’s recently gone missing, adding the mystery layer to Open Heart.

It takes some deft acting to pull off a rebellious teen that you want to cheer for, and Cameron really is a revelation. With just two professional acting gigs under her belt—Signed, Sealed, Delivered and R.L. Stine’s The Haunting Hour—the Vancouver Island native jetted to Toronto for weeks of prep work with, among others, Degrassi alum Stefan Brogren before cameras rolled on Season 1.

“We spent the first three of four weeks just breaking down Dylan,” Cameron says. “We had the first four scripts and just broke them down. Why is she doing what she’s doing? What are her motives? Why does this mean so much to her? Why is she saying this?” The result is a series that—despite being broadcast on YTV—can entertain any genre of viewer.

Tuesday’s debut of two 30-minute episodes—Open Heart shifts back to the one-instalment setup next week—introduces viewers to the main characters, including fellow hospital staffers in Dr. K (Demore Barnes, Hemlock Grove), Teddy Ralston (Dylan Everett, Degrassi), Dr. Scarlet McWhinnie (Elena Juatco, Canadian Idol), Seth Park (Patrick Kwok-Choon, The Best Laid Plans), Jared Malik (Mena Massoud, The 99) and Dr. Hud (Kevin McGarry, Being Erica). The briskly-paced stories jump from hospital to family mansion back to the hospital where Dylan uses her street skills to get some much-needed information into her dad’s disappearance. By the time the hour is up you’re left wanting more.

“My style of writing is very fast and I want people to buckle up at the beginning of the episode and know you are on a ride,” Barckert says with a laugh. “There isn’t a lot of filler. There are no musical montages about feelings and no longing looks. The characters make decisions quickly and move quickly. There is not a lot of pausing.”

Buckle up everyone, it’s going to be one hell of a ride.

Open Heart airs Tuesdays at 9 p.m. ET/PT on YTV.

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Preview: Undercover High returns to freak out more high schoolers

Normally, I don’t like watching television shows where people get pranked. I physically cringe when someone is put into an uncomfortable situation that lasts for what feels like forever, squirming, while a joke plays out. Turns out I have no problem with watching high schoolers be the targets in YTV’s Undercover High.

Perhaps it’s because host–and head prankster–Lisa Gilroy makes it a ton of fun. The petite blonde, who bears a more than passing resemblance to Kristen Bell, wins viewers over with her spunk, charm and unique ideas for pranking two groups of high school kids in each of the five new episodes. I’m pretty sure, despite what she claims on-air, she didn’t come up with the situations on her own, but that’s not important. What is important is pulling off the prank with style, and Undercover High does that.

It helps that Gilroy is aided by a handful of actors and actresses to fill a variety of fake roles and elicits the students’ actual teachers to aid in making it all seem real. Saturday’s first episode visits Cobourg District Collegiate Institute East and St. Thomas Aquinas Secondary School for the Arts, where mayhem ensues at both locations.

At CDCIE, teacher Miss Norohna suggests pranking her Grade 9 business class and the Undercover High folks come up with a doozy. After claiming her friend needs their help with a world record, the group enters the school gym to construct a tower of items created by a 3-D printer. Suffice it to say the printer isn’t real, the world record attempt is fake and the people organizing the whole thing are in on the joke. What isn’t fake are the reactions of the students when things begin to go south. I’m pretty sure I saw some actual tears and trembling chins as the minutes rolled by and the situation deteriorated.

Things don’t improve at St. Thomas Aquinas Secondary School for the Arts, where drama teacher Mr. Thomas pranks his kids by plunging them into a fake informercial where they find out–with seconds to go–that some will be reading Korean off cue cards while showing how an unknown kitchen item works. You can’t make up the red on the face of one lad who looks like he is going to pass out or throw up (or both) just before the cameras roll.

Kids are pretty savvy, and the secret to Undercover High‘s success is that the teachers–the people the students trust–are in on the joke. If they weren’t, the jig would be up within seconds. Luckily for us, they don’t catch on.

Undercover High airs Saturdays at 6:30 p.m. ET/PT on YTV.

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Preview: Max & Shred tear up YTV

A TV series about mismatched characters who end up getting along are a common trope in kids’ programming. Heck, almost entire networks are made up of the stuff. And yet when it’s done well, the result can be very entertaining.

Max & Shred is just such a series. The Breakthrough Entertainment project–debuting Tuesday at 7 p.m. ET/PT on YTV–focuses on two boys that couldn’t be more different. Max Asher (Jonny Gray) is a world-famous snowboarder, a cool dude with floppy hair, a crooked smile and undeniable charm. Adults and kids all love him. At odds is Alvin Ackerman (Jake Goodman)–a.k.a. Shred, a nickname he picks up in the first episode–a bookworm, genius inventor who is awkward around everyone and everything that doesn’t have to do with science. The two, of course, are thrown together and eventually become best buds.

What makes Max & Shred different from other stuff out there is the chemistry between the two lead characters. Rather than being over-the-top with their performances–something that plagues this genre–they play everything with enough subtlety that you’re captivated rather than annoyed.

Though it’s never explained in the pilot episode, Max explodes into  Alvin’s Shred’s life when he comes to live with the Ackerman family, a group that includes mom Diane (Siobhan Murphy), dad Lloyd (Jean-Michel Le Gal) and sister Abby (Emilia McCarthy). They’re all super-stoked Max is there, but the future Shred isn’t. He has a science fair to win with his new invention and doesn’t have time–or anything in common–with the high-flying snowboarding superstar. One case of mistaken identity later, and both boys find themselves having to walk in each other’s shoes (or in the case of Alvin, Max’s boots) and learn to respect each for the individuals they are.

Thanks to a smart pilot script by Josh Greenbaum and Ben McMillan (and a catchy as all heck theme song), Max & Shred is a gnarly addition to the genre, dude.

Max & Shred airs Tuesdays at 7 p.m. ET/PT on YTV.

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