Perhaps nothing better exemplifies how out of touch Corporate America and network television executives can get than the selection of entertainment for next week’s Super Bowl XLIV in Miami. Of course, nobody could’ve predicted that a team vying for the NFL championship would hail from one of the USA’s music capitols, New Orleans. And, yeah, I know every city has its own musical style. There are the other real famous ones like...

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If anybody ever tries to tell you that Canadian TV isn’t all that special, ask if they’ve ever heard of Nick Slaughter. Nick was a fictional gumshoe from the classic Dashiell Hammett mould. Unshaven and hard-drinking, he was saddled with a “down these mean streets walks a man who is not himself mean” morality and a dark sense of humor. Nick was played by one of Canada’s finest actors, Rob Stewart, the lead character in a...

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“There’s three things that separates a man from all the other animals. One, he’s got thumbs. Two, he knows there’s a future. And three, he can lie like a sonovabitch!” That’s a line from a play called “Pumpkin” that Paul Quarrington wrote sometime in the late 1970’s. It was about a bunch of guys from Timmins or North Bay or Sudbury who had come to Toronto to see a Leafs game, a game in which the home team’s Ian Turnbull...

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The “Save Local TV” campaign took another hit on Tuesday as Rogers Communications, the cable giant that had assured the CRTC that there was no need to give any of their cable money to assist local programming, especially to the stations they themselves owned, gutted the local programming of their own stations due to “new economic realities”. Six percent of the people who had a job at a CITY-TV stations across the country,...

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Although I’m edging to the slide side of the demographic, I’m still a middle aged white guy. And when, as a producer, I put a project into development with a Canadian television network, especially a project that will require Public money to be realized, I have to sign an agreement which includes an acknowledgement that I will “reflect the diversity of contemporary Canadian society” and that I am also “aware of the need to increase...

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I’m not sure what keeps drawing me back to the Red Bull “No Limits” stunts held each New Year’s Eve. Perhaps it’s the sheer joy that bleeds (sometimes literally) through these events. Perhaps it’s the imagination and the theatricality. You know, all those things that you hope with be present in the January “Second Season” of Canadian television, but sadly, somehow never materialize. According...

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One of the primary benefits Canadian broadcasters have wrung from the CRTC is the right to simultaneous substitution. That’s the ability to simulcast their US purchased programming at the same time as the US network. In the process, their signal replaces the American channel, allowing their commercials to play on the foreign platforms visible here as well as counting the people who left their TV on Fox to watch “House” to...

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I’ve always been a big fan of magazines. When I was a kid, “Life” and “Popular Mechanics” came to the house, introducing me to people and things that never came anywhere near my small town. I learned about short stories and cartoons from the “Saturday Evening Post” that was always on my grandmother’s kitchen table. I cribbed jokes I could tell in polite company from the stacks of “Readers Digest” at the doctor’s office. ...

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Over Christmas, somebody told me Aesop’s fable about “The Dog in the Manger”. It seems that one day a dog went to sleep in a manger. Come suppertime, he was woken by the cattle, who were hungry. But the dog kept the cows from eating the hay he’d been sleeping on, leading one of the cows to moo the moral of the story: “Some begrudge others what they aren't using themselves”. The same sentiment is attributed to Jesus in...

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At least a half dozen of my Facebook friends got in touch last night with invitations to join one of the groups being formed to protest the recent prorogation of Parliament, “Get government back to work”, “save democracy” etc. Some appended little missives reminding me that Prime Minister Harper was a very dangerous man who frightened them deeply. A lot of my fellow artists often remind me of those stalkers who truly believe...

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We’re on the threshold of the official “Second Season” in television. The PR machine is already humming at full speed as it spews out the bios and backgrounders to let you know what’s worth seeing, what might be good for you and what may not be a total waste of your time. This stuff usually focuses on the stars, the genius auteurs, the track record of the producing company, or the novelists whose...

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