Tonight’s fifth episode of Dan For Mayor has a little plot point that should shake up the rest of the season. Our hero Dan (Fred Ewanuick) and his campaign manager Jeff (Paul Bates) are trying to land an influential “subdivision guy” as a corporate backer. Meanwhile, Dan’s ex-girlfriend Clair (Mary Ashton) and her finance Mike (Benjamin Ayres) are hosting a bachelor party at the place where Dan works, Fern Bar and Grill. The characters and stories all clash in what turns out for Claire to be the engagement party from hell.
Executive producers Mark Farrell, Paul Mather and Kevin White, the Corner Gas alumni who also wrote this episode, do a nice job batting all the characters and ingredients around for 22 minutes of carefully choreographed mayhem. A slide show at the bachelor party mixing sweet couple shots with shots of dudes getting wasted proves to be a bad idea. There’s a whole subplot about the sexual orientation of the subdivision guy (“He says he likes Gordon Lightfoot and then he orders a drink with an umbrella,” states a confused Dan).
Dan For Mayor isn’t so much a laugh out loud show as a smile out loud show. A crack about Earth Day being a bad thing because it could lead to days “for all the other planets” is typical of the sharp writing. The long term success of the show, however, will rest with the characters and the relationships. Tonight, the relationship of two of those characters gets a little more complicated.
Dan For Mayor airs tonight at 8:30 p.m. on CTV.
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