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| Don Draper can see us. Can we see him? |
Don’t subscribe to AMC and vexed about missing Sunday’s Season Four premiere of Mad Men? Wondering why CTV didn’t pick it up again and give us our Don Draper fix? Looking everywhere for those new episodes of Futurama, even on the Internet, and getting nothing but dead ends?
Wrote a feature for The Canadian Press this week on American shows Canadians have read or heard about but have a hard time finding. Mad Men‘s not a great example–any basic plus cable package gets you AMC–but plenty of viewers who have read or heard about shows like Men of a Certain Age or Party Down may not realize they are available on way-up-in-the-300s Super Channel (channels 334-340 on Rogers in Brampton). Other shows just aren’t available here yet at all, like Burn Notice (coming to Showcase in September), Louie (comedian Louis C.K.’s edgy new FX comedy) or Covert Affairs, a spy drama shot right on the streets of Toronto. These shows are all on the radar screens of Canadian show buyers, but for whatever reason–price, timing, potential ratings–they either haven’t been picked up or simply haven’t been announced.
The upcoming Television Critics Association press tour, which begins Tuesday in Los Angeles (check this site daily for reports and updates), will present a whole new crop of American cable fare to reporters. Every year, there are always a handful that never make the Canadian cut. Some of that is a very good thing (not getting some E! programming now is undeniably one of the cultural advantages of living in Canada), and some of that is a shame.
Fans of Damages may have read that Emmy-winning series starring Glenn Close has jumped from FX to DirecTV in the States. The good news is that Showcase, which carries it in Canada and buys it directly from Sony TV International, will keep right on offering it.
Read more about these Yankee dawdlers here.
3 Comments
Regarding Mad Man and AMC: I’m with Rogers in Toronto and have their basic digital cable package and, for reasons that are beyond my understanding, they offered last season of Mad Man for free with their On Demand service even if you didn’t subscribe to a package with AMC. And I’m pretty sure it was a “get it a day late” thing and not “get it a year after airing”. Either way, if you do have Rogers On Demand, you can watch all of season 3 right now (as well as the intriguing first episode of AMC’s Rubicon).
“Psych” is my favourite TV show (it’s not necessarily the BEST, but it’s my favourite to sit down and watch) and yet it doesn’t air here. And thus, none of my friends even know about the show at all, which is frustrating when I want to talk about it with people.
It’s a strange phenomenon especially because, like “Covert Affairs”, it’s filmed in Canada (Vancouver), and yet the show doesn’t air here. When I interviewed Steve Franks (“Psych” creator) we actually spent a good chunk of time talking about how weird it is that the local crew can’t even see what they’ve worked on until the DVDs come out.
Our connection to the U.S. media world, yet distinct separation from it, is such a strange and unique cultural oddity.
I was pining over not being able to see Mad Men (until the torrent files started trickling in …) for a while, THEN a tweet from AMC the other day left a link to see the premiere online. BAM. I will assume AMC plans to tweet me every week, no?