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| Ken Finkleman is back as boorish producer George Findlay in Good God |
This will not come as a shock to most industry observers, but Ken Finkleman is no fan of the Sun News Network.
The producer of The Newsroom switched it on once out of curiosity and stumbled upon Sun News pundit Ezra Levant. “He was an embarrassment,” says Finkleman, creator, writer and star of Good God, a new series that looks an awful lot like a parody of Sun News. The half hour comedy premieres Monday night at 9:30 ET /8:30 PT on The Movie Network/Movie Central.
Finkleman’s only other exposure to the network dubbed “Fox News North” was seeing a YouTube clip of “a woman from Sun TV beating up on a modern dancer because of the grant she had gotten.”
His assessment: Sun News is “not very good at being stupid. I think Fox News is much better.” He believes that “if you’re going to do silly stuff at least be good at being silly—like the World Wrestling Federation.”
The Winnipeg native cites a poll suggesting Fox News viewers represented the most ill-informed demographic in the country. He wonders about viewers who take those newscasts seriously, unlike “viewers like myself who watch waiting for those classic moments of absolute, unbridled stupidity and racism and all that stuff—it’s kind of jaw-dropping.”
Finkleman wrote all ten scripts for Good God, although he says he has no memory of doing any of them. “I’m not trying to make myself sound mysterious and I’m not being cute or coy here. I do not remember doing it. I swear to God.”
He says he writes in front of a keyboard, at his computer on his desk. Some stuff he thinks up lying down before he goes to sleep and then forgets in the morning. “Maybe everything goes on to the page that’s in my mind at the time. Even the memory of it ends up being wiped out of my head. I wrote a novel two years ago and I don’t remember doing that, either.”
He says he writes in front of a keyboard, at his computer on his desk. Some stuff he thinks up lying down before he goes to sleep and then forgets in the morning. “Maybe everything goes on to the page that’s in my mind at the time. Even the memory of it ends up being wiped out of my head. I wrote a novel two years ago and I don’t remember doing that, either.”
What he does remember is that he had more fun shooting Good God than anything else he’s ever done for TV. The cast brought it all to life, he said. It helped being in the spanking new Corus Quay Building at the foot of downtown Toronto, he says. An empty floor served as the newsroom set for the series, which was produced with Shaftesbury Films and shot last summer. Outside were blue skies and sail boats on Lake Ontario.
For more on Finkleman and Good God, follow this link to the story I filed today for The Canadian Press.
