A quick program note: hat’s off to ET Canada for turning this week into Reunion Week.
It’s a simple idea and one perfectly suited to today’s desire for some TV comfort food: reunite the stars of old TV shows and bring viewers up to date on where are they now. While American television has never been shy about celebrating its past (such as that salute just last month to Happy Days co-creator Garry Marshall), the fresh twist here is that the spotlight is for once on vintage Canadian TV shows.
From Monday through Friday, a different Canadian series from the ’90s and early 2000’s will be showcased. Things kick off tonight with Ready or Not stars Lani Billard and Laura Bertram returning to talk about their years spent playing best friends Busy and Amanda. It’s their first get together since their teen drama ended in 1997.
The fun continues Tuesday as cast members of the shot-in-Toronto soap Train 48 talk about their series, which ran on Global from 2003 to 2008. Two of the most famous alumni, Paul Sun-Hyung Lee from Kim’s Convenience and Allana Harkin from Full Frontal with Samantha Bee, will engage in commuter chat.
The teen drama Falcom Beach (above) began as a TV-movie in 2006. Two shot-in-Manitoba seasons followed. Find out what happened to the cast on Wednesday’s ET Canada.
The Red Green Show, featured Thursday, had an amazing, 15-year run on various channels, including Hamilton’s CHCH and PBS. Here was a TV comedy truly held together by duct tape. Red himself, a.k.a. Steve Smith, used to tell PBS viewers during pledge week that, if they liked his show, send money. If they didn’t like it, send more money to PBS “so they can buy a better show.”
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Things wind up Friday with a salute to North of 60, which was shot in Alberta and ran from 1992 to 1997 on CBC. The story about an indigenous, sub-arctic community continued after that in several TV-movies. Tina Keeper and Tom Jackson (Corner Gas) will be among Friday’s returning stars.
The ET Canada Reunion Week airs Monday to Friday at 7:30 p.m. ET/7 p.m. PT on Global. Also look for full episodes of many of these shows — free and on-demand — on the all-Canadian YouTube Encore+ channel.
4 Comments
Falcon Beach…I really liked the original movie and as someone who lived for a couple years in the Interlake region of Manitoba, I was really excited to see a series shoot by Gimli. However, the series, while initially being quite good, soon began to annoy me by the obvious attempts the writers made to hide the show’s Canadian setting. I remember going online to complain and then someone informed me that the show was being sold as a series set in New England for American audiences. This was one thing that always pissed me off about Global TV’s dramas–their blatant emphasis on trying to have a generic (American-like) setting. Nowadays that just doesn’t matter as American audiences, being exposed to all corners of Netflix and Amazon, have become less repelled by non-American shows and an original setting can actually be attractive. Its funny that many of the comic-book series airing on CW are shot in Vancouver and basically every fan (who goes online) knows the show is shot there. The best Canadian shows are the ones which embrace their setting and run with it. Think Republic of Doyle, Heartland, KIm’s Convenience and Cardinal. One show which recently did not do well in this regard was Northern Rescue. The series almost seemed to blend the U.S, and Canada into one country and it was very obvious that they were trying to write for an American audience–I was extremely disappointed and surprised because CBC has usually been the one Canadian network a person could count on to be proud of its Canadian setting.
North of 60 is one of my favorite Canadian series of all time. I grew up with only two channels (CBC and CTV) and my family watched North of 60 faithfully for years. A few years ago, when I still had cable, I would often watch the reruns on APTN. I also watched a lot of Road to Avonlea.
Northern Rescue did have a perfect opportunity to take full advantage of it’s production setting — Parry Sound, Ont. Home of Bobby Orr!! You can’t get more Canadian than that. The lunch counter where Laura Robertson’s character worked was just a block or two away from the Bobby Orr museum. The series was made for both CBC Gem and Netflix but, as you point out, producers don’t have to cloak Canadian settings anymore — Canada sells internationally. Netflix is a big part of the embrace of international TV settings. The good news: I recently asked the head of CTV programming if Transplant will be altered during its NBC run to hide any Canadina setting clues. He assured me NBC audiences will see the very same episodes that were shown in Canada.
Well that’s a relief.
I am a huge dork for knowing this but Laura and Lani totally got together in 2018 and did an interview for the YouTube channel Encore+, they even reposted one of the clips after this week’s interview aired!