Looking for a summer listen?
Check out the latest from Brent Butt, my guest this week on brioux.tv: the podcast. The creator, writer, executive producer and star of Corner Gas Animated returns to brioux.tv:the podcast to set up the fourth and final season of his award-winning series. You can listen to the podcast now by clicking on the blue-and-white button, above.
The Saskatchewan native is the first return guest to the podcast. Had he known, he tells me, he would have worn a better T-shirt.
Several guest star voices are featured in Season Four, including Mark McKinney as an anxious pilot in the opener (“Parachute the Messenger”) as well as Kim Coates, Simu Liu, Rick Mercer, and former Barenaked Ladies frontman Steven Page. There’s even a surprise Hollywood superstar who recorded a voice for the final episode. Who? Butt isn’t saying, so let the guessing begin. Just pick the Gassiest celeb that comes to mind.
The spin-off from the live-action version of Corner Gas remains the No. 1 Canadian original on CTV Comedy. So why is this the fourth and final season? Butt, who has been making TV shows for CTV since 2004, had hoped to make more seasons but the network decided to end the series with these final 13 episodes.
As Butt suggests, the past year plus has been an especially tough time for broadcasters, and there has been a regime change at CTV in terms of programming executives. Still, as we also discuss, animated comedies, made in relative isolation with none of the safety measures imposed lately on live-action content, are almost pandemic proof. A fifth season order for a known Canadian brand and franchise would have seemed like a safe bet.
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Butt also talks about getting back on the road after his standup comedy act has been quarantined for a year-and-a-half due to the pandemic (a tour starts in Ontario this fall). What did he do with his time off the road? Write a book of course. Not the book you’d think he’d write, either, as he teases with a few tantalizing hints.
He also talks about ther benefits of stepping away, from time-to-time, from social media. Butt finds that days not starting each morning with a survey of his latest Facebook or Twitter feeds can lead to more care-free days. Or as he puts it, “Social media is an endless torrent of all that is wrong in the world right now… and I don’t know if humans were meant to deal with ceaseless torrents of horrors.”
The new season of Corner Gas Animated premieres Monday, July 5 on CTV Comedy.
