On Thursday, Netflix announced it would cut back on smoking scenes in its original series. This was in response to an anti-smoking organization, “Truth Initiative,” who called out the streaming service for all the tobacco use in a show most popular with younger auidences: Stranger Things (back this week with a third season). The series
It always seemed to me that Arte Johnson should have been a much bigger TV star. As The New York Times notes in their obituary of Johnson, who died Wednesday in Los Angeles at 90, the actor/comedian was “a one-man ensemble.” I first became aware of Johnson, as did many others, as one of the
Got 30 seconds? A friend posted this recently on Facebook so I thought I’d share. Many years ago, when I was a young lad working at TV Guide, I did a little work on the side making TV commercials with my buddy Andy Tough. Andy, who I met doing videos at Maclean-Hunter Cable TV, went
A few weeks ago I was invited back to Mike Boon’s Toronto Mike podcast, this time to kick out the TV theme song jams. I played it pretty close to my wheelhouse for all things ’60s and ’70s, so it had quite a retro vibe, for which I make no apologies. The brassy, audacious theme
Veteran character actor Sean McCann’s busy career spanned six decades in Canadian television. He passed away last week in Toronto at 83. The actor was starring with Jayne Eastwood in the children’s series Noddy when I interviewed him in 1998. The ambitious and entertaining TVOntario/BBC production boasted a toy-strewn set, with Katie Boland among the
Earlier this month at the Corus Upfront in Toronto, I had the good fortune to meet and interview two of the stars of The Young and the Restless: Amelia Heinle (Victoria Newman, left) and Melody Thomas Scott (Nikki Newman). Their long-running CBS daytime serial is still one of the most popular shows on Global, ranking
This month marks the 50th anniversary of John Lennon and Yoko Ono’s recording of the single “Give Peace a Chance” in a Montreal hotel room. The makeshift studio was Room 1742 of the Fairmont Queen Elizabeth Hotel in the heart of the city, where the Lennons drew press from all around the world with their
Podcaster Mike Boon, a.k.a. “Toronto Mike,” invited me back on his show Monday to “kick out the jams.” Mike, a fellow Michael Power grad, who, as he liked to point out, graduated from that high school many years after I did, invites all manner of media types over to his basement studio and quizzes us