NBC UPFRONT PART TWO: Still smarting from that whole Leno at 10 fiasco, NBC has plenty of problems with the back end of its schedule. New dramas Chase and The Event were rejected last season. Friday Night Lights is no more. The whole Law & Order franchise seems to be on its last legs.Among the new hopefuls
NBC prepares to host its upfront to advertisers in New York NBC got a jump start on upfront season by spilling their new 2011-12 schedule on Sunday. Gone are bubble shows Outsourced (a TVFMF favourite) and The Defenders. Back for a final 13-episode fall arc is a show you can’t kill with a stick, Chuck. NBC
The world was very black and white in 1961. Images of people on TV were still broadcast that way, with colour TV sets a decade away for most consumers. Society, too, was still very black and white to the point of de facto—if no longer legal–segregation in much of the Southern United States. Signs declaring
…from Thursday’s Late Night with Jimmy Fallon: A Dairy Queen in Canada broke a world record this week by creating a 10-ton ice cream dessert. Or as we call that in America, “a medium.”
HALIFAX, N.S.–Turn a remote local hockey arena into a TV soundstage? Only in Canada. You have to be resourceful to begin with when it comes to cranking out TV shows in the land of low licence fees and perennial under funding. Even in large urban centres like Toronto and Vancouver, cheap rent stealth studios can
HALIFAX, N.S.–You can count Jason Priestley out of the Two and a Half Men sweepstakes.“I’m booked,” says the busy actor/director. His TMN/Movie Central series Call Me Fitz has wrapped production on a second season and he’s busy shooting four episodes of Haven, which returns for a second season on Showcase July 18.Priestley says he knows Charlie Sheen
Canada is more into S#*!, or at least S#*! My Dad Says. The William Shatner comedy has struggled on CBS and is one of those “bubble shows” that may not be back next season. Yet in Canada on CTV, it soared prospering behind the No. 1 TV show in the nation, The Big Bang Theory.
Summertime and the living is…Canadian.Off to Halifax to visit the set of Haven, which returns in July for a second season. The Showcase series got a second window on Global Friday nights this spring. That second window just opened for The Borgias, a Showtime/Bravo! drama starring Jeremy Irons. The shot-in-Hungary historical drama will premiere Tues.