At the start of this conversation recorded before Christmas at the CBC broadcast centre in Toronto, Allan Hawco reminded me that I’ve been tailing him for 20 years — back to the launch of Republic of Doyle in 2005. Hawco and French costar Josephine Jobert are back with 12 new episodes of Saint-Pierre, the highest-rated sophomore series
Allan Hawco, he of Republic of Doyle, has been visiting Saint-Pierre and Miquelon for decades. It is a little slice of France in the Atlantic not far from where he grew up, in Newfoundland. He was there not too long ago and thought, dammit, this would be a great place to set a police procedural
The new CBC series North of North has a lot going for it. The setting, a hamlet in the Arctic, is unlike anything we’ve seen on Canadian TV, and it is coldly beautiful. The cast is mostly Inuit, as are the creators and the writers, giving it a point of view unique from anything else
If only this was really the world. This was the view from our living room as the Games of the 2024 Olympics wrapped in Paris. The Olympic ideal seems so far removed from the fractured state of planet Earth, politically, environmentally and on so many other levels. Hats off to France and their Olympic organizers
Of the 137 podcast episodes I’ve done here over the past four-plus years, the most amazing conversation might be the second one we recorded. That was with one of my favourite actors, Enrico Colantoni. The man has done very well since he left Etobicoke for the Big Apple to study at the American Academy of
In this episode: two CBC Tuesday night comedies for the price of one. First up is Andrew Pfung and company from Run The Burbs. The sitcom returns for a third season with Rakhee Morzaria, who plays Camille, joining Phung on this round-table chat, along with showrunners Jennica Harper and Nelu Handa. We start off talking yard
Two actors known exclusively for their work in the horror genre step off script and into their own real-life thriller on their quest to decipher if Canada’s most ghostly places are truly haunted. Yes, Luke Hutchie and Matthew Finlan are the ghostbusters in this “factual” (CBC never uses the “R” for reality word) series. Both
Winter finally arrived in much of Canada Tuesday night. The good news is so has CBC’s trio of Tuesday night comedies. I interviewed the casts of all three shows last month at the Winter Media launch at CBC’s downtown Toronto broadcast centre. Later this month over at brioux.tv: the podcast, you can listen as the