Brandon Tartikoff — last century’s John Landgraf — once said that TV ratings had become the box score of the ’90s. I’ve made a career buying in to that. There was a time when I tweeted out overnight TV ratings estimates every single day. I also wrote weekly ratings columns for a couple of years
Sunday night’s Emmy Awards were the best Emmys Ever — especially for a Canadian. The so-called “PandEmmys” were over an hour old before anything other than Schitt’s Creek claimed an award. The shot-in-Toronto series swept all the major primetime comedy awards — the first time this has ever happened — on its way to becoming
Holy Schitt’s! Canada swept the comedy categories this year at the 36th annual Television Critics Association Awards. It was announced Monday that the CBC/Pop-TV sitcom Schitt’s Creek, for Outstanding Achievement in Comedy, and Catherine O’Hara, for Individual Achievement in Comedy (playing Creek’s richly eccentric Moira Rose), were the tops in their categories as deemed by
The latest Total Canada (English) Top 30 TV programs report from Numeris shows the return of NHL hockey has had an impact, albeit not an overwhelming one so far. The top five most-watched programs August 3 – 9, 2020, as measured in average minute audience (AMA) and among viewers 2+ are as follows: CTV Evening
Add August to the months during which The Toronto Maple Leafs can’t win a playoff series. After hitting the draft lottery motherload in 2015 and 2016 and signing free agent John Tavaris, the Leafs have not won a single NHL playoff round. All that promise four years ago — the right coach, the right GM,
How big a deal is the return of live hockey, basketball and baseball to Canadian sports network schedules? Looking at the first weekend ratings, it has seen Sportsnet go from worst to first. This is especially true at Sportsnet, the only home of NHL hockey through till the presentation of the Stanley Cup (or as
With American network schedules on life support this summer, time to bring in the Coroner. The COVID pandemic has shut down production on many shows, and forced networks to push other series returns back until the fall. Usually exclusively in the export business, American networks have had to up their imports, including a reach across
A director once told Roger Cross — who currently co-stars opposite Serinda Swan on the hit CBC drama Coroner — that the studio felt his character simply wasn’t “black enough.” Cross got the implied message — play it more “LA street.” The director quickly found out — as you’ll hear on Episode 9 of BriouxTV: The Podcast — that