Twenty years ago, when I was still a fairly new recruit as The Toronto Sun’s TV columnist, I wrote about my childhood hero — Kiddo the Clown. The name will mean little to anyone reading this who is not in their sixties, but Kiddo, played by a man named Trevor Evans, was the biggest star
The best new show I have seen this season on broadcast network television is Pretty Hard Cases. Several other critics, including John Doyle at The Globe and Mail, have sung its praises. So why is it having a pretty hard time finding an audience? The CBC buddy cop show stars Meredith MacNeill from Baroness von
I was a little wary before screening the pilot episode of the new NBC sitcom Young Rock. I was expecting a chokehold, given that the title sounds too much like Young Sheldon; or an eye gouge, as I would want to gouge out my eyes after screening another unfunny network sitcom. Happy to report, however,
Christopher Plummer, the talented stage and screen star best known for playing opposite Julie Andrews in “The Sound of Music,” died Friday at his home in Connecticut. The cause of death was a blow to the head as the result of a fall. He was 91. He’s the only Canadian so far to have won
Pretty Hard Cases, which premieres Wednesday on CBC, starts with a bit of madness straight out of a Baroness von Sketch Show routine. We find Meredith MacNeill as guns and gangs detective Sam Wazowski, losing her mind in her unmarked car during a stake out. She’s obsessing about hair and won’t shut up about it.
You type a lot of obits these days when you work the TV beat. This one hits home harder than most — Jim Bawden. It was Bawden’s TV column I read in the Toronto Star back when I was in high school and college. He covered the medium in print for 40 years (including an
I am a little obsessed with a show called The Courtship of Eddie’s Father. That was the reason why, one year ago following a Television Critics Association press tour session, I followed Cicely Tyson out into the hall. Way back in the late ’60s, the distinguished actress was a guest star on an early episode
In 2015, PBS aired a Pioneers of Television special saluting Mary Tyler Moore. Much of the special, of course, centred on Moore’s seminal sitcom of the early- to mid-’70s. The series was designed around Moore but the early seasons featured a trio of top TV performers: Moore as “make it on her own” career girl