Back in January I attended a TCA press tour dinner in Pasadena presented by the Hallmark Channel. The cable network likes to mix the press in with the stars from their upcoming family movie offerings. There at one table sat the great Ed Asner. I walked over and said hello to the TV legend. He’s
The folks behind Sensitive Skin are smart. Get too wordy in a review and you wind up sounding like Al, Skin‘s wannabe downtown Toronto hipster who clings to columnist status though he’s barely a blogger. Al is played by Don McKellar, also the director of this series which premiered July 20 on HBO Canada. I was
Steve Patterson, host of The Debaters: still on CBC Radio One Should The Debaters have been among the shows axed by CBC? At first glance, the public broadcaster’s decision to lose the comedic point-counter-point series, hosted by Steve Patterson, doesn’t seem debatable when you look at the numbers it was drawing—roughly 250,000 viewers per episode
Are some shows just too smart or challenging for the mass audiences that sustain broadcast TV? Take Michael: Tuesdays & Thursdays, as I do in a feature up on the wire for The Canadian Press this week. You can read the full story here.Michael: Tuesdays & Thursdays airs its final episode of the season Tuesday
CBC’s new shrink series continues to shrink in the ratings. Michael Tuesdays and Thursdays drew just 153,000 overnight, estimated Tuesday night viewers less than a week after being relocated from Wednesdays. That’s the worst performance yet for the series, heralded here as the best new comedy of the season. It’s a number that would not get it
Boy, CBC continues to schedule in a vacuum.The public network seems clueless when it comes to launching TV shows in the competitive buzz saw that is today’s broadcast environment. How else to explain the kamikaze scheduling of smart new comedy Michael Tuesdays & Thursdays last Wednesday opposite the season premiere of one of Global’s heavyweights,
Michael Tuesdays & Thursdays is insanely good. Smart, funny, touching at times, the CBC sitcom, which airs Wednesday nights at 9 p.m., is the best new comedy of the season.Let’s get the so-well-crafted part out of the way. Just hats off to Bob Martin for a sharp, witty pilot script (“…what the hell? I am