That McDonalds ad where the little girl approaches Canadian Olympic figure skater Patrick Chan for an autograph? Really?You’ve seen the spot. This little curly-topped cutie asks Chan to make the beyond ironic McDonalds Olympic sport water bottle (“do you want fries with that?”) out to “Mommy.” Bad enough that the spot is so forced and
Woodstock, man. 40 years ago this weekend. Three days of peace, love and inadequate toilet facilities. I’ll never forget hitching a ride down to Max Yasgur’s farm in Bethel, N.Y. way back in ’69… wait a minute, I wasn’t there. I was a kid.Any way, Joan Baez was there, as she reminded critics at PBS’s
Despite the fact that it is the middle of summer, there was plenty of hockey talk on the TCA press tour. A lot of it came out of the session for ABC’s The Forgotten. Executive producer and hockey nut Jerry Bruckheimer let slip that he cast Christian Slatter in the drama after a post game
Rob Salem calls them “frostbacks.” They’re all the Canadians who land on U.S. network TV shows every year. There’s quite a bunch of them this fall, and I’ve rounded them up for a feature in today’s Toronto Star. You can find it here.Nina Dobrev is a good ambassador. The well-spoken Torontonian has the lead female
Scott Thompson called today to catch up on all the good stuff that went down on the recent TCA press tour. I spilled the beans on CHML, You can listen in here. The main stuff was all about Jay Leno, how he took the NBC portion of the tour by storm, looking trim and fit
Sad to report the passing of former Canwest publicity manager Dan Kenning. Kenning, who had moved on to an editing position at MediaEdge publishing, was a real spark plug over at TVTropolis, a perfect fit at the classic TV net. He was friendly and efficient, knew his stuff and had great enthusiasm for vintage shows
As Jimmy Kimmel pointed out at the ABC upfront, it’s never a good sign when a network puts on a show with the word “tank” in the title.ABC’s new reality show Shark Tank, a makeover of the CBC venture capital hit Dragon’s Den featuring two of the Canadian series’ judges (including Kevin O’Leary, right), tanked
Bill Lawrence is one of the true good guys at press tour. The still-boyish-at-40 Scrubs executive producer is always friendly and accessible after each session, as he was again on Saturday when he was promoting his new series, Cougar Town.A number of publicists spent press tour yanking talent away after 60-second scrums. Lawrence resisted three