The auction has ended, items are being shipped out and the donation is being made. With the help of our prize donors, bidders and those who helped spread the word, we raised more than $8,000 for Kids Help Phone—a free, anonymous and confidential phone and on-line professional counselling service for youth.
If you’d like to contribute to Kids Help Phone, go directly to their website to make a donation.
Special thank yous to the following for the fantastic items and experiences:
The Toronto Blue Jays’ regular season thriller may have been a boon for fans, but it’s caused one major headache for the CBC. The Jays one-game wild card faceoff against the Baltimore Orioles goes Tuesday night … straight up against the highly-anticipated debut of Kim’s Convenience.
Knowing baseball will decimate everything else ratings-wise in primetime on Tuesday, the network decided to move Kim’s Convenience‘s debut to next Tuesday, Oct. 11, at 9 p.m. for two back-to-back episodes. The days of solely relying on overnight ratings is a thing of the past; live plus-7 is where it’s at in the numbers game, so I don’t totally understand the decision to do this, especially after all of the media coverage for Kim‘s touting this week’s bow.
The other show affected by this is Mr. D. Season 6 of Gerry Dee’s comedy was slated to return on Oct. 11 at 9:30 p.m. It will debut a week later on Tuesday, Oct. 18, at 9:30 p.m. on CBC.
Created by Ins Choi first as a play for Toronto’s Soulpepper Theatre, Kim’s Convenience tells the story of the Kims, a Korean-Canadian family who run a convenience store in downtown Toronto. Mr. and Mrs. Kim immigrated to Toronto in the 80’s to set up shop near Regent Park and had two kids, Jung and Janet who are now young adults. However, when Jung was 16, he and Appa had a major falling out involving a physical fight, stolen money and Jung leaving home. Father and son have been estranged since.
Kim’s Convenience stars Paul Sun-Hyung Lee as Appa, Jean Yoon as Umma, Simu Liu as Jung, Andrea Bang as Janet and Andrew Phung as Kimchee.
Kim’s Convenience debuts Tuesday, Oct. 11, at 9 and 9:30 p.m. on CBC.
Mr. D returns Tuesday, Oct. 18, at 9:30 p.m. on CBC.
Spoiler warning: Do not read this article until you have watched This Life’s Season 2 premiere, “Stay Positive.”
CBC drama This Life kicked off its second season Sunday night with “Stay Postive,” an episode that delivered equal parts hope and angst. While Natalie (Torri Higginson) was relieved to experience side effects that could indicate she’s receiving the real drug over a placebo in her drug trial, she was also blindsided by a contentious meeting with her ex-husband David (Louis Ferreira) over their children’s future. Meanwhile, Matthew (Rick Roberts) grew closer to his son but struggled with his separation from Nicole (Marianne Farley), and Maggie (Lauren Lee Smith) made living arrangements with her new friend Raza (Hamza Haq)—a move that may or may not bring more stability to her life.
Throughout Season 2, we’ll be chatting with This Life writers about the major themes and plot points of each episode. This week, series showrunner Joseph Kay joins us to break down the premiere—which he penned—and provide some behind-the-scenes insights.
Last season, you were a first-time showrunner. Was your approach any different the second time around?Â
Joseph Kay: We were able to play to our strengths more in the second season than we were in the first. I was happy with the first season, too, but you learn what you like and you learn where you think the show really lives, and I was able to focus on that.
And just getting to know the actors is a really big one. We’re on set all the time and we develop relationships with the actors and their characters and that informs the way we wrote the second season in a really big way.
As a showrunner, what kind of environment do you try to create in your writers’ room?Â
It’s just really important to me that it’s an unbelievably safe place, that it’s not competitive and that nobody is vying to win anything, that everybody feels totally safe to come up with whatever possibly lame idea—myself included—that they have. It’s a no assholes rule. It should just be a safe place, and I really think it is. It’s a very, very hard show to write because there is plot in the show, but the plot is primarily emotional. So our job is to get into the heads of these people and to know what they’re feeling and to navigate sometimes very slight movements of emotion and make that dramatic, and it’s really hard. So it only works if everybody is having a good time and everybody feels safe to draw from their own lives and experiences. And I have a really great group of writers. I’m really, really lucky.
This Life is filmed in Montreal. What’s it like shooting there as opposed to someplace like Toronto?
Shooting in Montreal is fantastic, it’s a very film-friendly city. Our local crews are incredible. We have a much smaller crew than I’m accustomed to in television compared to shooting in Toronto, but then we get a lot of value. I’m really proud of the look of the show, and I’m really proud of the subtle ways I feel the city works itself into the show.
The show is shot entirely on location, no studios, no sets, and that is a real production challenge. Again, it’s a show about how people feel and we can’t tell it all in Natalie’s house. We have to move around. It just needs that dimension of different parts of the city. We sometimes make four location moves in one day, so we can shoot one scene in a restaurant or one scene in a cafe or wherever, and the crew is amazing and the city is very accommodating to that sort of thing. Although, one thing is that it is a very noisy city!
The Season 1 premiere began with Natalie learning she was dying of cancer, but the Season 2 premiere starts with Natalie ziplining, taking a literal and figurative leap into hopefulness. Was that a purposeful contrast?
Yes. The pilot begins in such a way that it tells you all hope is lost, essentially. I think that’s amazing and so brave and that was really exciting. But it was really important for us to find a way to pivot into hope, and as we were writing the back part of the first season we decided we were going to introduce this idea of a drug trial, and we wanted there to be hope. We never want to, and we never will betray the central conceit of the show. The information that’s introduced to her in that first scene, we’re not backing away from that. But we just loved the idea of framing the season with hope and how you might sometimes talk yourself into having hope, whether it’s realistic or unrealistic.
Natalie’s ex-husband, David, is challenging her custody plans for the kids. How is that going to play out?
Her fight with her husband is real and very important for her. If you look at the first episode of the show, other than the information her doctor gives her, the first thing that we dramatize with Natalie is her sister telling her she hasn’t lived her life well. We bring back the husband to let her examine her own choices in her life, to let her examine that question and make sense of it. We want her to dig deep into who she is and the choices that she’s made and to go on the journey with her. We’re really going on two journeys. We’re going on the health journey and all the inherent stakes that come with that, and we’re also going on this very involved personal journey with Natalie in her life and the choices that she’s made and the person she is and what she wants to change before it’s too late.
So many characters are in flux in this episode. Matthew’s marriage to Nicole is crumbling, Maggie is trying to figure out where to live and Oliver is trying to rebuild. Everyone is looking for a place to land.
I think we always sort of looked at it as, ‘How can we tell the story of an extended family that reflects the reality of the way that our lives are always changing and realigning?’ As soon as we knew what we were doing with Matthew and Nicole, for example, we really loved the notion of taking this marriage and ripping it apart and watching it come back together or continue to fall apart on a really micro level. We don’t race through any of the steps, not with Natalie’s cancer, and we don’t race through the steps with them. It doesn’t go from rage to forgiveness or rage to it’s over and get a new partner for him or for her. I think that’s the way the world works. The thing that you think gives your life permanency isn’t that in five years, and you look back and think ‘How did everything change so much?’
In terms of everybody being in flux, I think this idea of hope hopefully trickles down to all the characters, maybe not literally in every sense but thematically.
Can David (Louis Ferreira) be trusted?Â
Teens can be tricky to write well, but This Life does a great job placing Natalie’s kids in real and relatable situations. In this episode, I loved that Romy stole one of her mom’s cancer pills for the most Romy of reasons: to examine it in the science lab. What’s the key to writing believable teen characters?
The writers have their own approach to all of those characters and we have our ways to make it feel like it’s really believable. I mean, I think everyone has a special dial-in with Romy for some reason. She’s a really unique girl and we have lots of ideas for her that we don’t do but that we get really excited about and try to really gently land in the places she’d be. We just work really hard to keep her scenarios believable. I think one thing is that we don’t think, ‘What do we want to do with Romy?’ We don’t do that with any of the characters, particularly the kids. We look at it more as ‘What would Romy do in this situation?’ We just really try to follow her, and that’s an easy thing to say, but it’s a hard thing to execute.
What can you tease about upcoming episodes?
Natalie continues to go through the trial, and we try to unpack the relationship she’s had with her husband. Matthew tries to put his marriage back together the best he can, and there’s lots of complications for those two. Oliver plays a much bigger role in the second season than he did in the first. He tries to start his life over again. He came to Montreal to see his sister, but he stays to start his life over. We pay a lot of attention to him and the choices he’s making. And Maggie has an interesting journey.
Yes, she’s got a big episode next week.
Yeah. Without spoiling that, Maggie is introduced as a character with her own very specific set of values, which we think are entirely valid. We never wanted to say that Maggie’s singular values aren’t valid, we think that they are. But we wanted to find ways to mess with her. I’m really excited about her story. She’s managed to get to this point in her life by taking everything lightly, and we wanted to put her in a situation that she ultimately couldn’t take lightly, and I think that works in interesting ways for her.
And Natalie’s kids go on very specific journeys into the world. One of the benefits of framing the season with hope is that we’re allowing them a sort of breath. They’re not walking around all the time thinking that their mother is dying. By opening up hope a little bit we’ve allowed the kids to not have to spend all their time focusing on that and instead react to where their lives are right now and see where that takes them in the world.
I have one last character to ask about. Please tell me the cat Natalie found will be a series regular. He’s cute.
The cat is going to stick around.
I was afraid he may have made outrageous contract demands and we wouldn’t see more of him.
He’s not expensive, but he is time-consuming. When I wrote it I didn’t even think about that. You see dogs a lot on TV, and I know dogs can sit on demand, but I didn’t even think cats could do that, but they can. This one was really good. He jumped into Torri’s arms at the end of the episode totally spontaneously.
I can’t believe it’s been seven months since Heartland signed off. And yet here we are, discussing the Season 10 return episode, “There Will be Changes.”
When we last left the folks at Heartland ranch, Lou had rebuffed Peter’s desire to get back together, Adam and Georgie were officially a couple, and Casey and Tim were on a break.
Sunday’s episode began with Amy having a bad dream and Ty waking her up. Amy turned away from the camera as she sat up, effectively hiding her belly and holding off on how much time has passed since the Season 9 finale. We also discovered Georgie had bought a horse, Tim was in a mood (and has been for some time) and Lou refused to wave to Jack and Mitch as she drove by the paddock.
What the heck has been going on at Heartland? It wasn’t until Adam announced it was he and Georgie’s anniversary—over five minutes in—that it was revealed three months had gone by between the Season 9 finale and Sunday night. The episode title didn’t lie: there have been a lot of changes since then. The biggest? Minnie the horse was having twins. In a brilliant bit of a head fake by showrunner Heather Conkie, it was the newest addition to the dude ranch that’s having two babies and not Amy. I admit, I totally fell for it, though I did wonder why Ty and Amy would rely on a DVD to find out what was going on with their baby.
To Tim that meant a worst-case scenario—the loss of one or both foals—but Ty had a more confident outlook. Amy, meanwhile, took the news hard and ran off to the barn. Clearly, it’s finally dawning on her how the coming human addition is going to affect everyone’s lives forever. That revelation went a long way to explaining why Amy was having those dreams about Spartan. Being pregnant means she can’t ride client horses or her favourite equine buddy; she worries she’ll “lose” the connection she has with Spartan. By episode end, the birth of Minnie’s foals had brightened Amy’s outlook and that only improved when Jack and Tim presented she and Ty with the cradle that’s been in the Bartlett family since … well, forever.
Meanwhile, Lou got some pretty amazing news; some New York City investors want to open a Maggie’s in Brooklyn. However, the one-off restaurant could very well cause her to choose between life on the ranch or in The Big Apple.
How many parents would love to be a fly on the wall of their child’s high school? CBC’s This is High School, premiering tonight, puts 48 flies on that wall. Cameras, that is, on the walls of British Columbia’s South Kamloops Secondary School, and they offer a compelling and compassionate peek at the lives of the students.
The six-part documentary series intersperses footage from these cameras with interviews with the subjects, including students, teachers, guidance councillors, the vice-principal  and principal.
“We scoured the country for the right high school that would not just let us in—after a long conversation with administration, teachers, students, parents, and the government—but the school had to have inspiring teachers and an open administration,” said David Paperny.
Luckily, Paperny has an Academy Award nomination for the documentary The Broadcast Tapes of Dr. Peter and success with series such as Yukon Gold and Chopped Canada as his calling card.
“We had to prove to them that we had no hidden agenda, that we really did want to present life as it was, and to use our tradition as reputable producers of factual programming for the last 20 years.”
They selected certain children to follow who were on an interesting journey. About a dozen are highlighted, two per episode, and they offer some naked vulnerability on screen. Sometimes the students are obviously mugging for the cameras, sometimes they have obviously forgotten the cameras are there, and sometimes they are speaking directly to the interviewer about their experiences and feelings.
For someone whose high school days are a far-off but not unpleasant memory, I was reminded of three things: children can be casually cruel to each other, I’m incredibly thankful I didn’t grow up in the social media age, and the adults who tried to tell us back then that those were the best years of our lives were out of their minds.
In the first episode we follow Maddie, who is adjusting to changing friendships and cyberbullying, and Dusan, a good-hearted boy who’s causing chaos with his antics. The children and their parents put an enormous amount of trust in Paperny and CBC’s hands, and it’s not misplaced. Their stories are told with respect and compassion.
“They’re volatile, they’re poignant, they’re at a stage where their lives are being shaped and they’re making big decisions. For us to be there was such an honour and a privilege.”
Producer David Paperny
“Once we started following kids they knew we were following them, and we’d be pulling them aside for short interviews at the end of a school day,” said Paperny. “Yes, they left themselves vulnerable, but I think they were proud that their lives were important enough to be followed for a few weeks by a television production company,  and that their seemingly small struggles are actually—for all of us, but especially for high school students—big challenges, big issues.”
The tone of the show is more poignant and inspirational than expose. “It’s not an inside report on bullying or drug abuse or teen sex,” said Paperny. “Some of that comes up, but the point is kids have goals, they have challenges. And teachers, even more than when I was a high school student, are taking on a bigger role to help individual students overcome those challenges. That’s what our show’s about.”
Paperny cites the Oscar nomination 22 years ago as the touchstone for the rest of his career when he realized “great television, entertaining television, newsy television could have a positive and inspirational impact on the world.” He sees that same force at work in his current CBC series.
“In England where they’ve had this format for a few years, it’s run for four seasons already. It’s reopened a dialogue across Britain about the role of teachers—a national conversation about education because of its insights. This is High School is exactly the kind of program we love doing.”
This is High School airs Sundays at 8 p.m. on CBC.
