Tag Archives: Featured

Featured, Your Morning

Comments and queries for the week of August 26

4 Comments

Your Morning not a hit with fans

Watched the first show of CTV’s Your Morning for maybe 20 minutes and will not be back. Huge disappointment! I agree with previous comments re: The View and The Social ( two other very uninteresting shows). Also very disappointed that both CTV channels broadcasted the same content. I envision a large boardroom with some hired (big bucks) consultant presenting this wild idea to members who have no clue of their audience. You drank the Kool-Aid! Terrible show! Gather any remaining senses and bring back Bev, Marci, Anwar, Todd and Michael—at least they know how to connect with an audience and present information worth knowing. —CJ

This new show is such a letdown. Where is the actual news? Having to see and listen to Ben, and his harem of chatty ladies, is extremely annoying first thing in the morning. They seem to be speaking over one another in a quest to get the most attention. I have to admit that I was happy to say goodbye to Jeff and good riddance to his ridiculous videos, but this new team is too much! Surely, you can do much better CTV! —From Ottawa

Terrible! Used to watch every morning and loved it. I can’t stand the new version. Bring the old format back and the former hosts! Unless they change the format I will watch another channel/competitor! —Pat

Agree there no class on this show. Can’t stand The Social and this is what this is. If you only appeal to the young you will lose millions. The young watch the Internet for news, not TV. The Social is immature and yappy and so is this. Weather girl trying to compete with other noisy people. Not to criticize, but this generation has no intelligence emotionally, no sophistication and can’t pull off charm. And you can’t fake charm. —Sharon

Please cancel this new morning show! It is unbearable. I gave it a third chance! Couldn’t do it. Thirty minutes later and I switched channels again! It is terrible. Please bring back the Canada AM we all knew and loved in the mornings! Ben and the gals have to go! —F&B

I watched Canada AM every morning since the early 80’s. Sorry, not a fan of the new show. I also don’t like the change to the news channel. The whole point of a news channel is to watch the news, not some poor version of The Social. —April

I truly don’t understand the mindset of creating Your Morning! Our kids are thirtysomethings and watch Breakfast Television. One tuned in and found it “noisy” due to hyper-like chatter. We agree. If an updated format was needed, why not update Canada AM? It seemed a well-oiled machine, relaxed, great hosts! The Social is successful—why duplicate it? What is CTV trying to accomplish? It’s too early in the morning for this crew and the type of program this is! We’re now watching CBC. —Kathy

Very very sad when Canada AM was cancelled. I enjoyed starting my day with the the wonderful hosts and easygoing format. I was not able to enjoy a morning show when I was working, and once I retired Canada AM fit the bill perfectly! I think CTV made a mistake by trying to appeal to a younger age group. They are probably all at work and won’t be watching anyway. I decided to give Your Morning a chance and watched a few episodes—very disappointing :(. There is not much on TV  to appeal to 60-plus demographic anymore. I think I will probably turn off the TV and either read a good book or go for a walk instead! —Jane

Got a question or comment about Canadian TV? Email greg.david@tv-eh.com or via Twitter @tv_eh.

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Featured, Killjoys

Killjoys doles out heartbreak heading into season finale

This week’s new episode of Killjoys may be “Johnny Be Good,” but Johnny is anything but good heading into Friday night. Last week, Kendry instructed Jelco to activate the wall, dosing everyone with the feel-goods, poisoning the rations and framing Johnny and Pawter for murder. With Friday’s instalment standing between us and the season finale, a lot of stuff went down. And not everyone made it out unscathed.

Here’s what Space supplied as an episode synopsis:

Dutch and Johnny are at odds when Pawter’s plans to free Old Town from Jelco’s control results in Dutch being seized by an angry mob.

And here’s what we can tell you after watching the episode, written by Adam Barken, in advance:

Dutch and Pawter have a heart-to-heart
The two ladies discuss lying, men and people in power. It’s not a nice conversation, but it is necessary, what with Johnny keeping his secret plans from his Killjoys partner and all.

Killjoys4

D’Avin and Johnny vs. the computer
Every episode offers laughs from the Jaqobis brothers, and “Johnny Be Good,” is no different. Their back-and-forth with a company computer is snort-worthy.

Dutch is in deep
Cut off from Johnny and D’Avin, Dutch can still talk tough, but she’s in real danger. It’s a predicament we’re not used to seeing Dutch in, and it’s darned scary.

Dutch and Johnny have a heart to heart
We’re not giving it away, but their quiet scene is stunning in its emotion, with feelings laid bare.

Return of the plasma
Yup, the green goo is back, and turns up in a very unexpected place.

Killjoys‘ season finale airs Friday, Sept. 2, at 9 p.m. ET on Space.

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Featured, Four in the Morning

Ira Parker’s “magical realism” comes to CBC’s Four in the Morning

Ira Parker’s budding writing career couldn’t be more different. Last year saw him writing and co-producing the DirecTV drama Rogue. This year? He’s not only part of the writing and producing team of The Last Ship, Michael Bay’s explosive end-of-the-world adventure headed into a fourth season, but his own project, Four in the Morning.

But where the characters on The Last Ship are larger than life, those in Four in the Morning are totally relatable. Debuting Friday at 9 p.m. on CBC, the eight half-hour instalments catch up with a quartet of twentysomething friends who discuss life through the alcoholic haze of early-morning, where answers are simple, succinct and brilliant. Because alcohol. Starring Michelle Mylett as Jamie, Daniel Maslany as Bondurant, Lola Tash as Mitzi and Mazin Elsadig as William, Four in the Morning fits perfectly in CBC’s primetime lineup, an unconventional comedy with twists of the absurd, something Parker calls “magical realism.”

Four in the Morning couldn’t be any more different from The Last Ship.
Ira Parker: It’s true. I always thought that my first show coming out of grad school would be a comedy. And then I got on to Rogue, which is maybe the least comedic series in the history of the world. All of a sudden, this drama thing started taking off. Then I got a call from Serendipity Point Films, saying CBC loved the show and we were going to make a first season. I was like, ‘Cool, I guess we’re going back to this.’ I wrote the pilot script for Four in the Morning, like, four or five years ago. I wrote that in grad school and it was great to sit down and dig back into that world.

It must have been interesting to go back and revisit those days, days when your mindset was in a very different place.
It was different. I think, certainly, having some space away from it gave me some perspective and informed the writing going forward. But I had a season mapped out in my mind a long time ago. I knew I was in good hands with the producers, who were on board with this odd little feature. Writing on The Last Ship is very navy intensive and requires a lot of reading and research; with Four in the Morning I get to just sit down and write what naturally comes out of me.

I’ve watched the first two episodes of the series and I really liked it. A friend of mine described it as Woody Allen-esque whereas I thought it presented very much like a play. Was that what you were going for?
It’s funny that you say that the first episode was like a play, because that was the goal of the pilot episode, to make it feel like a play. We started with 15 pages in the diner, and then a long walk and talk. Episode 2, to me at least, feels almost like our most standard episode, but we do have a long intro that is heavy on dialogue in the diner.

(l-r) Michelle Mylett, Mazin Elsadig, Daniel Maslany, Lola Tash

Were you in your 20s when you wrote the initial pilot?
I wrote this when I was in my mid-20s. In Episode 2, we talk about life and death, the existential crises that we all get into arguments about at that time of the morning. In Episode 1, we talk about jealousy and letting that fester until it comes out later on. Each episode is really about that rather than specific moments and things that happened to me over many, many long nights at four o’clock in the morning.

Let’s talk about the writing process. Did you do it all on your own and what were the challenges of bringing to life four very different voices?
Yes, I penned all the episodes on my own, but I also had Daniel Goldfarb—who is a playwright in New York City, worked on Rogue and is a dear friend of mine—who came in and we spent a week together. Once we got picked up, we were on this incredible timeline, so we spent a week together breaking the stories for the whole season. That was very, very helpful to me.

Delving into the characters … each one of them is based a little bit on me or friends I have. Putting it all together came out of moments and situations that we put them in.

What do you want viewers to come away with when they tune in to Four in the Morning?
Twenty-two minutes of entertainment. There’s nothing else that I’m going for here. Everything that needs to be said about people in the 20s has been said very well by a lot of TV shows. Creating something that is entertaining to people is the ultimate goal of this.

Four in the Morning airs Fridays at 9 p.m. on CBC.

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Featured, Reality, Lifestyle & Documentary

Working It Out Together: Decolonization Dance

Season 3 ends on a high note featuring dance, and its ability to heal. Host Waneek Horn-Miller sums up the significance of dance: “Dance has always been an integral part of our ceremonies and traditions. It expresses our prayers, and our mythology, it celebrates our victories, and is a way to heal.”

However, colonization nearly destroyed dance. Policy forced dance underground, yet it survived and is seeing a resurgence across the land. Briana Olson, Manager, iHuman Youth Society, explains, “Our ceremonies were related, and central, and fully immersed in how we raised our children, how we engaged in trade, and through our language was how we were directly connected with how we viewed our land.” But to the colonizers, dance was viewed as a threat to the values they held. Thus the settlers created policy to ensure language, ceremonies and sacred dances were all banned. This form of colonization has facilitated  the culture of shame that, for many Indigenous people, has become a way of being.

Karen J. Pheasant, Cultural Knowledge Keeper, also speaks to the tradition and importance of dance in Indigenous culture: “We always gave first and foremost recognition to the powers that be, that brought these to us and we gave them with ceremony which was song, which was offerings, and celebrate the good life. What enabled us to do that was through our dance.”

James Jones, is a self described fusion dancer who, following a career altering knee injury, combined hip-hop with traditional dance styles. James, the official dancer with the popular band A Tribe Called Red, describes dancing as “food for the spirit.” When not touring, he has  been leading youth workshops, sharing his own experiences with multi-generational trauma and how that journey has affected his life. James was able to overcome personal tragedy and in so doing claims he was healed by the power of Hoop Dancing.

One interesting final note with respect to this episode: in the segment about James’ life in gangs on the streets of Edmonton,  there are a series of shots edited in, but never directly addressed. We see images from the Red Dress Campaign. This campaign was designed to draw attention to the plight of the Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls across Canada.

You can read more about James Jones here at WIOT Zine.

Overall, this season has  been incredibly instructive. Each episode, each facet explored, demonstrates how pervasive colonization has penetrated the lives of Indigenous people. If you are a student or a teacher wanting to understand colonization, particularly in light of the recent TRC Report and its Calls to Action, or if perhaps you are looking to add more content to your Social Studies units I HIGHLY recommend watching this season in its entirety. When viewed together, you get a real sense of the over arcing scope government and policy have played in the lives of Indigenous people in Canada. Additionally, there is a wealth of resources that could easily be adapted for classroom activities, located in the link listed above.

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Amazing Race Canada, Featured

The Amazing Race Canada blows a gasket in Havana

It took eight legs of The Amazing Race Canada for Jillian and Emmett to figure it out, but better is late than never. The former Big Brother Canada duo realized on Tuesday in Havana, Cuba, that encouraging their teammate is crucially important, and it netted the pair their third leg win of the season.

What’s become a common sight almost every week is a head-to-head battle between Steph and Kristen and Jillian and Emmett. The teams have gone back and forth, commanding all but two legs, and Tuesday’s new episode was no different. But frustration between Steph and Kristen during the Face-Off beach volleyball test led to Jill and Emmett winning—while cheering each other on—and steaming through the rest of the challenges with nary a waver. Steph, still hurting physically after cutting her finger with a machete while crushing sugar cane, lashed out at Kristen on the beach, revealing cracks in their game plan. They pulled it together during their second match between Rita and Yvette, and never really looked back.

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The trip to Cuba offered a nice mix of challenge, from the physicality of sugar cane crushing and salsa dancing to noting the location of Ernest Hemingway’s hotel room, from beach volleyball to making engine gaskets. The result was a truly entertaining episode showcasing the strength of individuals.

The Amazing Race Canada is a fickle beast, able to lift and crush spirits in a moment. Want proof? Look no further than Frankie and Amy, who were dispirited after the beach volleyball loss and downright frustrated making gaskets. Frankie seemed to be a second away from throwing down her tools and walking away. Then, suddenly, she realized what she’d done wrong and—according to the edit—completed all three gaskets in quick succession and they tore off to the Pit Stop.

Fortunately for Rita and Yvette, the leg was a non-elimination (something I should have realized since the season finale is still a few weeks away), and the sisters will encounter an extra challenge in Cape Breton next week.

Here’s how the teams finished this leg of the Race:

  1. Jillian and Emmett (win trip for two to Cancun)
  2. Joel and Ashley
  3. Steph and Kristen
  4. Frankie and Amy
  5. Rita and Yvette (non-elimination)

The Amazing Race Canada airs Tuesdays at 8 p.m. ET on CTV.

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