Last weekend Pan Am touched down in Ottawa and a couple of days before that Pan Am landed in Montreal after first taking off from Halifax a fortnight ago. This weekend Pan Am was in Rocky Mountain County, Alberta.

Pan Am is the new show from Sony Television which will be on Sundays starting later this month on both CTV and ABC. It is about the iconic air travel company from the 1960s and its pilots and most importantly it stewardesses. And their fashion. There is some personal drama, some romance, some international espionage by sweet-faced American women, and other things of the era. The series, which stars Christina Ricci, is what you might consider broadcast television’s answer to the latest trend of historical settings for shows, the most famous these days being Mad Men over on cable channel AMC.

Bell Media (aka CTV) has had a screening centre set up in various malls across the eastern portion of Canada the last couple of weeks. ABC has had a more fancy screening centre in various malls across the western and central USA in the last couple of weeks. In Canada you can see a collection of what would best be described as extended trailers for Once Upon A Time, The X Factor, Whitney, Pan Am, and Grimm. In the USA you apparently get to see a preview of Pan Am and nothing more.  This weekend the screening centres were near Calgary and Chicago. From there they go as follows:

Burlington MA, Burlington Mall
near Boston
9 September – 11:00 am – 8:00 pm
10 September – 11:00 am – 5:00 pm

Burnaby BC,  Metropolis at Metrotown
near Vancouver
9 September – 10.10am – 9pm
10 September – 10.10am – 9pm
11 September – 11 a.m. – 7 p.m.

Edmonton AB, Edmonton City Centre
15 September – 10 am – 8 pm
16 September – 10 am – 8 pm
17 September – 10 am – 6 pm

King Of Prussia PA, King of Prussia Mall
near Philadelphia
September 16 – 11:00 a.m. – 8:00 p.m.
September 17 – 11:00 a.m. – 5:00 p.m.
September 18 — 11:00 a.m. – 5:00 p.m.

Manhattan NY, Times Square
September 23 – 6:00 a.m. – 6:00 p.m.

Vaughan ON, Vaughan Mills Shopping Centre
near Toronto
23 September – 10 am – 9 pm
24 September – 10 am – 9 pm
25 September – 11 am – 7 pm

The first 10 people in queue each day in Canada get one of the Pan Am Explorer bags. There are draws hourly throughout the rest of the day for a bag. Sadly there are no goodies in the bag. The bag itself is the goodies. If they were not sold-out you could buy one for $90 from Pan Am Brands. In the US the Pan Am Explorer bags are given out a bit more randomly. If you want to try to buy one you can always check eBay or panambrands.com for a direct purchase.

The series premiere is Sunday 25 September at 10.01pm ET/PT on ABC and CTV.

Grimm looked interesting. Definitely going to be watched in my home since we grew up with The Brothers Grimm’s tales.  The other sci-fi show Once Upon A Time really reminded me of Haven. A lot. In some aspects. It also kind of reminded me of Merlin a little bit. But most of all it felt akin to Happy Town. Blending fairie tales into a modern sci-fi mystery show is nothing all to different. The execution of it can be a bit awkward to follow. Or hopefully that was just the way the preview was edited. Having seen the preview of Whitney from the NBC Fall Preview Show the other week it seemed like nothing special. The preview from CTV was a little more interesting though it appeared as though the segments comprising the preview might have been edited together a little out of order. Overall it is not a bad show but nothing spectacular.

CTV seems to be shying away from their other new acquisitions. Unforgettable starring Poppy Montgomery and The Protector starring Ally Walker were two new cop shows which received no mention beyond the opening sequence to the preview screening in which they name all of the shows and have a cast member or two in the silliness that has been tradition of CTV for nearly a decade now to promote their autumn programming. The Protector is already on tv in the USA where it is seen on the cable channel Lifetime. It is about a single mother with two young sons who is sharing a house with her brother. In its own way they make it work to help each other and raise the boys. Unforgettable is about a cop who has an eidetic memory. It will be on the channel home to most cop dramas, CBS, in the USA. There was no mention at all for any of the other comedy shows which CTV picked up.

If you live near where one of the screening centres will be and you want the must-have-bag-of-the-season then do go. You get a t-shirt and pretzels too.