Ladies and Gentlemen, i am pleased to inform any of you who haven’t yet heard the news from CBS’ twitter feed… Unforgettable is unforgotten.

CBS had a tough schedule to work with given what they thought of their pilots and how well their shows from 2011-12 did. CBS decided to forget about Unforgettable. Fans of the show did not forget. The number crunchers and commentors over at TVBTN pointed out it was the worst performing new show on CBS. Fans pointed out that even though it was the worst of the new  CBS it’s numbers were still far better than many a veteran show on any of the US broadcast networks. CBS relented and has unforgotten Unforgettable.

Season two of Unforgettable will be on in the summer of 2013 and have 13 episodes. Yes that means more than a year will have passed between the end of season 1 and the start of season two but if any show will be remembered it is Unforgettable.It is about time CBS had a summer scripted drama of its own. They used to put Flashpoint on in the summer but CBS bailed on that show and these days has repeats and Big Brother. Finally some diversity of programming. And maybe a little competition for rookie blue.

Someone over on TVBTN made a comment about Poppy Montgomery’s ass being the only good thing about the show. I composed this little homage to Poppy’s career in response and it seems fitting to include it here.

Without A Trace of Relativity Poppy’s ass is as Unforgettable as a Devil In A Blue Dress, with or without the Silk Stalkings. O how i think back to those Glory Days that were Magic Beyond Words when Poppy’s ass could be seen regularly on a Sunday afternoon committing Murder In The Hamptons, but you had to get CTV for that. So long as Poppy’s ass isn’t Going To California then The Beat of Life will carry on in her NYPD Blue jeans.

How did i miss this last Friday? Really, how?

Rogers’ move away from scripted CanCon to realitycrap CanCon went belly-up. Canada’s Got Talent no more. Rogers pulled the plug after one season. Was this a surprise to anyone? Canadians just don’t watch reality shows like Americans do. And those Canadians who do prefer to watch the American versions of the shows.  And some of those Canadian viewers are probably tuning in to laugh their asses off at the stupid things Americans will put on tv and the things people will do to get on tv.

Brian Cormier wrote a piece last year for the Huffington Post in which he boldly sung the praises of reality television and scolded Canadian broadcasters for not getting involved. Let’s look at that in light of the cancellation of a show which he a year ago was arguing was what Canada wanted, deserved, and needed.

There’s a reason there’s so much reality television these days. It’s cheap to produce, it’s popular and can make boatloads of money with the right format. Unfortunately, Canada’s three largest television networks seem to be missing the boat except for a few exceptions.

Methinks Canada’s Got Talent didn’t make as much money as the simulcasting of America’s Got Talent does. Which would mean it probably wasn’t that popular. And it isn’t the format that is a problem since clearly the American version does quite well both domestically and as an import in Canada. Read the rest of this entry »

Canada’s favourite summer drama rookie blue will be back with it’s fourth season next summer. Announcement of the renewal came earlier today from Shaw Media and it’s American broadcaster ABC.

Development on season 4 is underway and production is scheduled to begin on 20 August in Toronto.

The press releases call this an unprecedented territory for a Canadian show and if you think about it it really is. You will likely instantly think of Flashpoint and say it will have 5 seasons. True.  However CBS always treated Flashpoint as a second-rate show that would be moved around to fill gaps in the schedule and might be shown many months after the respective episodes were on tv in Canada. Of course CTV would show those episodes when CBS did but in Canada they were repeats at that time. CBS also bailed on Flashpoint effective 1/3 of the way through season 4 having sold their interest in the show to ION. While ION is a broadcast network it has nowhere near the availability or audience that CBS has. rookie blue will have 4 seasons on one of the major broadcast networks in the US and at this time shows no signs of there not being a similar announcement next year for a fifth season.

From its very first episode, we had no doubt that this show would resonate with viewers and today’s announcement proves it remains a dominant force in our program schedule. This is amazing news for Rookie Blue fans and the television industry.

Barbara Williams, Senior Vice President, Content,Shaw Media

rookie blue returns this week after a brief hiatus for the NBA Finals in the US with a thrilling episode about a woman who crashes her car after a bachelorette party. When Officer Nash discovers that the person in the parked car was already dead she realises she might not be cut out to be a detective after all, having possibly compromised a homicide investigation.

You can read the press releases about the renewal here: Shaw Media and ABC

The new historic police drama from Shaw and Cineflix has a premiere date in Canada – finally. Look for it on 26 August 2012 on Showcase, only a week after it is on BBC America.

The series is created by Emmy® winner Tom Fontana (Oz, Homicide: Life on the Streets, St. Elsewhere) and Academy Award® nominee Will Rokos (Monster’s Ball, Southland) and among the executive producers is Academy Award® winner Barry Levinson (Good Morning Vietnam, Rain Man, You Don’t Know Jack). And yet when it came to finding a home for the show it ended up being on BBC America, the home of almost all imported British programmes, which seemed a bit strange since the central character is an Irish immigrant police officer.  Even more strange is that when it came to actually making the show no American studio or indie production company got in on it. The show is being made about an Irish cop in Manhattan for BBC America by Canadian companies Shaw Media and Cineflix in Toronto. Given the great and varied successes of the creative team behind the show one would think they would have had domestic interest re production but apparently not.

Why such interest in the show? This writer, well she loves the story and ambiance of Gangs Of New York, and guess when and where this show is set. Manhattan’s The Five Points in the 1860s. Sadly Leonardo DiCaprio isn’t in this show.

If you are wondering what ever became of The Five Points in the 150 years since Gangs Of New York and Copper you are not alone. There is not much mention of it these days in main-stream media. Or so you might think. The courthouse on whose steps many a scene from the Law & Order collection of shows were and still are filmed is at the centre of what once was The Five Points neighbourhood. Foley Square sits on the site of Collect Pond, which was one of the original fresh water sources for the city, but in 1811 was drained and filled-in because it had become severely polluted and implicated in typhus and cholera outbreaks. The exact location of the former “five points” intersection itself is a little bit east of Foley Square, on the other side of the New York City Supreme Court building, and also on what was once part of Collect Pond, and is currently the intersection of Worth (Anthony) and Baxter (Orange) Streets. Mosco (Cross) no longer extends to that intersection, and the section of Baxter south of it no longer exists. Little Water Street no longer exists.

She’s back!!!!

Bristol Palin, whom most of us last saw in Dancing With The Stars And A Palin, returns to tv with a new show on Lifetime and it is all about her. Her and her fatherless son. Her and her sister. Her and her mother. Her and her friends. Her and the guys she has been dating. Her and the people who hate her mother. The first episode is currently free on iTunes in the US and so i thought ‘why not?’.  The better question would have been ‘why?’.

Why would anyone want to watch a show about a 20 year old single mother who is only famous because she was pregnant at 17 when her mother was the Republican candidate for US Vice President in 2008? Why did people watch her on Dancing With The Stars And A Palin? Why did she write a book about her life while still in her teens? Why did it end up being a best-seller?

Bristol Palin: Life’s A Tripp had this viewer wishing she was watching The Simple Life. At least Paris and Nicole made their show more of a campy improvised comedy. Bristol’s show feels like it belongs with 16 And Pregnant and Teen Mom with a touch of The Hills over on MTV. The premiere is a bit of an introduction to the family and Bristol deciding to move to California to work for some charity. And where does she move to you might ask. Well the house in the hills that belongs to friends of her mother’s. Even Bristol’s mother compares her daughter to The Beverly Hillbillies in the first episode. I had this strange feeling as i found myself actually in agreement with Sarah Palin for the first time in my life.

Read the rest of this entry »