Shaftesbury shows
Saving Hope finale, Copper premiere, and more
Thursday, 13 September 2012 | Author Jessica
Yes, it really will be on CTV tonight. Most peoples’ guide should be showing Saving Hope episode 13 is on tonight and thus any series recordings that had been programmed months ago should mean you will have it to watch.
In the season finale of Saving Hope, ”Pink Clouds”, Alex confronts game-changing questions following a monumental turn of events. Meanwhile, Joel is in a race against time to save a young patient from rapidly advancing flesh-eating disease. If you miss it tonight it will repeat on Saturday night at 8pm ET (check for other time zones).
CTV two has an impressive schedule for Saturday. If you have missed The L.A. Complex in HD because MuchMusicHD isn’t available to you then Saturday will be your chance to catch up as the season 1 premiere, “Down In L.A.”, will have an encore showing on your local CTV two station. Also on CTV two this coming Saturday is an encore of the season 1 premiere of Saving Hope. It will be on at the same time as the repeat of episode 13 is being shown on CTV. And then comes the broadcast network premiere of season 2 of The Borgias.
And of course Citytv will have 2 repeats of Murdoch Mysteries. They are followed by the series premiere of the new football reality show Hail Mary. Citytv has abandoned original scripted series and all of their original series these days are reality crap.
Also on this coming Saturday is the Showcase/BBC America original series Copper in its broadcast network premiere on Global. The first two episodes, “Surviving Death” and “Husbands And Fathers”, will be on at 9 and 10 pm ET/PT. Global is scheduling them around a simulcast of a repeat of NCIS so check your local listings for when Copper will be on in your time zone.
Copper is the story of an Irish immigrant police detective in the Five Points area of New York in 1864. Tom Weston-Jones stars as Detective Kevin Corcoran, a man struggling to maintain his moral compass in a turbulent world, while on an emotional and relentless quest to learn the truth about the disappearance of his wife and the death of his daughter. The series was 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 is being made in Toronto by Montreal’s Cineflix Studios, Shaw Media, TVA, and The Levinson/Fontana Company.
Posted in E1 shows, Shaftesbury shows, Shaw Media shows, Take 5 shows | 
Tags: Citytv, Copper, CTV, CTV two, Global, Murdoch Mysteries, Saving Hope, Showcase, The Borgias, The L.A. Complex | No Comments »
Murdoch Mysteries evening in UK
Monday, 3 September 2012 | Author Jessica
With the success of Murdoch Mysteries in the UK and the recent convention in Toronto last month a British fan has organised a special night of their own. Detective Murdoch would be proud of the initiative shown by his fans.
The fan gathering will take place at The Old Joint Stock Pub & Theatre in Birmingham beginning at 18.30. The address is 4 Temple Row West, Birmingham, across the street from the Birmingham Cathedral. The cost is £20. The room at The Old Joint has a capacity of 50 so it promises to be an intimate event. There will be a trivia contest, a raffle, and other fun as well as a bar and buffet. The cast even recorded the answers to the trivia for this event.
Shaftesbury, the production company for Murdoch Mysteries, has even been so kind as to send bags of goodies for everyone, including some things that one can’t get otherwise. If you are a fan of Murdoch Mysteries and can get to Birmingham this Saturday evening you should be in for a great night. Victorian era dress is optional but encouraged.
If successful this could be made an annual event.
Contact info regarding purchasing a ticket or other questions: https://www.facebook.com/events/151951324929172/ or murdochmysteriesuk@gmail.com
Season 5 of Murdoch Mysteries repeats on its new home of CBC beginning on 17 September at 9pm.
Oooops, they did it again
Tuesday, 28 August 2012 | Author Jessica
Three cheers to 2HD for releasing The Booth At The End. However, much like with Murdoch Mysteries our friends at 2HD once again fucked up the episode numbering. 2HD’s caps are from FX Canada, a channel only a few service providers have access to and offer to their customers. FX Canada is currently showing season 1, which was originally shown on Citytv two years ago. Noone, and i mean noone, capped it then so there is no duplication of content with scene releases or otherwise. Citytv’s owners aren’t really known for promoting their original non-reality programming. What 2HD released today is actually 3/5 of season 1 not season 2.
Citytv had season 2 available online only and then last night somewhere about midnight showed the 5 episodes of season 2 edited together into a feature length movie. There wasn’t exactly any promotion for it and they broadcast it at midnight for fucks sakes. I had personally been looking now and then for a long time now. It went from ‘we don’t have a date yet for the premiere’ to ‘we showed the whole season last night’. Fuck!
Here’s hoping 2HD complete this season. Correcting the file names if they keep releasing it as season 2 isn’t hard but the owners of FX Canada are such asses about which service providers they will allow to carry the channel and where i live FX Canada simply isn’t available.
The.Booth.at.the.End.S02E01.HDTV.x264-2HD –> The.Booth.at.the.End.S01E01.HDTV.x264-2HD
The.Booth.at.the.End.S02E01.720p.HDTV.x264-2HD –> The.Booth.at.the.End.S01E01.720p.HDTV.x264-2HD
The.Booth.at.the.End.S02E02.HDTV.x264-2HD –> The.Booth.at.the.End.S01E02.HDTV.x264-2HD
The.Booth.at.the.End.S02E02.720p.HDTV.x264-2HD –> The.Booth.at.the.End.S01E02.720p.HDTV.x264-2HD
The.Booth.at.the.End.S02E03.HDTV.x264-2HD –> The.Booth.at.the.End.S01E03.HDTV.x264-2HD
And speaking of Murdoch Mysteries, the season 5 finale is on tonight on Citytv. Where i live it is a repeat at 8pm (Murdoch really is all over the Citytv schedule) followed by a 2-hour America’s Got Talent and then Murdoch Mysteries s05e13 “Twentieth Century Murdoch” at 11pm. The schedule may vary depending on whether 2HD’s Toronto or Vancouver capper does the episode. Or maybe they have someone in Winnipeg.
This is the final new episode of Murdoch Mysteries to be shown on Citytv. After tonight every episode one channel surfs into will be a repeat on Citytv. I would like to say the show had a nice five year run on the network but who the fuck would i be kidding? Citytv has treated Murdoch Mysteries like the Asian bastard step-child in a white supremacist family. They can’t just kill it but they can be certain to accord it every dis-favour they can conjure up. No promotion. Showing the seasons months after they were on in the UK. Cancelling the show at the peak of its performance ratings-wise. And all the while using it as the go-to show to satisfy schedule gaps and Canadian Content requirements. That meant putting on repeats in February whilst the new season was being shown in the UK. It meant the new episodes, when they did get broadcast on Citytv, were buried among up to a half-dozen repeats each week in the summer. And one year Murdoch Mysteries’ then-current season was available on DVD in the UK two weeks before any episode from that season was broadcast in Canada. Yes, Murdoch Mysteries did last five years on Citytv but it was hardly anything close to nice. The show itself is brilliantly nice. The treatment it received from its domestic broadcaster has been not so nice.
In a few weeks Murdoch Mysteries will be on its new home at CBC but they will be repeating season 5 this autumn with season 6 starting in January 2013. I would have loved for season 6 to be on next month and for a change have the UK broadcast be months later. At least we won’t have to wait until June or July.
Posted in Rogers Media shows, Shaftesbury shows | Tags: 2HD, CBC, Citytv, FX Canada, Murdoch Mysteries, The Booth At The End | No Comments »
2HD releases WRONG ep of Murdoch Mysteries
Wednesday, 22 August 2012 | Author Jessica
It is nice that the HD releases of Murdoch Mysteries from 2HD have resumed but Murdoch.Mysteries.S05E11.720p.HDTV.x264-2HD.mkv and Murdoch.Mysteries.S05E11.HDTV.x264-2HD.mp4 are not s5e11 “Murdoch In Toyland”. They are not even from season 5. 2HD likely picked the episode up from one of the half-dozen or so repeats each week on Citytv, where guide info is not always so accurate for what is actually broadcast.
I had skipped to the end because i like the theme music and i wanted to see if 2HD had retained the end credits. They had indeed retained the credits but what appeared at the end was the old ‘gold bell’ logo for Shaftesbury that hasn’t been used for a few years now. Then i went back a couple of seconds and looked at the copyright notice. It is 2008. I thought maybe it was some bad editing that cut the credits from an old episode onto the end of a new episode so i went back to the beginning and checked the writer and director credits. What 2HD did release the other day is not s5e11 but s1e09 “Belly Speaker”, original air date 16 March 2008 on CHMI and 20 March 2008 on the rest of the Citytv network.
And… what 2HD released as Murdoch.Mysteries.S05E08.720p.HDTV.x264-2HD.mkv is actually what should have been released as Murdoch.Mysteries.S05E11.720p.HDTV.x264-2HD.mkv unless of course 2HD is asserting they determine episode numbering and even the DVDs are wrong. The releases of s5e07 and s5e12 are fine.
On the up side the first 4 seasons of Murdoch Mysteries had not received any scene releases from TV, at least in English, and no groups have ripped the recently released Blu-ray discs. That means this mis-titled release doesn’t actually dupe anything but simply needs to be renamed to Murdoch.Mysteries.S01E09.720p.HDTV.x264-2HD.mkv and may i suggest that including the episode titles might not be such a bad idea.
2HD could release most of Murdoch Mysteries in 720p if they wanted to as there are usually 4 or 5 unique repeats each week on Citytv. A little cross-referencing with an episode guide such is here or on Wikipedia to help ascertain which episode they really do have and then release it. I would remind 2HD that if they ever do come across s4e07 “Confederate Treasure” that the version shown on Citytv is a different edit than that found on the DVD and BD. Citytv’s version has Stephen Harper guest starring whilst the retail discs have the international version in which Stephen Harper doesn’t appear.
I am seeing why Murdoch Mysteries was never released all of these years. Of all of the scene groups only 2HD has any interest in the show and even they don’t seem to really give a shit about not royally fucking up when it comes to Murdoch.
ZZGTV needs to follow English scene rules not German
Thursday, 16 August 2012 | Author Jessica
Dear German scene group ZZGTV,
While it is nice that Germany and Canada are currently aligned for broadcast of The Listener you appear to have grossly neglected some fundamentals.
German language releases are subject to German rules. English language releases are subject to English rules. They differ.
The Listener is shown with 5.1 audio in Canada and people expect it. Your release has the English 2.0 down-mix from a secondary stream. That does mean you can release an English version but it will piss off a lot of people when they discover no surround sound. Or you could release the English lowres x264 .mp4 format which requires 2.0 audio.
While German releases allow discretion for CRF 18-20 the English rules are much less flexible. Scripted programming is to be CRF 18 or 19 and never 20. You made The Listener with CRF 20 in English. That is nuke-able. And o god i soooooo do hope that happens soon. English looks for high quality not small file sizes, which seems to be the suggestion in the German rules. People mercilessly and endlessly mock and complain about much of the shit TLA releases with their stripped headers, unsynchronised audio, and inappropriate CRF. They are the worst example one could choose to emulate and yet you seem to have taken TLA as your role model. May i strongly suggest you look to the example of GeT as a European group that has some really nice releases of shows in English which for various reasons were not available in 720p with 5.1 audio in their native countries’ broadcasts.
It was however nice to see that FOX is indeed showing season 3 somewhere in the world.
For how picky 2HD had been about TWG i am surprised that 2HD has so far let a nuke-able CRF setting slide through unchallenged. Especially since 2HD did release the episode in the lowres x264 .mp4 format last night.
UPDATE: Poland actually had episode 10 on the same night Germany and Canada had episode 9. Perhaps the Polish broadcast doesn’t contain a secondary audio stream in English.
Posted in CTV shows, Shaftesbury shows | Tags: 2HD, Canadian, CTV, FOX, The Listener, ZZGTV | No Comments »
