Among the renewals this week are Defiance (Syfy/Showcase), Criminal Minds (CBS/CTV), Nikita (The CW/CTV two), and yes even The Carrie Diaries (The CW/City).

So far still stuck on the proverbial fence is are most of the ABC schedule, Hannibal (AXN/City), The New Normal (NBC/CTV), and The Cleveland Show (FOX/Global) . When word on the fate of Hannibal will be known is uncertain since it isn’t exactly an NBC series though NBC is the American broadcaster of the show which is set in America.  In recent years Sony has started to commission original programming for their AXN network of channels that cover much of the planet excluding Canada and USA. This year their show is Hannibal; last year it was The Firm, which was also picked up by NBC.

Somewhat noticeably absent from the list of new shows picked up is the latest spin-off  in the JAG family, the somewhat disappointing NCIS: Red or whatever they were going to settle on as the title. Shows in that fictional universe have a habit of lasting at least 10 seasons and being quite popular. NCIS: Red just didn’t seem like it could survive even 10% of that. This doesn’t mean it won’t be picked up. It just means there has not yet been an early announcement in advance of CBS’s 2013-14 Up-front announcement on 15 May.

After viewing the past few episodes, as well as receiving numerous complaints from viewers, KSL TV will cancel the airing of the NBC show “Hannibal” on Thursday evenings.

This decision was made due to the extensive graphic nature of this show. The timeslot will be replaced with a special edition of KSL 5 News at 9pm.

NBC remains a valued partner to KSL TV. KSL is confident that with the proliferation of digital media, those who wish to view the program can easily do so.

This is the most recent in a grand tradition of refusing to broadcast the more controversial programming from the network the station is affiliated with. Hannibal joins the distinguished group which of late includes The New Normal and The Playboy Club. When more than a few of NBC’s affiliates refused to broadcast The Book Of Daniel, a show about a drug-addicted Episcopalian priest who believes he regularly converses with a physically present Jesus, it was KSL who took the odd stance of insisting upon broadcasting it.

With The New Normal KSL announced they they would not be broadcasting the show weeks in advance of its scheduled premiere on NBC. Something about a gay couple and surrogacy and pre-watershed time-slot was just too much for KSL. With The Playboy Club KSL likewise announced that due to (perceived) subject matter and corporate brand they refused to broadcast the show, some 3 months in advance of its scheduled premiere on NBC. How is it that a show about Count Dr Hannibal Lecter VIII, a psychiatrist working with the FBI who is also a serial killer and cannibal, wasn’t obviously or probably beyond the comfort-zone of KSL? Had noone at KSL ever seen any of the films or read the novels that Hannibal is based on? The Silence Of The Lambs is 22 years old now but it was one of the biggest names in Hollywood film from the late 20th century. Did station management not preview the first episode and notice its extensively graphic nature?

The station announced in June 2011 that they would not be broadcasting The Playboy Club per their “long-term policy to screen programming for material which significant portions of our audience might find objectionable.”

Where is KSL’s line for acceptable/objectionable content drawn? Overtly homosexual content is not acceptable. The potential for rampant promiscuity is not acceptable. Certain brand names are unacceptable. A drug-addicted religious leader is acceptable. Rape and murder are acceptable. A cannibalistic serial killer working for the FBI initially was ok but no longer is. But wait! How does KSL reconcile broadcasting the 194 episode / 8 season NBC comedy Will & Grace with its overtly homosexual content and promiscuity? KSL seems to hope you don’t remember the show.  From over here it looks like KSL’s moral stance is about as ambiguous as the word “sometime”.

What so few really considered when crunching the numbers was that Beauty And The Beast is actually a Canadian show. CBS made the pilot in Toronto. When it was picked up for series CBS partnered with Take 5 Productions of Toronto to make a formal international co-production. Take 5 also brought in Whizbang Films. How exactly CBS managed to make a show that qualifies as Canadian Content is a bit of a mystery but they did put all of the puzzle pieces together to achieve just that. How do we know that Beauty And The Beast is really CanCon? The licence for Showcase doesn’t allow non-Canadian programming to be shown between the hours of 7 and 10 pm ET and Beauty And The Beast is on Thursdays at 9 pm ET.

Why does it matter that Beauty And The Beast qualifies as CanCon when considering its renewal prospects? The money. CanCon carries a premium. Shaw doesn’t have a piece of the production pie. That means what Shaw pays for the rights to each episode is ‘new money’ on the books rather than money moved from one pocket to another. What exactly Shaw is paying per episode isn’t available but if CBS was wise they charged market rate for CanCon. That has the potential to off-set the lower advertising revenue the show brings in in the US.

The other reason that has been tossed around a bit more frequently is that Beauty And The Beast is the only CBS production (in any configuration) currently on The CW, which CBS co-owns with Warner.

Also renewed today for a third season is Hart Of Dixie, the small-town medical drama starring Rachel Bilson, Wilson Bethel, Scott Porter, Jaime King, and Cress Williams as Mayor Lavon Hayes. Hart Of Dixie is available in Canada on Hamilton’s CHCH and Victoria’s CHEK, the only employee-owned station in North America,  as well as Chicago’s WGN, Los Angeles’ KTLA, and New York’s WPIX if your service provider offers The CW (check the movie channels bundle). CHCH and CHEK are indie stations that used to be part of the CH network and still sometimes pick up shows together which the Canadian networks pass on, such as Hart Of Dixie and the past few years of Supernatural.

The other renewals of the day include CBS’ Two And A Half Men, sans the half-man, for an 11th season. Ashton Kutcher and Jon Cryer have signed on for another year but Angus T. Jones has not. Beyond that there are the NBC renewals of Revolution, Chicago Fire, Parenthood, Law and Order: Special Victims Unit, and Grimm for 22 episodes each.

If using a character set that does not support Œ the proper rendering would be “Oe” as in Oeuf, which is French for egg. What someone at NBC has done is take Œ and make it “Ce” and Americans have blindly and obediently followed as it has appeared on all manner of blogs and newspapers and even the likes of IMDb have changed to embrace the typo after previously having it correct. Ceuf is all over Hulu.com and NBC.com, which are the “official sites” for the information and it is all wrong. It is a mega massive perpetuation of a typographical error.

The titles of the episodes of Hannibal are all relating to food and are all in French. Ceuf is French for not a damn thing and only exists as the American bastardisation of the title of this episode of Hannibal. It is such a unique word that if you type it into Google.com or Google.ca it returns nothing but results for the show Hannibal. Americans have apparently accidentally, inadvertently, and ignorantly created their own word which has no meaning at this time.

Anyone who is vaguely familiar with French knows that Americans have grossly messed this up. On all of the AXN websites it is either Œuf or Oeuf depending on the character set used for whatever the language of the website allows for. The City website has recently added the cannibalised remnants of the episode and it unsurprisingly follows the American lead on this. Could this be the largest typo ever?

Some people have said it was due to the bombings of the Boston Marathon that the episode was removed from the schedule but the bombings came afterward. The 102nd episode of Castle has been delayed a week due to its plot involving a bombing and in its place the 103rd episode of the series will be shown this coming Monday.  The 102nd episode is now to be shown on 29 April 2013.

There are bombings almost every day somewhere. There are murders every hour somewhere. If the US broadcasters were genuinely concerned they would pull each episode of Law & Order SVU every time a woman was raped. They only do it for the free media coverage it gets them and their shows when they do it ‘out of respect for the victims’ which need be sufficient enough for a massive amount of attention to be focused on the incident. And that incident need happen within the borders of the USA (or involving US military abroad). Otherwise it is totally business as usual and who cares what happens elsewhere.

When the town of Slave Lake in northern Alberta was destroyed by forest fire a few years ago NBC thought nothing of broadcasting the episode of Law & Order Los Angeles in which a part of Malibu was threatened by wild fire. The episode was shown in Canada on CTV but it was prefaced with “In light of recent events… viewer discretion is advised.”

Africa was full of brainwashed child soldiers years before Mr Fuller decided to write an episode of Hannibal which included brainwashed children killing children. Then the mass murder at a school in Connecticut happens and four months later Mr Fuller decides the episode won’t be broadcast. To me it looks like Mr Fuller is saying the murder of children in Connecticut matters whilst the murder of children in some country of Africa many people couldn’t even name is irrelevant and maybe even ok. The mass murder in Connecticut happened whilst the first season of Hannibal was in production. If Mr Fuller really were wanting to be respectful he would have scrapped the episode and done whatever it took to replace it with a different episode  while the show was still being filmed so as to avoid this publicity stunt now. I had been a fan of Mr Fuller for many, many, many years but today am absolutely disgusted by him and the gross double-standard he is embracing ‘out of respect’.

Œuf, the fourth episode of Hannibal, is still scheduled for broadcast on the various AXN channels around the world. The episode will be shown in Mexico on Wednesday 1 May 2013 at 10pm. At this time that is about as close to being shown in the US that the episode will get.

When in-trouble, badass Brit retro rocker Sarah exits a train, she hears a woman crying on the platform — then watches as the woman takes off her shoes, puts down her purse and turns around.

The woman has the exact same face as Sarah. A second later the woman leaps in front of a train and is killed.

Within seconds, the cops arrive and chaos ensues. Before she has time to think, Sarah grabs the woman’s purse and leaves.

So begins an intriguing new series, “Orphan Black,” from BBC America, which doesn’t debut until March 30.

Other than the show not being “from” BBC America that all is pretty accurate.

The reason you’re reading about it now is because BBC America isn’t usually on the front burner of people’s brains — and this show is worth noting.

“Orphan Black” is another of the network’s original scripted series and, like “Copper,” it takes place in NYC — sort of.

Orphan Black isn’t “another of the network’s original scripted series” and it doesn’t take place in NYC at all, in any sort. It is a show commissioned by Bell Media for their channel SPACE which BBCA subsequently picked up. The show is made in Toronto by Temple Street Productions, which is partially owned by BBC Worldwide. Copper was commissioned by BBCA and it does take place in NYC, albeit in the 1860s, and it too is made in Toronto.

Although Sarah (Tatiana Maslany) exits at a train stop called Huxley Station, and the PA announcer intones “Next train to New York City,” perhaps he should be announcing “Next train to Any City,” because I’ve never seen an American city like this one.

Anyway, the city has the graffiti of Manhattan circa 1985, but it looks nothing like NYC in any decade, even though the cops seem to have NYPD coffee mugs. It’s British, so maybe they think it’ll pass for Manhattan. Once you get past this confusion, what you’ll be left with is a darned good premise of a show with interesting actors.

I am still trying to find where Huxley Station is. Obviously if there is an announcement regarding the “next train to NYC” then the show isn’t set in NYC but rather somewhere that has trains which go to NYC, such as Toronto. It is a pretty common thing for Americans to insist that Toronto is “Any City, USA”. They did it for years with Flashpoint. Some still insist that rookie blue is set in the USA because they don’t recognise the neighbourhoods and streets named in the show. Nevertheless, if the television critic for the New York Post is looking at where Sarah gets off the train and knows it isn’t NYC why is she still complaining that the graffiti reminds her of Manhattan circa 1985 but that the whole looks nothing like any NYC she has ever known. Once she gets past that confusion, which she still doesn’t seem to actually understand. she goes off on a brief but clearly insane assertion that the show is British. And then she instantly comes back to the belief the show is set in NYC and the Brits who made the show have no clue what NYC looks like.

It’s a show about identity theft — but with a twist.

A show made by Brits, thus per her theory presumably in Britain, that is set in Any City, USA but trying so hard to be NYC is quite the twist. If it were in any way actually true it might be worth a look into. Alas, the only twist is that it is actually set in Toronto and made in Toronto and is a ‘cheap Canadian import’ as so many love to call the Canadian shows which make it into the schedules of American channels.

Thing is, Sarah has stolen the identity of someone who is in worse trouble than she is.

But when Sarah decides to not just steal another woman’s identity, but to assume her identity, things become very confused — and very dangerous.

Sarah, now Beth, is at first thrilled with her luck. Beth has a great apartment, a Jaguar with a parking spot just for her (for sure it’s not New York!), and a handsome-if-boring boyfriend.

Look at that, the critic for the New York Post is back to the belief the show can’t possibly be set in a fictional but realistic NYC. She was doing so good for a couple of paragraphs without a fuck-up. Why can’t she just realise the show is set in Toronto and that Toronto looks just like what she is seeing because o it is filmed on location rather than some place pretending to be another place.

But Beth killed herself, and by the next day, Sarah is hauled (as Beth) into the police station.

Turns out that Beth was a cop who shot a civilian. Watching her figure out who she is supposed to be during the hearing, and managing to wriggle out of the inquisition in front of the police brass, is ingenious.

As the series unfolds, we learn that Sarah was a foster kid who now has fostered out her own child to Mrs. S. (Maria Doyle Kennedy). Sarah/Beth has a stepbrother, Felix (Jordan Gavaris), and a cop partner (Kevin Hanchard) who smells a rat.

Sarah has a step-brother Felix but Beth does not. She was o so close to accurate with that.

Or maybe that’s the sweet smell of cloning in the air.

Or maybe that’s the sweet smell of an American Idiot finger-stroking a keyboard and proving to all who read just how American-centric she is and also how uninformed she is. Not all television shows are set in NYC and the presumption that a show is set in NYC is highly arrogant. It is pretty sad that the television critic of such a large newspaper as the New York Post is so misinformed and ranting so much about how the reality of a sci-fi show doesn’t agree with what is in her head. It is even more sad that no editor at the New York Post noticed just how factually inaccurate the whole article is. Could this be a by-product of the habitual behaviour of American media outlets proclaiming things to be American and then others following their lead and infinitely compounding it until the average American swears it is true and has a hundred sources to back it up and in reality the only truth is that it is a widely held belief among Americans who are all incorrect in their belief. In other times that is what we call propaganda.

The one thing that is clear is that Linda Stasi has been duped. On the up-side she does give this Canadian sci-fi show 3 out of 4 stars.  At least she got something somewhat correct.

There is now a date for when it will be on in the US on Reelz and it is not after it is shown in Canada. Yes, XIII has been held back so long that this Canadian-French show will have its domestic debut last among all the major markets it is shown in. The second season of XIII will begin on Reelz on 29 March 2013, a whole 11 days before it is on in Canada.

If that wasn’t enough salt in the wound of Canadian fans and Canadian television, the second season of XIII has been shown in Australia Sunday nights at 7.30 on FX for a while now.  The tenth episode will be shown this coming Sunday.  Should you have an Australian iTunes account you can purchase a season 2 pass for $40; currently there are 8 episodes available.

Here’s what Showcase is promising you can expect with season 2 of XII:

Betrayed by the only person he ever trusted, XIII found solace living off the grid.  Back in the USA after travelling the world, he stumbles upon the activist group The Veil and is seduced both by their environmental/anti-corporate/anti-globalisation message and the beautiful activist Betty Barnowsky.

When XIII is framed for bombing global conglomerate Synequanon’s headquarters, he understands that he is being manipulated – he just isn’t sure why or by whom. Now he’s back on the radar and certain people are after him: President Carrington, clinging to power at any cost; Colonel Samuel Amos, former National Security Adviser and now CEO of Synequanon; and a mysterious figure, who seems to have a lot (too much, in fact) in common with XIII.

XIII is pulled into an international conspiracy that threatens to unleash a new weapon to rival the atomic bomb. While unravelling this global plot, he must also confront the truth about his identity and a past he can neither remember nor escape.

Given the less than thrilling performance of season 2 in France, the poor reviews from European fans, and the three month Canadian broadcast delay without any explanation it is really unlikely that XIII will have a season III. If you are a fan of the show enjoy it while it lasts.

This is one of the worst kept renewals of the season. The fourth season of Lost Girl has been on the Directors Guild Of Canada’s list of forthcoming productions for a little while now.

Shaw has proclaimed their intent to show season 4 in “late 2013″ which should equate to the usual September premiere. Syfy has promised the show will be back in the USA in “2014″. Here’s hoping this time Shaw has the integrity to not go back on their word and piss off their own audience for the sake of making Syfy happy. Shaw did announce season 3 would be shown in September and the show was done with post-production and was available for broadcast in September 2012 but suddenly it was rescheduled to align more closely with what Syfy intended to do – January 2013 broadcast. FUCK Syfy. If the show is ready for September and Syfy refuses to broadcast it until January that is their fucking problem to deal with and giving in to their stupidity is the best way for Shaw to piss off their own audience. Is it really worth it? Does Shaw like being told by a foreign broadcaster when they can broadcast their own show? It is a little sadistic.

If one were to look up Lost Girl on the NBCUniversal press website they would find it listed under Syfy’s “acquired scripted content”. Continuum would be right there beside it. Now if only they could stop claiming all of these Canadian and British imports are their “original series”.

Season 4 is to be 13 episodes. The season 3 finale is to be on 14 April in Canada and on 22 April in the USA.

If you want to read the Shaw press release click this. The actual press release from Syfy presently isn’t available at what should be it’s source and primary publication location. It is on TV By The Numbers and The Hollywood Reporter has a little article on it.

* * * * *

In other news, Tom Flanagan, a professor at the University Of Calgary, a former Chief Of Staff of the current Prime Minister of Canada, and the now former campaign manager for Alberta’s extremely conservative Wildrose Party, participated in a discussion last night at the University Of Lethbridge where the matter of his comments from 2009 about child pornography was raised. Four years ago most mobile phones did not include video cameras. When Mr Flannagan re-affirmed his position that child porn is “just pictures” last night he was recorded doing so and it was published on the internet for all to see. What does this have to do with tv? Mr Flanagan has been a regular contributor to CBC News’ Power & Politics with Evan Solomon. Jennifer McGuire, the General Manager and Editor In Chief of CBC News, issued a press release today saying that while she supports free speech his comments “have crossed the line and impacted his credibility” and he has been terminated.

The writing was not quite as many fans are used to from the five seasons set in the Old World’s western shores. The production quality however was far superior to that of the British series. Omni Films do make some nice looking shows.

Bell declined to renew the show because the numbers were not favourable. The show is broadcast on Watch in the UK and often people cite the greatly diminishing numbers for the UK. What is often overlooked is that it started off even worse in Canada. The series premiere had 130000 viewers on SPACE.  That would be horribly disastrous in the USA and not much better in the UK. In Canada that would be the limit of tolerable for a cable show but not for a series premiere of a highly promoted series with an established fan base.

South of the border Primeval New World has been picked up by Syfy. Syfy has yet to announce a date for when they will show the series to Americans.

The complete series will be released on DVD in the UK on 1 April 2013 but there is as of yet no word on a Canadian DVD or any Blu-ray release. If you are so inclined you can pick up the series from British iTunes for £27.

The group is a rather obvious one. No, not CLERKS. The other one; the group that releases DVD rips of many shows which are sold via Amazon, Warner Bros., and other online retailers as manufacture-on-demand. That would be REWARD. For these they have turned it around to Drawer.

Everwood.S01E01.720p.WEBRip.h264-DRAWER.mkv is how they named episode one. What is odd is that they used the “webrip” tag concurrent to openly acknowledging the rest of the world has had this for years and calls it WEB-DL because they are ‘downloaded from the interwebs’.

The English scene rules don’t currently have any place for this and last time it came up SAiNTS went apeshit over CLERKS using WEB-DL to make XviD and claiming they were ripped from DVDs. While not condoning the lie if you take just a moment to think about it – a 4mb/s 720p mpeg4 file will produce a better XviD file than a 2mb/s 480i mpeg2 dvd will – SAiNTS was actually arguing in favour of poorer quality. They proceeded to find WEB-DL of all but one show which CLERKS had released DVDrips of. They seemed to think it was proof. What they didn’t acknowledge is that WEB-DL is just as if not more organised that scene releases and so of course they were able to find releases of all of those then recent and popular shows. What is really surprising is the other group that signed the notice of apeshit-ness was none other than REWARD, the very group who by an inverse of their name openly come out in favour of it about 2 years later.

The German scene has allowed such sourcing for some time now but each language has their own rules and for English it has been a big ‘no’.

One of the reasons SAiNTS and REWARD went apeshit a couple of years ago was because the CLERKS release of Scrubs season 9 was 16×9 (like the tv broadcast) while the DVDs were cropped to 4×3 and so clearly the CLERKS release wasn’t really what it claimed to be. Today Drawer puts forward the arguement that WEB-DL is better in most instances because Everwood seaason 1 DVDs are cropped to 4×3 despite being made and originally broadcast as 16×9. The one point of agreement with Drawer here is that it is a shame the extended version of the Everwood pilot isn’t available.

As part of the fallout from the CLERKS deception there came a rule for proof of source, ie. photo of the actual discs,  must be included when scene groups release things. To try to comply with that Drawer has decided to use a screenshot of the download of the purchased season. What does this achieve? Well it does show they did indeed purchase the show from iTunes. It suggests they didn’t simply re-mux the existing release of Everwood season 1 that was done by LinkinPark some two years ago.  Scene does operate on its own with a ‘fuck the rest of you not in our little group’ attitude. They generally loathe and despise anyone not in their circle who release things. The only thing they seem to hate more than outsiders releasing things is insiders taking the releases of outsiders and passing them off as their own. Did Drawer really use their own purchase of Everwood for their release or did they simply purchase it, take the screen shot, and then actually use the existing release and simply re-mux it to get a new ‘writing date’ ? That is where it gets strange since the version of mkvmerge used was from 9 December 2012 whilst the writing date (aka the Encoded date) was actually 22 February 2010, nearly 3 years ago.

Less than a day after being uploaded at one of the torrent sites where the WEB-DL releases almost all originate from and where release of them is coördinated the Drawer release of Everwood was deleted as a dupe of the LinkinPark release. While the scene may not consider this release from Drawer a dupe it has been nuked by the sites which originate the WEB-DL shows as a dupe. The releases of Psych and Carnivale are not currently there and maybe they never were.

With regards to Psych Drawer actually puts forward the arguement, “The quality is not amazing but it’s arguably better than dvdrip.” because the first two seasons of the show were not broadcast in HD. Argueably better than dvdrip??????? Since when is it possible that a 720p h264 file with a bitrate of 4mb/s is worse than a 352p xvid file with a bitrate of 0.9mb/s. This screams from the mountaintops the arrogance of the scene to assert that it could be reasonably argued the dvdrip (which came from them) is better. The quality while not amazing is actually better than what Drawer in their other incarnation as REWARD release when they get their hands on Blu-ray discs of a show.

As for Carnivale Drawer has also undertaken to release some 1080p of the show even though it was released by one of the WEB-DL groups mere weeks earlier. For animation it isn’t too bad but for shows with actual people being filmed the 1080p usually doesn’t look so great. It often lacks facial detail that is found in the 720p release. But it is 1080p and some people who don’t really know what they are looking for or looking at will buy it just because it is 1080p and therefore is undeniably better (not really true). For the sub-standard quality of 1080p you can blame the encoding standards required by iTunes which significantly lowers the bits/pixel (aka picture quality) compared to 720p.  The 720p files are about 4 MB/second while 1080p files are about 5 MB/second, which looks better until you think that the bits/pixel of 720p is about 0.178 while 1080p is about 0.104  (0.233 and 0.099 for 25 frames per second files) 720p at 25 fps is anamorphic video, so there are less pixels per frame, and thus the bits/pixel is much higher.

Another scene group actually had used some 1080p to make 720p of a certain show not being broadcast by ABC. Perhaps you have found 666.Park.Avenue.S01E10.720p.WEBRip.x264-DiABLO.mkv and 666.Park.Avenue.S01E11.720p.WEBRip.x264-DiABLO.mkv out there. DiABLO has actually taken the 1080p of the two episodes and encoded them to scene standard 720p. If one down-converts something to scene standard then the obvious inference is that whatever the source it had to be better than scene but the explanation from DiABLO is “the show continued airing in Australia, and since no one seems to have any cappers from that region, an iTunes rip will have to do for now”. So it is both better and a temporary settling for sub-standard. The logic is a bit dysfunctional. What is odd is why DiABLO didn’t just use the source 720p like the other scene groups instead of down-converting 1080p > 720p. DiABLO’s release is about half the size but smaller always means sacrificing quality.

So far the scene nukers haven’t been nuking these releases but that could simply be because they are being preed such that they end up in the TV XviD category (and who is watching that anymore?) or without a category.

The groups that have been doing WEB-DL for years now do shows as they come available, often because the scene release sucks or because it is nicer without the snipes and bugs. Drawer has so far only touched on shows either long since ended or the earliest of seasons for some current long-running shows. Will Drawer release season 7 of Psych each week concurrent to the release by ECI?  Psych season 7 starts on 27 February 2013 on usa in the US and sadly is not actually used for more than schedule filler in Canada on Global.