Motive Cast — Brendan Penny, Lauren Holly, Louis Ferreira, Kristin Lehman and Roger Cross — CTV promo image
The murder is just the beginning. There’s always a motive and Vancouver homicide detective Angie Flynn (Kristin Lehman) will find it. Filming wrapped last Friday on Motive’s thirteen-episode first season.
Motive debuted in a prime but delayed post-Super Bowl slot on CTV to 1.23 million Canadians, the culmination of an unprecedented publicity campaign by CTV for a Canadian show. Normally, only CTV’s American simulcast shows get this scale of rollout. And in a sweet twist, American network ABC has picked up the Vancouver crime drama for broadcast this summer.
Ratings held steady after Motive’s move to its regular 9 p.m. on Sundays slot, dipping for the second episode but rising back over one million for the third episode, to give Canada’s #1 new drama a series-to-date average of 1.06 million viewers.
Instead of a regular whodunit that focuses on who did the crime, Motive is a whydunit that focuses on why the crime was committed in the first place. The Killer and The Victim are revealed to the audience at the top of the show and we follow detectives Angie Flynn (Kristin Lehman) and Oscar Vega (Louis Ferreria) as they uncover the reasons behind the murder.
Once Upon a Time makes TV looks like the movies every week. Revolutionary Z.E.U.S. visual effects technology allows the modern fairy tale series to be as epic as a movie on a TV budget. If you looked through a camera lense or a monitor in studio in Vancouver you would see scenes rendered in real time while the cast performs on mostly empty green screen stages. And beautiful British Columbia has a hand in creating stunning backdrops too with on-location filming in our forests, deserts and oceans for Fairy Tale Land and in the village of Steveston for present-day Storybrooke.
But Once Upon a Time would be just pretty pictures if the creators and cast didn’t bring emotion to the stories they tell. Here are some promo photos of the actors who make us care about fairy tale characters week after week.
Charming (Josh Dallas) and his daughter Emma (Jennifer Morrison) on location in Steveston south of Vancouver.
Does any show spoil itself as much as Once Upon a Time does? This is not a judgement. More is more is a valid promotional strategy.
No one is safe on this Sunday’s The Queen is Dead with two deaths. One in present-day. And one in the Fairy Tale Land past. As you can see from the promo, sneak peek clips and promo images, the Rumple family — grandfather Rumplestiltskin/Mr. Gold (Robert Carlyle), father Baelfire/Neal (Michael Raymond-James), mother Emma (Jennifer Morrison) and son Henry (Jared Gilmore) –bond a little in Manhattan. At least father and son do. And then Captain Hook (Colin O’Donoghue) shows up to exact his revenge on a Rumple with no magic. But he attacks him with his hook not The Dark One’s dagger, so there’s hope.
And new alliances may help Rumple too. Snow/Mary Margaret (Ginnifer Goodwin), Charming/David (Josh Dallas) and the Blue Fairy/Mother Superior (Keegan Conner Tracy) team up to find The Dark One’s dagger before Cora (Barbara Hershey) and Regina (Lana Parilla) do in order to protect Henry’s other Grandfather.
That’s the Dark One’s dagger in Snow’s hand. But whose heart is Regina/Evil Queen holding?
All Hell Breaks Zeus this Wednesday night. An amnesiac man (John Reardon of Arctic Air/Continuum) turns out to be Greek God Prometheus not a zombie. And he’s under attack from Greek Goddess Artemis (Anna Von Hooft). Sam (Jared Padalecki) and Dean (Jensen Ackles) Winchester investigate.
Friday, February 22nd – Arrow films 1×19 at abandoned mental institution Riverview Hospital in Coquitlam.
Thursday, February 21st – Supernatural films at the Cleveland Dam in North Vancouver
Thursday, February 21st – Level Up liquidation sale atNorth Shore Studios.
Thursday, February 21st – SPACE channel opts not to renew Vancouver’s own dinosaur procedural Primeval: New World for second season. Show in talks with other international broadcasters.
Wednesday, February 20th – Is Fringe headed for a three-peat at the Saturn Awards? Nominations for Fringe and cast, Once Upon a Time, Supernatural, The Killing, Falling Skies, Arrow and Vancouver’s own Continuum.
Wednesday, February 20th – Vancouver’s teen sitcom Mr. Young with Brendan Meyer, Matreya Fedor and Gig Morton, resumes filming season three Read More »WEEK: February 18-24, 2013
The Holy Shitballs episode, as Arrow star Stephen Amell calls it on Twitter, filmed on location inside the Westin Bayshore Hotel with assassins Deadshot (Michael Rowe) and China White (Kelly Hu) trying to kill Malcolm Merlyn (John Barrowman) at a benefit honouring Merlyn for his work with Starling City. This is where I saw the Dancin’ Merlyn Boys ahead of their scene.
Last Wednesday, Moira Queen (Susanna Thompson) asked Frank Chen (Chin Han), an associate in The Undertaking, for help in ordering a hit on Malcolm Merlyn. Read More »PROMOS: ARROW 1×16 Dead to Rights
Kokanee’s The Movie Out Here hits theatres next Friday. It’s a B.C. version of Hot Tub Time Machine meets Old School populated with your favourite characters from the beer commercials like the Sasquatch, Kokanee Ranger and Glacier Girls plus a new buddy ranger duo Glacier and Fresh. Robin Nielsen, Viv Leacock and James Wallis co-star as old friends who band together to fight a land developer in the ski town of Fernie as itself. I met the Kokanee Ranger and his successors Glacier and Fresh and interviewed Nielsen and Leacock on set at Alouette Lake (before the two-week Fernie shoot), while crew filmed Wallis watching Glacier Girls change bikini tops on the beach for a Kokanee commercial within the movie.