Skip to content

CBC

BIG READ: ARCTIC AIR is our Local Star in CBC’s Fall & Winter Lineup

Published September 13, 2012 on Vancouver is Awesome

How much does the CBC love Arctic Air? Heaps. At the CBC Upfronts in May, host George Stroumboulopoulos introduced the cast of Arctic Air first in the Prime Time segment, ahead of the Dragon’s Den Dragons. And for good reason. The Vancouver-and-Yellowknife-shot adventure series, starring Adam Beach and Pascale Hutton, averaged just under a million viewers in its first season, making it the most-watched debut season for a CBC drama series in fifteen years.

Arctic Air, which returns for a second season in early 2013, is just one of CBC’s Canadian dramas to look forward to this fall and winter. Long-running 1890s Toronto detective series Murdoch Mysteries, starring Yannick Bisson, relocates to the CBC next Monday, September 17th, airing a repeat of its fifth season before unveiling a new sixth season on the public broadcaster (Bisson joked at the upfront that leaving City-TV for CBC was like the girlfriend who got dumped but married a surgeon). And the rollicking father-and-son private detective series Republic of Doyle, set in picturesque St. John’s, Newfoundland, returns for a fourth season in the new year. It not only stars Newfoundland native Allan Hawco, it is produced and often written by this impressive multi-tasker. Also coming this winter on CBC is a new, present-day Toronto detective series Cracked, starring David Sutcliffe (Rory Gilmore’s Dad) as the police detective and Stefanie von Pfetten as the psychiatrist, who work together in a Psych Crimes Unit.

Read More »BIG READ: ARCTIC AIR is our Local Star in CBC’s Fall & Winter Lineup

CTV Orders New Vancouver-Set Procedural MOTIVE to Series

The yet-to-be-cast 13-episode CTV series Motive, about a “feisty female Vancouver detective” solving murders, is the latest TV drama series to let Vancouver play itself. We’ve gone from zero to four in a very short time–  possibly five if Endgame is resurrected.

Why now? Some credit the Vancouver 2010 Winter Olympic Games for making our city “cool” and recognizable the world over.

While CBC’s hit adventure series Arctic Air mainly films its Yellowknife interiors on permanent sets in Aldergrove and its exteriors in Yellowknife, when the action is in our city, as it was in the wonderfully-titled episode Vancouver is Such a Screwed-Up City, then Vancouver plays itself.

And Showcase’s out-of-the-box hit Continuum features not one but two Vancouvers. In the part sci-fi, part procedural Continuum, a future police officer travels back in time from Vancouver in the year 2077 to Vancouver in the year 2012, swept up in an escape by a group of terrorists — Liber8 – who plan to change the future from the past by targeting the corporations that will come to rule the world. Here’s Rachel Nichols’s officer-from-the-future at the Vancouver Public Library.

Over at SPACE’s upcoming sci-fi and procedural series Primeval: New World, we can look forward to seeing apartment-building-sized dinosaurs and other primeval creatures rampaging through our neighbourhoods like Stanley Park, Coal Harbour and the Olympic Village. Read More »CTV Orders New Vancouver-Set Procedural MOTIVE to Series

ARCTIC AIR Trio Talk about First Hit Season on CBC

How much does the CBC love its new hit drama series Arctic Air? Heaps. At the CBC upfronts earlier this month in Toronto, Vancouver and Calgary to unveil next season’s schedule to advertisers and media, host George Stroumboulopoulos introduced the Arctic Air actors first in the opening Prime Time segment, ahead of the Dragon’s Den Dragons.

And for good reason — Arctic Air was the most-watched debut season for a CBC drama series in fifteen years, averaging just under a million viewers (965,000) for its first ten episodes. I watched all ten and even live-tweeted the finale in mid-March, along with so many other Canadians. Arctic Air is a classic adventure series — filmed mainly on permanent sets in Aldergrove with most exterior scenes filmed in Yellowknife  — where the main trio are often in peril. It started with Bobby Martin (Adam Beach)’s return to Yellowknife to help keep alive the maverick airline co-founded by his dead father and the notorious curmudgeon Mel Ivarson (Kevin McNulty). There he reunites with Mel’s daughter Krista (Pascale Hutton), a former flame and hot-shot pilot. In the season finale cliffhanger, much of it filmed near Clinton  in B.C.’s Cariboo country, Mel has internal bleeding after helping the other survivors of a plane crash.  What? “Mr. Crankypants better be with us next season,” I tweeted.

Read More »ARCTIC AIR Trio Talk about First Hit Season on CBC

BIG READ: CBC Dramas ARCTIC AIR & REPUBLIC OF DOYLE Soar

Published January 31, 2012 on Vancouver is Awesome

Wow. The CBC is kicking simulcast-American-show butt this winter with its made-for-Canadians-by-Canadians dramas, comedies, unscripted and current affairs programs, led by set-in-Yellowknife aerial adventure series Arctic Air and set-in-St. John’s father-and-son private detective series Republic of Doyle. Both dramas premiered in the Million-Canadian-Viewers-Plus Club earlier this month and remain there after three episodes apiece, although Arctic Air dipped below a million viewers for its second outing before climbing back up.

While nothing is going to touch this country’s love for CTV’s simulcast of American comedy hit The Big Bang Theory, CBC shows like Dragons’ Den, the Rick Mercer Report, new comedy series Mr. D. and a rejuvenated Marketplace have all hit the Million-Plus Club and are winning or placing well in their time blocks. As is Global’s new hit mini-series Bomb Girls, filmed in Toronto. So what happened to CTV, proud home of Corner Gas, during this resurgence of homegrown shows? Well our most financially-successful Canadian TV network has no Canadian dramas or comedies on its prime time 2011-12 schedule so far although it remains a giant in covering Canadian news and sports.

Why are CBC’s dramas so popular this winter? Just as The Beachcombers represented B.C.’s West Coast to the world for almost twenty years, Arctic Air and Republic of Doyle showcase a specific region of Canada with adventure and humour, plus something new — sexiness. Feel free to argue, but Bruno Gerussi with his giant medallion on his overly hairy chest on The Beachcombers did not exude sexiness like today’s CBC leading men — Adam Beach of Arctic Air and Allan Hawco of Republic of Doyle.

Adam Beach has said he likes that the Arctic Air creators made his character Bobby Martin a “player”, especially because — in a sweet twist — Bobby’s first hookup on returning to Yellowknife is Frontier Hotel receptionist Candi played by Leah Gibson, who became his real-life girlfriend. Gibson is on Beach’s right in the photo below (the pair even kissed for the cameras). And Allan Hawco has been juggling dozens of women for two seasons and counting as swaggering Jake Doyle on Republic of Doyle in Newfoundland. Last week’s episode ended with his character in a hot kiss with his remarried ex-wife.

I was fortunate to be invited by the CBC to the red carpet premiere of Arctic Air at the Vogue Theatre on January 10th and an Actors Studio-style session at the Vancouver Film School with Republic of Doyle star and Newfoundland native Allan Hawco a week later.

It all began late last November when I got the chance to meet the stars of CBC’s 2012 Winter Season out in Aldergrove Read More »BIG READ: CBC Dramas ARCTIC AIR & REPUBLIC OF DOYLE Soar

BIG READ: Vancouver as Yellowknife for CBC’s ARCTIC AIR

Published December 2, 2011 on Vancouver is Awesome

Vancouver as Yellowknife. That’s a first. Upcoming CBC adventure series Arctic Air works on two episodes at a time, filming the exteriors in Yellowknife for a week and the interiors on Vancouver sets for two weeks. Walk into these sets out in Aldergrove and you’ll feel like you’re in real-life Yellowknife institutions like Bullock’s Bistro and The Explorer Hotel, or flying in a cramped, ramshackle Buffalo Air DC3.

Years ago, I experienced all three: flying up to Yellowknife on a prop plane with someone’s household goods in the back; staying in The Explorer (long before Will & Kate made it famous); and walking very quickly in sub-zero temperatures down the hill to Bullock’s Bistro, where everyone signs their name — on walls, on tables and on the bar.

Is this the CBC’s next Beachcombers? Adam Beach, whose American credits include big feature films like Cowboys and Aliens and Flags of our Fathers, and Pascale Hutton, who sang beautifully on Sanctuary’s Glee-meets-The Exorcist episode last week, hope their new series will represent Canada’s North to the world as well as The Beachcombers did with the West Coast. Although perhaps not for as long. Beach looked taken aback at the thought of matching The Beachcombers record of nineteen seasons. In Arctic Air’s 10-episode first season debuting on January 10th, Beach is the headstrong son of the now-dead partner of a renegade prop airline, who after a decade down south returns to Yellowknife where he reunites with his childhood friend Hutton, whose TV father Kevin McNulty is the very much-alive and cantankerous other partner of this dysfunctional two-family business. The fourth lead has to be the place itself. “Yellownife is another member of our cast,” Hutton told me.

Since Arctic Air owes its inception to the success of documentary series Ice Pilots NWT, I expected filming of the new drama series to be done up north too. Read More »BIG READ: Vancouver as Yellowknife for CBC’s ARCTIC AIR