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WEEK: February 25 – March 3, 2013

WEEK: November 5-11, 2012

  • Sunday, November 11th – Once Upon a Time‘s Red Riding Hood/Ruby-centric episode 2×07 Child of the Moon.
  • Sunday, November 11th – Glen Schaefer (The Province)’s feature on Brent Butt’s big movie No Clue — No Bogart in this Joint
  • Friday, November 9th – Fringe reveals the child Observer whom Walter hid in a pocket universe in the sixth episode of the final season, Through the Looking Glass and What Walter Found.
  • Friday, November 9th – Red Widow films on the North Vancouver waterfront.
  • Friday, November 9th – Bates Motel films in Fort Langley.
  • Friday, November 9th – Battlestar Galactica prequel Blood and Chrome with Ben Cotton debuts first and second webisodes
  • Thursday, November 8th – Sitcom Package Deal tapes its pilot in front of live studio audience in Burnaby.
  • Thursday, November 8th – Brent Butt’s No Clue films in Coal Harbour on a yacht with a follow boat and a technocrane photographed by Rusty Deluce.
  • Thrusday, November 8th – Emily Owens M.D.’s Mamie Gummer & Justin Hartley film at UBC’s Life Sciences Centre,
  • Thursday, November 8th – Fringe films episode eleven on the platform for the West Coast Express at the Waterfront station with Loyalist soldiers, Peter, Olivia, Walter and the child Observer.
  • Thursday, November 8th – News of AMC and Netflix nearing deal for surprise third season of The Killing via Deadline.com.
  • Thursday, November 8th – News of Twilight fans already lining up for Monday’s Los Angeles premiere of The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn 2 Read More »WEEK: November 5-11, 2012

YVRShoots Series – Sitcom PACKAGE DEAL Live in Burnaby

Published November 9, 2012 on Vancouver is Awesome

Update: While taped in Burnaby, Package Deal is set in Toronto.

Partway through the live taping of sitcom Package Deal’s pilot episode last night I had to zone out for a bit, exhausted from laughing non-stop for hours. Of course the sitcom is laugh-out-loud funny, although the details are embargoed until after the premiere airs early next year on Citytv. I can tell you that the laughs for the acerbic Harland Williams’s flubbing of his lines were just as big as when he did it right. “That’s not the line,” Williams told the audience. “Stop laughing, I’m sensitive.”  Williams, more than anyone else, cracked up his fellow cast members on set. Meanwhile, wrangler/perfomer Dave Dimapalis kept us entertained  in the audience between takes by coaxing volunteers to play progressively lewder games. Bachelorette #1 in the Bachelor game quipped “100% down” when asked how she would label herself in a store. Is it any surprise the blindfolded bachelor picked her from three possible candidates? I was rooting for Bachelorette #2 , by the way, who described herself as “a cub not yet a cougar.”  And halfway through the taping,: pages came round with pizza slices from the Flying Wedge to keep our energy up.

Read More »YVRShoots Series – Sitcom PACKAGE DEAL Live in Burnaby

BIG READ: Teen Sitcom Mr. Young Live in Burnaby

Published October 28, 2011 on Vancouver is Awesome

Break-dancing kid, rapper Mom, a trio singing The Climb while building a girl pyramid, large group performing the Macarena and YMCA. That’s the audience at the Live Show of homegrown teen sitcom Mr. Young. So much talent in the audience and on set makes the Friday night taping of this multi-camera sitcom a fun destination for parents and kids. Plus every so often a well-known actor sits watching the show instead of being on it: V’s Christopher Shyer and family won a round of audience Monster Family Feud last Friday.

Made-in-Vancouver Mr. Young is a situation comedy about child prodigy Adam Young (Brendan Meyer) returning to his high school at the age of 14 to teach science to his best friend Derby (Gig Morton), his crush Echo (Matreya Fedor) and the dim-witted school bully Slab (Kurt Ostlund). Filming its second season in a massive studio behind the old Watchmen set in Burnaby, Mr. Young is a Canadian hit about to make it big in the U.S. Last month children’s entertainment giant Disney started airing YTV’s #1 show on its Disney XD channel and this past weekend premiered three episodes on the main Disney Channel as well as multiple airings on Disney XD. Seven episodes aired on Saturday alone.

Is Mr. Young on its way to becoming The Suite Life North? It has the pedigree: Mr. Young was created by Dan Signer, the writer/producer of Disney’s hit series The Suite Life on Deck. And it’s certainly laugh-out-loud funny to kids and some of their parents, although some of the adult-oriented jokes might have to be toned down for prospective Disney audiences. Each episode name is a variation on the premiere Mr. Young, from Mr. Roboto to last week’s Mr. Tickleshmooz — about Adam’s attempt to clone his crush’s hamster after it dies in his care. I laughed watching Brendan Meyer give the stiffened original hamster CPR and again when the cloned hamster grew to monstrous size filling the school hallway. Monster hamster turned out to be the fifteenth episode of the second season, which started taping in July and wraps in January of next year — six months for 26 half-hour episodes, including brief hiatuses for the young cast.

Last Friday’s Live Show for Mr. Cyclops began with the audience load-in at 4:15 p.m. of about 200 into a basketball-court-length grandstand, followed by a playback of Mr. Tickleschmootz, which I’d already seen on TV at home. Shooting of live scenes began about 5 p.m. and ended five hours later at 10 p.m. with a curtain call for the cast. That’s a long time but the audience’s energy never flagged thanks to wrangler/performer Dave Dimapalis, who kept the kids hopping between set-ups with games, contests, singing, dancing, you name-it. This man is great at his job.

Of the eight live scenes we watched, my favourite had to be Adam and Derby dressed as Men in Black with CIA (Cyclops Intelligence Agency) badges in their back pockets and black one-eye bands on their heads.

Note the yellow card in the photo above asking the audience not to “jump over the railing” at the teen stars. Read More »BIG READ: Teen Sitcom Mr. Young Live in Burnaby