Mike's Bloggity Blog

It i’s officially in Winter in Canada now and while the weather might be frightful, the year-end television ratings are anything but!

As 2011 comes to a close, BBM Canada, which keeps track of TV ratings, is providing a snapshot of what Canadians were up to over the past 12 months.  It shouldn’t be a surprise that The Stanley Cup playoffs were among the most-watched television broadcasts of 2011 in Canada. In scripted programming, TV comedy continues to attract more and more viewers in Canada, with Two and A Half Men, The Big Bang Theory and The Roast of Charlie Sheen all raking in monster numbers.

It is interesting to see that Survivor and The Amazing Race still pull in HUGE numbers in Canada, yet we still don’t have versions to call our own.  Also of note, Shit My Dad Says, which was canceled by CBS for it’s low ratings, was the 6th highest rated program of the year!

What days were the most Canadian watching TV?  That honour goes to the 2011 Federal Election (25 million) and the Royal Wedding (24.9 million)!

Canada’s Top 10 Most-Watched Days in 2011

Canada’s Top 10 Television Broadcasts of 2011

Canada’s Top 10 Television Programs of 2011

Fresh off the blockbuster success of Rookie Blue and so-so ratings for Combat Hospital, Global TV is sticking with shows profiling those who risk their lives with their six-part series Bomb Girls. The drama profiles the life-altering experiences of five brave Canadian women who risk their lives working in a munitions factory during the Second World War.

Starring in Bomb Girls is Oscar® nominee Meg Tilly (Agnes of God, The Big Chill), Jodi Balfour (The Sinking of the Laconia), Charlotte Hegele (Murdoch Mysteries), Ali Liebert (Hellcats) and Anastasia Philips (Skins)

The series also stars a trio of guys, including Antonio Cupo (L’Ombra del destino), Sebastian Pigott and Peter Outerbridge (ReGenesis).

Before it premieres on January 4th, you can now check out a sneak peak at the series.

Anytime you name a show that can easily be turned into a bad pun, I get nervous. So it will be interesting to see how Bomb Girls does.  Will it be a bomb or a blast? You also have to wonder if the the crash landing that is Pan Am (see what I did there) and Playboy Club, has Global a little nervous. Will Bomb Girls be the first show to capture some of Mad Men’s vintage success?

We’ll soon find out.

In what I consider very surprising news, Global TV has announced that they’ve renewed Canada Sings for a second season.

No really, they did.  Like seriously.  I’m totally not lying to you.

The one-hour original series aired to little fan-fare late this summer, it challenged Canadian workplaces to form glee clubs  and compete workplace Glee clubs, the winner eventually got to donate the prize money to the charity of choice.

While I wasn’t really a fan of the show, I liked the completely random selection of judges which included, Jann Arden, Pierre Bouvier (of the band Simple Plan) and Vanilla Ice, all of whom will be back for round two.  The show’s first season was won by Eric Hamber Secondary School as “The Edutones”, and they got to donate $10,000 to the BC Children Hospital

Question: How do all of these teams get two months off of work? 

The show’s renewal goes to show that there’s no such thing as a sure thing, even when that sure thing is cancelation.

So now that I’ve come to terms with the impending season of Canada Sings, it’s time to talk casting.  The show is currently on the look-out for offices that want to compete.

The deadline to apply is Oct. 24, 2011 at 5 pm, so if you think your office has what it takes, click here to apply.

When you work in the media you get used to getting a certain amount of swag sent your way.  I remember when it first started, I thought it was a sign that I had “made it.”  Since then, I’ve been sent everything you could imagine including countless canes of Coke Zero, boxes of Axe Body Wash and more branded notepads than I know what to do with.

But if my last two pieces of mail are any indication,  PR companies seem to be going a whole new direction: clothing!

In the past few days I’ve gotten two pieces of clothing in the mail to help support and promote tv shows.  From Global’s Combat Hospital, I got a pretty nice tactical military scarf from the Kandahar-based drama series. Now I’m not about to perform surgery in a desert to test its authenticity, but I can tell you that it’s a scarf that most hipsters would kill to have.  Minutes after putting it on, I already felt my jeans getting tights, my bike getting smaller and I couldn’t seem to get Metric out of my head.

I’ve never been a person to fashionably wear scarfs with any sort of success, but I gotta admit, I know quite a few people that would pay a pretty penny at Urban Outfitters for the scarf.  I’m definitely going to hold on to it for a while, just in case Zooey Deschanel ever shows up to listen to some Death Cab For Cutie.

The second piece of clothing came just today.  It’s actually a really nice shirt from Under Armour in support of the new CTV series Expedition Impossible.  The show is going to be hosted by Canadian adventurer and zoologist Dave Salmoni and premieres on Thursday night.  Now in concept, the shirt is great, I did a little Googling and it’s actually worth about $40.  Totally not complaining.

Unfortunately the shirt is literally five sizes too big.  Yup, they sent out XXL shirts to all the media across Canada….the ones who are most likely to already have eating disorders.  Not that I expect to have a custom shirt sent my way, but is XXL really the average size of the writers and journalists in this country?  If so, we’ve got bigger problems…literally.  Wouldn’t a large have been a little more reasonable?  Again, these are problems “white people have” and I don’t want to sound ungrateful, I’m from the maritimes, I’ll always take free clothing, I just find it kinda funny.  Now excuse me as I go purge my dinner.

Hopefully sending free clothes is a new trend in publicity, for the record, I’m typically a size small.  Just sayin’!

Remember when Glee premiered last year and a small group of people rallied to save the show?  It was the amazing “little show that could.”  Now Glee has completely exploded and everyone knows about it.  The flip side of the coin is that people who haven’t even seen it yet are sick of it.

The show will be back on Global TV in just a few week on and they’ve just released the first preview of the show’s second season.  Looks promising, but that probably doesn’t mean a thing!

As an example of how huge this show, watch how many blogs post this video today.

Good News:  Global TV’s summer hit Rookie Blue, has just been picked up for a second season.  Even better news is that ABC picked it up too!  The show premiered with over 2.1 millions viewers and has been maintaining great numbers ever since.  So really it was a no brainer, but this was the hit that Global TV so desperately needed.  I can’t think of the last time that they launched such a terrific original series.  (Sorry Train 48)

Bad News: Unfortunately CTV’s The Bridge hasn’t been as successful in the States.  It premiered this past Saturday with two episodes and the ratings weren’t good.  How bad were they?  Cops and America’s Funniest Home Videos got higher numbers.  Both of those shows are more than 20 years old.  Yikes.  So while the future of The Bridge doesn’t necessarily look good on CBS, CTV has already renewed this other cop series for a second season!

It seems that Canadian broadcasters might have a case of the Katie Couric-itis!

Last week, CTV announced that Lisa LaFlamme would be taking over Lloyd Robertson‘s seat for the CTV National News and then just this morning Global TV announced that Emmy Award-winning journalist Dawna “Never met a lipstick I didn’t like!” Friesen will take over for Kevin Newman on Global National.

All of a sudden Peter Mansbridge is in the minority!  (Now is your chance Wendy Mesely!)

I honestly don’t have a preference if my evening news anchor is a boy or girl, as long as they have a catchy sign-off.  (I’m still bummed that Ryan Seacrest dropped Seacrest-out.  I thought it worked.)

Either way it certainly is interesting that so many major networks seem to be switching to the female persuasion.  Maybe Lilith Fair is still relevant after all!

By now you’ve probably heard that Canada is getting their own versions of Top Chef and Wipeout. Which is great and I hope Canadians have a great time being on them.

But I have the question I always have to ask: Where the hell is our versions of Survivor and The Amazing Race.

I know, I know you’ve heard people complaining about it for years. But just yesterday Global and CTV released their annual ratings and both shows ranked very highly in the Top 10 Most watched shows in all of Canada. Actually, Survivor was #1. That’s right, in it’s twentieth season, Survivor still ranks as the highest rated show in our country!

So explain to me again how do you we not deserve own editions of these shows yet?

And it’s not like I haven’t thought this out. Obviously the costs of these shows would be exponential. So why don’t we just tag along on the american shows? As soon as Jeff Probst and Phil Keoghan, why don’t we swoop in with our Beaver Tails and Molson Canadians and start filming before they have a chance to pack up and leave?We could even run along the americans in the Amazing Race.  Hell most of us are bilingual, we’d probably end up passing them!  Plus, I’m sure Mark Burnett and Bert Van Munster wouldn’t mind the extra dough!

It is is obviously a huge risk, but one that pretty much has guaranteed results: If the ratings are so high for the american editions, imagine the ratings if we are given the chance to cheer for our family members, co-workers or fabulous gay friends!

Bring The Amazing Race and Survivor to Canada, we’ve earned our shot!

By now you’ve probably heard that Shaw has just bought Global, or was it that Global bought Shaw?  Someone bought something. Truthfully,  I never bother much with network financial troubles, mostly because it is only a matter of time before CTV owns everything anyway.

But while everyone else was busy crunching numbers and trading stocks, one very important piece of information may have slipped through the cracks.

This past Friday, my second favorite Canadian news anchor Kevin Newman, announced that he will be stepping away from the Global News desk by August. Obviously Lloyd Robertson is number one, but Newman is easily #2.  Kevin has always kinda felt like that uncle who was cool enough to save you from a boring family reunion and get drunk with you and your friends in a bowling alley.  But at the same time, he could explain to the difference between Iraq and Iran.  I have three uncles, trust me, that is no easy task.

In his career, Uncle Kev has won two Gemini Awards, two Emmy Awards and a Peabody Award.  Plus he tells the dirtiest jokes in front of your grandmother.

It will definitely be sad to see him leave. The TV landscape is obviously changing, I just wish he was still going to be a part of it.