Pass the popcorn, and the remote

Click here to listen to Roger Currie’s commentary on private commercial TV in Canada

Private commercial television in Canada is mostly controlled by two groups these days. There’s the Shaw Group that owns Global, and Bell Media which owns CTV.

Monday evening, April 29^th, just before the tax deadline, the networks have the season finales of two very different one hour drama series. The Following, on CTV, is about the most offensive program I have ever watched on Canadian television. It is horrendously violent, and beyond that I don’t want to say any more about it.

Over on Global, the curtain will fall on the second season of Bomb Girls. Despite attracting an audience of more than one and a half million for the early episodes back in January, there will not be a third season for this very good show about Canadian women working in a munitions factory in the darkest days of World War Two.

It’s very good storytelling about part of Canada’s relatively recent past, that most of us postwar Boomers know very little about. The show got great reviews and captured several awards, but the ratings tanked last month when Global moved Bomb Girls from Wednesday to Monday, putting it up against – you guessed it –  The Following.

Shows like  Bomb Girls are always destined to be ‘non-recurring events’ it seems. The cost to produce them is high, well over a million dollars an episode.

It’s cheaper to buy American shows off the shelf, as we have always done in this country. Global has announced that next season there will be a two hour movie to wrap up the storylines on Bomb Girls. 

They haven’t said where it might be shot. It could be North Carolina. It certainly won’t happen in Saskatchewan. A year ago, Brad Wall killed the movie and TV industry in Rider Nation. Even Corner Gas will have to go elsewhere if they ever shoot a reunion.

Please pass the popcorn, and the remote.

I’m Roger Currie