Mediocre "Letterkenny" headlines a frustrating experience with Crave TV

The cast of the new Crave TV comedy "Letterkenny".
Photo Credit: Bell Media

(A caveat: I feel the need to preface this anytime I write about a Canadian series, particularly one about which I have a negative opinion : I do not begrudge any Canadian television show for being made; in fact its existence in at least one aspect makes me happy. More Canadian television needs to be produced outside of the CBC. I don't care right now if the programming is not top notch. I'm just happy someone is putting in the time, money, and resources to make it exist at all. More please, and stat.)

It was around last Christmas when my brother asked me something to the effect of, "so I guess Shomi is the new Rogers thing now?" I really had no idea what he was talking about - somehow I had missed being inundated with television commercials for Rogers and Shaw's joint streaming video venture that had launched a month prior. It didn't help that my mother seemed convinced that Shomi was actually a rebrand of the Rogers On Demand service (it isn't, though Rogers sure did a good job of burying their VOD platform in service of Shomi).

Before long though, commercials for Shomi and it's competitor, the Bell-owned Crave TV, popped up everywhere and it became all too easy for me to compare and contrast the services even without actually subscribing to them. Crave offered a deeper program catalogue even before signing deals for the HBO and Showtime libraries, for less than half the cost of Shomi, whose commercials seemed to always feature the same five popular series in every single commercial (i.e., the only ones they had streaming rights to). Neither service seemed "necessary," even as I recognized that I was basically spouting the Canadian version of, "but I already have Netflix, why do I need to subscribe to Amazon?". But they seemed harmless, and if the existing daily schedules of Bell's network and cable channels was deemed insufficient as an on-demand "Big Bang Theory" delivery system, Canadians were welcome to pay $4 a month for their hit.

A(nother) rant against Global, and my frustration with the current landscape of Canadian television

     The stars arrive Sunday (January 19) night for "Global
     Presents The 20th Annual Screen Actors Guild Awards
     Live Asterisk".

If you happened to have stumbled across these parts this time last year, you might remember me laying in to Global TV, truly a perfect shining example of Canadian television, for absolutely shitting the bed with regards to their telecast of the 19th Annual Screen Actors Guild Awards. For viewers like myself watching on the east coast, the first 40 minutes of the broadcast (or roughly one third of the show) were spent watching a rerun of an ancient home renovation show called "From the Ground Up with Debbie Travis" while Global flashed a crawl on the screen telling us the SAG Awards would start soon*

(*Just as soon as the network frantically tries to figure out why they were not getting a signal of the show into the country).

Well this year, in a horrifying feat of spectacular trainwreckery, Global managed to outdo themselves.   Now credit where credit is due, they did manage to air the entire show this year (or so I am led to believe), which might make those two hours the most successful broadcast in the network's history. But this year they decided to air the show on a delay of 24 hours - the awards were presented, and aired on American cable channels TBS and TNT, last Saturday (January 18) night, while Global opted to air the telecast on Sunday (January 19) night.

Leaving aside the fact that, as someone pointed out to me on Twitter, E! carried a live red carpet pre-show on the Saturday night anyway (someone high up in an office at a Canadian broadcaster really did just decide at some point that we're all stupid and everyone else has run with that idea for years if not decades), the decision to delay the show by a day is really baffling to me. The idea was tossed around that Global didn't want to compete with CBC's broadcast of "Hockey Night in Canada," but to me that's a much preferable form of ratings competition than CTV's Sunday night broadcast of the NFC championship game. Global said in a statement that they were delaying the SAG Awards to air them on a night that was more convenient for their audience - which either means they felt it was more convenient to ensure their audience they would see the entire show this year (not a good reason in any way to delay the telecast), or decided that because we as idiots are used to seeing such an event on a Sunday night (or that there are more of us around to mindlessly gawk at them), we won't mind that the winners will have been known for 22 hours beforehand.

Global's continued butchering of the SAG Awards is just one symptom of a larger problem for Canadian TV nerds like myself, and it's this: yes, we get all (or at least most) of the programming we know and love - but we have no way of watching it in a non-bastardized form.

Global's SAG screwup reflects a network in shambles

     "Homeland" star Claire Danes reacts to winning the SAG
     Award for Female Actor in a Drama Series Sunday night.

A funny thing happened on Canadian television last night.

No, that's not right. Allow me to rephrase. A funny thing didn't happen on Canadian television last night.

Hmm, still not exactly right, since even for TBS and TNT viewers in the United States, the 19th Annual Screen Actors Guild Awards probably weren't a laugh riot.

Okay, how about this: a super weird, ridiculously embarrassing thing happened on Canadian television last night. A major screwup the likes of which I can't remember ever seeing before.

If you could just go ahead and shut up about how NBC broadcasts the Olympics, that'd be great

     Opening ceremonies of the Summer Olympics in London.

There's been a fair bit of outrage on Twitter tonight regarding NBC's presentation of the opening ceremonies of the 2012 London Summer Olympics. Some of it is deserved, like the excessive commercial breaks that wouldn't be necessary if NBC didn't overpay for the television rights to these games again. Some if it is totally deserved - if Bob Costas and Matt Lauer did indeed spend the duration of Kazakhstan's entrance in the Parade of Nations talking about Borat (as Twitter tells me they did) then obviously that's not journalism and just very ignorant. That being said, allow me to offer a couple bullet point forms of defense.

- Tape delay: There are pros and cons here. You have to keep in mind both that a) there is a 5 hour time difference between London and the east coast of the United States, and b) NBC is still a television network that makes most of its money broadcasting in primetime. The argument that social media has killed the tape delay is only half right. Sure, CBS should continue to be nailed for tape delaying the Grammys every year on the West Coast considering they air on a Sunday and are produced in Los Angeles; but NBC should not be nailed for airing this event in primetime because fun fact: the majority of Americans were working today, a Friday, at 4:00pm eastern time and would have no way of seeing this event live. That's not to say that one of NBC's cable channels, like USA, couldn't have aired this live instead of the three reruns of "Law and Order: Special Victims Unit" that it aired during those hours instead. That's because it's much easier for them to do that than for NBC to clear three hours from every one of their affiliates to air the opening ceremonies live. An event this big is going to be talked about, even if it's three hours later than when it actually happened. The West Coast tape delay of the opening ceremonies are proving that right now. NBC Sports is another contended to air this event live, but at the time they were already showing Olympic coverage in the form of men's soccer.

- America, ra-ra-ra: Please stop. America is far from the only nation to do this. If you watched CTV's coverage in Canada as I did, then you must remember watching Brian Williams and Lisa LaFlamme babble over footage of Canadian athletes walking through the entire stadium as between five and ten countries behind them were ignored entirely. The countries with the biggest teams, like Australia, Canada, and the U.S. among others, will usually have commercials aired over them because nobody wants to watch 200+ person teams walk through the stadium as the commentators have run out of things to read from the notes they printed off Wikipedia. The Olympics are extremely political, so it's kind of pointless to complain when more coverage is given to a team of hundreds than to a team of 4. Also, coverage will always vary by country because they're trying to try to offer you a take on the games from your own nationality. Because of the primetime tape delay NBC uses, they get complaints about their coverage focusing too much on the American team. Umm...what? They have three primetime hours to sum up the day's highlights, and the people who watch the games in that format want to hear first and foremost about the American team. Canadian television operates on a different model and because of that, coverage will be ongoing all throughout the day on the main CTV network and can therefore more easily cover a broader scope of nations that will otherwise be ignored. Don't blame NBC - this would happen on any major American network. It's just the biz, folks.