Crave TV orders up first original series: Letterkenny

Crave TV orders up first original series: Letterkenny

Bell Media’s recently launched streaming-content service, Crave TV, has ordered its first original Canadian series, and it’s a beauty: a half-hour comedy called Letterkenny, inspired by a wildly popular series of online mini-sodes about a couple of fast-talking tough guys in a rural Ontario town.

Letterkenny Problems, which has garnered more than eight million online views and received a 2014 Canadian Screen Award for best web series, is a collection of five short videos — none longer than two minutes in length — in which two Letterkenny country boys, played by Jared Keeso (19-2) and Nathan Dales (King & Maxwell), rattle off a rapid-fire series of insults and profane observations about the hicks, “skids” and hockey players that irritate them on a daily basis.

Crave TV’s version of Letterkenny will follow good ol’ boy Wayne (Keeso) as he tries to protect his farm-based lifestyle and attitude against the threats that the ever-evolving outside world keeps delivering to his doorstep.

In a Bell Media release, CTV/Crave TV’s senior vice-president of programming, Mike Cosentino, called Letterkenny “raw, authentic and unlike anything we’ve seen before,” and predicted the six half-hour episodes commissioned for Crave TV will be standouts in the service’s comedy collection.

The scoop on lawn bowling

If you’ve ever wondered what bowls — better known as lawn bowling — is all about, the Free Press has the scoop on it.

First off, to get you in the right headspace it’s important to not compare bowls to alley bowling. Although there is a ball that is rolled, there are no pins at the end to knock down. Bowls is better compared to curling and bocce ball.

The game is played on a turf known as a rink. The rink can be made of grass — a bowling green — or carpet.

Both types of rinks have advantages and disadvantages, with players usually having a preference. With grass turf, bowlers need more force while rolling the ball to make it through the thicker terrain, while carpet is a smooth surface and requires a lighter touch.

Unsafe conditions force Sea Bears, Honey Badgers into winner-take-all CEBL final in Winnipeg Saturday

BRAMPTON — The Canadian Elite Basketball League’s new Finals format lasted one minute and 46 seconds.

And it’s possible even that was too long.

What was supposed to be a historic best-of-three series between the Winnipeg Sea Bears and the Brampton Honey Badgers will now return to the league’s previous format of a single-game elimination. Wednesday’s Game 1 at the CAA Centre in Southern Ontario was cancelled shortly after tip-off due to condensation on the court, which made the playing surface unsafe for competition.

The championship will flip to the Manitoba capital for a single, winner-take-all contest at Canada Life Centre on Saturday (2:30 p.m.).

Icy relationship with U.S. beginning to thaw at border, data shows; American visits to Manitoba hit five-year high

As Canadians begin to lower their elbows and start to cross the U.S. border again, Americans are coming to Manitoba in numbers not seen in years.

Ducks Unlimited makes province’s largest-ever conservation-land purchase

A Manitoba landscape that helped save the Giant Canada goose from extinction has now been permanently protected in the province’s largest conservation land purchase in history.

Signs the Carney approach is working

It was, if nothing else, a glowing review in trying times.

Matt Winkler, the editor in chief emeritus of Bloomberg News, spoke last week on Bloomberg Business News Daily about a recent Bloomberg analysis of the performance of the Canadian economy, and this country as a target for investment

“This is one of the greatest periods for overseas investment in Canada that we’ve seen in the century, and it may be unprecedented, because we have to wait for the rest of the year. … Money is pouring into Canada like we have not seen from everywhere. Stocks and bonds are the obvious beneficiaries,” Winkler said. He argued that Canada is both liked and seen as reasonable.

“The point is… Canada since Mark Carney became prime minister in 2025, has outperformed everyone in America and also the Eurozone and anywhere in the world. The 10 largest stock markets in the world, Canada appreciated the most, more than 40 per cent. … Its bond market is also doing great, partially because the inflation rate in Canada, unlike the Eurozone or America, is actually trending lower, and is outperforming both the Eurozone and the U.S.”