Crave TV orders up first original series: Letterkenny

Letters, Aug 21

Let them put U.S. booze back on the shelves. Then let’s simply not buy it. Our governments can’t be blamed by the U.S. and individual Canadians can make a point.

Planned Elmwood Hub project combines 115 mixed-income housing units, social supports, programs

A long-awaited project will aim to add 115 new homes in Elmwood, with on-site social programs to support some of its more vulnerable residents.

Finish summer strong with these fun, relaxing options

Late summer can feel neither here nor there.

As on a Sunday night, a certain back-to-school or -work melancholy sets in. The big Manitoba festivals have come and gone. You’re starting to take a reckoning of all the craft beer and food-truck calories you’ve sopped up for two months, without having done as much hiking, canoeing or yard work as you promised yourself.

The wind begins breathing threats of fall, but the golden colours, jack-o’- lanterns and corn mazes aren’t here yet to reassure you of fall’s dusky pleasures. Instead, on a perfect 22 C day, you find yourself having flashbacks of Winnipeg winter nights colder than Mars.

Are we being overly depressing? Absolutely.

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.

Provincial teacher watchdog releases names, details in three disciplinary matters

An Interlake teacher with a history of “intimidating” outbursts has been ordered to participate in counselling and study anger-management strategies after he made a child cry.