CTV first off mark with fall lineup

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 04/06/2002 (8552 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

TORONTO — It’s the first week of June; the leaves are out (finally), the grass is green (finally), and the birds have stopped shivering and started singing those old familiar songs.

In TVCriticLand, this can only mean the arrival of one season: fall.

That’s right, fall, not summer. Here in the centre of the Canadian TV universe, this is the week when television networks unveil their plans for the upcoming prime-time season — that odd, only-in-Canada patchwork of new and old programs, home-grown and imported shows, and a few potential hits mixed in with a bunch of certain failures.

CTV was the first of Canada’s major broadcasters to step into the fall-launch spotlight, and the 2002-03 season features nearly a dozen new offerings, a third encounter with U.S. cable’s most notorious mobsters and a return to full-time prime time for one of Canuck TV’s most popular characters.

CTV will add four new imported hour-long dramas — CBS’s heavily hyped C.S.I.: Miami, Fox’s pulse-pounding road-cops show Fastlane, NBC’s inner-city police drama Boomtown and the WB’s moody family drama Everwood.

The roster of new comedies includes two Canadian offerings, The Holmes Show (starring rising sketch-com star Jenny Holmes) and Just For Laughs, and four U.S. programs, including three from ABC — 8 Simple Rules for Dating My Teenage Daughter (starring John Ritter), Life With Bonnie (as in Hunt), Less Than Perfect (starring Popular alumnus Sara Rue) — and a Wonder-Years-ish Fox arrival, Oliver Beene.

CTV will also broadcast Season 3 of The Sopranos, beginning next March, and will present a second season of the home-grown Degrassi: The Next Generation featuring Pat Mastroianni as the matured but still irrepressible Joey Jeremiah.

Early next year, CTV will unveil its newest Canadian-made drama — The Eleventh Hour, which examines life inside a TV newsmagazine show.

Returning hits in the CTV lineup include C.S.I.: Crime Scene Investigation, Third Watch, The West Wing, Law & Order, Charmed, L&O: SVU, L&O: C.I., Alias, ER and The Amazing Race.

The network will also air at least 10 new Canadian-made TV movies during the 2002-03 season, led by the fact-based drama 100 Days in the Jungle, which examines the kidnapping of eight oil-pipeline workers by Colombian guerillas in Ecuador. Its stellar Canadian cast includes Aidan Devine, Michael Riley, Nicholas Campbell, William B. Davis, Jonathan Scarfe and Brendan Fletcher.

CTV’s top programmer described this year’s crop of rookie U.S. shows as uniformly strong but without anything that falls into the absolutely-can’t-miss category like The West Wing and C.S.I. have in recent years.

“Sometimes, you see something and you go, “Ohmigod, I MUST have that,'” said Susanne Boyce, CTV’s president of programming. “There wasn’t really anything like that this year.”

Boyce added that the emergence of high-profile and critically acclaimed made-for-cable shows like The Sopranos and Six Feet Under has forced the commercial U.S. networks to bring better dramas to their schedules.

“I think HBO has really set a benchmark,” she said. “The quality that is on cable has now moved over to conventional (TV).”

The addition of now-grownup actor Pat Mastroianni to the cast of Degrassi: TNG brings the show’s complement of original-series characters to three: Joey, Spike (Amanda Stepto) and Snake (Stefan Brogren).

Mastroianni said he has stopped trying to distance himself from the character that made him a small-scale star and possibly short-circuited his chances of ever having a more diversified acting career.

“If you would have asked me about this five years ago, I would have said, ‘Never — I am so done with Degrassi and Joey Jeremiah,'” he explained. “I went through a phase where I wanted to get as far away from that as possible; I felt, as an actor, that I had to move on.

“The (Degrassi) reunion special last summer was a wonderful surprise… and the idea of coming back and playing Joey again really appealed to me. I had gone through that whole rejection stage, and then I began to embrace it again. Now I’m at a point in my life where I feel that if this (Joey) is what I’m remembered for in Canada, that’s great. What could be better than to be remembered for a show that helped a bunch of kids who grew up watching it?”

Next up in Toronto: CBC’s fall launch.