Smartphones are killing commercials

By Jesse Brown - Tuesday, May 31, 2011 at 5:36 PM - 6 Comments

The remote control was supposed to kill off TV ads—audiences would just click away during commercial breaks. And we did, but only enough to make ads louder and more abrasive. Later the VCR was feared to be the commercial’s mortal enemy. We would all just tape shows and fast-forward through the ads. And we did…now and then. The same fears (and hopes) emerged when TiVos and DVRs hit the market. Now we wouldn’t need to pre-tape a whole show—just the first five or ten minutes worth, and then zip past those annoying adverts. But still, no dice. Turns out only 2% of ads ultimately get skipped over this way. Seems we like to watch TV as it comes, and “time-shifting” hardware has proven no match for the 30-second spot.

So what will kill the commercial? Phones.

AdAge reports on how spooky eyeball tracking technology was used in a recent study to measure how often TV viewers get distracted from ads, and by what. 60% of disruptions came by way of viewers’ smartphones. As Brian Monohan writes, “the challenge is not moving one’s thumb to push fast-forward, but rather moving one’s head to look at their smartphone.” Laptops, video games and other “companion media” also had an impact, but nothing near so damaging as phone use.

This is not so surprising. Before smartphones, the ad’s biggest competition was in fact the human being—we would wait until a commercial break to interact with the people we watch television with. In that sense, nothing is really changing—we’re just reading emails and checking social media instead of chatting with our friends and families. But whereas it was frustratingly impossible for advertisers to transfer their ad dollars from TV spots to sponsored live human conversations, GMail, Twitter and Facebook will happily sell brands access to our ad-time chatter.

Look for new “smart” ads that know what shows we’re watching and position their messages accordingly.

Down with television repeats

By Jaime Weinman - Wednesday, May 11, 2011 at 3:27 PM - 5 Comments

Here’s one thing I would like to say before the U.S. networks announce their fall schedules: reruns. Avoid them whenever possible. Except in the summer, and maybe not even then. And especially avoid them near the end of the season, in April and May.

Looking at the viewership numbers for a lot of shows this season, there seems to be a clear overall pattern – when a show takes some time off from airing new episodes, and it’s not for an occasion where nobody shows new episodes, then some viewers don’t come back when the new episodes do. Take Glee, which managed to avoid long stretches of repeats last season because of the split-season format it used. This season, it managed to hold steady for most of the season, even surviving a January hiatus with the help of a major launching pad (the post-Super Bowl episode) that gave it heavy promotion. But then it took some more time off in March and April: after the March 15 episode, it didn’t air another new episode until April 19. And since it’s come back, it’s lost 1-2 million viewers. You can find a similar dip in viewership for many shows around the same time – for example, Community got 4.4 million viewers for its March 24 episode, then had some reruns and pre-emptions, and came back a few weeks later (April 14) with a million viewers gone. It was already airing against Idol, which didn’t take that many viewers away from it – but reruns do what Idol cannot. NCIS took a break between April 12 and May 3, and two million viewers didn’t come back when it did.

It’s probably unwise for me to dwell too much on individual examples, since week-to-week or month-to-month declines have other explanations besides the repeats, and sometimes a show can buck the trend and go up if there are other factors working for it. But it’s a pattern, and it’s a pattern that makes sense. We hear all the time that viewers have more options than ever before. We also know that TV viewers are creatures of habit. If a show doesn’t provide a new episode for a couple of weeks, it may not turn us off the show, but it can break the habit – we may discover another show on cable, or we may just start recording it. The danger of finding another show during repeat weeks was less pronounced during the three-channel era because it was less likely that we could find something to give us exactly the same kind of entertainment at exactly the same time. It’s still not the likeliest thing in the world, but it’s more possible.

Networks realized some time ago that serialized shows don’t repeat well and that they needed to find ways to keep a steady flow of episodes: that’s one of the reasons for Fox’s famous trick of not starting 24 until Continue…

Fox Cancels Everything

By Jaime Weinman - Wednesday, May 11, 2011 at 12:46 AM - 9 Comments

Fox tonight was the first network to announce some of its 2010-11 pickups and cancellations – mostly cancellations. I don’t think Fox fully deserves its reputation as the evil cancellation-happy network; they’ve stayed with many shows through mediocre or worse ratings. But they’ve definitely decided to clean house this time, except for Fringe, which has already been renewed.

Simon Cowell is taking over the network with The X-Factor, which I greatly fear will be a crushing hit like it is all over the world, and that makes him the Jay Leno of Fox: everything has to go to make room for him. So in order to clear space for Cowell while still picking up some new scripted stuff, the network has canceled virtually all its “bubble” shows:

- Breaking In, which had decent ratings that were, however, heavily inflated by an American Idol lead-in, is gone. This makes Christian Slater’s third straight failed series.
- The Chicago Code is gone, making Shawn Ryan’s second canceled series in a year. This is the really sad one among the cancellations: a good cast and some good writing, plus the Chicago atmosphere Continue…

Watching TV may narrow blood vessels in childrens’ eyes: study

By macleans.ca - Monday, April 25, 2011 at 4:16 PM - 1 Comment

Kids who spent more time in front of televisions and computer screens, and less time outside, have narrowed blood vessels in their eyes, according to a new Australian study reported in the New York Times. Scientists looked at 1,492 six-year-olds across Sydney, and had their parents answer questionnaires about how much time they spent doing physical activity, versus sitting in front of a TV or computer. They then examined the kids’ eyes. Children who watched the most TV had blood vessels in their eyes that were slightly smaller in diameter than those who watched the least. Kids who exercised the least had narrowest vessels in their eyes. What it means for these children is still unknown.

New York Times

Direct appeal

By Aaron Wherry - Thursday, April 21, 2011 at 9:35 AM - 34 Comments

The Liberals will air a half-hour program on Sunday afternoon showcasing Mr. Ignatieff and the Liberal platform. From the official release:

“Michael Ignatieff’s Town Hall for Canada” will feature candid interviews with Mr. Ignatieff, and exclusive footage of him on the campaign trail in this election as he brings his message of hope to Canadians … “Michael Ignatieff’s Town Hall for Canada” will make the case directly to Canadians why the Liberal Party is the only choice in this election that can protect Canada’s universal public health care system and bring a new level of economic stability to Canadian families through the Liberal Family Pack.

Jackie Kennedy meets 'Dawson's Creek'

By Jaime Weinman - Saturday, April 9, 2011 at 9:00 AM - 6 Comments

Watching History TV’s The Kennedys (airing April 10), you might think it’s just another historical miniseries. It features heavy-handed irony (“My husband,” Jackie Kennedy tells a reporter, is “exactly who he appears to be”) and lots of Mad Men-style ’60s nostalgia, including Katie Holmes struggling to hold up under Jackie’s accent and hairdo. But it’s actually the most controversial miniseries since The Reagans. History TV’s U.S. equivalent, the History Channel, commissioned the show and then decided not to air it, declaring it was not accurate enough. Michael Prupas, head of Muse Entertainment in Montreal and one of the executive producers of the show, told Maclean’s ominously that this decision “came from higher places.”

Those “higher places” are rumoured to contain a bunch of Kennedy family members; the Los Angeles Times reported that Caroline Kennedy and Maria Shriver were “believed to have lodged private protests against the show.” But a lot of the pressure came from writers who feared a smear job against a key dynasty of the Democratic party. Rick Perlstein, author of such books as Nixonland, was one of several historians who denounced the project after reading a draft of the script where Joe Kennedy broke a crucifix: “Every kind of narrative argument being made was that the Kennedys had no redeeming qualities.” It didn’t help that one of the producers was Joel Surnow, the conservative creator of 24; he’s seen as part of what Perlstein calls “an entire infrastructure devoted to calumniating liberalism and the Democratic party,” and liberals feared the show was an attempt to validate Surnow’s world view.

Continue…

More Mad Men musings

By Jaime Weinman - Wednesday, March 30, 2011 at 4:22 PM - 3 Comments

Something I didn’t say in my previous post on the Matt Weiner vs. AMC fracas: As usual, there’s a lot we don’t know about what’s really going on in these negotiations. Especially since most of the leaks appear to be coming from one side – Weiner’s. And frequently, from Weiner himself. He gave an interview saying that contrary to initial reports, the network wants to cut not just two characters but a total of six, two a year. “A person familiar with the negotiations” gave the same story to another outlet, but the person is clearly on Weiner’s side and for all we know could be Weiner himself. Continue…

Netflix vs. the networks

By Jaime Weinman - Monday, March 28, 2011 at 5:42 PM - 0 Comments

Now that Netflix has driven video rental companies out of business, it’s going after the television networks. The online video-streaming company made a deal last week to produce its first original series, outbidding HBO and AMC for the rights to House of Cards, producer-star Kevin Spacey’s remake of an acclaimed British miniseries. Netflix reportedly won the rights to the show, featuring Spacey as an evil politician, by ordering 26 episodes up front without even making a pilot.

If the show succeeds, it could allow Netflix to displace cable TV: it doesn’t have the operating costs associated with a regular network, and instead of scheduling the show, it will simply release the episodes online, for people to sample whenever they want. Executives at Time-Warner, which owns HBO, were rattled enough that one of them ran to the Los Angeles Times denigrating Netflix’s chances: “It’s hard to see how that kind of economics can fit into a service that charges $8 or $10 a month, because the math doesn’t work.” Even if that’s true, Netflix may have no choice but to press ahead with its efforts; with Amazon and other companies starting their own streaming services, it can’t depend on other people’s movies and shows forever.

Google, Apple, and Netflix: tomorrow's entertainment studios?

By Jesse Brown - Tuesday, March 22, 2011 at 1:55 PM - 4 Comments

David Carr has posted some interesting thoughts on Google’s mission drift: though they’ll deny it ’til sundown, the search giant is slowly but surely getting into the content business.  They’re cutting deals with major league sports and with Hollywood studios. They’re investing millions in celebrity content for Youtube. And last month, they rolled out One Pass, an attempt to wrap a universal payment layer around “pro” publishing content.

Meanwhile, Netflix made headlines last week by trumping the cable TV networks and buying a new David Fincher series (sight unseen) for $100 million.  The news gobsmacked the entertainment industry, who considered Netflix merely a conduit for content, not a producer of it.  But the strategy is nothing new. Continue…

Cable Networks Have Hits and Flops Now

By Jaime Weinman - Monday, March 14, 2011 at 6:02 PM - 8 Comments

I’m a bit late to this discussion, but I took a slightly different meaning from this piece, where Tim Goodman argues that basic cable’s quality boom is in danger of being choked off by reality TV. The idea being that reality shows are at once the most popular and cheap fare on cable, and that the incentive for cable networks to produce high-quality scripted programming is being reduced.

The key case in this article, as in many recent articles, is FX, which has introduced two straight prestigious, critically-acclaimed dramas that completely failed to find an audience (Terriers and Lights Out). John Landgraf, the head of FX, has been sounding very frustrated lately with the change in the cable landscape, which has not only led to several high-profile flops but made it unprofitable to do the kind of complex serialized drama that he obviously likes. (Landgraf famously gave Damages a two-season renewal after its not-particularly-popular first season, a decision that proved financially unwise — and, considering that the show had nowhere to go after its exciting first season, probably creatively unwise as well.) Though the network has its share of critical and popular successes, like Justified, it’s no longer where it was a few years ago, when The Shield and Sons of Anarchy touched off serious talk of FX becoming the HBO of basic cable.

Even AMC, which pretty much is the HBO of basic cable, had to cancel the prestigious Rubicon, is having trouble getting another season of Mad Men off the ground, and broke through to mainstream success based on arguably (I said arguably) its creatively weakest show to date, The Walking Dead. Meanwhile the big basic cable success stories often involve shows that are not better-quality than broadcast network fare, and we’re not just talking about reality shows here. We’re talking about hits like The Game, Jersey Shore, Hot in Cleveland, Tosh.0 and Pretty Little Liars. All these shows are the flagship shows of their Continue…

Should We Watch TV Shows From the Beginning?

By Jaime Weinman - Monday, March 7, 2011 at 12:25 PM - 13 Comments

That’s an question that I’ve heard more often lately (though it’s been around for a while; I wrote another post addressing the issue a couple of years ago). Increasingly the answer is “yes.” The traditional way to encounter a TV show is just to drop in and start watching, and maybe catch up with the earlier episodes at a later date. But now that TV series are taken more seriously as complete and coherent works, to say nothing of the fact that we can watch from the beginning no matter how late we discover the show, there’s an increased preference for getting the full experience of the story from beginning to end. Even where the show deals mostly or partly in self-contained stories, like Justified or almost any half-hour comedy, many new viewers prefer to start from episode one.

It’s well-known, of course, that almost every TV series wants people to jump in in the middle, or at least that the creators wouldn’t object if we did. Different shows may provide different amounts of information to help new viewers get caught up, but with rare exceptions of shows that are very insular (usually limited-run shows) shows will provide signposts along the way to help people understand what’s going on, and ground the storylines in traditional emotional conflicts — love, hate, revenge, corporate machinations — that are familiar enough for new viewers to understand. Soap operas have been doing this for decades, and they’re constantly getting new followers who, after a few episodes, are completely aware of who these people are and what they want. Most shows’ mythologies and ongoing relationships are simple enough that a new viewer can understand them, maybe not the first time, but certainly without going back to the beginning.

But just because we can know what’s going on in a show doesn’t mean we really understand it, and the argument is that (particularly for a sophisticated show, or one that Continue…

Kicking television

By Aaron Wherry - Thursday, January 27, 2011 at 11:21 AM - 7 Comments

Conor Friedersdorf laments for television news.

There’s an important caveat that Benen left out: Olbermann offered something that couldn’t be found elsewhere on television. For liberals who like that medium, I’m sure the show proved cathartic. But wouldn’t they be better informed, more meaningfully entertained, and psychicly happier if just read Washington Monthly instead? Yes, I know, television is a very popular medium (mostly because it demands so little from its audience). But it is the worst way to engage politics in America. Compared to reading it is a wildly inefficient time suck. The format itself often strips the issue at hand of all nuance. It rewards demagoguery, and the host’s words disappear into the ether so fast that inaccuracies slip easily past and are seldom corrected for the people misled by them. Often as not, its producers and writers just take insights from the written medium and dumb them down.

Regis Philbin announces his retirement

By macleans.ca - Tuesday, January 18, 2011 at 11:30 AM - 1 Comment

Regis Philbin, who has hosted ABC’s Live With Regis and Kelly (originally Live With Regis and Kathie Lee) since the 1980s, announced today that he will be stepping down from the show. The 79-year-old Philbin spent many years as a host on both television and radio; he was selected by comedian Joey Bishop to be his sidekick on a talk show that tried, and failed, to take on Johnny Carson. In addition to his talk show duties, he also hosted ABC’s version of Who Wants to Be a Millionare?, which became one of the biggest hits of its era. He also appeared as himself on my other talk shows and TV series like How I Met Your Mother, and had a role in Woody Allen’s movie Everything You Always Wanted To Know About Sex But Were Afraid to Ask. Live will continue after Philbin’s departure, slated for the summer; the network is looking for a new host to work with Philbin’s co-star, Kelly Ripa.

Deadline

Is TV More Ephemeral Than Ever?

By Jaime Weinman - Sunday, January 2, 2011 at 11:44 AM - 17 Comments

Yesterday I made a snarky comment that was at least partly serious. I said that most cult flop TV shows are like American Idol contestants: they’re incredibly important for a few months, and then they’re forgotten as soon as the show is over. Every year there are some shows that make 10-best lists, get save-our-show campaigns, and inspire more online discussion than most hits. Then they’re canceled and they vanish from the discussion; even those of us who loved them no longer have much to say about them. The show that goes away and still lingers in the public memory — the Freaks & Geeks type of thing — is rare.

One one level this isn’t surprising, since most flop shows are more potential than fulfilment, and that becomes much clearer after they’re gone. Terriers, for example. I liked Terriers a lot, as I’ve said; it was my favourite new show of 2010, and one of the few that actually seemed to be a fully-formed, professionally-made show instead of something that was just potentially good. I still think that. But now that it’s canceled, the “heat” surrounding it will fade, and it might not seem as much of a stand-out as it did when it was the best of a poor crop of new shows. To bring back the Idol analogy, we’re very interested in a great contestant undeservedly losing to inferior ones. That doesn’t usually mean we’re going to follow that person once the competition is over. And a show that gets some cult attention while it’s still on is much more common than a show that builds a cult after it’s gone.

I think it’s not just flop shows, though, that start by getting a ton of attention and then are quickly forgotten. It seems to happen a lot. I can’t prove that, of course, but I think I see this cycle happening with a number of shows: they start out with an incredible amount of online (and critical) discussion, praise and argumentation, and then when they’re gone, they’re gone — nobody seems to talk about them any more. It’s inevitable that a show will lose a lot of its cultural currency once it’s no longer making new episodes; it’s not only inevitable, it may even be right and good. But a show doesn’t have to fade away completely after it stops making new episodes. Thanks to syndication, DVDs and just the fact that some of the characters became part of the language, shows like Seinfeld and Friends were probably bigger than some new shows after they were canceled; Mulder and Scully are still well-known character archetype;s and people who grew up in the ’80s still hold up many cartoons and action shows as cultural icons.

I’m not going to say that isn’t happening now, because nothing ever really stops happening. But it does strike me that it’s less common for a show that started in the ’00s to continue to be really, really famous after it’s over. More common is something like Lost, which seemed to fade away almost as soon as it ended. Even 24, the ’00s show that probably had the most cultural impact, seemed to lose its heat after it ended or maybe even a little bit before; unlike Sex and the City, it hasn’t even been able to spin off a movie version yet.

Of course, Lost and 24 and other serialized shows have the usual disadvantage in keeping themselves in the public eye: they don’t syndicate well, whereas something like SATC does Continue…

Hawaii 5-0's "Danno" dies

By macleans.ca - Thursday, October 28, 2010 at 5:32 PM - 0 Comments

Actor James MacArthur, best known for his role as Jack Lord’s sidekick Danny on the long-running TV series Hawaii 5-0, has died at the age of 72. MacArthur, the son of playwright Charles MacArthur (The Front Page) and adopted son of actress Helen Hayes, had a forty-year acting career that included a great deal of work in films and stage, including a number of live-action films for Walt Disney. But his greatest success was on television, where his supporting role on Hawaii 5-0 gave him eleven years of employment (he left the show before its final season). His character was best known for being the recipient of Lord’s catchphrase “Book ‘em, Danno.” MacArthur was reportedly considering a guest appearance on the current remake of Hawaii 5-0 before he died.

Telegraph

Kicking television

By Aaron Wherry - Thursday, October 28, 2010 at 1:41 PM - 0 Comments

Ken Dryden laments for the squawk box.

“When interaction is based on punchlines, we get nowhere,” Dryden says. He cites the example of the political panels on TV, in which partisans are seen to excel if they hold their ground and repeat their talking points until the segment is over.

“The only meaning that comes across is the conflict. What’s the message of that five-minute interaction between five people? It doesn’t have to do with the subject; it has to do with the conflict.”

When your dinner guests are out to get you

By Jacob Richler - Tuesday, October 26, 2010 at 2:00 PM - 0 Comments

‘You take wildly different people who would never meet and put them in a room and see what happens,’ says a show insider | W NETWORK

Deep in Mississauga, Ont., on a balmy September evening, a two-camera television production crew, four dinner guests, a handful of producers, PR flacks and other interested observers (well, me) sat huddled in virtual silence in a cramped basement apartment, while over in the kitchenette, a vivacious, blond woman named Cathy struggled to assert control over some defeatingly bouncy scallops.

When she at last wrestled them onto her square black dishes, she looked up at the nearest camera in triumph—but only briefly—for as she did so she caught sight of a neglected bottle sitting on top of the fridge. An overlooked ingredient? No, it was just the badly needed wine, which Cathy had evidently been keeping all to herself, while over at the dinner table her guests struggled with conversation unassisted. Even baseball wasn’t working (“Alex Rodriguez . . . he plays for the Blue Jays, right?”). So Cathy materialized to nervously splash some lubricating red plonk into four, thoughtfully chilled stemmed water glasses. Yes, into the frozen water glasses. But this was not a mistake on which to dwell. It was time to serve her appetizer—“the salty sea,” crusted scallops served with cucumber salad—and, according to my watch anyway, they were already stone cold and then some.

Continue…

The future, or a flop?

By Josh Dehaas - Thursday, October 21, 2010 at 8:00 AM - 0 Comments

Kimimasa Mayama/Bloomberg/Getty Images

At a recent trade show in Tokyo, Toshiba unveiled a 3-D television that doesn’t require users to wear bulky glasses. “A dream TV is now a reality,” said Masaaki Oosumi, president of Toshiba Visual Products. The main impediment to widespread 3-D TV adoption has always been that consumers—at least half of them, according to Nielsen research—refuse to buy 3-D TVs because of the hassle of wearing special glasses.

Despite that obstacle, industry research firm iSuppli estimates that by 2015, 40 per cent of TVs sold will be 3-D. Other manufacturers are betting on 3-D, too. Nintendo will soon launch a glasses-free hand-held gaming console, the 3DS. But even as manufacturers rush to churn out more 3-D products, some analysts say the sales predictions are too bullish. “If [the iSuppli forecast] is true, I’ll eat my light bulb,” says Alan Middleton, a consumer behaviour expert at the Schulich School of Business in Toronto. It’s true that Toshiba has overcome the biggest hurdle to mainstream adoption, but consumers can be fickle, says Middleton. For one thing, 3-D appeals particularly to sports fans and their “dream TV” doesn’t max out at 20 inches, like the new Toshiba. It also likely costs less than the Toshiba’s $2,950 price tag. Then there’s the question of comfort. The new Toshiba model produces its 3-D effect by shooting nine beams of light at each eye at slightly different angles. But to get a clear picture, viewers need to position themselves at a specific angle to the screen.

Another challenge for manufacturers will be to convince the average consumer to buy 3-D TVs when most TV content still isn’t filmed in 3-D. After all, “no one seriously expects all TV programming to gradually be converted to 3-D, unlike HD,” says Stewart Clarke, editor of TV industry magazine TBI. “There’s unlikely to be much demand to watch the six o’clock news in 3-D,” he adds. For those reasons, Clarke says it’s still too early to know if 3-D will become the new standard at home. Middleton agrees. “Mass adoption is certainly not going to happen in five years,” he says. “In 10 years, it’s possible, but before then? I expect not.”

The telecom contrarian

By Chris Sorensen - Thursday, September 30, 2010 at 1:20 PM - 0 Comments

Adrian Wyld/CP/ Jessica Darmanin

Three years ago, Telus Corp. chief executive Darren Entwistle and the company’s board of directors were considering a bid for phone giant BCE Inc., a move that would have created a telecom colossus with annual sales of more than $26 billion. While Telus’s bid never materialized (Entwistle blamed “inadequacies” in BCE’s bidding process), the fact that it was being contemplated at all highlighted the degree to which the Burnaby, B.C.-based telco was the more muscular of the two former phone monopolies, even if the Bell parent was bigger.

These days, though, Telus is increasingly being viewed as an also-ran in the fast-moving telecommunications sector. BCE’s recent decision to pay $1.3 billion for the 85 per cent of the CTV television network that it didn’t already own means Telus is now the only big communications company in Canada that’s not in the TV content game—Rogers Communications Inc. (which owns Maclean’s) has CityTV and Sportsnet, Quebecor Inc. owns Vidéotron, which is launching a wireless service in Quebec, and Shaw Communications Inc. purchased the television assets of Canwest Global Communications Corp. earlier this year for $2 billion. And some are suggesting that could be a big problem for Telus if rivals start using exclusive television programs and sports content to lure new customers to their wireless and other services.

Continue…

Piers Morgan to replace Larry King

By macleans.ca - Wednesday, September 8, 2010 at 3:51 PM - 0 Comments

CNN has announced that Piers Morgan will be taking over the time slot being vacated by Larry King. After the veteran King announced the end of “Larry King Live,” Morgan, a British journalist and TV host, was widely considered the front-runner to replace him. The struggling CNN is attempting to boost its low ratings with new hosts, and they hope that Morgan will provide King’s softball interview style with a younger and cooler twist. CNN President Jon Klein’s announcement also suggests that Morgan will look at the news “with style and humour with an occasional good laugh in the process.”

CTV News

Shania Twain next 'American Idol' judge?

By macleans.ca - Friday, August 13, 2010 at 11:58 AM - 0 Comments

The celebrity gossip site TMZ has reported that Shania Twain is set to be the next American Idol judge if Jennifer Lopez doesn’t get the position. Two days ago, People magazine reported that a source said that Lopez’s talks had fallen through because of her diva behavior. The show is looking for a new judge after Ellen DeGeneres announced that she would leave the series in late July citing scheduling issues. Her departure was the second major blow to the series in the past six months: Simon Cowell, arguably the show’s most famous host, left in January.

TV Watch

TMZ

"Live! With Regis & Kelly" from PEI

By macleans.ca - Monday, July 12, 2010 at 11:13 AM - 0 Comments

Regis Philbin and his “Live! With Regis & Kelly” co-host Kelly Ripa have arrived in Prince Edward Island to begin filming their daytime talk-show. The show, which will broadcast from PEI July 12 to 15, will show off the island’s scenery and culture. P.E.I.’s tourism office pitched the idea of hosting the show in the hopes that “Live! With Regis & Kelly” will bring attention and more visitors to the island. “We really felt that what we had to offer was a secret location people did not know much about,” said spokesperson Brenda Gallant. But bringing the show to P.E.I. cost the taxpayers $1 million, amounting to a fifth of the province’s yearly tourism advertising budget.

CTV News

Lloyd Robertson calls it quits

By macleans.ca - Friday, July 9, 2010 at 9:32 AM - 0 Comments

Lloyd Robertson, who has been the news anchorman of CTV since 1976, has announced his retirement. The Stratford native, who is 76, will be stepping down from CTV News With Lloyd Robertson next year. Robertson first came to national attention as a news broadcaster at the CBC; he was the host of The National in the early ’70s. At CTV, where he became sole anchor in 1983, he has announced most of the big events of the last 30 years. He was also parodied as the recurring character “Floyd Robertson” on the sketch comedy SCTV. CTV has already chosen Robertson’s replacement and plans to announce him or her soon; Robertson will share duties with his successor for the next year, before stepping down and moving on to other roles at CTV.

Toronto Star

Emmy nominations announced

By macleans.ca - Thursday, July 8, 2010 at 11:26 AM - 0 Comments

Glee and Mad Men are the biggest contenders at the 62nd Emmy awards on August 29. Glee, the show about a high school glee club, is nominated for 19 awards, including Best Comedy. Modern Family and
Emmy-darling 30 Rock also cleaned up, with 15 and 14 nominations each, including Best Comedy nods. Mad Men, which is set in a glamorous 1960s Madison Avenue advertising firm lead the pack of dramatic shows with 17 nominations. The series 24 got a surprisingly low five nominations, but it didn’t get snubbed nearly as badly as the recently cancelled Law and Order, which wasn’t nominated for anything.

LA Times