Carla Collins is a minor Canadian celebrity.  Her main claim to fame is co-hosting BBS/CTV’s Entertainment Now/eNow from 1995 to 2001, which led to the 2000 sketch comedy series Chez Carla.  When that project died the death of most Comedy Network shows, she hosted CTV’s short-lived 2001 variety show Sonic Temple.  Her most substantial Canadian role was as Rusty Sinclair on Paradise Falls.  The last few years of her life have seen Collins move to the Los Angeles area to strike it big there.

I’m not sure what Carlawood (TVtropolis: starts April 19, 9:00 PM) is supposed to be.  Lone Eagle Entertainment tries to sell it as “Curb Your Enthusiasm meets Kathy Griffin: My Life on the D-List,” and I can’t see that high concept.  Collins is not nearly as bitchy or as outspoken as Kathy Griffin or Larry David.  Also, to be Curb Your Enthusiasm means heavy use of profanity, something Carlawood isn’t capable of.

Carlawood doesn’t make Southern California look all that weird.  The first episode has Collins reading through an audition for a romantic comedy.  The casting director moonlights as a psychiatrist, comedian and salsa dancer.  Collins makes out like the casting director’s a total nutcase.  Despite wearing many hats, he seems more obnoxious than eccentric.  Collins was a comedian/radio jock/entertainment show host/weathergirl in Canada, so she’s one to talk about hyphenates.

Tyrone Power, Jr., Collins’ current husband, comes across as goofy and likable.  Power is on crutches throughout the episode, as he injured himself standing on a rock.  He was on one foot and a huge tidal wave hit him.  Now that’s eccentric!  Of course, Collins has to bounce jokes off Power, since Carla Carla Carla.

I’m not expecting schadenfreude on the level of Hogan Knows Best or The Osbournes, but Carlawood is mundane.  Nothing happens in the first episode.  Carla Collins goes to a casting session, markets her stage show and walks her dog Buster.  Maybe the show gets weirder after a few episodes, since the first episode is mainly setup.

Carlawood was supposed to debut April 1 on E!, Canwest’s secondary broadcast network.  E! is dying, so moving this show to TVtropolis was the right move.  Carlawood fits right in with reruns of TV Made Me Do It and Vanity Insanity.  There might be an audience for Carlawood, but I know I don’t belong in it.

People seem to overlook the forces of CanCon that created the Bob & Doug (Global: starts April 19, 7:30 PM) phenomenon.  As has been exhaustively reiterated, CBC wanted Canadian filler for its version of SCTV Network 90, which was two minutes longer than the American version.

Not fond of the request, Rick Moranis and Dave Thomas generally pissed around at the end of a shooting day, talking about various Canadian inanities in the most stereotypical manner ever.  The sketches were meant as throwaways, a collective up-yours to government-mandated culture.

Come 2009, Kanadian Korner/Great White North has spawned two albums, a feature-length film, an anniversary special and this new animated series.  It’s SCTV’s most enduring cultural legacy, which is a shame as Count Floyd was a better character.  Bob and Doug get Strange Brew while Count Floyd rates a how-to video.  It’s an unfair 3D world…of slavechicks!  Ha ha ha!

I had apprehensions about Bob & Doug before it debuted.  This show had been languishing in development hell since at least 2003.  A preview was released as part of the Strange Brew DVD, but that title debuted on DVD in 2002.  Needless to say, I had visions of Bob & Doug being unwatchable.

Luckily, Bob & Doug isn’t horrible.  It’s not great, but it’s better than I figured it was going to be.  For an almost thirty-year-old franchise, Bob & Doug is surprisingly vital.

Dave Coulier is alright as the voice of Bob McKenzie, although he’s no Rick Moranis.  Dave Thomas is off-model as Doug McKenzie, which isn’t surprising since he’s edging sixty.  Thomas sounds more like himself than he does his principal character.  It doesn’t take away from Bob & Doug’s quality, but it’s noticeable enough.

The voiceover cast includes Patrick McKenna, Derek McGrath, Neil Crone, Ron Pardo and Michael Dunston.  It’s a given that the voiceover acting is more jarring than in an American series, but casting Maurice LaMarche for an episode was a good move.  The last Canadian adult animated series I heard him in was Tripping the Rift, so Bob & Doug is a step up.  I’m also not surprised to hear Jayne Eastwood on the show, since she’s about one-quarter of all Canadian acting.

Bob & Doug takes the post-modern tack of many cartoons, ignoring the fourth wall and making self-aware references to itself.  There are asides where Bob & Doug cut from the action to explain the episode’s concept to the audience.  The show even parodies popular culture much like The Simpsons.  Bob & Doug is Strange Brew on steroids.

Of course, none of this matters if Bob & Doug isn’t funny, and it isn’t much of the time.  I can see the promise in the show, yet the gags are stitched together and have the subtlety of a jackhammer.  The talent’s there, the writing is sometimes good, but Bob & Doug doesn’t gel the way it should.  Strange Brew at least let the jokes unfold when it wasn’t trying to shoehorn Hamlet into a buddy-comedy format.

Bob & Doug’s animation style honestly reminds me of John Callahan’s Quads!  Bob & Doug is not as badly-animated as Quads! – Quads! didn’t even have backgrounds – but it’s still a typical Flash-animated cartoon.  Bob & Doug deserves better.

Fox helped develop Bob & Doug, yet its animated shows are usually of a higher standard than this.  Bob & Doug seems like a show Fox would air during the summer to burn off.  I’ll be amazed if Fox even airs Bob & Doug despite Bob & Doug McKenzie’s cross-border popularity.

While Bob & Doug McKenzie are true Canadian icons, I honestly can’t see a long future for Bob & Doug based on the cheap production values and uneven writing.  Of course, Chilly Beach looked worse than Bob & Doug yet found its niche, so anything can happen on Canadian television.  At the very least, Bob & Doug ought to earn higher ratings than ‘da Kink in My Hair.

The main selling point of Sit Down, Shut Up (Fox/Global: starts April 19, 8:30 PM; 7:30 PM Central [Fox]) is that it’s a new series from Mitchell Hurwitz and Two and a Half Men writers/executive producers Eric and Kim Tannenbaum.  Most people stop at the mention of the Tannenbaums and go “ew, Two and a Half Men? that show is shit!”  In all fairness, Two and a Half Men is shit, but let’s move on.

Sit Down, Shut Up is similar to Arrested Development in that it features Jason Bateman and Will Arnett in lead roles.  The show is fond of ludicrous character names – Bateman is everyman P.E. teacher Larry Littlejunk, while Arnett is English teacher/womanizer Ennis Hofftard.  Saturday Night Live castmembers also feature, with Will Forte, Cheri Oteri and Kenan Thompson earning some pay.

The pilot takes a while to introduce Sit Down, Shut Up’s characters, hardly Knob Haven High School’s finest.  Littlejunk, Hofftard, New Agey science teacher Miracle Grohe (Kristin Chenoweth), Acting Principal Sue Sezno (Thompson), happily oblivious Ass. Principal Stuart Proszakian (Forte) and bisexual drama teacher Andrew LeGustambos (Nick Kroll) are the most focused-on.

Tom Kenny is terrorist/custodian Muhannad Sabeeh “Happy” Fa-ach Nuabar.  Oteri plays ugly, gruff librarian Helen Klench, while Henry Winkler rounds out the cast as German teacher Willard Deutschebog.  The pilot even goes so far as to underline key catchphrases, just in case Sit Down, Shut Up becomes popular and Mitchell Hurwitz needs to license some shirts.

Sit Down, Shut Up is ostensibly a remake of the same-named 2001 Australian sitcom, except that it’s a pragmatic adaptation.  The show is similar in style to Bromwell High, a 2005 British/Canadian series that focused mainly on teachers.

Sure, Bromwell High also focused on three students, but the “students second” attitude is similar.  While Sit Down, Shut Up can be funny at times, Bromwell High had Iqbal.  Advantage: Bromwell High.  Next on our list, item 54…

Larry Littlejunk is a fairly boring lead character, as much the straight man as Michael Bluth on Arrested Development.  I’m going by two episodes of a series that will air after I write this review, but I already don’t care for his infatuation with/hatred of Miracle Grohe.  The other Sit Down, Shut Up characters are more interesting, even Deutschebog.

There’s a lot of fourth-wall breaking in Sit Down, Shut Up, which doesn’t seem as odd in an animated show airing before Family Guy.  There isn’t a fundamental difference between Sit Down, Shut Up and AD the way there is with Family Guy and American Dad! or The Simpsons and Futurama.  That’s a problem.

The photographic background gimmick is just that.  It’s not important to the show, although the backgrounds and animation are blended almost seamlessly.  Mo Willems‘ character designs are much more important, giving the show a clean and visually distinctive look.  Stuart Proszakian looks fairly close to real-world Will Forte.  It makes me wonder why Arrested Development wasn’t a cartoon, since that might have earned the show a few more years.

The first two episodes of Sit Down, Shut Up are as uneven as Arrested Development was during its three-season run, which is still funnier than the shows currently on Fox’s Sunday lineup.  Compared to the twentieth season of The Simpsons or Family Guy at its Conway Twittiest, Sit Down, Shut Up isn’t that bad.

Will Arnett is always fun to watch, while Kristin Chenoweth is perfect as Miracle Grohe.  Nick Kroll’s voice is also appropriate for LeGustambos.  Kenan Thompson is in a role where his tendency to overact is muted, which is odd since he’s voicing Sue Sezno.  Thompson playing a woman should lend itself to all sorts of Virginiaca-isms, but he reins himself in for Sit Down, Shut Up.

Cheri Oteri underperforms as Klench, while Forte just plays Forte and gets away with it.  As for Tom Kenny, he could have stayed home since Happy’s not much of a character.  Sit Down, Shut Up wastes Kenny in a role that amounts to barely a minute of screen time per episode.  It’s like hiring Bobcat Goldthwait to yell “ahhhh!” once every twelve minutes.

The show has garnered mainly negative reviews so far.  I’m actually amazed critics are piling on Sit Down, Shut Up.  Either I’m not noticing how bad it really is, Mitchell Hurwitz’s comedy style is no longer in vogue, or the critics expected such a high standard from SD,SU that they’re overreacting to a fairly manky pilot episode.

The real problem with SD,SU is that it comes up short compared to other shows set in a high school.  It’s hard to go up against Daria, Bromwell High, Summer Heights High and Clone High and not expect to be sacked harder than an inept quarterback carrying his team to the ass-end of a 105-0 blowout.

It’s not like Sit Down, Shut Up can’t improve.  Futurama and American Dad! found their niches despite poor starts.  The first season of The Simpsons was absolute shit compared to what it became later.  If Sit Down, Shut Up is going to be all Stuart-is-a-prison-clown jokes, the show won’t last, but I’m not ready to throw it into the Fish Police/Capitol Critters box at this point.

Sketch comedy in the late 2000s tends to follow an absurdist, high-concept model more often than not.  The vast majority of shows from this era will doubtless age ten years from now, as the absurdist model becomes overused and new groups rebel against it.  Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In was considered edgy in 1968, while Turn-On was once the height of bad taste.  People also used to think Jerry Lester was funny.  Tastes change, and so do the comedy stylings.

I prefer the style of The Whitest Kids U’ Know (Super Channel: April 8, 11PM ET) to that of its closest modern competitors.  I appreciate the efforts put forth by Human Giant and Tim and Eric Awesome Show, Great Job!, yet WKUK is the show I actually laugh at.  The Whitest Kids U’ Know is crude at first glance, but there’s some intelligence behind its lowbrow façade.

The WWII sketch that starts off the first thirty-minute episode of season three is a case in point.  Four people enter Hitler’s bunker and come across Charlie Chaplin.  The Whitest Kids U’ Know players go for the predictable climax (Charlie Chaplin kills everyone) and then smack the viewer upside the head with a grossly inappropriate ending.  The Whitest Kids U’ Know has that duality with many of its sketches – predictable one point, surprising the next.

The second thirty-minute episode of WKUK’s third season is stronger overall due to some inspired sketches.  J.J. Martin, the punkest man on the planet, can make terrible folk songs punk as fuck, while J.P. Barger and Son Trading Post sells water balloons in the American Old West.  The first thirty-minute episode has a lovely musical number about God’s connection to obsessive compulsion, so it’s not far off in quality.

Not every sketch on The Whitest Kids U’ Know works.  For instance, the Lord of the Rings sketch in episode two hinges on its greatest plot hole, Gandalf not utilizing a giant eagle to fly Frodo and his friends to Sauron’s volcano.  It’s an obvious complaint which The Whitest Kids U’ Know don’t put a fresh spin on.  The sketch is saved by an out-of-place rape reference, but more rape references kill the sketch again.

A 3:2 good sketch:bad sketch ratio is maintained overall.  It’s not the best ratio for sketch comedy, but The Whitest Kids U’ Know are also throwing stuff at the wall to see what sticks.  IFC airs the third season in fifteen-minute blocks, which may be the best format for The Whitest Kids U’ Know – if you hate this show, more than fifteen minutes is akin to torture.  There is very little middle ground between fans and haters of this show, so Trevor Moore and co. have to be doing something right.

WKUK isn’t as polished or as good as Mr. Show and Monty Python’s Flying Circus, but the show can be genuinely funny at times.  WKUK will air on relatively obscure stations like IFC and Super Channel for years to come, and they’re probably the best places for the show anyway.  Assy McGee has proven there are far worse things on television than Trevor Moore’s brand of lowbrow humour.

I haven’t done one of these Canadian TV-on-DVD entries for a while, purely since there hasn’t been much movement on that front.  I also grew disinterested with the “new box art for Season 1 of Flying Pig-Dog Hour!” entries on TVShowsonDVD.com.

In fact, TVShowsonDVD.com hasn’t been making with the truly interesting news as of late.  Sure, The Dana Carvey Show and American Gladiators, we all want that.  Was the world clamoring for more Brothers & Sisters and California Dreams, though?  Sheesh, give me Automan and Manimal.  I want to see Simon MacCorkindale fail to act, damn it!

---

The complete Zeroman series out on DVD June 2, 2009 via kaBOOM!/Peace Arch.  I honestly never expected this to come out on DVD, although Teletoon shows frequently merit series sets.  Then again, Zeroman isn’t exactly Delilah and Julius or Cybersix.  Nothing could be Cybersix.

Zeroman isn’t the worst thing Leslie Nielsen’s ever done.  Liocracy, Dracula: Dead and Loving It and 2001: A Space Travesty are all worse than Zeroman, although that’s damning Zeroman with faint praise.  At this point, Leslie Nielsen should retire the deadpan humour he used to be so good at with Airplane! and The Naked Gun.

Ron MacLean and Don Cherry have recurring roles on Zeroman, as do Ryan Reynolds and Kevin McDonald.  Did I mention Zeroman was shit?  At least the show’s animation was surprisingly decent.

---

Corner Gas‘ sixth season set will come six weeks after the show’s series finale airs.  The June 9, 2009 release will have the retrospective behind-the-scenes filler It’s Been a Gas and “footage of the final read-through,” at least according to CTV press bumf.  Not a bad deal, especially since CTV is pimping Corner Gas‘ final episode out.  It’s Canada’s greatest-ever mainstream comedy series.  Canada will fall apart when Corner Gas ends, right?  Won’t it?

---

Corner Gas II, also known as Little Mosque on the Prairie, will see its second and third season sets come out in the fall of 2009 through Morningstar Entertainment.  The information comes from CBC Shop, so let’s just vouchsafe that the discs will come out.  After all, if The Collector can come out on DVD…

---

In a related segue, The Collector’s second season set comes out May 26, 2009 through Morningstar Entertainment.  I’m rather surprised The Collector sold well enough to merit a second-season DVD set.  It just goes to show you how people like certain Canadian programs, but CityTV aired The Collector.  Murdoch Mysteries and Less Than Kind fans know CityTV is where Canadian shows go to die.

---

Acorn Media releases Murdoch Mysteries‘ first-season set on June 16, 2009.  There are many hardcore Murdoch Mysteries fans out there, so I have a feeling this will sell well.  Why is it that an American company can cherry-pick shows like this and gain a reputation for quality releases?  If Acorn Media snaps up Less Than Kind, I’m going to lose my shit.

---

Blood Ties “Season 1″ out June 2, 2009, while “Season 2″ might come out September 2009.  The reason I quote the seasons is that the show aired worldwide as a 22-episode season.  Lifetime split Blood Ties in two seasons for U.S. consumption.  Eagle Vision is releasing this since, you know, strong fanbase.

Yeah, another Canadian show’s home entertainment rights snapped up by an American company.  If nothing else, Peter Mohan stands to make serious bank off the DVD releases.  Vampires are trendy these days, so he might as well profit from the trend.

---

Critical Mass Entertainment and Anchor Bay Canada released another Hilarious House of Frightenstein DVD set on March 31, 2009.  It’s an Igor-centric compilation, for those Fishka Rais fans.  It’s hard to fault Anchor Bay for putting the Frightenstein comps out, since they come out with some regularity.

If Critical Mass gains DVD rights to Maniac Mansion, John Hemphill fans are going to have an epileptic seizure.  Watch, I’ve now set in motion events that are going to culminate in Maniac Mansion season sets, at least in my mind.  After all, I am Turner Edison.  You think “Cameron Archer” is a real person?  Bullshit!

The CBC has rarely, if ever, made government bureaucracy seem funny.  Not My Department, In Opposition and Rideau Hall left three craters in that field years ago.  The Good Germany (CBC: Frantic Films, 2008) has left a smaller crater than those nadirs of Canadian television, unless this show is/will become a regular series.  Either way, I don’t want to see this show ever again.

The town of Germany, Ontario is rather poorly run, but that fact is only established a few minutes into The Good Germany.  Without this bit of information, the title makes little sense since Germany isn’t the most evil place on Earth right now.  If the show was called The Good Toronto and set in Alberta, that would make more comedic sense.  Then again, it’s hard to ask much from a show that uses a Rita MacNeil fat joke in its first minute.

Jack Mackay is the town’s newly elected mayor, trying to fix former mayor Gordon Verlaine’s various messes.  A motley crew of incompetent councilpeople, including Verlaine, try to impede Mackay’s progress.  Wayne Robson and Chris Leavins are among the show’s castmembers, and they’re better than the material they’re given.

A scene in The Good Germany underlines how bad the show really is.  It’s based around an impotence joke – Jack Mackay has not been able to fill “ink in his pen” since his wife died, a phrase councillor/manchild Pete misinterprets.  A normal show would throw this joke away in four, five seconds, tops.  The Good Germany tries to flog the same joke for a minute’s worth of material, except that the buildup makes the bad joke worse.  Another scene has Pete failing to repeat a spittake he made earlier in the episode.  It’s one thing to tell bad jokes, but this show repeatedly extrapolates on them.  Amazing.

The subplots are eminently believable.  Toronto city liaison Ellen Tremblay is the spitting image of Mackay’s dead wife.  Was The Good Germany honestly trying to milk a whole season out of this implausibility?  There’s also the matter of Mackay’s son dating Verlaine’s daughter.

Mackay got on the cover of Maclean’s for saving an infant from a burning building, which led to his becoming mayor.  Mackay’s too perfect, Verlaine schemes ineffectually and the city councilpeople are one-note ciphers.  No wonder CBC didn’t give this show any fanfare.

Show creator/writer Garry Campbell has written for shows like Less Than Kind, Blue Collar TV, MADtv and The Kids in the Hall.  He was also a member of The Chumps, which as a comedy troupe had a CBC Radio program in the mid-1990s.  With a pedigree like Campbell’s, I can’t believe this is the best he can do.  If this show has more episodes than the pilot in the can, for the love of God, keep them in the can!