This is the first of what I hope will be a few reviews concerning the Teletoon Pilot Project.  The Pilot Project, which has currently aired three of its nine pilots, airs every Sunday at 11:30 PM on…well, you can just guess.

Since URBMN is pilot-friendly, I’m attracted to the Teletoon Pilot Project.  I’ve skipped Fugget About It for now, as the review for it was originally bundled with unpublished reviews for The Dating Guy and Archer.  Also, Fugget About It‘s title describes the show perfectly.  I might not get to Fugget About It for a while.

Upload Yours, a collection of user-generated clips from The Comedy Network’s heavily promoted Youtube-baiter, will debut Thursday, June 3, 2010 at 10:30 PM.  The show will follow Tosh.0, which The Comedy Network tends to move around often.

Anyone watching The Comedy Network since 2009 will know (and hate) the Upload Yours commercial by heart – Jamie Watson asking viewers if they have a treasure box of comic gold, man in hardhat dancing and faking an injury, upbeat ska music.  By this point, Upload Yours has been flogged for more than a year.

I should be against Upload Yours on principle.  CTVglobemedia owns every clip sent to Upload Yours.  The terms and conditions are fairly onerous.  You’re giving material away to Upload Yours for the carrot of free publicity.  This is the exact thing Amid Amidi rails against on Cartoon Brew.

The Comedy Network’s previous web-projects-made-series are Good Morning World and Hotbox.  Whatever one can say about those programs, at least they’re proper programs.  Upload Yours is stitched-together clips, like The Comedy Network needs an excuse to be cheaper with its CanCon than it already is.

I’d be happy if The Comedy Network could greenlight a series like Summer Heights High, Ugly Americans or We Can Be Heroes – you know, rise to the calibre of the shows TCN is currently airing.  Instead, Canadians get a “best”-of-Internet clip show.  This country…

A second season of Producing Parker is in the pipeline.  This item was mentioned by the Channel 56 blog, and confirmed on Breakthrough Films & Television’s website.

The show, originally set to debut on Canwest’s now-defunct E! network, debuted on TVtropolis this May.  Reruns currently air on Global and TVtropolis.  This entry will be updated as more information becomes available.  As of this writing, news is limited to “Producing Parker 2: until 2011.”

I assume this item has been up since October, as this Google cache mentions Breakthrough’s non-broadcast Gemini Award wins.  Producing Parker 2 was then in production “until 2010.”  I guess no one bothered to notice until this week.  I don’t know.

I’m not sure what to think of this.  Producing Parker is aired on TVtropolis far too much, sometimes in odd timeslots.  ”Twat” references and bare breasts at 6:00 PM on Sundays?  I understand cable channels are lax on censorship, but that’s bizarre scheduling.

The only Canwest specialty channel appropriate enough for Producing Parker is Showcase Diva.  While I’m not a big fan of Producing Parker, it deserves a better home than TVtropolis.  The show’s better than Bob & Doug, but so is colonic irrigation.

I’m surprised Producing Parker is a more-than-single-season wonder.  Are CanCon regulations keeping this show alive, or is there something to Producing Parker that I’m missing?

Producing Parker (TVtropolis: starts May 4, 8:30 PM ET/PT) was one of two shows originally scheduled to debut on E! this spring.  It and Carlawood later moved to TVtropolis, as E! will no longer be a network in the near future.

Producing Parker could actually succeed for TVtropolis.  Unlike Carlawood, Producing Parker has a few things going for it – a point, comedy, Kim Cattrall, one of the stars of Young People Fucking and Peter Keleghan.

The show is almost too good for TVtropolis, unless Canwest is making an effort to build the channel up.  Of course, TVtropolis added Bob & Doug to its lineup recently.  I expect both Bob & Doug and Producing Parker to be rerun seven times a week.  It’s the TVtropolis way.

I’m not sold on Kristin Booth as Parker Kovak, the producer of The Dee Show (although she isn’t credited as such until the end of the first episode.)  It’s not that Booth’s voice is bad, it’s just that Kovak as a character is generic – she wants a man, is career-oriented and keeps the show from going pear-shaped.  Booth imitates Tina Fey, but Fey is more multifaceted and has Alec Baldwin to bounce jokes off.

In fact, almost all of Producing Parker‘s characters are generic.  Simon (Aaron Abrams) is the wannabe reporter slumming on daytime television.  Blake Bellamy (Peter Keleghan) is the good-looking yet oblivious head of Bellamy Broadcasting.  Chicago (Sarah Cornell) is the ditzy, unqualified intern.  Massimo (Jamie Watson) is the talking dog/stand-in for the man Kovak wants.  Producing Parker does try to make its characters three-dimensional, but they’re placeholders for gags at this point.

Kim Cattrall is Dee, the superego of a talk show host.  She’s bitchy, temperamental and trend-conscious.  Cattrall sells Dee, displaying quite a bit of emotional range.  Considering how one-dimensional Dee could have been, Cattrall manages to make her more than an over-the-hill celebrity figure.  It’s really because of Cattrall, Cornell and Keleghan that Producing Parker works as well as it does.

The main problem with Producing Parker is that it’s shrill and a bit shallow.  The Newsroom and Made in Canada were more biting looks at television behind the scenes.  Producing Parker‘s traditional Simpsons-style gags work only some of the time, but at least they work.  Producing Parker isn’t nearly as unfunny as Punch! and The Wrong Coast, but that should be a given.

Producing Parker‘s animation is fairly well done.  While I’d like to see more traditionally animated Canadian cartoons, PP is a much better Flash effort than shows like Total Drama Action and Bob & Doug.  There’s a concerted effort to pace and animate the show so that the tweening is less noticeable, although Producing Parker still looks like a Flash cartoon.

Producing Parker isn’t on the level of 30 Rock or The Larry Sanders Show, but it’s a modest success.  I can see Breakthrough Films and Television selling this to America on the strength of Cattrall’s name, which makes me wonder why Producing Parker didn’t debut on Global.  Compared to Bob & Doug, Producing Parker has a much better sense of what it is and isn’t trading on familiarity.  Bob & Doug is dredging 200,000+ viewers a week, so I can see the two shows flip within two to three weeks.