Originally this feature was going to be in two parts, one for Canadian shows and the other for “foreign” content.  I then read this article, realized how right it was, and will take the article’s advice in order to alleviate the lull between URBMN posts.  It doesn’t make for a nice segue into Rabbit Fall discussion, but I’m not a fan of segues.

I’m also not fond of the promotion Space has given Rabbit Fall.  It reran the entire twelve-episode run of the show earlier this year, not doing much to advertise that fact.  Space did promote the second season when in first run, but I thought Space would big up the first-season episodes for the newbies.  Not everyone is in love with Battlestar Galactica, so say we few.

Andrea Menard is Constable Tara Wheaton, a Métis cop transferred from Toronto to Rabbit Fall via “professional indiscretion.”  She’s a fairly decent actor in a straightforward supernatural crime drama.  Rabbit Fall is decidedly generic, which doesn’t surprise me as four networks (SCN, VisionTV, Space and APTN) have had their hands on it over two seasons.  Still, the quality of this show is better than I expected.

I don’t understand the show’s comparison to Twin Peaks* – Rabbit Fall does not have Killer BOB, log ladies or backwards-speaking gnomes.  The X-Files is a good reference point, since Rabbit Fall shares the same conspiratorial MO.

While Rabbit Fall‘s second season is much better than the first production-wise – Rabbit Fall looked badly lighted its first year – the show does have its problems.  Some of the acting is atrocious, while the supernatural element can be a bit cartoonish at times.

For instance, main antagonist Simon Blackhorse turns into a crow while in a police car.  Sure, his distraction of Sergeant Stanton Martinsky leads to a crucial plot development in Rabbit Fall‘s second season premiere, but it looks silly in execution.

Another thing I don’t understand is why the show’s being a half-hour drama is sold as unique.  The half-hour drama is a concept dating back to The Twilight Zone, early Gunsmoke and Dragnet, and these are just obvious examples.  Hour-long dramas are the norm for modern episodic television, so Rabbit Fall is just bucking the trend.  I can’t see how Rabbit Fall would benefit from expanding to an hour, as that would just force padding on its meat-and-potatoes story structure.

In the end, Rabbit Fall‘s positives outweigh its negatives.  If nothing else, it shows that Saskatchewan can produce decent television.  I’d like to see more Saskatchewan-based television shows in the near future.  Toronto moonlighting as Generican/Genadian City can get a bit tiring after a while.

^{*As an aside, Twin Peaks wasn’t the weirdest David Lynch television show.  It’s amazing how many people have forgotten or suppressed On the Air, which the YouTube link will soon rectify.  If you watched it, you can’t unwatch it!}

The Comedy Network now receives South Park episodes two days after the show’s initial American airing.  As a longtime South Park fan, I’m happy.  I’d be happier if the major ISPs in this country didn’t automatically redirect me from Comedy Central’s webpage to The Comedy Network’s, but then I’d be walking into a morass of questions like “how will the CRTC handle new media?”  As soon as it figures out how to handle regional television and cable channels switching their mandates on a whim, let me know.

“The Ring” suffers from a bad case of déjà vu.  Mr. Hankey is South Park‘s own-brand Mickey Mouse, as “Chef’s Chocolate Salty Balls” makes clear.  High School Musical had already been made fun of by South Park four months previous to “The Ring.”

Kenny’s dying of syphilis as a result of girlfriend Tammy Warner’s fatal blowjob is reminiscent of “Kenny Dies” and “Spontaneous Combustion,” as Kenny is given a proper funeral.  ”The Ring” is even similar to “Christian Rock Hard.”  Replace secular lyrics in Christian songs with the purity ring’s role in selling sex to minors, it’s the same concept.  Never mind “Simpsons Already Did It,” South Park is cannibalizing its own ideas at this point.

Despite this, “The Ring” is a fairly spot-on thirteenth season premiere.  ”Elementary School Musical” was essentially “High School Musical is gay” brought to a moderately funny extreme.  ”The Ring” goes after the selling of a semi-religious item, the purity ring, to a secular audience.

The Walt Disney Company is also given a skewering.  Mickey Mouse is revealed as a greedy corporate bastard.  Using the character in this fashion is obvious, but South Park keeps the Mouse surprisingly on-model.  Mickey punctuates his sentences with his trademark laugh, a surprisingly funny verbal tic.

The last time Mickey was this funny, it was during a Saturday TV Funhouse cartoon.  Mickey’s never funny in his own cartoons.  Then again, no one is, not even Goofy.

Other Walt Disney Company-related items are also lampooned.  After Kenny wears his potentially blowjob-nullifying purity ring, he becomes boring enough to want to watch Grey’s Anatomy.  The Jonas Brothers also sing about Netflix, a great place for Disney Channel’s more homogenized offal, as an alternative to sex.

“The Ring” works as it’s not about how The Jonas Brothers and Disney suck.  How The Jonas Brothers are portrayed in the episode versus what they’re really like is irrelevant.  What is relevant is how commercial interests can take something like The Jonas Brothers’ evangelical beliefs and use it as a selling point to shift units.  Mickey Mouse is the only character in the episode openly disdainful of Christianity (“they believe in a talking dead guy!”), but that’s because he’s actually a Norse demon.  Or something.  Ha ha.

Overall, “The Ring” makes for a strong South Park season premiere.  It’s a better debut for its season than “Tonsil Trouble” was for the twelfth.  I’ll go so far as to say it’s the best season premiere since season ten’s “The Return of Chef.”  ”The Ring” is familiar in spots, but it’s above-average for South Park.  I can’t wait to see how South Park makes fun of The Princess and the Frog.

Hell, I’d like to see if South Park acknowledges Robot Chicken‘s existence and/or the Jon Stewart/Jim Cramer brouhaha.  Those topics would make for fun episodes.

By the way, Mickey as depicted in South Park would not have come from Valhalla.  He would most likely have come from Múspellsheimr, the realm of fire.  I’m reading too much into a throwaway gag near the end of “The Ring,” but it’s still lazy writing.

I’m also not fond of South Park ending the episode on an over-referenced G.I. Joe line.  Discredited tropes always make for painful television.  Now you know, and screwing the pooch is half the battle!

Lately there’s been news of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation asking for a bridge loan to cover an up to $65 million advertising shortfall for 2008-09.  Over-the-air broadcast television is failing as “old media” like television and newspapers have gone/threaten to go bankrupt.  The Conservative government didn’t approve the loan, leading to talk of whether CBC needs to exist, adapt to the new economic climate and what have you.

In many ways the back-and-forth is typical – the more liberal want CBC Television to go ad-free and above the “usual rubbish” on television, however poorly defined said rubbish is.  Also, there’s a lot of “mean old Harper” fist-shaking.  The more conservative want all CBC-related projects dead or privatized, $1 billion worth of taxpayers’ money wasted, the usual fuck-’em-they’re-socialists talking points.

Most of the talk seems to be related to CBC Television and Télévision de Radio-Canada, the divisions of the CBC most bolstered by ad revenue.  CBC.ca also accepts advertising, but it’s not likely that Internet advertising revenue amounts to much.  Since CBC Television and its need in a 500-channel universe is a popular enough topic, I thought I’d at least add my two cents on the Mothercorpse.

I don’t think CBC Television has made many good programming decisions in recent years.  CBC Television has lavished undue amounts of attention on “can’t-miss” series – The One, MVP, Being Erica, Making the Cut, Little Mosque on the Prairie, The Tudors et al.

The danger with this sort of programming strategy is that if the show fails or does worse than expected, all that promotion means diddly poop.  Overhyped shows that fail can easily kill a network’s reputation.  If the show is also derivative of existing content, American or otherwise – MVP was essentially Footballers’ Wives transposed to hockey – it doesn’t reflect too well on Canadian television.

There’s also a problem with relying on more American content to generate “more revenue.”  The real problem with importing shows like Jeopardy!, Wheel of Fortune and The Martha Stewart Show is not that the shows are American, it’s that there’s no necessity to have the shows on CBC Television.  I’m not anti-American, but it makes more sense to me to launch a modestly-budgeted game show than to make sure OMNI.1 and A Channel don’t make bank from Pat Sajak.  It’s not like A Channel’s making bank right now, as is the case with most traditional media.

Instead of Jeopardy!, CBC could have bought the Canadian rights to Mastermind.  The format is fairly simple – hard questions, a chair, a university backdrop, a host, a yearly tournament – but it’s done well for BBC.  As long as Rex Murphy or Big Daddy Tazz don’t host, Mastermind would be at least decent filler.  Just a thought.

Also, what happened to CBC Retro?  That initiative seems to have died in recent years.  Its output has been limited to Jimmy MacDonald’s Canada, Pop-Up Royals and Extreme Weather, as far as I know.  CBC Retro can still work provided someone actually bothers to do something entertaining with it.  The bar can and must be raised higher than Scott Thompson wearing a dress.

Even if CBC Television becomes ad-free, which I can’t see happening in my lifetime, its programming decisions continue to puzzle me.  Take comedy, for instance.  Back in the 1990s, CBC had some decent comedy shows – The Newsroom, Comics!, Kids in the Hall, CODCO and This Hour Has 22 Minutes when it was good.  Even some of the fair-to-middling performers (hi, Gullage’s and Ken Finkleman’s non-Newsroom series) were a step up from Mosquito Lake.

Recent CBC comedy programming tends more toward filler programs like the Just For Laughs galas, Just For Laughs Gags and The CBC Winnipeg Comedy Festival.  Shows like The Rick Mercer Report and Little Mosque on the Prairie are safe and quirky, lamely topical or both at the same time.

The CBC has tried for edgier fare – The Tournament, The Altar Boy Gang, jPod, What It’s Like Being Alone – but hardly anything sticks.  It also cancelled Kenny vs. Spenny in its first season, leaving Showcase to turn the show into a hit.  CBC Television can foster truly edgy comedy when it wants to, since that brings in a deeper talent pool to draw from.  It might also equal better advertising revenue.  I don’t know.  No one knows with television.

The big thing about CBC Television is that it’s the English lynchpin of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation.  CBC Radio has its good and bad traits, but CBC Television’s current direction and the numerous mistakes it’s made give the portrait of CBC itself as an out-of-touch, directionless entity.

Granted, it’s always had that reputation to some extent.  Dropping Don Messer’s Jubilee despite continued popularity and giving Ralph Benmergui a late-night talk show has that effect on a network.  It is still hard to ignore things like CBC losing the rights to the Hockey Night in Canada theme song, the piddling performances of Being Erica and Sophie, a reliance on ratings when ratings are at their most meaningless and hiring new executives of questionable worth.

I can see why people are opposed to CBC not receiving bridge funding.  $700 million a year should go towards more varied fare than The Week the Women Went and Arrested Development reruns.  CBC Television needs to realize it’s not the arbiter of Canadian culture it was in the 1950s and go from there.  I can’t see the network being scrapped, but CBC Television needs more than new “Canada lives here” ads with unfolding gem action and dinky jingle.

Oh, and could someone explain to me why bold needs to exist?  Sure, it airs the new Doctor Who episodes and Peter Benchley’s Amazon, but is that all it does?  The channel, formerly CBC Country Canada, has had no purpose since it stopped talking about rural culture and became a programming bran tub.  Give me a reason to care about bold.  David Tennant fighting a Sontaran isn’t going to be enough here.

Proof that Robot Chicken has become more elaborate as a show can be found on “They Took My Thumbs.”  This particular episode has almost eliminated the five-to-ten-second gag, aside from a decent Hall and Oates reference and a bestiality gag even Jon Dore wouldn’t touch.  The show almost doesn’t feel like Robot Chicken.

“Wildman” is this episode’s best sketch.  Sebastian Bach makes it work by being his usual Rock God^™ self.  Baz is still hard rock’s walking punchline, not that he gives a shit.  I hope Baz does more stuff where people are laughing with him and not at him.

Some of the sketches in “They Took My Thumbs” are weak.  ”You Bet Your Ass That’s a Boulder” takes its one Raiders of the Lost Ark-derived gag and stretches the hell out of it.  A boulder, two hundred darts and an altar’s weak point make for an elaborate way to protect a gold idol, but this five-second observation is padded to two and a half minutes.

“Train Man” and “Thursday the 12th” are slice-of-life tales.  ”Train Man” concerns one man’s desire to succeed despite a subway train almost cutting him in half.  ”Thursday the 12th” shows Jason Voorhees’ daily activities when he’s not slaughtering teens.  Neither sketch is funny.  ”Train Man” attempts Futurama-style poignancy, which is odd coming from this show.

“Bring a Sidekick to Work Day”…I like the fact that the “original” Aqualad was a limbed fish that could survive out of water.  Robot Chicken doesn’t resort to those ever-fresh ‘Aquaman is gay’ jokes in this episode.

Comedy gold should come out of Wonder Girl, Robin, Speedy, Kid Flash and human Aqualad.  The best “Bring a Sidekick to Work Day” can do is The Martian Manhunter’s “invisible” sidekick, which isn’t good.  Robot Chicken has done better superhero parodies, so the attention to period detail is wasted.

“They Took My Thumbs” is a weak Robot Chicken episode.  The episode’s slower pace doesn’t beget funnier material.  I appreciate the show’s effort to be more than farting and retards, but “They Took My Thumbs” is a little padded.  Luckily, the fourth season gets better from here.

Another year, another season of Robot Chicken.  It’s like this sort of thing happens every year on an arbitrary date decided by [adult swim].

Every Robot Chicken season premiere has to have a big “we’re renewed” introductory sketch, so Seth Green and Matthew Senreich hit up Joss Whedon, Seth MacFarlane and Battlestar Galactica executive producer Ron Moore for work.  It doesn’t matter that Green and Senreich killed [adult swim]‘s Mike Lazzo last season.  Robot Chicken‘s famous for dead people magically coming back to life, sometimes in the very next sketch.  Cartoons are neat.

Seeing Joss Whedon and Ron Moore kill each other warms my heart as I find both Battlestar Galactica and Whedon overrated, but the sketch itself isn’t funny.  I hate the “Robot Chicken cancelled/renewed” cliffhangers.  Robot Chicken is one of [adult swim]‘s most popular shows.  Robot Chicken has at least three more years of being milked.

“I Am Needed Upstairs” is the best sketch of the episode.  Seth MacFarlane’s Trojan Man routine (“the reservoir tip is for your semen!”) helps sell the sketch, otherwise it’s the typical “fictional character in real world” mashup.  ”I Am Needed Upstairs” works due to its use of dialogue, something Robot Chicken isn’t as good at as Dead Baby Comedy.

“Can’t Be a Crime to Kick a Dope Rhyme” is also notable.  Although the sketch is just okay, it wins points for referencing PaRappa the Rapper and replicating its paper-thin look.  Three seasons ago, characters in Robot Chicken weren’t even in scale.  The show has come far.

Tila Tequila’s sketch (“Pre-Pubescent Alien Whore”) is watchable enough, even though the Terminator 2 reference is just there and I could give a potted damn about anything or anyone Tila Tequila does and/or has sex with.  She got a plug for her MTV show in, so that’s her role fulfilled.

The ending sketch, “Just the Good Parts,” is a mixed bag.  It’s similar to season one’s “Welcome to the Spoilers,” but isn’t as funny.  There’s a callback to the beginning of the episode, which is wasted on Seth Green dying.

The occasional Sarah Michelle Gellar and Seth MacFarlane cameos are fine, as are the credit references to Gellar and Mila Kunis.  MacFarlane making fun of Family Guy‘s manatee gags, though, comes across as mutual ass-patting.  MacFarlane’s awesome, I get it.  He only says that about himself once every three seconds.  Robot Chicken can structure a much better gag than Family Guy at this point.

“Help Me” is a fairly solid season premiere for Robot Chicken.  At this point viewers and non-fans alike should know what to expect – farting, retards, nut shots, clever satire with ironic subtext and Joey Fatone cameos.  Robot Chicken may be maturing, but it’s still crude and offensive.  May this show never be up its own ass with self-importance.

Originally I was going to review The Jon Dore Television Show (The Comedy Network: Wednesday, 10:00 PM ET/PT) a day before the premiere.  In typical me fashion, I flaked on the review.  It’s a thing that I do occasionally.

There hasn’t been much press about The Jon Dore Television Show‘s second season anyway.  A few mainstream interviews have appeared in newspapers.  The usual condemnations of the show exist.  Dore isn’t exactly Russell Peters in terms of popularity.

The Jon Dore Television Show knows Jon Dore isn’t a great actor.  His deadpan persona is milked effectively for comedy.  JDTS takes the basic premise of The Sarah Silverman Program. – unlikable protagonist goes through a life issue every episode – and splices it with a TLC documentary.  This conceit actually works, even though there is no way it should.

The second-season premiere of The Jon Dore Television Show, “Jon Fights Discrimination,” features feminist Judy Rebick, media professor Marion Coomey and microbiologist Chris Liu.  They all intersect with Dore’s campaign to end discrimination, a quest borne of Dore having to pay to get into a bar on Ladies’ Night.

Dore does his part to end discrimination by dressing up as a fat, blind, Asian black woman with red hair and a snake for a tail.  Somehow, the show progresses from this to Dore dressing his neighbours up in white bodystockings while he rants on about creating a “pure race of people.”  Some of the jokes in “Jon Fights Discrimination” fall flat, such as a running joke involving black centaurs, but I found Dore as the ultimate minority amusing.

“Jon Gets Horny” continues the comedy trend set by “Jon Fights Discrimination.”  This time, Dore has a constant erection and needs to get rid of it.  Dore talks sex with his aunt Kathy Layton, who is a registered nurse.  He also interviews sex addiction expert “Mike” and “Sex Industy Expert” Kedra Alliard.

Psychotherapist Susan Lynne, who guested as herself several times in the first season, makes her first appearance of the second season here.  She is to JDTS what Chef was to South Park, a voice of reason that Dore plays off of.

Compared to “Jon Fights Discrimination,” “Jon Gets Horny” is comedically limp.  In one week, the show has gone from satirizing the media to making fun of cam whores.  Too many of the jokes in “Jon Gets Horny” are variations on the “Jon humps inanimate object” theme, which is not good.

The Jon Dore Television Show will probably stay a cult item by the end of its second season.  The show’s format is such that it would easily fall apart in the wrong hands.  I’m curious to know how long Dore can keep the show going before it collapses like the Tacoma Narrows Bridge.  As long as JDTS is funny at least some of the time, I’ll keep watching.

Canadians have not forgotten the name Ralph Benmergui, inasmuch as Friday Night! with Ralph Benmergui gave him his infamy.  The show is still seen as the nadir of Canadian late-night talk shows, although haters of The Hour and/or Open Mike with Mike Bullard would disagree.

Lately Benmergui has found his niche on VisionTV, working with director Allan Novak on shows like Ralph Benmergui: My Israel and 5 Seekers.  God Bless America (VisionTV: January 19, 10:00 PM ET/7:00 PM PT) is Benmergui and Novak’s latest project, a six-episode documentary series about how religion intersects with United States politics.

It took me a few viewings of God Bless America‘s first episode to understand what Benmergui and Novak are driving at.  The episode specifically targets the “evangelical right” and its influence on American politics.

God Bless America‘s strength is in underlining the relationships between religion and politics while not denigrating religion itself.  It demonstrates that certain groups within the evangelical right, like Liberty University and the Center for Christian Statesmanship, have become organized and established enough to influence the secular world.  In their view, church and state have a symbiotic relationship and should not be separate.

The first episode of God Bless America has its problems.  A Toronto rally concerns the non-arrival of Fred Phelps and the Westboro Baptist Church.  He was to protest the debut of Alistair Newton’s play The Pastor Phelps Project, only to be detained at the U.S.-Canadian border.

This is juxtaposed with an anti-gay demonstration held in Denver, Colorado at the 2008 Democratic National Convention.  Benmergui tries to frame the issue as “Canadians are gentler than Americans,” which is misleading.  He’s comparing a local play to matters of international importance.

God Bless America bothers me in another way.  Richard Nixon was the first U.S. President to say “God bless America” during an April 30, 1973 speech.  Benmergui has it wrong when he says Nixon resigned “within days of uttering those words.”

The 1973 speech concerned the resignations of Nixon aides H. R. Haldeman and John Ehrlichman, as well as the dismissal of then-White House Counsel John Dean.  Nixon wouldn’t resign until August 9, 1974.  Fudging the date of Nixon’s resignation like this is just sloppy research.

God Bless America is a decent effort by Benmergui and Novak, although scattershot in its approach.  Later GBA episodes focus on topics like the religious left and creationism versus evolutionary theory.  The series is not nearly as well-executed as it could be given its central concept, but it’s worth a look.

The Comedy Network is airing The Gong Show with Dave Attell (The Comedy Network: January 15, 10:30 PM ET/PT) out of order.  The fourth episode will be the first aired in Canada, which makes little sense to me.  It’s not like there’s a danger in airing a talent show out of order, but the scheduling is arbitrary.

The original Gong Show* was both old-fashioned and a product of its time.  Contestants went before the cameras to have their acts judged by a celebrity panel.  If an act was bad enough, it was gonged.

Acts usually started off bad and deteriorated from there.  Chuck Barris’ amateurish hosting meshed with the bad acts, while the celebrity panelists did whatever the hell they felt like.  The show was a daily trainwreck, which is part of its enduring appeal.

To its credit, The Gong Show with Dave Attell remembers what made the original show good.  The amateur performers are about as bad as on the original Gong Show.  The top prize is $600 and a gaudy championship belt.  The panelists have a rapport with each other and the show doesn’t pretend to be an earnest talent competition.

The main problem with The Gong Show with Dave Attell is that it’s too stiff.  The host and panelists find it more necessary to deliver stinging one-liners to contestants/each other than to have fun with the format.

Andy Dick at least threatens a contestant with the gong mallet, but that’s as chaotic as The Gong Show with Dave Attell gets.  Maybe the panelists are boring this episode.  Not every panelist can be Triumph the Insult Comic Dog, where you can just sniff his non-butt and smell the money.

The Gong Show with Dave Attell isn’t as cheerfully haphazard as the original Gong Show, but it’s better than Extreme Gong.  I give this show a 5 for execution and a 2.5 for Brian Posehn’s beard.

^{*No, not the John Barbour version.  Don’t be smart.}