Could this be the end of Hockey Night’s Don Cherry?
SATURDAY
The Montreal Canadiens host the Toronto Maple Leafs in the first game of Hockey Night in Canada’s weekend doubleheader, in an Original Six matchup that once would have had the entire country gathering around the home hearth. Much has changed in the past week.
By now, even non-hockey fans know the 12-year, $5.2-billion deal struck this past week between the NHL and Rogers Media spells the end of TV hockey as we know it. Hockey Night in Canada will stay where it is for four more years, on CBC, but starting next season all the major decisions — including on-air talent, play-by-play announcers, colour commentators and on-air hosts — will be made by Rogers, not CBC.
Some have speculated this could spell the end of Don Cherry, a Canadian hockey tradition right up there with moaning about the Leafs and wondering whether the Vancouver Canucks will ever win the Stanley Cup.
It’s hard to imagine Cherry and his Coach’s Corner sidekick, veteran broadcaster Ron MacLean, won’t address the deal at some point during the game, regardless of what happens on the ice. (Saturday, 7 p.m., CBC)
SUNDAY
A pall of gloom has settled over the ever-dwindling band of post-apocalyptic survivors in The Walking Dead, as the improbably popular thriller reaches its midseason finale this weekend.
An old enemy is back, David Morrissey’s Philip Blake, a.k.a. The Governor — very much alive, still breathing and all too human.
He has vowed to take revenge against those who deposed him as dictator of his own survivors’ community, and he’s now in a position to exact that revenge.
Online fan forums have been alive all week with speculation that at least one Dead character won’t see the end of this weekend’s winter finale, and that seems entirely possible.
The genius of The Walking Dead — and, make no mistake, this is a special and unique series — is that it has taken the impossible and made it seem eerily familiar.
A handful of characters have been there from the beginning — Steven Yeun’s hard-luck idealist Glenn Rhee, Norman Reedus’s reformed racist Daryl Dixon, Chandler Riggs’s manchild Carl Grimes, a scared little boy who, in four short years, has grown up to be an iron-willed, occasionally cold-hearted adolescent who’s learned how to handle a gun and fend for himself. (Sunday, 9 p.m., AMC)