2018’s TELEVISION WINNERS & LOSERS
Toronto Star TV Critic Tony Wong picks the best and worst of the past year
My pick for the most riveting television this year is something that no Hollywood scriptwriter thought of dreaming up: That’s U.S. Supreme Court Judge candidate Brett Kavanaugh having a petulant meltdown.
Kavanaugh’s reaction was so hysterical and over the top, especially compared to the calm and measured testimony of his accuser Christine Blasey Ford, that Matt Damon’s parody of the judge on Saturday
Night Live seemed tame in comparison. It made you wonder if he was really trying for a seat on the highest court or angling to replace Judge Judy. Similarly, Netflix political thriller House of
Cards debuted a final season without disgraced star Kevin Spacey but, once again, the antics of the real White House made the show irrelevant.
Diane Lane played a GOP billionaire donor trying to influence the presidency from the outside in. Meanwhile, GOP billionaires such as Betsy Devos and Wilbur Ross are already part of the actual administration. Writers are still scrambling to keep up.
Still, if you could rip your eyeballs off cable news, television did have some truly momentous moments in 2018. From landmark miniseries directed and starring the best in Hollywood, to real achievements in diversity and an unprecedented expansion of studio space in Toronto. The Star looks at the winners and losers in TV this year. WINNER TORONTO (really) BECOMES HOLLYWOOD NORTH
From Star Trek: Discovery to Suits and The Handmaid’s Tale, Toronto is bursting with television production.
And television and film industry crews and producers wanting to film in the city are the big winners with an unprecedented spate of announcements in 2018 for new studio space.
Among the recent headlines: Pinewood Toronto Studios’ groundbreaking this month on a major expansion; CBS Studios’ new production hub to open in Mississauga in March; the Markham Movieland studio that will boast North America’s largest sound stage; and an expansion of the privately owned Cinespace with a new location in Toronto’s Port Lands.
Movie producers have long been complaining that they have had to turn work away to places like New York and Atlanta because studios are fully booked.
According to Altus Group in an exclusive analysis for the Toronto Star, that means there will be an estimated 1.15 million square feet of new studio space — equivalent to about 11 Walmarts — becoming available within the next two years.
That’s in addition to the 2.21 million in studio space currently available, which gives the industry an astonishing rate of growth of 50 per cent in a short time span.
Will this go from boom to bust? That’s a real possibility. But investors are banking that this will follow the trend of Silicon Valley, where the proximity of competitors such as Google and Facebook end up creating a virtuous circle of investment in the television and movie business where like-minded businesses cluster together. And Netflix, which has promised to spend $500 million in Canada, doesn’t look like it’s going to go broke anytime soon. LOSER CBC NEWS
Canada’s public broadcaster bizarrely decided not to run live televised coverage of the Ontario elections, including the Toronto and Ottawa markets. Instead, they showed episodes of Murdoch Mysteries and Frankie Drake.
The CBC said that’s because people can get their information from digital sources, including social media pages and live radio coverage. Their competitors, which include private broadcasters CTV and CHCH TV in Hamilton, didn’t think so. They provided at least an hour of live television as a public service.
But apparently you know what the public can’t just get from digital? The U.S. mid-term elections. The CBC did cover a major election this year with a special edition of The National: America Votes.
The debate over profits versus public interest and whether foreign elections should take precedence over domestic, are issues that the broadcaster will have to seriously reconsider in the new year. WINNER LIMITED SERIES
In the old days, limited series were called miniseries and movie stars rarely slummed it on the small screen. Seeing B-list stars like Richard Chamberlain in James Clavell’s plodding, whitewashed 1980 series Shogun (soon to be rebooted by FX) would have been a pinnacle of the genre.
But never have viewers had such visual riches than in 2018. The small screen is now attracting the best of the A-list stars and directors and this year seemed to hit peak Hollywood.
Freed from the constraints of conventional television, creators have been given space to experiment. Not always successfully. But showrunners have been let off the leash with Netlfix and Amazon scale money and the results are spectacular.
You can’t get bigger than Julia Roberts. The star was in Toronto at the Toronto International Film Festival to premiere her first television series Homecoming, a dark psychological thriller directed by Mr. Robot’s Sam Esmail for Amazon.
Meanwhile, Netflix released Emma Stone and Jonah Hill in the bold fantasy-thriller Manic for Netflix, directed by Jane Eyre’s Cary Joji Fukunaga.
Jim Carrey’s Kidding for Showtime is perhaps his best television work yet, as a deeply unhappy Mr. Rogers- based character trying to find himself. It’s directed by Michel Gondry who previously cast Carrey in his best film, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. And there was also Sharp Objects, starring Amy Adams and directed by Canada’s Jean-Marc Vallée ( Dallas Buyers Club) an atmospheric, gripping southern gothic drama about a reporter who returns to her hometown to cover the murders of two young girls.
And, as if there weren’t enough riches to prove the depth of television today, the best dramatic series turned out to be an Italian-subtitled show with few recognizable Hollywood stars: HBOs darkly luminous My Brilliant Friend, based on the Neapolitan novels of Elena Ferrante. LOSER REALITY DATING SHOWS
Reality dating shows have long seemed oblivious to the #metoo movement — where networks seem to think sexual harassment equates to good television.
But this year there were a spate of incidents that suggest producers have failed to properly vet their contestants. And that’s a dangerous proposition. This includes ABC yanking the second episode of its new reality series The Proposal, after a woman on the show took to Facebook to accuse a male contestant of sexual assault.
• Married at First Sight’s Tristan Thompson discovered that this newly minted wife had been arrested on a warrant for stalking claims.
• The Bachelorette contestant Lincoln Adim was convicted of indecent assault and battery before coming on the show to woo Becca Kufrin. Meanwhile, the eventual winner now engaged to Kufrin, was found to have a problematic social media past, liking Instagram posts that mocked transgender people and immigrant children.
Producers at dating shows say they do extensive background checks before they select contestants. I’m not sure which high-priced detective firms networks are hiring, but a simple Google search would have been a good start. WINNER CBC AND DIVERSITY
The CBC dropped the ball on election coverage. But it hit a home run this year on diversity.
First, it introduced the first Black recurring character on the Anne of Green Gables inspired Anne with an E. Dalmar Abuzeid ( Degrassi: Next Generation) is a joy to watch, and his Trinidadian accent is the most authentic ver- sion yet from someone who has never set foot on the island. The stories are also written by an all-female writers room, headed by Breaking Bad writer Moira Walley-Beckett.
On CBC’s original new show Diggstown, General Hospital’s Vinessa Antoine makes more history as the first Black Canadian female lead in a drama. The show follows legal aid attorney Marcie Diggs fighting for her clients in the Nova Scotia-set drama.
This follows on Season 2 of the sublime Kim’s Convenience — following the lives of a Korean family — that debuted on Netflix this year to international audiences and is winning major plaudits. Smartly written and more insightful than anything you will find on ABC’s Fresh Off The Boat. LOSER ROSEANNE BARR
Roseanne Barr returned to television with a bang and then promptly blew herself up with a racist tweet. After comparing Barack Obama adviser Valerie Jarrett to an ape, her show was promptly cancelled by ABC despite monster ratings.
The disaster created an unlikely winner: ABC retooled the show without Barr but with the cast intact, including John Goodman and Sarah Gilbert, to decent ratings.
In the première of The Conners, viewers learned she had died from an opioid overdose, something that didn’t sit well with the star.
“That it was done with an opioid overdose lent an unnecessary grim and morbid dimension to an otherwise happy family show,” she said in a statement with her rabbi.
But her tweet said it best: “I ain’t dead B-----s!” WINNER DOCTOR WHO
It took 13 incarnations but, finally, we have a female Doctor Who.
In 1986, the creator of Doctor Who, Canadian Sydney Newman, suggested that “at a later stage, Doctor Who should be metamorphosed into a woman.” He suggested several actresses, including Joanna Lumley for the role, but the BBC didn’t bite.
Three decades later, the time-travelling humanoid alien has regenerated into a woman. English actress Jodie Whittaker is the first to portray a woman doctor in the series since it started in 1963. That’s a heck of a long time to wait — even for a Time Lord. Whittaker, with a joyful energy and comic sensibility has re-energized the franchisefamous for hiring grumpy old white guys. LOSER LES MOONVES
Les Moonves ran CBS with an iron fist.
But the most powerful man in television was felled by allegations of sexual harassment and misconduct. A report by Ronan Farrow in the New Yorker made him the television industry’s most visible villain of the #metoo movement in 2018. Moonves made CBS the number-one television network, green-lighting shows such as Survivor, The Amazing Race, CSI and NCIS. For that he was amply rewarded, commanding the highest salary in Hollywood, bringing in a bigger paycheque than any of his movie- and television-making CEO colleagues.
The charming, but notoriously thinskinned Moonves was famous for rewarding his friends and punishing his enemies.
The first time I met him, I asked him why shareholders should pay him $67 million in annual compensation. He was furious and refused to answer the question. Moonves was the star-maker who answered to no one. Until now. WINNER DANIEL DAE KIM
Daniel Dae Kim walked off the set of Hawaii Five O along with co-star Grace Park because CBS refused to give them wage parity with their white co-stars.
Kim then went on to create one of television’s biggest new hits, The Good Doctor, based on a Korean soap opera.
It’s also got a Canadian connection, since the show runner is London, Ont., native David Shore of House M.D. fame.
Ironically, Kim first brought the concept to CBS, who turned it down. That left the door open to competitor ABC, where it became the highest-rated first-year drama in more than a decade, helping to spawn other medical shows this season.
And on the subject of parity, a shoutout to Canada’s Sandra Oh, who became the first Asian actress to be nominated for the Best Dramatic Actress Emmy. Oh’s comic turn as MI-5 agent Eve Polastri in the BBC’s Killing Eve is a delightfully understated, complex in tone, bravura performance. LOSER SUPERHEROES
Iron Fist had the worst martial arts action scenes imaginable for a series whose star was supposed to represent the pinnacle of Kung-Fu.
The perma-petulant billionaire Danny Rand (Finn Jones) always looked like he was leading yoga warm-ups in a Lululemon retail store, not saving the world, so no surprise that Netflix cancelled the show. But then, shortly after, it also killed Luke Cage and, more recently, Daredevil, the best of the Marvel franchises at Netflix.
Could television finally have hit peak superhero? There are, by my rough count, almost 20 superhero shows on the small screen, including the Vancouver shot The Flash, Supergirl and Legends of Tomorrow for the CW.
Superhero fatigue has set in with viewers. And it’s hard to believe that in 2001, Smallville, starring Canada’s Kristin Kreuk (Lana Lang) was the first and only show on the dial when it premièred. As Kreuk told me, it seemed like a risk at the time: “We didn’t anticipate Vancouver would turn out to be superhero city.”
Now every major network has some variation of a superhero show on their channel.
But it looks like broadcasters are culling the herd. The family drama it seems, has replaced the superhero. This is Us anyone?