The comeback kid
CBC’s new ‘raunchy family comedy’ Little Dog is all about redemption
Little Dog Thursdays, CBC Rocky long ago proved that when it comes to boxing movies, audiences love an underdog.
The new made-in-Canada series Little Dog will test whether that also holds true for television.
Little Dog is a passion project of Newfoundland-based actorwriter-producer Joel Thomas Hynes. He describes the series as a “raunchy family comedy” about a burned out, washed-up boxer named Tommy (Little Dog) Ross who left the ring in disgrace five years earlier and now has a shot at a rematch with his old rival.
“More than his career is at stake,” says Hynes. “There’s his personal pride and his relationship with his family.”
While the rival he’ll face is Rico St. George, played by Dwain Murphy, Tommy’s greatest opponent may be his mother, Sylvia (Irish actress Ger Ryan). She’s a failed lounge singer who will never let her son forget that he’s a loser.
Tommy’s brother “Lowly” (Stephen Oates) works hard at making Little Dog feel small, too, as does his sister Ginny (Katharine Isabelle). The only family member in Tommy’s corner is Ginny’s bicycle-riding son, Chesley (Billy Cochrane). To him, Uncle Tommy is a hero. In this messed-up family, that’s pretty much right.
According to Hynes, who created the series, the character of Tommy was somewhat inspired by a reallife boxer named Andrew Golota. In a heavyweight match with Mike Tyson in 2000, Golota did the unthinkable: he quit the fight, walking out of the ring after the second round. The then-32-year-old boxer had been knocked down in the first round and was later diagnosed with a concussion.
“There’s extraordinary footage online of the fans smashing drinks off his chest and everything as he’s walking away,” says Hynes. “We just started thinking, ‘Where the hell is that guy now, and do you ever come back from that, if that’s your legacy?”’
Adds showrunner and executive producer Sherry White (Rookie Blue, Saving Hope), “It’s really about do you ever get a second chance?”
Hynes was never a professional boxer, but says he has had “my share of fights.” Several of those were of the hockey variety.
“I spent seven years on the ice and I spent a lot of time just street fighting,” he says, “so it’s not a foreign thing to me. I eventually moved toward boxing and martial arts because you can’t get away with just fighting anymore.”
Before filming began in St. John’s last September, Hynes trained with Newfoundland featherweight Jason Hayward. The 41-year-old actor doesn’t only use his hands for boxing. He’s punched out scripts, too, including the seven episodes of this series. He’s also written stage plays and novels, including We’ll All Be Burnt in Our Beds Some Night, winner of the 2017 Governor General’s Literary Award for English language fiction.
His acting credits include roles on a few other Newfoundlandbased projects including Republic of Doyle, Frontier and Hatching, Matching and Dispatching.
This isn’t the first shared project for Hynes and White. They also produced a son, Percy Hynes White. The teenager is also an actor.
Hynes and White split up, but unlike the family in Little Dog, they can work together — as parents as well as filmmakers.
Percy, in fact, was supposed to have a role in Little Dog until he landed an acting job on an American network series: the Marvel Comics X-Men drama The Gifted.
“We were scooped,” says mom White.