The Autism Enigma: Must See Canadian TV

Sometimes a promising documentary gets vaulted into the must see category by events that can only be described as serendipitous.
The hour long The Autism Enigma falls into this category . The explosion of autism in very young children began as a Nature Of Things project co-directed by Marion Gruner and Christopher Sumpton.
Guleph based Gruner is a new mother who was only beginning to hone in on the subject when she interviewed the remarkable 90-year old Dr. Sydney Finegold, the world's leading authority on bowel flora.
In 1998 Feingold had a call from a Chicago gastroenterologist who knew a mother Ellen Bolte with a young son who she figured out might have had some form of bacterial infection.
"And we went to Chicago area to see her,"Gruner reports. "And she's a remarkable woman with a background that enabled her to know where to dig for facts and who to contact.
Her theory went something like this: the baby had to have huge doses of antibiotics which seemed to change his very demeanor and she wondered if it had somehow impacted on his central nervous system.
Interviewed on the hour Feingold says that was entirely possible and that when treated with Vancomycin the baby dramatically improved for the six weeks he was on the drug only to regress later.
"It turns out Mrs. Bolte photographed this period extensively and we see how much improved the boy is. And then we see the shocking regression," Gruner adds..
Bolte's remarkable documentation vaults The Autism Enigma into the category of must see TV.
And being able to personalize the story should make all the difference to many viewers. It provides an instant connection.
"It is a vastly complicated subject,"Gruner says.
And to further personalize the story the experiences of Somali children in Canada are documented --many experience similar symptoms when exposed to Western food traditions.
Then we get to know the leading researchers in the field: Dr. Derrick MacFabe, director of autism research at the University of Western Ontario, Laurie Mawlam of Autism Canada, Hassan and Idman Roble of the Somali Parent Support Group, Dr. Emma Allen-Vercoe and Dr. Emma Allen-Vercoe at the University of Toronto, Dr. Stephen Scherer of the Hospital For Sick Children, Biologist Jeremy Nicholson at London's Imperial College.
As absortbing as all their shared knowledge is it isn't pitched over the heads of an average viewer. And it's not presented in a scarey way either but logically.
Biggest problem Gruner faced was assembling a 44-minute print for NOT but she's done a splendid job here. A longer version has already been sold to French and German TV." It contained a whole segment on the situation in Norway which had to be deleted here for time."
I'd say a sale to U.S. TV should occur sooner than later because of the timeliness of the subject.
The Autism Enigma is the latest first rate documentary running on NOT this season making it one of the venerable series' best.
THE AUTISM ENIGMA PREMIERES ON NATURE OF THINGS THURSD. DEC. 8 ON CBC-TV AT 8 P.M.
MY RATING: ****.

"Yes, I Am Clark Gable's Daughter"

"Yes, I am Clark Gable's daughter. My mother is Loretta Young."
That was the explosive way Judy Lewis introduced herself to me in 1994 when she was on a promotional tour for her autobiography.
The thing was in 1986 I'd scored a major scoop in Toronto by being the only Canadian reporter allowed on the set of Loretta Young's TV movie comeback called Christmas Eve.
Getting Young to agree to a one-on-one interview had been difficult but on the very last day of shooting she relented.
The head of NBC International which was making the movie simply told her the film had not yet been sold to a Canadian network "because people don't know who you are anymore."
At first Young said she'd give me 15 minutes but seven hours later she was still talking and reminiscing about her great career.
At 73 she was indeed still gorgeous and enviably wrinkle free.
And finally as she prepared for her last scene of the movie I took my leave but not before she offered this compliment: "Thank you for not asking the usual question."
And I said "If I had what would your answer have been?"
Young: "That if true it was the most romantic moment in Hollywood history."
The story was that Young and Clark Gable had an affair on the set of Call Of The Wild (1935). When the deeply religious Young learned she was pregnant she refused to use the studio abortionist but instead went to Europe for months returning anonymously on a ship that docked at Montreal.
From there she proceeded by train via Toronto and Chicago and then had what turned out to be a lovely daughter who was born in a private home in Venice, California. She then arranged to formally adopt the daughter so no one in Hollywood would ever suspect.
To be an unwed mother in 1935 Hollywood would have meant banishment by the studios all of whom had morality clauses in their contracts.
Gable offered to divorce his wife and marry her but Young simply refused.
When I told all this to Judy Lewis, her daughter, eight years later she briefly burst into tears.
Lewis had been told she was adopted and lived with her mother who subsequently married producer Tom Lewis. Young subsequently had two sons by Lewis.
"Growing up I longed to find my real mother. Little did I know she was right beside me."
Judy Lewis talked about the loneliness of growing up thinking she was adopted. But one day in 1949 when she came home from school there was Clark Gable waiting for her in the living room.
"He held my hand, asked all kinds of questions for over an hour. And then he left and kissed me on the forehead. I never saw my father again."
But Lewis joked "I had his dumbo ears, so big I later had to have an operation to reduce them."
Only when she was about to be married did Judy Lewis learn "from my husband" that she indeed was the daughter of Loretta Young and Clark Gable.
"My mother would not admit it to me until 1966. She called me a mortal sin which truly angered me."
In 1994 Judy Lewis was already 59 and had been through several careers as an actress and later soap opera producer. She was studying to be a therapist dealing with traumas of adopted children, she said.
Her book titled Uncommon Knowledge caused a three year rift in her relationship with her mother. They were reconciled before Loretta Young's death from cancer at the age of 87 in 2000.
But when I asked Young for another interview when she was back in Toronto in 1987 making another TV movie she defiantly said "Never!" That movie had already been pre-sold to CTV and she turned down all interview requests.
Judy Lewis died on Nov. 25e of lymphoma at her Pennsylvania home.
She was 76 and is survived by a daughter and grand children.
I remember her saying "Sometimes the real stories of Hollywood are far more interesting than the movies." And how right she was.

TV Talkers See Ratings Drip Away

The November Sweep ratings are in and the news isn't great for tsome of TV's biggest talkers.
First, Piers Morgan who was plopped into Larry King's coveted CNN talk slot after King's ratings began a downward slide.
Well, it turns out Morgan's numbers are even worse.
Morgan is crazy about himself but few American viewers seem to be.
The November ratings give him an average of just 154,000 viewers a night in the 9 p.m. slot.
Far from stemming the slide Morgan has started his own avalanche.
He's down 4 per cent among the key demographic of viewers 25 to 54.
By contrast MSNBC's Ed Schultz averages 201,000 nightly although he has dropped 35 per cent over the year.
I just don't think Americans cotton on to Morgan's Britishness. His interviews with American politicians have been all over the place. Arts interviews seem a whole lot better.
King thrived for 20 years because he was the voice of the people and took pride in the fact he never studied up for an interview.
Also, Morgan's shows are taped and look it --he apparently didn't have the experience to go llve as King did after decades as a radio talk show host.
Morgan has stepped down from America's Got Talent in order to better prep for each night's CNN show. That's an indication he knows he's in serious trouble.
There's a similar trouble with Anderson Cooper's day job.
The personable CNN news host also has a daytime chatter show plagued with low ratings since its fall debut.
I'm thinking Anderson is just too serious for the fans of daytime who much prefer hyped, confrontational shows than the low wattage discussions his show projects.
As is typical on a show in trouble there's been movement at the top: executive producers Cathy Chermol and Lisa Morin are departing and Terence Noon who did a great job in rebooting Dr. Oz into a TV celebrity is coming in.
Apparently things came to a head during an edition on the Penn State scandals when the executive producer asked the audience no to hold back and Cooper disagreed with her. Tempers flared.
Good for Cooper not wanting to be exploitative but such seriousness does not grow ratings.
And then there's the strange case of Rosie O'Donnell now installed as the celebrity talker on Oprah Winfrey's new TV weblet OWN.
So far ratings have been disastrous --there's been a 49 per cent drop since Rosie's debut in October.
Look, I liked "Rosie Lite" when she had her daytime syndicated talk show and did mostly show bizzy interviews.
Then she got all feisty as part of The View and finally left in a huff --but let's face it veteran Barbara Walters was not going to be sideswiped by anybody.
Here she's a disappointment. The other night she snagged Phytllis Diller and incredibly the show just sagged --Diller in her 90s was quite funny.
Rosie isn't getting the big, competitive guests most nights because her ratings are so low. Like Conan she's been relegated to a network few peopled know exists.
Update: I just caught Rosie with stand up Brett Butler and it was a terrific show. Maybe Rosie is going to turn her show around.

I'd predict a quick cancellation here.

Waking The Green Tiger Is Great TV

With all the chatter in Ottawa these days about the future of the CBC along comes a brilliant new documentary that fully justifies the Corporation's continuing existence.
Directed by Vancouver film maker Gary Marcuse and narrated by David Suzuki Waking The Green Tiger has its TV premiere on The Nature of things Thursday night on CBC-TV at 8 p.m.
It's quite unlike any other recent documentary on China in that it penetrates beneath the official government censorship to show how peasants in a southern part of China stopped the construction of a gigantic dam in "Tiger Leaping Gorge" in the Upper Yangtze River.
Marcuse's team enjoyed incredible access to the beleagured peasants of the valley and to the green activists who were egging them on to try to stop construction.
The hour blends in perfectly with Marcuse's two other films on environmental concerns. The first Nuclear Dynamite copped a Gemini with its look at the wacky idea of building a new Panama canal using nuclear explosives.
The second Arktika: The Russian Dream That Failed looked at the emerging Russian green movement sparked by fears of nuclear contamination from submerged Russian submarines in the Arctic.
"I was surprised at the level of government cooperation we got on this one," Marcuse tells me on the phone from B.C.
"I think it's because the green movement is seen not as a political problem but as a source of genuine concern for everyone. The premier had even expressed misgivings several times about the plan to build so many new dams on the Nu River and the Upper Yangtze.
"The passing of new green laws encourages people to express their concerns which certainly was not the case just a few years ago."
The production has already won an award as Best Canadian documentary at Toronto's Planet In Focus film festival and was listed as one of the Top Ten Canadian films at the Vancouver International Film Festival.
Marcuse says the Canadian contingent was small --just him and cinematographer Rolf Cutts-but he needed the cooperation of key Chinese green activists in telling the story correctly.
Some of the images are breathtaking --of the lush river valley and the industrious farmers.
"The landscape is simply stunning,"Marcuse says with some awe. "It's a big tourist center."
Government plans called for the displacement of 100,000 people and the complete flooding of 265 kilometers of the upper Yangtze.
Marcuse has compared it to flooding the Fraser river from Vancouver to Hope.
There are some great moments when local farmers board a bus to visit displaced villagers up the river and see for themselves what "progress" means. All over China a staggering total of 16 million people have been displaced by government dams.
"At first they're just happy to be on this trip, many had never been outside their valley. Then doubts set in by what they see."
Farmers in the relocated region now must root through garbage dumps to recycle glass bottles. They say they can't survive on the meagre compensation packets and many are dressed in rags. The villagers return with a renewed determination to fight the government bureaucrats.
When surveying posts are spotted in their fields the posts are quickly torn down. And the villagers meet and discuss ways for peaceful resistance which eventually does succeed in the delay for many years of the dam.
When I say many villagers do no look Chinese he says "There are many ethnic minorities there, many Tibetans and others. The valley was always a meeting spot for traders from different regions."
Everything the environmentalists are doing today runs counter to the pronouncements of Chairman Mao in 1958 as he urged his Great Leap Forward. What Map was really urging his supporters to do was wage war against the environment.
Archival black and white footage shows enthusiasts killing off the sparrows because Mao said they ate too much grain --but the birds also ate insects and without them great swarms of locusts resulted in massive crop failures in 1958 and 1959.
Marcuse even gets a typical Chinese couple of today who remember the starvation to wonder ironically why Chairman Mao so hated the sparrows --it's a great touch.
Today the green movement booms in China. Marcuse says his official government contact --his "minder"-even arranged an exclusive last minute interview with the former head of China's environmental protection agency Qu Geping who in a remarkable candid talk admits major mistakes were made.
Qu explains how environmentalism was allowed to sweep through the nation and how the government actually cooperated with the acitvists as long as they remained apolitical.
Marcuse says one inspiration was green activist Shi Lihong who graduated from film studies at Berkeley and had made a 20-minute film about the problems in the Upper Yangtze.
She emerges as one of the movement's heroines for sure.
For the moment Marcuse wants to get his film accepted for the Sundance festival. Already copies have gone viral in China and who knows some day might even be shown on government TV.
NOT has a 44-minute version and Danish TV bought a 56-minute one. The movie version runs 78 minutes so Waking The Green Tiger is reaching audiences in all sorts of ways.
WAKING THE GREEN TIGER RUNS ON CBC-TV'S THE NATURE OF THINGS ON THURSD. DEC.1 AT 8 P.M.
MY RATING: *** 1/2.

Surviving The Grey Cup: A Guide

So the other day as I was addressing a Grade 8 class on the future of TV (I don't think it has one) a pert and sassy 13-year old asked me how I survived adolescence in the old world of a 10 channel universe.
I thought it was a funny line and tossed back an equally funny retort.
But now I'm thinking about it because The grey Cup is on Sunday night at 7 on TSN.
It doesn't carry the buzz it used to have.
Not on CBC. Not on CTV.
In ye olden days there'd always be a tussle about which of the nation wide networks would show The Game.
CBS always got there first with big bags of dough --remember this was before Quebecor started asking all those pesky questions about The Corp's finances.
One year I even remember CTV and CBC shared the broadcast so no one would be left out --in those days CTV's coverage was significantly less than CBC's
But these days?
The Game is live on TSN and that's that. The CRTC assumes everybody gets TSN these days but little do they know a lot of people are switching back to antennas these days. They're simply fed up with the huge cable fees and the lousy service.
I think the sports casters covering it will do just fine.
But to misquote my old U of T Chaucer professor Marshall McLuhan, the medium really is the message.
And being relegated to TSN, well, it somehow diminishes The Game.
The same thing happened when Glenn Beck was kicked off Fox TV and wound up on some obscure service and nobody ever quotes Glenn Beck anymore.
Same thing happened to Conan O'Brien in the States as he jumped from NBC to a service (TN) few Americans bother to subscribe too.
Conan no longer is getting the A list stars.
Well, we don't have a 10-channel choice anymore, do we?
The cable universe is 959 cable weblets and counting.
There's VHS and DVD to tape the game for future reference. Yo can tape The Game for later.
A guy I was just talking to told me he has 2,000 hours of curling on TV in his video library. And oh how he loves to watch those classic plays in slow motion.
Instead of Grey Cup CBC has three hours devoted to a movie blockbuster: The Chronicles Of Narnia.
Many households have more than one TV set these days so the days of the entire family gathered around watching CFL football is long gone.
Sunday night CTV is wall-to-wall Americana:Once Upon A Time, the Amazing Race and the 2004 flick The Bourne Supremacy.
Global TV continues its unabashed love affair with American imports: the Simpsons, The Cleveland Show, Alleb Gregory, Family Guy and American Dad.
And so it goes. I could pick Sister Wives on TLC. Naw. Or episodes of Suits and Castle on Bravo! Nope!
Buffalo's PBS affiliate WNED has a two-hour salute to the Lennon Sisters. If it were running a new Mystery! or Masterpiece Theater this is where I'd stop.
Also, there's Animal Planet which carries the repeat of the 2011 Puppy Bowl followed by the special When Animals Adopt at 8. Very tempting, very tempting.
There's a House Hunters marathon running on HGTV. But I'm more tempted by The Walking Dead marathon on AMC.
Turner Classic Movies has its premiere of Marilyn Monroe in There's No Business Like Show Business--Ethel Merman and Marilyn Monroe together again for the first (and last) time.
A baker's dozen of familiar American movie titles also dot the landscape.
And now I'm thinking how did I ever survive in that constipated old 10-channel world.
How did I spend my time?
Than it dawned on me --I actually read a lot of books and magazines back then.
And there was a ton of homework in high school --the government since my day abolished Grade 13 which is the reason record numbers of kids flunk out of university these days.
I made it through the rain OK. I survived on less.
And now with so many chances I just can't make my mind up at all.
Out of sheer frustration I just may watch an old tape or a preview DVD of something I want to review later on.

As My Stomach Churns: The End Of TV Soaps?

Cue the organ music. Cut to a monstrous close-up of a circling globe.
And now dear friends I must report that two of my fave TV series One Life To Live and All My Children are definitely over.
Kaput. Finished. The End.
For months those of use who follow the soaps with any regularity had been reeling at the news All My Children and One Life To Live had been cancelled by ABC.
One Life To Live. of course, continues on ABC but only until its anticipated climax on Jan 13, 2012.
A new venture Online Entertainment had planned to move both soaps to the internet conditional on whopping pay reductions from the unions concerned.
The media and production company would be Prospect Park founded in 2009 by Jeffrey Kwatinetz and Frank Rich (former head of Disney Studios).
But after five months of negotiations the talks have broken off.
Closing with the AMC stars proved impossible. No way was Susan Lucci going to wind up on the internet after her ABC stardom days. So there already was some sort of delay in getting AMC back up and running.
But among the OLTL cast virtually all the stars including Erika Slezak, Ted King, Michael Easton and Kassie DePaiva were on board and raring to go.
The unions wanted too much, initial viewing figures might be negligible and there even was talk of selling second rights to some cable concern.
New series going straight to the internet?
It was a question of too much, too soon.

Is Dr. Jennifer Gardy CBC's Next Big science Star?

Whither The Nature Of Things? Hither? Or thither?
Let me explain --the venerable CBC science series with Dr. David Suzuki almost went under a few seasons back when the CBC management team of the day wanted to cancel it after its 50th season on TV.
Nothing strange about that.
Over the years CBC-TV planners cancelled such CBC icons as Juliette, Tommy Hunter, even the gang on Front Page Challenge.
In each case the replacements proved less than stirling and in time got cancelled as well.
I was thinking about NOT's future when previewing Thursday's new episode Myth Or Science starring Dr. Jennifer Gardy.
Is it not a disguised pilot for a bright new hip science series. Just asking.
The formula is the kind of thing Discovery does so well all the time.
And the knock against NOT these days has been its cadre of aging viewers.
And may I also say i has an aging host --Dr. David Suzuki --the one who put NOT on the map eons ago.
I was around back then as NOT and its mighty rival This Land fought ratings duels week after week.
NOT's executive producer at the time, Jim Murray, told me of his game plan to fight back. Murray reckoned with CBC budget cuts there would soon be space for only one of these series and he wanted it to be NOT.
So he personalized the show, installed Suzuki as host and narrator, and when CBC honcos sat down to decide the fate of the two shows it was the hostless This Land that got dumped.
These days the hour long documentaries that are the hallmark of NOT have fallen out of favor with the head programmers.
Myth Or Science is a very watchable, fast paced look at all those scientific old wives tales we hold near and dear.
And instead of Suzuki fronting the show it's bright and perky Vancouver molecular biologist Jennifer Gardy who gets involved.
She's photogenic, has just the right credentials and is a natural on TV.
I've a feeling she'll be back in a series spinoff of this hour. And she's game for just about anything. Down the road a bit she may even get to step in as host of NOT.
Example: She journeys down to a Gainesville swamp in Florida and a mosquito breeding facility to check out whether anthropods really have an attraction for female over male flesh. the conclusion? Watch the hour to find out.
Or can eating fast cause weight gain? In New York city she goes hot dog to hot dog with Dave "Coondog" O'Karma to check out this myth.
At the University of Manitoba she meets "Dr. Popsicle" who submerges her in a tank of ice water to check the myth that the head loses body heat faster than other parts of the body.
Gardy makes a
She tried in 2008 to land a similar series attempt called the Project. But this time out she may make it.
Dugald Maudsley wrote and produced the hour (Jeff Semple directed) for Infield Fly Productions and as I say it's definitely a series possibility.
MYTH OR SCIENCE PREMIERES ON NATURE OF THINGS ON THURSD. NOV. 24 AT 8 P.M. ON CBC-TV.
MY RATING: *** 1/2.