Massimo Capra's New Series Gourmet Escapes

I first started noticing Toronto chef Massimo Capra on City Line where his hearty personality was attracting a wide audience of devoted foodies.
And when he moved over to the Food Network's Restaurant Makeover I started wondering when he'd get his own show.
Well, it's here and exclusive to the revamped Travel +_ Escape network now owned by GlassBOX Television.
Any program with Capra finds the expansive cook front and center but this time he must yield some space every weeks to a guest chef.
I watched the first episode in the new 13-week series and was impressed. Set in Ireland it shows the wide variety of fare available to the connoiseur of local fare.
"Everywhere there's green in many shades,"Capra tells me. "It was a wonderful experience. We shot enough for several more programs, it was hard to stop."
The theme is local cooking so Capra partners with local cooks who show him the insides and outsides of their craft. "I cook beside them, do what they want me to do. But most importantly I ask questions."
"The Irish episode really works. I sample Irish honey, it's so amazingly pure. And when we go for rhubard the stalks are the size of a tree trunk yet when cooked simply sweet and delicious.
"My job is to get these artists to be comfortable on camera. You know my old friend actor Jonathan welsh told me to simply ignore the camera and be myself. That's what I tell all my guests. Oh, sure, I'll play up a little to get them loose but they have a lot of expertise to show us."
Each episode starts with an appeal to the local Tourism board to find the right chefs and the right locales.
"In Italy I won't be doing the obvious places --like Rome. I want to go to Sicily, to Cremona. In Switzerland we are doing two shows. The one in Amsterdam highlights Dutch cooking which few of us know much about. I Wales I've found a food school worth shouting about."
But doesn't all this traveling interfere with his Toronto restaurant Mistura?
"Not really, when I'm here I'm really here and I'm rarely away for more than 10 days. My patrons expect me here and I can't be away more, you see.
"This series is taking a long time but it's the beginning, we want to get everything right.
"I hope the Irish show interests everyone. We go to an island where the only inhabitants are pigs. And our chef poaches a huge pike and I provide assistance with the other courses. We serve it to a large, invited crowd and they were knocked out. It's all in the service of better cooking."
GOURMET ESCAPES PREMIERES ON TRAVEL + ESCAPE ON WED. NOV. 2 AT 8 P.M.
MY RATING: ***.

FX Canada Signs On With American Horror Story

You can tell from the opening credits of American Horror Story that this new series on FX Canada is going to creep you out.
The Credits open with a montage of creepy stills and bloodied surgical instruments. And it's all been created by Ryan Murphy who last gave us Glee!
But American Horror Story has but one purpose: to scare the viewer half to death.
It also helps to know your horror movies and TV series from the past.
At one point in the basement of this old dark house I swear I heard snatches of Bernard Herrmann's score from Psycho.
As a salute to the best of the past it helps that you've seen Bettlejuice, A Nightmare On Elm Street, Rosemary;s Baby, The Shining and about a dozen other classics.
First up there's the old dark house which psychiatrist Ben Harmon (Dylan McDermott), wife Vivien (Connie Britton) and their daughter Violent (Taissa Fermiga) have moved into in Los Angeles after a move from Boston.
The mansion doesn't look Southern Californian at all but has been lovingly restored from its Victorian splendor.
As in all these stories the family doesn't realize at first the mansion is haunted and has been the site of several grisly murders over the decades.
Next door resides a deliciously evil dumb blonde Constance portrayed in high style by Jessica Lange.
And Ben meets the horriblf burned Chad (Zachary Quinto) who once lived in the house before torching it and killing his wife and daughters. Frances Controy from Six Feet Under plays a strange housekeeper Moira who is attached to the home.
Shot on location in an actual old home in Country Club Park, Los Angeles, the house quickly emerges as the most interesting character of all. Some scenes are filmed at Fox on sets which are exact replica's of the rooms in the house.
Murphy's style has always been to overdo almost everything and here he succeeds. In the horror genre less is considered more --the less you see and know the more creeped out you're going to be.
But on AHS it's all scary scenes without the necessary down moments for the viewers to recuperate.
There's a lot of nudity, blood letting, screaming --you name it.
Jessica Lange understands she must play everything at full throttle to disguise her character's true intentions and she is obviously having a ball. And one line she has in the opener made me sit up straight when she warns the maid: "Don't make me kill you again."
The maid is sometimes Frances Conroy but she morphs into a sexy, young thing when Ben is eyeing her.
But after awhile the profusion of gore got to me. I was no longer shocked by the succession of killings. Too much is too much. At certain points in this story the blood letting gets impossible to top. Certainly you will not be bored although you might have to turn away on occasion.
But logic escapes this story. It ends up not making any sense at all and makes Psycho look like a church picnic. That's when camp takes over. Jessica Lange understands this but Connie Britton tries for subtle touches which are not needed.
AHS emerges as extremely indulgent when what was really called for was a dash of subtelty.
But I effortlessly predict the sales of renovated old dark houses will slip as long as AHS is runs on FX Canada.
AMERICAN HORROR STORY PREMIERES ON FX CANADA ON MONDAY OCT. 31 AT 9 P.M.
MY RATING: ***.

Let's Cancel the New TV Season

So far the new American TV season has bombed.
There are only two new unvarnished hits: Working Girls on CBS and New Girl on Fox.
Every thing else could be cancelled tomorrow and who would notice?
According to a brilliant new story on ADWeek this week the rest is just filled with also rans.
My network sources say getting play for the new shows gets more difficult by the year particularly with the advent of so many competing cable channels who premiere their fare at all through the year and just not in September.
Jiggle TV is brain dead: look at those casualties Charlie's Angels and The Playboy Club.
The much hyped Terra Nova isn't getting renewed --its plots are sully,. Who tunes in for a bad story but great special effects.
Some much anticipated series like Pan Am and Prime Suspect might still make it but their ratings are anemic so far.
Would you believe Fox is number one right now --that could also be due to baseball playoffs.
CBS is so close that for demographic purposes it says it has a tie. ABC's audience is down 4 per cent this year while NBC is in free fall and has lost a whopping 14 per cent of its audience. The only show saving NBC from complete collapse is Sunday Night Football, I'm told. All this does matter in Canada because the commercial networks purchase U.S. hits for hundreds of thousands of dollars. But why pay a fortune and get a stinker like Charlie's Angels?
It just doesn't make sense to me.
CBS's big problem remains its rapidly aging schedule of procedurals. This could be the last season for one or two of the very expensive CSI franchises.
ABC says its new shows are performing well and has placed full season orders for the Tim Allen show, Once Upon A Time,
Revenge and Subpurgatory.
NBC says it isn't panicking and has ordered full seasons for Whitney and Up All Night despite their bad ratings.
Biggest headache for Fox is the poorly performing The X Factor: it's so expensive to produce it may well wind up a one season wonder.
With ratings plunging why don't the U.S. networks switch to the Canadian ratings system which claims that ratings on conventional Canadian networks (outside of CBC) are up in the past few years?
Because if you believe that you'll believe anything.

American Networks Sliding In Ratings

The big news of this still young TV season is the drip-drip-dripping away of ratings among most of the American networks. Biggest drop is being posted by NBC which was already in fourth spot when the new season began last month.
Having a whole pack of dopey new shows and some rapidly aging old ones doesn't help.
How does this affect Canadian viewers?
Well, most of the fare on the Canadian commercial networks these days consists of American imports.
According to the Wall street Journal ratings are down across NBC by as much as 30 per cent which is a whopping drop any way one looks at it.
Both Law & Order:SVU and The Biggest Loser lost one of their biggest stars and have posted tremendous declines. NBC's downfall comes after a decade of cutting costs. Remember that stupid plan to cancel all the NBC dramas at 10 p.m. in order that Jay Leno could soar in prime time?
It didn't happen and when the dust cleared Leno was back at 11:30 p.m. in his old Tonight Show berth and decades younger Conan O'Brien had quit the network in disgust.
This year Comcast purchased the ailing web from General Electric with a plan to pump money into bid budgeted new drama series.
Bob Greenblatt who had successfully steered U.S. cable weblet Showtime to ratings success was plopped in. But one of his first new shows the dog awful The Playboy Club has already tanked and is gone.
NBC sources are saying the network is sticking with Prime Suspect which seems to be getting better by the week. NBC has started promoting the heck out of it with multiple runs to pump up audience interest.
And two NBC comedies --Whitney and Up All Night--do how signs of promise. But both poll way below Fox's bright new sitcom hit New Girl.
And the situation at 11:30 just isn't laughable with Nightline on ABC now pulling ahead of Leno.
But The Office is doing OK for a very old show --much better than CBS's Two And A Half Men which has lost half its premiere week audience.
The only thing left in the NBC hamper is the new series Grimm which starts Friday plus Fear Factor waiting in the wings.
But if NBC gets real desperate it could always import a Canadian drama or two as filler, right?

Jayne Eastwood And I

Jane Eastwood And I, we go way, way back in Canadian TV.
I was a very young summer student reporter for The Globe And Mail in July, 1970, when entertainment editor Donn Downey despatched me to the wilds of west Toronto to interview someone he described as a "bright, new starlet.
"Her name is Jayne Eastwood," he barked "and she's in that hot new Canadian flick Goin' Down The Road."
Wait a minute! A new Canadian "flick" that was hot?
Well, I went to the cinema that night to catch Eastwood and company and boy was she mesmerizing in this brilliant movie directed by Don Shebib.
And all of a sudden critics were talking about the birth of Canadian cinema.
It never happened but that didn't stop Eastwood from sashaying into one of Canadian TV's biggest stars.
I remember how hot it was that day and the bareness of her apartment --the only piece of furniture she had was a lumpy mattress on the floor.
I seem to recall a cat named Frank although that might be from a later visit.
She was funny, she was sassy and willingly posed on the back porch waving a bottle of beer as if still in character as GDTR's Betty. It all added up to a great story although stodgy Globe editors remained unimpressed.
Only later was I to learn Downey's brother was her agent. But no matter. She made for a delicious interview and fopr a few years after that she was much sough after.
I interviewed other starlets in those years and most of them were never heard from again.
But Eastwood persevered. She became ever more busy with the passing of the years.
She was the original choice to co-star with Al Waxman in the CBS sitcom King Of Kensington but was pregnant with her first child and only got onto the show in its last years (1978-80) after original star Fiona Reid decided to quit.
I definitely remember a reunion with Eastwood who was rehearsing for a live drama at CBC with expatriate Canadian actress Allyn Ann McLerie but it is not listed among her credits. Hey you guys at IMDB look out!
I definitely caught up with her again on the promising CBC sitcom Material World (1990-92). Her dressing room was next to Chris Potter who would be her co-star on Zoe Busiek: Wild Card (2003). a decade later.
When she was later dropped from the show the series started to tank.
Of course there were dozens of other credits:guest spots on Friday The 13th, Mom P.I.,Ray Bradbury Theater, Night Heat. It's a virtual who's who of Canadian TV.
One time I sat with Jayne and her delightful brother at the Gemini awards.
And thank goodness she finally received the prestigious Earle Grey awards for her contributions to Canadian TV.
Family commitments kept her from defecting to Hollywood decades ago. She could have been a big star down there.
Her career most closely resembles Barbara Hamilton's. Both had a firm commitment to country and with their verisimiltude they could always find quality work here.
In recent years Jayne, 65, has had a choice recurring role on Little Mosque and two more projects are in post production (Dark Star Hollow, The Story Of Luke).
It couldn't happen to a more talented actress.
And TV and movies have only been part of her career. Check her out in person in the revue Women Fully Clothed where she more than holds her own.
Sorry!Have to ring off now. I'm off to see Down The Road Again, the sequel that only took 41 years to come together.

A New Canadian Series On Canadian TV! Wow!

I'm being constantly asked this fall why some Canadian TV networks have virtually no Canadian shows save for the obligatory national newscasts.
Well, there are new Canadian series out there, you only have to dig a bit to find them.
Like the brand new series Extraordinary Canadians which premieres Sunday night at 8:30 on Citytv.
The premise made me hesitate for a moment: Canadian authors talking about their subjects for half an hour. The series is a TV adaptation of the Penguin Canada series of books which going to paperback this fall.
I feared it might be another talking heads thing and we've got several of those around where one feels obligated to listen in as academics churn about and drone and drone.
So I plopped in the first DVD --Mark Kingswell on Glenn Gould and --surprise --I learned something and was fascinated all over again with this true eccentric.
And here's my Glenn Gould anecdote --the day of his death (Oct. 4, 1982) all the entertainment critics at the Toronto Star (all save the classical music critic who was cruising down the Mississippi on a junket) got lists of sources to phone to get quotes and reaction.
First on my list was famed pianist Artur Rubinstein and the agent even gave me his direct telephone line in Paris.
The Star operator dialed and Mr. Rubinstein, 94, answered the line.
And for several moments he gave me a precise description of the way he liked to play the piano (with an audience) and how Glenn Gould prefered a solitary recording styudio.
Kingswell plays on this oddity --a star pianist who seemingly shunned the spotlight and even played up his oddities.
Kingswell visits Gould's well worn chair now in the National Archives, we see the Toronto Beach house where he grew up, the summer cottage.
All this is accompanied by TV clips, newsreels, old interviews and various yellowing clippings.
I liked it all and was very disappointed it only runs half an hour.
So I chose the second DVD: Adrienne Clarkson on Norman Bethune.
This could be Clarkson's first sustained TV work since she exited Adrienne Clarkson At Large to become Governor General.
She seems scarcely changed at all, still in command of a medium she dominated for decades.
And the catch is she was born in Hong Kong the same year as Bethune died in China as he was saving soldiers on the battlefield.
Again Clarkson does a fair bit of traveling from Bethune's Gravenhurst family home (now a museum) to Montreal where he became a surgeon to various statues of him in his some country.
The catch is visitors to the museum are mostly Chinese tourists to Canada, his own country doesn't know him as well as his adopted land of China where he is revered as a saint.
PMS Productions Producer Kenneth Hirsch is quoted as saying the series took five years to execute. I like everything about it save the regrettably short running time --the only half hour shows left these days are sitcoms.
Upcoming are episodes on Mackenzie King, Emily Carr and Pierre Trudeau.
There'll be an instant rerun on The Biography Channel on Sat. Oct. 29 at 7:30 p.m.
EXTRAORDINARY CANADIANS PREMIERES ON CITYTV ON SUND. OCT. 23 AT 8:30 P.M.
MY RATING: *** 1/2.

Conspiracy Theory Filled With Conspiracies

If I were a sceptic I'd think there might be a link between the Wall Street protests and the new TV documentary Conspiracy Rising.
But that would make me a conspiracy advocate, one of many profiled in this must see new CBC program directed and produced by veteran Andrew Blicq for Merit Motion Pictures.
The polls tell us that many of us concoct conspiracies to explain those distressing aspects of this modern age.
I can remember as a high school student being in the middle of a Grade 12 Latin examination when the whisper went around the auditorium that President John Kennedy had been assassinated in Dallas.
Then there were the strange, unexplained circumstances surrounding the car crash and death of Princess Diana in 2008.
And let's not forget 9/11. Around 1 p.m. that fateful day I looked out the gigantic front windows at the Toronto Star and saw the sky filled with American jets circling over Lake Ontario --The World Trade Center had been bombed and all planes in American air space diverted to Canada.
Did I concoct any theories about these unusual events?
Well, I have never believed the lone gunman theory at Dallas. And neither did ex-prime minister John Diefenbaker the one time I interviewed him.
So Conspiracy Rising was made for me. And anybody else suspicious about events in recent modern history.
It's remarkably well put together, mixing archival footage we've come to know (and hate) plus comments from talking heads explaining all this phenomena.
It reminds me a bit of a book I read in my American history course at university: Richard Hofstadter's The Paranoia In American Politics.
Because nineteenth century conspiratorialists tried to explain that John Wilkes Booth hadn't assassinated President Lincoln --and it wasn't Booth's body burned in that barn.
The Kennedy assassination continues to fascinate. A recent new story said widow Jacqueline Kennedy suspected vice president Lyndon Johnson had arranged the killing with Mafia support.
The lone gunman theory was dissected years after the fact by CBS's Walter Cronkite who tested rifles at the site of the Texas School Book Depository and wasn't satisfied a poor shot like Lee Harvey Oswald could have done the deed.
But Blicq goes to the site and finds tourists saying it was anywhere from two to nine shooters participating.
It's so much easier to think Princess Diana was killed by the royal family than the simple explanation someone so gifted and wealthy could fall victim to a drunken driver.
I think the best shots are at the alien museum at Roswell, New Mexico, where the supposed autopsy of an alien who had crashed in the desert is discussed at length --the curator's father was the doctor who did the procedure.
There's even an interview with newly weds who got married and then hurried to the site to spend a night searching the stars for answers. they got none.
The authorities who soothingly explain away most of our fears include human rights activist Chip Berlet, Dr. Patrick Leman, Prof. David Livingstone Smith and Dr. Michael Shermer. All of them are expert at what they do.
But I still have this clump of uncertainty at the back of my brain. Not to worry, I'm told we're all genetically programmed to believe what others keep insisting is the truth.
And I'm not alone.
Conspiracy Rising tells us 16 per cent of Canadians believe the American government had some hand in the 9/11 attacks. And 70 per cent of Americans think Lee Harvey Oswald was part of a larger conspiracy. And a fifth of Canadians believe aliens have visited our planet.
You'll watch CR because it is so well put together.
Will you believe what's said or simply revert to dark theories about the great events of our time?
Maybe my theories have changed after exposure to this hour. Then again maybe not.
CONSPIRACY RISING DEBUTS ON CBC-TV'S DOC ZONE ON THURSD. OCT. 20 AT 9 P.M.
MY RATING: *** 1/2.