Tag: Departure

SHOW OF THE WEEK 1: Trickster (Oct. 7, 9 p.m., CBC and CBC Gem)

Of all the many elements that go into making a successful TV show, casting is arguably one of the most important.

The cast is our proxy, the people we have to follow wherever the characters lead, so there’s a lot riding on getting it right. The casting team for “Trickster,” led by Jon Commerford and Rene Haynes, did a bang-up job, especially with series lead Joel Oulette.

Just 17 when he played teenage protagonist Jared, Oulette had only a few supporting roles to his name when he took on the starring role in “Trickster” — but you’d never know it from the skilful way he elicits our empathy and our interest.

Jared is an ordinary teen in Kitimat, B.C. with some extraordinary burdens. He juggles the usual stressors like school, part-time work, friends and a new romance, but also supports his parents financially and emotionally: mother Maggie (Crystle Lightning), a hard-partying hellraiser who hears voices, and father Phil (Craig Lauzon), a recovering opioid addict who has a child on the way with his new partner.

That might sound dysfunctional, but Jared has a loving relationship with both his folks. His real troubles arise outside the family unit: from his mother’s drug dealer boyfriend (Joel Thomas Hynes), the swaggering stranger who tries to insinuate himself into his life (Kalani Queypo) and the strange things Jared starts seeing.

“Trickster” fits into a continuum of supernatural teen-focused dramas, everything from “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” to “Teen Wolf” and “The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina,” but the mythology explored here comes from Indigenous traditions, particularly of the Haisla Nation of northern B.C.

Indigenous viewers might appreciate seeing their stories reflected onscreen while non-Indigenous ones might learn something; in both cases, they can expect to be entertained. 

You can read my interview with the cast and series co-creator Michelle Latimer here.

SHOW OF THE WEEK 2: Departure (Oct. 8, 10 p.m., Global TV)

You can’t watch “Departure” and not marvel at the sight of maskless people packed into a passenger jet with not an empty middle seat in sight. I myself have not been on a plane since January and don’t expect to be on one for a good long while thanks to the COVID-19 pandemic.

But you should watch “Departure” not because it’s a reminder of the before time but because it’s a well-made, suspenseful drama with a fantastic cast.

Canadian legend Christopher Plummer, still a force to be reckoned with at 90, and excellent British actor Archie Panjabi head the team, but there are plenty of other Canadian names who deserve to be on your radar, among them Kris Holden-Ried, Rebecca Liddiard, Allan Hawco, Mark Rendall, Tamara Duarte and Evan Buliung (whom I’ve had the pleasure of seeing live onstage at the Stratford Festival and elsewhere). And don’t forget Brits like Shazad Latif (“Star Trek: Discovery”), Peter Mensah and Claire Forlani.

The six-part series is about what happens after a plane carrying 256 passengers and crew disappears over the Atlantic Ocean on its way from New York to London. The crash is but a small part of the first episode, plus brief flashbacks throughout. The drama comes from watching a team of investigators led by Panjabi’s and Holden-Ried’s characters figure out what brought the plane down, something that kept me as engaged as any detective drama in the two episodes I’ve seen so far.

There’s also a mystery involving one of the passengers for the team to solve, but I won’t say what because that would be a spoiler.

You can read my interview with Plummer, Panjabi and series creator Vincent Shiao here.

There’s No Place Like This Place, Anyplace (Oct. 8, 8 p.m., CBC) and Company Town (Oct. 10, 8 p.m., CBC)

I’ve grouped these two “CBC Docs POV” documentaries together because they both deal with the consequences of capitalism and the loss of valued ways of life. 

In “There’s No Place,” Lulu Wei uses her debut film to examine the loss of Honest Ed’s discount store and the adjacent Mirvish Village after the buildings at Bloor and Bathurst Streets were sold by David Mirvish to Vancouver developer Westbank Corp. for rental units. Mirvish and Westbank aren’t portrayed as villains here, but the story of gentrification disrupting communities is a familiar one in Toronto. The overwhelming feeling as the onetime discount mecca crumbles is not just the loss of an affordable place to shop, affordable housing for tenants like Lulu and her partner, and affordable work spaces for artists like Gabor Mezei in Mirvish Village, but of the loss of a very piece of the city’s soul.

In “Company Town,” the way of life at stake is Oshawa’s century-plus history of automaking as General Motors decides to close its assembly plant in the city, with direct layoffs for more than 2,000 workers and thousands more jobs threatened in supply companies.

The blame is laid squarely on corporate greed, but there’s anger to spare for Unifor president Jerry Dias after the best the union could get out of GM was a promise to save 300 jobs by turning the Oshawa factory into a stamping plant.

The lasting impression from this doc by Peter Findlay is of the human cost of such decisions.

The Haunting of Bly Manor (Oct. 9, Netflix)

If you like a good old-fashioned, things-that-go-bump-in-the-night ghost story then turn down the lights and settle in for Season 2 of the “Haunting” anthology series. This one is based on several horror stories by 19th-century author Henry James, particularly his 1898 tale “The Turn of the Screw.”

The action has been updated to 1987 when perky American teacher Dani (Victoria Pedretti, “The Haunting of Hill House”) takes a job as au pair to a couple of odd, orphaned children in the English countryside (Benjamin Evan Ainsworth and Amelie Bea Smith).

Clearly there are otherworldly presences lurking in the mansion, but Dani is also haunted by something creepy from her own past and there’s the mystery of what happened to the children’s former governess (Tahirah Sharif).

It’s scary good fun, though not so spooky that it will have you jumping out of your skin at every turn, and with enough dramatic heft to keep you moving on to the next episode.

The Right Stuff (Oct. 9, Disney Plus)

You might have noticed there’s a space race on TV these days. On the heels of recent space exploration dramas like “For All Mankind” (Apple TV Plus) and “Away” (Netflix) comes this show based on the 1979 Tom Wolfe novel (previously turned into a well-regarded 1983 movie).

It’s the story of the seven men selected as the United States’  first astronauts and, more narrowly, the rivalry between two of them, Alan Shepard and John Glenn.

As portrayed by Jake McDorman (“Limitless”) and Toronto-born Patrick J. Adams (“Suits”), Shepard is an emotionally repressed, fiercely competitive womanizer while Glenn is a teetotalling, politically aware self-promoter, both keenly ambitious to become the first American in space.

The series is a bit of a throwback in its “Mad Men”-esque portrayal of some of the astronauts’ hard-drinking, skirt-chasing antics. The women in the plot mostly exist to stand by their men. Eloise Mumford gets the most fully realized arc as Trudy Cooper, wife of astronaut Gordo Cooper (Colin O’Donoghue) and an aspiring space pilot in her own right.

That being said, it’s an engrossing character study of the men involved and a skilful portrait of a particular period of time, when America was in the grip of space fever and astronauts were the new celebrities. 

Odds and Ends

The first ladies of Canadian sketch comedy return for the fifth and final season of “Baroness von Sketch Show” (Oct. 6, 9 p.m., CBC and CBC Gem). Expect the usual mix of silliness and satire. Highlights of the first episode, which I screened, include a post-breakup extraction team and female Mafioso discussing “shooting” etiquette.

CBC also has a new adaptation of H.G. Wells’ “War of the Worlds” (Oct. 7, 8 p.m., CBC and CBC Gem) set in contemporary Britain and France that benefits from the present-day setting, which ups the relatability. Lea Drucker, Gabriel Byrne, Elizabeth McGovern and Daisy Edgar-Jones star.

Also new to CBC Gem is “Detectorists” (Oct. 9), a British comedy that had very good reviews on its home turf about two blokes who spend their days metal detecting for buried treasure. It was created by and stars Mackenzie Crook (“Pirates of the Caribbean”) alongside Toby Jones (“The Hunger Games”).

Here’s another one that I didn’t get to screen: “neXt” (Oct. 6, 9 p.m., Global TV). It’s a cautionary tale about artificial intelligence turned deadly and just looking at the trailer makes me kind of glad I never got an Alexa. It’s from “24” producer Manny Coto and stars John Slattery (“Mad Men”) and Fernanda Andrade.