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Tag: Transplant

Watchable on CBC, CTV, Netflix Sept. 19 to 25, 2022

September 19, 2022 /

SHOW OF THE WEEK: Lido TV (Sept. 23, CBC Gem)

Lido Pimienta in her variety show “Lido TV.” PHOTO CREDIT: CBC Gem

Think of “Lido TV” as a heaping spoonful of sugar helping creator and star Lido Pimienta get her medicine down.

It’s a described as a variety show, although it also has the outward appearance of a children’s show with its colourful sets and costumes and puppets, but that whimsy belies a serious mission: to share information and stimulate discussion about social and political ills and systems of oppression.

The first episode, for instance, deals with colonialism. There are conversations on the subject between Lido and puppets Sunnyflower (Ali Eisner), Tomato (Sarah Ashby) and Tomàto (Adam Francis Proulx); a mini-documentary shot in Pimienta’s hometown of Barranquilla, Colombia, about the expropriation of Indigenous music; and a sketch in which virtue-signalling white people compete on a reality show to be named “Canada’s Top Land Acknowledger,” among other segments.

It’s not angry or strident — in fact, it’s often funny — but the point is very clearly made.

The other three episodes I screened dealt with beauty standards, hate and feminism, all combining chats with the puppets; mini-docs shot in Barranquilla; guest stars (Nelly Furtado, Bear Witness from the Halluci Nation and members of Canadian heavy metal band Kittie, for example); and wittily biting sketches.

Think: a woman agreeing to be turned into a vampire only if she can forever keep her blond dye job, fake boobs and Brazilian butt lift; or a hate shopping network on which you can buy “a genuine Indigenous friend” who’ll shield you from criticisms of racism and “pairs well with stolen land.”

Pimienta, a Polaris Prize-winning, Grammy-nominated singer/songwriter and visual artist, has walked the talk as a self-described Black, brown and Indigenous immigrant to Canada, as have her writers Tim Fontaine, who is Anishinaabe, and Sarah Hagi, who is Black and Muslim.

And with “Lido TV,” this energetic and ambitious creator is just getting started; she sees films as the next frontier (you can read my Toronto Star interview with her here).

Variety is the spice of life, the old saying goes, and there’s certainly nothing bland about Pimienta’s version of a variety show.

Short Takes

From left, Logan Nicholson, Meaghan Rath, Aaron Abrams and Mikayla SwamiNathan
in “Children Ruin Everything.” PHOTO CREDIT: Bell Media

Children Ruin Everything (Sept. 19, 8 p.m., CTV/CTV.ca)

I’m a big believer in celebrating Canadian shows that manage to hold Canadians’ attention amid the onslaught of content from the U.S., and this show is one of them. As it returns for its second season, James (Aaron Abrams) and Astrid (Meaghan Rath) have upped the ante by having a third child, baby Andrew, and the season opener does an entertaining job of poking fun at their sleep deprivation. Astrid has gone back to work, to discover that her new boss is a hipster bro and she’s now the oldest one in her office, and James is yearning to move out of the city, even though it would mean severing ties to the last remnants of his and Astrid’s child-free life. Supporting cast members Ennis Esmer, Nazneen Contractor, Dmitry Chepovetsky and Lisa Codrington are all back, adding to the amusement.

Keegan-Michael Key, Johnny Knoxville, Calum Worthy and Judy Greer in “Reboot.”
PHOTO CREDIT: Michael Desmond/Hulu

Reboot (Sept. 20, Disney+)

This comedy from “Modern Family” co-creator Steve Levitan has its moments. It lampoons the TV industry via the phenomenon of reboots. A cheesy early 2000s comedy about a step-family called “Step Right Up” is getting what’s supposed to be an edgy, cable-worthy update for Hulu from writer Hannah (Rachel Bloom of “Crazy Ex-Girlfriend”) — until original showrunner Gordon (Paul Reiser) muscles his way back in with his corny jokes. But cast members Reed (Keegan-Michael Key), Bree (Judy Greer), Clay (Johnny Knoxville) and Zack (Calum Worthy) really need the gig, having all seen their careers tank since leaving the original show. They’re joined by reality TV star Timberly (Alyah Chanelle Scott), who can’t act but has a built-in audience of 20-somethings. And a real-life family drama involving Hannah and Gordon forms the backdrop of the new show. It’s not exactly comedy gold but, like I said, it has its moments.

Disney also has the “Star Wars” spinoff “Andor” (Sept. 21), starring Diego Luna as Cassian Andor from the movie “Rogue One: A Star Wars Story” (reviews are embargoed for this one); the new season of “Dancing With the Stars” (Sept. 19); and Season 2 of “The Kardashians” (Sept. 22).

Alexis Haines (formerly Neiers) and Nicholas Prugo in “The Real Bling Ring: Hollywood Heist.”
PHOTO CREDIT: Courtesy of Netflix © 2022

The Real Bling Ring: Hollywood Heist (Sept. 21, Netflix)

I went into this docuseries expecting it to be a trashy waste of time but have to admit I found it fascinating. It tells the story of the teenagers who burgled the homes of celebrities like Paris Hilton, Audrina Patridge, Orlando Bloom, Rachel Bilson and Lindsay Lohan in 2008 and 2009, making away with millions of dollars in designer clothing, jewelry, cash and other items. As ringleader Nick Prugo tells it, he and best friend Rachel Lee started out robbing unlocked cars in rich L.A. neighbourhoods and got addicted to the lifestyle that the proceeds of their crimes funded. When they ran out of neighbourhoods to hit and, hence, money they moved on to bigger game: celebrities’ homes, using a website that listed stars’ addresses, Google Maps and gossip sites that reported on celebs’ every move to pick their targets. It’s astonishing how easy it was to gain access to the homes of the famous, whether through unlocked doors or open windows or, in the case of Hilton — whose home Prugo and Lee hit several times, “like our personal ATM” — a key left under a mat. Given that and the excess of stuff inside these houses it’s tempting to see the Bling Ring crimes as essentially victimless, but I can tell you from personal experience having your home burgled feels like a violation no matter who you are. Patridge and Lohan, for instance, were unable to live in their houses again after the burglaries and, in some cases, treasured family heirlooms were among the loot taken. Patridge recounts hiding in a closet, terrified, thinking the robbers were still in the house upon coming home to discover the burglary. Prugo and Alexis Neiers — who, despite being portrayed as a ringleader in the thefts, took part in only one robbery — claim to regret the crimes but seem to also want to blame burgeoning social media culture and its glorification of conspicuous consumption for their downfall. Ironically, one of the reasons they and their co-defendants got off with so little and, in some cases no, jail time was because a detective compromised himself by acting as a paid consultant on Sofia Coppola’s “Bling Ring” movie. It truly was, as deputy district attorney Christine Kee says, like “a fucked up L.A. Greek tragedy.”

Netflix also has the comedy special “Patton Oswalt: We All Scream” (Sept. 20); reality series “Designing Miami” (Sept. 21); “A Jazzman’s Blues” (Sept. 22), a rare foray into film drama by Tyler Perry; and “Thai Cave Rescue” (Sept. 22), a dramatization of the 2018 rescue of 12 soccer players and their coach from a flooded cave in Thailand.

From left, Jim Watson, Laurence Leboeuf, Hamza Haq and Ayisha Issa in Season 3 of “Transplant.” PHOTO CREDIT: Bell Media

Transplant (Sept. 23, 10 p.m., CTV/CTV.ca)

This Canadian medical drama doesn’t reinvent the wheel, aside from the fact that its lead doctor, Bashir Hamed (two-time Canadian Screen Award winner Hamza Haq), is a Syrian refugee who gets a second chance to practise medicine. But given the hold that medical shows continue to exert on audiences it doesn’t really have to. The main thing is that it has a talented cast, including Canadian Screen Award winner Laurence Leboeuf as Mags, Ayisha Issa as June and Jim Watson as Theo, who make us care about the characters. As Season 2 opens, Mags has transferred out of the ER to cardiology; June is still trying to figure out her path as a surgeon while grappling with having her half sister living in her home; and Theo is struggling with the after-effects of last season’s plane crash, which saw him spend nine (mainly unseen) days alone in the woods of Northern Ontario. And of course, there are medical cases of the week to keep the docs engaged. I suspect what a lot of viewers will want to know is what’s going on between Bash and Mags, but I’m not telling. You’ll have to watch.

Odds and Ends

If you’re a fan of a certain Canadian canine TV star, the good news is that there’ll be even more Rex (a.k.a. German shepherd Diesel vom Burgimwald) in the fifth season of “Hudson & Rex,” returning to Citytv Sept. 25 at 8 p.m. Rex’s humans will also return, including most notably detective Charlie Hudson (John Reardon) and forensic scientist Sarah Truong (Mayko Nguyen), and new cast member Bridget Wareham as a forensic pathologist.

Your best bet on Apple TV+ is “Sidney” (Sept. 23), the documentary about Oscar-winning actor Sidney Poitier produced by Oprah Winfrey and directed by Reginald Hudlin. It features the reflections of the rightfully celebrated man himself, who died in January at the age of 94.

I don’t usually talk up American sitcoms in this space, but I do when they’re funny, like Abbott Elementary. The mockumentary comedy about a group of public school teachers in Philadelphia begins its sophomore season (Sept. 21, 10 p.m., Global TV) coming off three Emmy wins, including Outstanding Writing for creator Quinta Brunson.

NOTE: The listings here are in Eastern Standard Time and I’ve verified the times where possible, but it’s always best to check listings for your own area. The selection of programs reviewed reflects what I’m given access to by networks and streamers, whether reviews are embargoed, how many shows I have time to watch and my own personal taste. The Odds and Ends section includes shows that I have not watched.

Americans get a taste this week of Canadian TV hit ‘Transplant’

August 31, 2020 /
Creator Joseph Kay on the set of “Transplant.” PHOTO CREDIT: Courtesy of GAT PR

When his TV series “Transplant” debuts on American television on Sept. 1, Joseph Kay will be watching the reaction — but he won’t be doing so nervously, he says.

“Lots of times, you’re accustomed to working on something really hard for a long time and not getting seen by as many people as you’d like. Now it’s got a platform on a pretty big network for a pretty big audience and they’re making a big push, so I’m excited for people to see it. 

“I’m very curious to hear what they’re going to say.”

The “it” is Canadian medical drama “Transplant,” which debuted on Canada’s CTV in February with more than 1.3 million viewers and ended its season in May with nearly 1.7 million, an impressive number for a made-in-Canada show. On Sept. 1 at 10 p.m., it will premiere on NBC, which knows a thing or two about medical dramas as home of the venerable “ER” and more current hits like “New Amsterdam.”

Not just that, “Transplant” will air right after top-rated reality series “America’s Got Talent,” an extra vote of confidence from NBC.

Kay, who has written for Canadian dramas like “This Is Wonderland” and “This Life,” and co-created the comedy “Living in Your Car,” has had some time since the auspicious Canadian debut of “Transplant” — which stars Hamza Haq as a Syrian refugee restarting his medical career at a Toronto hospital — to consider why the show resonates with viewers.

Hamza Haq as Dr. Bashir Hamed in “Transplant.” PHOTO CREDIT: Bell Media

He puts it down to a few things: the “democratization of content” or the idea that, with the rise of streaming services and the availability of non-English-language shows on those services, people are becoming more interested in other people’s experiences; the universality of the idea of starting over, like Haq’s character Bashir; and the fact it’s a hospital show, with its inherent possibilities for life-and-death storylines.

“Also the actor who plays the main character is pretty versatile,” adds Kay. “He’s really talented and he has an amazing vulnerability to him that sort of draws people in . . . he’s a star, like he’s gonna be a Marvel superhero” someday.

(As an aside, Kay knows something about the idea of starting over. He was a corporate lawyer for two years when he realized that wasn’t what he wanted to do with his life. So he got a grant to make a short film, which gained him acceptance into the Canadian Film Centre’s Bell Media Prime Time TV writing program, and then he met playwright George F. Walker through a friend of a friend and got a job on Walker’s CBC legal drama “This Is Wonderland.”)

When Kay first started to conceptualize “Transplant” in late 2016 and early 2017, Donald Trump had just been elected U.S. president and immigration had became a political issue in the U.S. Plus, Syrian refugees were in the news in Canada, which had taken in thousands of Syrians fleeing war in their home country.

Kay, who says he worshipped “ER,” had always wanted to write a medical drama. He had begun researching the lives of medical residents when he stumbled on just how difficult it is for foreign-trained doctors to get residency spots in Canadian hospitals. “And so, at that point, I realized it was a novel way to frame a medical drama.”

He talked to as many actual refugees as he could, to “earn the right” to tell the story, a right he says he continues to try to earn by having lots of newcomers to Canada as consultants on “Transplant.”

Interestingly, “Transplant” is having its U.S. debut just as Trump seeks re-election and immigration continues to be a topic of debate, particularly with travel restricted by the COVID-19 epidemic.

When U.S. viewers watch “Transplant,” they’ll be seeing not just an immigrant as the lead character but one who is a practising Muslim.

Kay recalls, when pitching the series to CTV, discussing the fact that Bashir was the type of character who hadn’t been the focus of a network show before “and we’re not gonna pretend he’s not Muslim. We’re gonna lean into it and that’s what makes the show. That’s what gives it its fullness and its honesty, and we’re not going to be afraid of any of that stuff.”

There’s another element to “Transplant,” one that has also been mentioned in connection with Canadian hit “Schitt’s Creek,” the idea of a kinder style of TV show.

“It makes total sense,” says Kay when I suggest it. “I think we all miss ‘The West Wing,’ where it was about smart, hopeful people who wanted to make the world a better place . . . And then we had this rich history of anti-heroes, like the “Breaking Bads,” the Don Drapers and the Tony Sopranos, and on and on and on. I love all those shows, but they’re kind of glorifications of darkness.”

Bashir was pitched as a character who had faced incredible obstacles but still had hope. “He kind of gets up every day thinking, ‘You can start again today’ and that everybody can start again, and that hope sort of infuses people to care about each other . . . It’s not that there isn’t any conflict. There’s conflict, and sometimes people are selfish and shitty and all the things that we all are, but the show is infused with an optimism and a hopefulness,” Kay says.

Hope is alive in another sense for “Transplant”: the hope that the show will return to production in Montreal in the fall. Season 2 has already been green-lit by CTV and episodes are being written. It’s just a question of when shooting can safely begin given the pandemic.

“Plans are being drawn up and we just have more social distancing parameters than the average workplace, but I have every confidence it will happen,” Kay says.

In the meantime, if you have yet to see “Transplant,” or you’d just like to watch it again, CTV will re-air the first season in sync with NBC, beginning Sept. 1 at 10 p.m. It’s also available on demand and on Crave.


Transplant’s Laurence Leboeuf loves smart, ‘spazzy’ Dr. Mags

May 26, 2020 /
Laurence Leboeuf as Dr. Magalie “Mags” Leblanc in “Transplant,”
which concludes its first season on May 27. PHOTO CREDIT: Bell Media

When the doctors and nurses of the fictional York Memorial Hospital are gathered around an emergency patient, calling out instructions and reaching for life-saving equipment, to actor Laurence Leboeuf it’s a bit like a ballet.

She plays Dr. Magalie “Mags” Leblanc in CTV’s “Transplant,” which ends its first season Wednesday, May 27 at 9 p.m. And she uses the word “ballet” a couple of times during our interview to describe the process of making the show’s medical scenes look and feel believable.

“Transplant” is about Dr. Bashir Hamed (played by Hamza Haq), a Syrian refugee who becomes a resident in the ER of a big Toronto hospital after saving the life of his future boss, Dr. Bishop (Scottish actor John Hannah), in an accident. Mags is one of his fellow ER residents.

As with all medical TV shows, Haq, Leboeuf and their cast mates have to convincingly fake a variety of medical procedures. For the really big traumas, the cast would spend hours rehearsing at weekend “boot camps,” Leboeuf said.

“At the beginning of rehearsal, sometimes I would start and after five minutes I was like, ‘This is never gonna happen. There’s too much to do,'” Leboeuf said over the phone from her hometown of Montreal, where “Transplant” shoots. “Then the puzzle comes together and, at the end, it’s super rewarding when the ballet happens and you’re like ‘Wow, that’s cool, we did that.'”

Not only did the actors have to learn medical jargon (with the help of consultants Dr. Zachary Levine and nurse “Magic Mike” Richardson), they had to learn to use it convincingly, to time it to their movements as they manipulated fake medical equipment and to, well, you know, act while spouting words like “pericardial effusion” and “sternotomy.”

Add the fact that English is not Leboeuf’s first language and it’s that much more of a challenge.

“I wanted Mags to speak really, really fast: to not think, like she knows everything; she’s read all the books, there’s no delay in her mind,” Leboeuf said. “So sometimes, with English being my second language, it was harder for me to put it into my mouth.”

Mags has been one of the most challenging and rewarding roles that Leboeuf has played. It’s the first time in a more than two-decade career that the 34-year-old has been a lead in a TV series.

She has played a doctor before, in the Quebec series “Trauma,” although that character was an “extremely troubled” surgeon “who was seeing her dead father and stuff like that.” Leboeuf has switched back and forth between French and English TV and movies, including “Being Erica,” “Durham County,” the English remake of “19-2” and the limited series “The Disappearance.”

Mags has been special, though. “I love playing Mags,” said Leboeuf. “I love her quickness and her spazziness and her awkwardness and her brain. When I first read the script I was just like, ‘Yeah, I love this character already.’ I could actually be playing her for a while if we get the chance. She is that interesting.”

And just for the record, the workaholic Mags is “just so the opposite of who I am,” Leboeuf said. “I enjoy doing nothing; I love having  a social life outside of my job, although I love what I do.”

As I write this, Bell Media has not yet said if “Transplant” is getting a second season. I would, however, be astonished if it didn’t given that the show has been a ratings hit here at home – drawing more than 1.7 million viewers in early May, according to the most recent Numeris ratings available – and has been picked up by NBC to air in the U.S.

Leboeuf says that last bit of news is “so rewarding.”

“When you’ve worked hard on a show, and we’ve all believed in it and we’ve all loved it and we’ve  all thought we were doing a great show, so just to have that validation not only within Canada but now kind of internationally that’s just really, really rewarding.”

Leboeuf has given some thought to why medical dramas are such an enduring part of our TV landscape.

“Medical shows are like an endless well of amazing stories to tell,” she said. “Always there’s sorrow and rejoicing and courage and life-saving and sacrifices. We see the family struggles, we see the doctor struggles, we see the human part of it.”

And with plot lines that touch on everything from anti-vaxxers to mental illness to racism to drunk driving to gender dysphoria, Leboeuf sees “an endless well of amazing stories, human stories” to draw on.

Assuming “Transplant” does get the go-ahead for more episodes, Leboeuf is itching to get back to work with the cast mates who’ve become “an instant family,” once it’s considered safe for TV production to resume during this COVID-19 pandemic.

In the meantime we’ve got Wednesday’s season finale to look forward to.

“It’s a great cliffhanger, something big’s happening. It’s a great episode,” she said.

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