brioux.tv: the podcast

Send us Fan Mail  “It’s not exactly ‘Angela’s Ashes,’” Rick Mercer says of his childhood. He writes about it in his engaging new memoir, “Talking to Canadians” (Penguin Harper Collins). When he first sat down to write the book, something of a pandemic project, he worried that he lacked the harrowing childhood needed to pen a comedian’s memoir. Brace yourself then, reader. Mercer’s tome is filled w...

Send us Fan Mail Peter Mansbridge feels a tad uncomfortable being the story instead of reporting it. The retired CBC chief news anchor, however, has written a bestselling memoir titled, "Off The Record" (Simon & Schuster).  And that's where he goes, spinning dozens of short, fascinating stories.  One of the best is his ridiculously unlikely break into the news business as a 19-y...

Send us Fan Mail Canada’s “Man Mountain of Comedy,” K Trevor Wilson, is finding it’s a great day for hay in Canadian television. Besides his regular gig as “Squirrely Dan” on the Crave hit Letterkenny , he’s now one of the three judges on CTV Comedy’s hilarious new reality competition series Roast Battle Canada . Wilson has earned his spot on the judges panel beside fellow comics Russell Peters an...

Send us Fan Mail Mark Critch has not let a little thing like a pandemic slow him down one bit. The busy Newfoundland native is in his 18th season on This Hour Has 22 Minutes . He is also co-creator of the upcoming CBC series based on his book, Son of a Critch . Meanwhile,  his new book, "An Embarrassment of Critches: Immature Stories from my Grown-up Life," is just out from Viking. Critc...

Send us Fan Mail As Canadian thanksgiving comes and goes, Zoie Palmer is thankful she's playing Jann Arden’s sensible sister Max on JANN. The Calgary-based sitcom is in its third season Monday nights on CTV. The British-born actress and York University grad is also well known for her five seasons as Dr. Lauren Lewis on the boundary-pushing Showcase drama Lost Girl. There her role as a sometim...

Send us Fan Mail Gerry Dee says he is thrilled to be back in front of a studio audience again as Family Feud Canada returns for a third season. The game show, shot at CBC’s Toronto broadcast centre, had to turn studio audiences away last season as COVID safety protocols limited capacity to participants and crew. Dee, a seasoned stand-up comedy performer, suddenly had to aim his ad libs at camera a...

Send us Fan Mail Jewel Staite was five-years-old when an agent stopped her and her mom walking through a mall. Did the girl want to be in a TV commercial, the agent asked? Staite had no interest until her mom suggested that if she did it, she'd buy her some new outfits with the money. And she's been working in TV and films ever since. Mainly, she's been doing sci-fi shows that becam...

Send us Fan Mail You know Thomas Craig as Inspector Brackenreid on Murdoch Mysteries , back for a 15th season on CBC. The Sheffield, England, native has been keeping the constables and detective William Murdoch (played by Yannick Bisson) in line for over 200 episodes. But did you know that Craig also logged over 200 episodes in two-and-a-half years as Tommy Harris on the world's longest-runni...

Send us Fan Mail  It was 20 years ago this week when the biggest story of Kevin Newman's career broke wide open. The Toronto-native was coming off a five year stint with ABC News in New York City and had just moved back to Canada's west coast to help launch Global National.   "It was 5:30 a.m. in Vancouver," he recalls, "when I got a phone call that something was coming up...

Send us Fan Mail  Former "This Hour Has 22 Minutes" standout Shaun Majumder talks about his latest TV effort, "Race Against the Tide," (premiering Sept. 9 on CBC). The series is an outdoors reality competition with a pretty compelling twist: sand sculpters from around the world flock to the Bay of Fundy and then have six hours to create towering works of art before the tide com...

Send us Fan Mail Bill Persky helped save Carl Reiner’s life. That’s how the late, great creator-executive producer of The Dick Van Dyke Show saw it anyway. As the third season approached, he desperately needed steady help churning out 30 to 33 scripts a year for his hit CBS sitcom of the 1960s.  Enter Persky and writing partner Sam Denoff. The former radio men from New York had made headway as ske...

Send us Fan Mail Star, executive producer and director Jason Priestley talks about the fifth season of his shot-in-Toronto procedural, Private Eyes . It's a series that, no matter how many times it gets tossed around the Global schedule,  always manages to return to loyal audience of over a million viewers. The light-hearted detective series, which co-stars Cindy Sampson and returned July 7,...

Send us Fan Mail The creator, writer, executive producer and star of Corner Gas Animated returns to brioux.tv:the podcast to set up the fourth and final season of his series. The spin-off from the live-action version of Corner Gas is the No. 1 Canadian original on CTV Comedy. So why is this the fourth and final season?  Butt, who has been making TV shows for CTV since 2004, comes up with what he t...

Send us Fan Mail Author Ira Wells spent three years working on "Norman Jewison: A Director's Life." A full year of that was pouring over Jewison's papers, annotated scripts and other manuscripts at Victoria College at the University of Toronto -- where Wells is an assistant professor of literature. He writes that Jewison's 24 feature films "could just as easily have b...

Send us Fan Mail "We were going to do it in March, we were going to do it in April, we were going to do it in May and finally, come hell or high water, it's going to come off on June 6th," says John Brunton. The CEO of Insight Productions is talking about the 2021 Juno Awards, Canada's annual music industry award show. Brunton and Insight Senior Vice President Lindsay Cox had a...

Send us Fan Mail Bestselling author and former New York Times TV columnist Bill Carter is back to share more stories about making The Story of Late Night . The six-episode docuseries continues Sunday nights on CNN.  I asked Bill to return (virtually -- our previous conversation was so long ago it was live in studio) to talk about the sixth and final episode, one that was not in the original plans....

Send us Fan Mail Bill Carter literally wrote the book on late night television. In fact, he wrote two bestsellers: "The Late Shift" and "The War for Late Night." Now he's executive producer of the compelling documentary series The Story of Late Night, premiering May 2 on CNN.  Carter shares the stories behind the making of the doc, including his latest conversations with S...

Send us Fan Mail I finally learn how to spell his name and then he retires!  Slawko Klymkiw has spent over 40 years towering over the media landscape in Canada. His list of acheivements are many, starting in news at CBC and working his way up to head of programming and entertainment. Shows such as The Rick Mercer Report and Da Vinci's Inquest flourished under his watch.  Not everything he tri...

Send us Fan Mail I first met Jay Baruchel 20 years ago in Los Angeles on a Television Critics Association  Fox network reception in downtown Los Angeles, At 18, he was starring in Judd Apatow's college comedy Undeclared alongside another young Canadian, Seth Rogen. The two were pretty excited to have landed on a promising show; what they  could not have known at the time was that they'd...

Send us Fan Mail Nobody makes me laugh out loud like Ron James. Canada's ultimate Road Warrior will be "Live from my Living Room" with a brand new comedy special on Sunday, March 21 at 8 p.m.  James' virtual New Year's Eve special sold over 3500 tickets. This new hour, co-written by a couple of comedy veterans, features all new material. Tickets are available at here with...

Send us Fan Mail As "Kiddo the Clown," Trevor Evans was the biggest star on TV when I was five. His daily series (1962-65) was produced in what was then the brand new CFTO studios in Agincourt right off the 401 in Toronto. It was the kind of bizarre local kiddie show that would one day inspire the likes of Pee-wee's Playhouse.  Kiddo was the landlord of a zany apartment where laundr...

Send us Fan Mail "Hearties" will be looking forward to the return of When Calls the Heart when the eighth season premieres Sunday, February 21 on Super Channel Heart & Home. So will Pascale Hutton and Kavan Smith, who return as sawmill sweethearts Rosemary and Leland Coulter. The two Canadian actors returned to Hope Valley -- really a specially contructed outdoor set located East of...

Send us Fan Mail Hard to believe, but Kristin Kreuk has spent over half her life before the cameras, starring on Smallville, Beauty and the Beast and Burden of Truth . Here’s something I didn’t know, however: she almost became half Klingon! In an engaging podcast conversation, Kreuk confides that, just before committing to play crusading lawyer Joanna Chang on Burden , she went after a lead role o...

Send us Fan Mail Like every actor on every series these days, Serinda Swan, who plays Jenny Cooper on Coroner , wore masks, shields and "bunny suits" in order to safely shoot scenes through this pandemic.  COVID is very much part of the storyline this season, which starts with an investigation of a Long Term Care facility. Did the fact all the actors had to gear up as a matter of course...

Send us Fan Mail You want to talk Pretty Hard Cases ? That's the title of the new Toronto-based detective drama premiering Wednesday, Feb. 3 on CBC. It stars Meredith MacNeill ( Baroness von Sketch Show ) and Adrienne C. Moore ( Orange is the New Black ). They were the first choices of executive producers, writers and showrunners Tassie Cameron ( Rookie Blue ) and Sherry White ( Little Dog )...