Amazing Race Canada: Are we by nature hammier than Americans or do our TV shows just make us look that way?

You could complain that a trip across Canada is not even close to a trip around the world—no culture shock, no money-changing confusion, no unfamiliar signage and, for the most part, no language barriers (we'll see what happens if the race goes to rural Quebec). It should be easy sailing for the teams on Amazing Race Canada.

But what struck me most about the show’s debut was how the transition from US to Canada revealed the format’s cracks and crevices. And not just in the slightly less dynamic camera work and the slightly slower editing.

Firstly, there’s the over-the-top product placement. Air Canada, Interac and Chevrolet commercials interrupted scenes where Air Canada, Chevrolet and Interac were the main drivers of the action--we got a better look at their debit cards than the Blue Bear. Who says Canadians are more reluctant to sell their souls than our American neighbours?

Then then was the contestant selection: A Canadian Forces sniper who lost both his legs below the knee, a dad with Parkinson’s, twin sisters, gay cowboys, actress/model sisters, former PSA stars—each team seems to have been chosen for a larger-than-life signature attribute, a marker that sets them aside from an average Canadian, perhaps in the hopes of making the teams memorable in the muddle of bland niceness that was exhibited in the debut. CTV takes Amazing Race’s approach to diversity and turns it up to 11.

If the handy labels don’t work in differentiating the teams, then excessive coaching might. Many of the teams seem louder and cockier than I bet they are in real life. The one thing about the US Amazing Race is that the teams tend to be amazingly unguarded—they bicker and sabotage like no one is watching. Perhaps it’s the way contestants are selected, perhaps the exotic locations are suitable disorienting, perhaps it's pure American guilelessness. The way the American contestants talk seems exactly the way they might talk to their friends and co-workers.

The Canadians, by contrast, seemed almost theatrical. The expressions on their faces when they were being told about the prizes seem to have been drawn from some high school musical they once starred in. One gay cowboy clutched his pearls. The "dudes" high-fived in a staged manner. Many of the teams are behaving as if they’re doing impressions of reality show contestants, not participating in a reality show themselves. Oh, Canadian self-awareness. Our blessing and our curse.

Who will win?

Obviously the dating BC hippies. Not because of their paddling skills or eco-awareness. But rather: “We wear the same clothes all the time,” says hippie Darren.

The hippies seem more concerned about winning than making a good impression. How un-Canadian of them.

If you didn't believe...

Peter Mansbridge's casual wear choices could get worse.

CBC rebranding

You have to applaud the effort to go for a younger, more contemporary look, but there's something about the relaunch of CBC's news departments that feels like old wine in new bottles. On radio, Peter Armstrong makes a much more relaxed, casual anchor, but the stories are still policy-wonky with a dose of recent death tolls. If the Corps is going to try to skew young, it's got to have a broader and more vibrant news agenda.

The National's facelift is even less successful. All you have to do is click a few times here, a few times there--nobody said it would be easy to find, baby--and you can watch a 10-minute web-only broadcast of the flagship show. That's where anchor Peter Mansbridge, not content to just walk around a studio reading the news, as he now does on TV, takes off his jacket, revealing his paunchy tummy, and stands in a hallway reading the news. You can see the direction they're headed. If they don't skew as young as they'd like this time around, Peter will be reading the news in his pajamas--or worse--perhaps while taking a leak or between rounds of flossing. That'll lure the tweens.

About the new name for Newsworld, CBC News Network--this must have been decided solely on the basis of how it looked on the screen, not how it would roll off the tongue or abbreviate: CB...CNN. Or maybe they are that desperate and cheesy, like a donut shop calling itself Country Time to cash in on the confusion with Country Style/Coffee Time.

I realize the emphasis is on the brand "CBC News" but did they fail to notice that that phrase was contained in the old name?

No shame in Shameless

Like so many foreign cultural phenomenon, I stumbled across the British comedy/drama Shameless purely by accident. A DVD of the first season (the sixth is currently in progress in the U.K.) was very cheap at a used book shop on Yonge Street because it was region two—having a multiregion DVD player finally paid off. I've made it to the end of season two.

I instantly fell in love with the show, based on the council-estate upbringing of creator Paul Abbott. It’s a laugh riot and a celebration of life. And that’s saying something since the show presents you immediately with a major learning curve—you have to learn to find the humour in a drunken Keith Richards-without-charisma father who absconds with any money that comes near the family’s townhouse in a Manchester council housing estate. Frank Gallagher (David Threlfall) is a totally useless leech who exploits the sweetness of his conscientious eldest daughter Fiona (played by Anne-Marie Duff), turning her into a surrogate mother while he runs around town. He’s not even particularly goodhearted, looking down on most people as his moral inferiors. Our entry point into this world of welfare scams, substance abuse, casual teenaged sex and pregnancy is Steve McBride (played by James McAvoy, who left the show in season two to head off to Hollywood—Atonement and Wanted with Angelina Jolie), a seemingly posh fellow who courts Fiona. He owns his own house and drives a nice car. The two meet cute in the first episode when her purse is stolen in a nightclub and he makes a valiant effort to rescue it. His infatuation with Fiona quickly expands to include the whole family and their cavalier attitude toward adversity and it through him that we see how loveable they are.

But midway through the second season, Steve develops his own serious problems (and by serious, I mean more serious than the everyday perils of his profession as car thief) and his own descent into reprobateness meant he was no longer the outsider—he was deeper in the muck than anyone else on the show. That’s when I realized, like father’s hand quietly removed from the seat of a child on a bike, I didn’t need him anymore as my fascinated proxy in Chatsworth Estate. I had myself accepted all the bad behaviour—kidnapping a child, accidentally shooting an acquaintance or poisoning the neighbourhood—as normal and funny, heartwarming and life affirming. And that’s what makes Shameless so special. It uses a magic realist style to juggle the awful and the rib-tickling. But it also avoids using purely black humour that would set us to laugh at the bad things in life—there’s no “He’s dead, ha-ha.” We don’t actually laugh at the crime and the misery per se. Each episode keeps the focus sharply on the family’s skewed reaction to their problems—and that’s where the humour lies. We don’t laugh at Frank Gallagher blacking out behind the sofa as much as we laugh at his youngest daughter Debbie bringing him tea—she’s a trooper who will never give up on a lost cause and we laugh at the futility of what she’s doing even as we admire her.

At a certain point in season two, I thought, “Aren’t there too many pregnancies driving the storyline? Are they jumping the shark?” But then I realized that unwanted/unexpected pregnancy is not a plot device on Shameless, it’s ambiance, it’s what happens in the down moments between crises, a well-worn worry that doesn’t require the extreme reaction everything does.

All the characters except Fiona—the show’s Bob Newhart—are offbeat and delightful. But they’re not quite circus freaks. On any other show, a tantrum like horny neighbour Violet (Maxine Peake) threw during her mother’s birthday—plunging it into dark silence by yanking out and tossing the fuses—would make us dislike the perpetrator. How can she treat people so badly? But we develop such a sharp sense of Violet as a real character, we can still like her without sweeping her horridness aside. She’s of a piece, the good and the bad. We come to expect that her mother will bring out the worse in her and realize it’s up to the other characters to help her negotiate it. We are all programmed defectively and must turn to the collective to help us overcome it.

Several formulas help contextualize the show’s situations so we are able to laugh as things fall apart. Firstly, friends will always help you out in the end. Secondly, the characters never come out ahead—no matter how much money is waved in their face. And thirdly, all problems are eventually solvable. Fourthly, there’s always a party to take the edge off.

In this, Shameless is closer to the work of P.J. Wodehouse than its makers would care to admit. You can only laugh at problems when they happen in a world where they are time and time again solved or contained, a world that has proved itself totally and absolutely safe even if—and this is where Shameless diverges from Jeeves—justice is totally and absolutely absent.

President or news anchor?

Obama seems to be on TV far more than any of his predecessors. It's nice that he's "out there" but you wonder, with all the travel and speech-writing and make-up that TV entails, when he has time to come up with solutions to talk about.

Springer into action

Jerry Springer - The Musical had its Canadian debut at Hart House Theatre last night, directed by Richard Ouzounian. It's the perfect show for a student production really: a great showcase for the leads and forgiving for weaker voices so long as the the performers really go for it--which they did.

Mondo trasho - EYE WEEKLY

Richard Ouzounian: sweeter and kookier than I expected.

Is it just me, or does it seem absurd that a wildly popular unscripted reality show is too expensive for CTV to produce, even in these tough times?

Regarding that Bell Canada Christmas ad where one son gets a modest reaction for giving his father a flatscreen TV while the other gets appreciated for giving a Bell recording thingie--is the message that Bell makes you an asshole? It's almost as bad as the Rogers ad where the nubile friends fawn over the dog named BlackBerry? You may not know what 3G is, but apparently it's hard to clean out of the carpet. At least the dog is cute.

HBO should have had Mad Men. It would have been 13 minutes longer and had more gratuitous flesh--Jon Hamm's butt, anyone? But instead, it's abandoned the dead for the undead. It remains to see how auteur #1, Alan Ball, distinguishes his creatures of the night from those of auteur #2 Joss Whedon. Except, of course, for the extra minutes and the gratuitous flesh.