Yeah! I remember that show. It would play in the early hours of the morning. They had also been replaying on the book channel when that was a thing. It was kind of funny looking back that it was the same actor as the Uncle Bill character from Red Green
One of the episodes I remember best was actually a 3-part one in which Rick Green was talking about shared-world universes (multiple authors collaborate in a shared setting; my favorite is C.J. Cherryh's Merovingen Nights, and of course Darkover, once the official anthologies came along).
Harlan Ellison ranted on at length in part of the interview at how he was so against shared universes, calling them "anti-talent."
So of course he and some of his writing colleagues held a brainstorming session and came up with
Medea: Harlan's World. (I've read it).
I guess he didn't mind it too much as long as it brought in $$$$$ (and the stories had creative, scientific ideas behind it).
I enjoyed it when he interviewed Judith Merrill. She made a snap decision in the late '60s that she and her daughter would move to Canada because she was fed up with the U.S. and the Vietnam War. I have her biography in my collection and she led an interesting life. She was one of the first female SF authors who wrote under her own name, rather than cave to the notion that women couldn't get published under their own names (ie. Andre Norton's real name was Mary Alice Norton, but she chose a masculine pseudonym).
Judith Merrill was among the First Fandom, back in the '30s. I never got to meet her, but I did meet her best-known husband - Frederik Pohl, at the same Calgary convention where David Gerrold was the co-Guest of Honor (what a combination!).
Sure, I consider those exceptions to the rule though. It certainly seems like there was a time when there wasn't much produced before it exploded again.
Let's see how many others I can name... Danger Bay, The Forest Rangers, DaVinci's Inquest, Excuse My French, and of course there were numerous music, comedy, and variety shows like Wayne & Shuster, the various versions of The Irish Rovers shows, John Allan Cameron, Don Messer's Jubilee, Royal Canadian Air Farce, This Hour Has 22 Minutes, Rick Mercer... quiz shows like Headline Hunters, Definition!, Front Page Challenge...
Fun fact: Our new GG was a guest subject of Front Page Challenge, I forget how many decades ago.
So we've actually done a lot. It's just that you have to be older than at least 40 to have seen most of it in its original production. I actually found a couple of compilations of scenes and an anniversary special about Don Messer's Jubilee a few weeks ago, on YouTube, and for some of it, it took me right back to Sunday nights in the '60s, when my grandmother and I watched it (I think she had a little crush on Charlie Chamberlain). For a couple of others I wondered, "WTF was I thinking, liking this? Those two tapdancers look like robots!"
Yeah, rather ironic isn't it? I think that actually happens more often than not. I remember constantly seeing commercials for TNT network (many of them co-productions) programming that was never available in Canada.
There were a lot of people livid at the initial plan to just show THT on Hulu and to hell with the Canadian fans. So they decided to show it on Bravo! (now CTV Drama)... 10 DAYS AFTER the episodes dropped on Hulu. So it was basically impossible to have a coherent conversation with anyone here on TrekBBS who was able to see it on Hulu; by the time I saw each new episode, they were done talking about that, and basically done talking about the 'next week' one that I wouldn't see for another 10 days.
Then Season 2 cut the wait down to a week. Season 3 cut it to about 3-4 days.
It wasn't until Season 4 that we finally got to see the new episodes on the same day as the Hulu-watchers... though enough hours after, that the first post here on the forum happily blabbed the first 3 episodes' worth of what happened, not giving a damn about spoilers or consideration that not everyone could all see it at the same time. So now I take my Handmaid's Tale discussion to the YT review channels. There are two or three I follow, and while the conversation can get very tense at times, it's mostly interesting. One of the male reviewers has expressed his appreciation that I explain some of the Canada story stuff that doesn't make sense, either from an American perspective since they don't know how things are normally done here and think something is weird when it isn't, or from a Canadian perspective since I pick up on all kinds of ridiculous things that wouldn't seem strange at all to an American viewer.
I actually haven't seen that version. There were two different versions of that series, but one of them was a european version, and often considered the better of the two and it was the one I watched on Netflix.
The unfortunate thing about the Showtime production is that it ran out of financing and they were not able to do what would have been the final season - and the most riveting one, in my view, because that's the one where Cesare really did become this fearless, fearsome warlord whose army swept across the Romagna, conquering and uniting the various city-states under the Borgia banner.
In real history, Rodrigo died at a really inconvenient time, and Cesare chose to trust Cardinal Sforza at exactly the wrong time. His fledgling empire he was accumulating fell apart, Lucrezia had remarried, this time into the d'Este family, and most of Cesare's old allies were either already dead or wanted nothing to do with him.
The 4th season would have shown this, and the producer did everything he could think of to raise money and get permission to finish the story he'd started. The actors offered to work for basically peanuts, and even permission for a 2-2-1/2-hour TV movie to wrap up the story was denied.
So the script was published and offered on Amazon. Some of it was bizarre and I don't see how it would have fit into a short movie, but it would probably have made sense in the course of a 10-episode season.
Cesare's death in battle was depicted as part of a montage of "this is the fate of the major characters" so we saw Cesare and Micheletto's deaths, Lucretzia happy in her new marriage, the next generation of Vatican plotting, etc.
It would have been glorious, if they'd been allowed to film and show it.
The casting was superb, in my view. Yes, Jeremy Irons wasn't a huge man, like Rodrigo Borgia was, and Irons brought this up as one of his questions when he was offered the part. But the showrunner felt it was more important to portray the Borgia determination, ruthlessness, amid the deep attachment to family that Rodrigo Borgia had.
I've seen clips of Francois Arnaud's audition, and it's amazing, the rapport Arnaud and Irons had.
This was entirely missing in the European production. I had no sense that the Borgias even liked each other let alone loved each other to the extent that history (and history's gossips) say they did. The scene where Lucrezia had to publicly consummate her marriage to Alfredo was honestly disgusting, with her father watching and
enjoying it. That same scene in the Showcase version had Cesare there as the Borgia's witness, and he looked ready to kill Lucrezia's father-in-law for insisting on this.
The only advantage I can see of the European version over the Showtime version is that the European show was able to fit the whole story in.
Except... they cheated. HOLY CRAP, DID THEY CHEAT!
History says that Cesare Borgia was killed in Viana, Spain in 1507. His body was stripped completely, everything he had was stolen, and the church did not believe he deserved a Christian burial. For centuries his remains were moved here and there, and at one point were under some paving stones on a street in Viana.
Eventually someone found them, eventually someone realized whose remains they were, and the church decided that after 500 years, it was time to forgive and give Cesare Borgia a dignified burial.
But what did the European TV series do? It was such a cop-out, designed to please the "I need a happy ending to be happy" fans. The scene shifts to the shore of South America, where some Spanish conquistadores are making their way to shore after having arrived on a ship - their goal to do whatever it took to acquire the Incas' gold and get rich.
One of those conquistadores was clearly shown to be Cesare Borgia... never mentioning how he could be both dead and alive, though of course the obvious explanation was that someone lied about whose remains were found on the battlefield - that one of Cesare's men had taken his horse and his body had been mistaken for Cesare... who had then lain low until he could get away by becoming a conquistadore.
Nope. If the star character of your historical drama dies in real history, he has to die in the damn show, as well. No cheating allowed.
Although I share the anger at the Catholic church over their role in the residential schools (and their continuing refusal to issue an official apology, AND their misdirection of millions of dollars that was supposed to go to survivors), I cannot support arson as any kind of legitimate protest.
We're agreed on that. What about the vandalism of the statues and pulling them down?
