CBC has lured two top writers from CTV’s Corner Gas, to have them work on Little Mosque on the Prairie.
Corner Gas has grown to be incredibly popular, pulling and average of 1.6 million viewers since Januaryl
The Globe and Mail has the deets:
Paul Mather, who oversaw the series’ day-to-day workings; and story editor Rob Sheridan, who has also worked on Showcase’s Naked Josh. In an interview, Mather said he jumped ship primarily because he couldn’t resist the challenge of trying to nip at Corner Gas’s heels in season two.
CBC will renew the sitcom when the first season ends shortly.
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Little Mosque steps on the Gas
Although Little Mosque on the Prairie may not be our greatest moment artistically, I am pleased that it portrays the humanity and issues facing our Muslim neighbours and friends. Knowledge and familiarity helps dispel fears of the unknown and the resulting distrust of another group. I have been horrified by the ignorance and bigotry of so many Canadians, even the highly educated. The CBC could have helped to remedy the suspision of Muslims that resulted 911, by airing programs that educated the public about the; Islamic faith, teachings of the Quran and values of the average Muslim. Terrorists use a ” cut and paste ” version of their Holy Book, as many Christians have in the past.
Humour, ” helps the medicine go down’ , so let’s hope that some of the ills of our society will be remedied by this program.
Wow Linda, I agree with you 100%. Thank you for being kind as well as wise!
I thought they WERE the same writers…corny mosque. Corner Gas was fresh and funny, at one time. I hope the writers don’t drag Little Mosque down into the same staid condition.
Little Mosque is the best thing CBC has put out in a long time. They do need to hire some more Muslim and Anglican writers to get some of their details straight and to keep the show from becoming just another generic sitcom, but so far so good. I heard a rumour about the production of the show being shifted to Toronto as well, and that could easily be a fatal move, so I do hope that that was just a rumour. Almost anything that gets produced out of Toronto seems to emerge with that distinctive a veil of Toronto shlock, and that is generally the kiss of death.
I’m guilty of never watching Canadian shows, put when I saw the previews for the show it caught my eye not too mention my curiosity. I watched Little Mosque’s 1st episode and enjoyed it immensely. The comedy is light enought but also likes to poke fun at both cultures in an non-offensive way.
I think the show will help Canadians having a better understanding of Muslims and see that they too struggle and face simular issues within their own culture. (ie. the teen who doesn’t want to wear her Hijab) As Canadians I think we are more accepting of people unlike our neigbours south who seem to have more hang ups about the Muslim world especially the ‘red neck types” that we like to make fun of.
I think the cast of characters all work well together and not too mention the good looking actors on the show. That Iman (sp?) certainly is a sight for sore eyes.
I hope the ratings are good enough for the show to continue. From what I read it had alot of positive reviews from around the world. Hopefully Canadians we’ll keep watching.
From what I heard, they filmed seven of the first eight in Toronto, and are moving back to Regina to film the second season’s episodes. I look forward to confirmation on this one.,
The first series of Little Mosque on the Prairie - the eps that are finishing up now - were written in Toronto, and shot at Dufferin Gate studios in the West End of Toronto.
The original pilot (which was unaired) was the only thing shot outside of Toronto. There was a rumor that they might shift west for S2. You’ve got it backwards.
One thing that won’t help Little Mosque is the knee jerk, “I hate Toronto” B.S. that comes from the rest of the country at every juncture. In this case, if you’re coming from the place of liking Mosque…
…so your entire point is moot, as well as prejudicial and uninformed.
There is nothing knee jerk about Canadians’ reaction to being overrun with Toronto shlock. I’d say that we’ve had far, FAR, too much patience with it, in fact. The CBC is spending our tax dollars to produce it, don’t forget. Count up the failures from the Gill Deacon Show to The Hour to the faltering pop culture shows on CBC radio, and I think you’ll find that a very common common denominator is their insipid, dumbed down, Toronto flavour, their Toronto shlockiness in other words. One of the big reason LMOTP is so good is that it managed to break away from that style. It clearly was very inspired by Corner Gas, (which is produced in Regina and has a cast of mostly Vancouver based actors), as well as by Zarqa’s experiences in Regina, and if this mix of interesting flavours managed to survive a short production run in Toronto then I’d say that the show dodged a bullet. If the show stays in Toronto, however, I’d give good odds that it will soon be covered in that veneer to Toronto shlockiness that we all know so well, at least all of us who live outside of Toronto.
Your post is entirely bias. It is content, and fact free.
Plus, you managed to do the laziest intellectual thing ever. Someone pointed out you were wrong and you blipped right over it. You made a statement. Your statement is disproved by fact. Then you move on to repeat the assertion in a different form, “Okay, it survived being produced there short term, but if it doesn’t move, it won’t survive.”
Twaddle.
Where do you think all those people working in Toronto come from? In my time working in Toronto, I’ve worked with the best and the brightest from Quebec, Winnipeg, Regina, Saskatoon, Vancouver, Calgary, Edmonton, Montreal, Ottawa, St. John’s, Fredricton, Moncton, Victoria and Halifax. And those are the cities. I’m not even going to get into the small towns and rural places people come from.
The point of having a city where people converge is just that: they converge. They bring their stories and experiences of the places they grow up. If Toronto is the problem, well then look in the mirror, because a great plurality if not majority of the people making the decisions came from outside of Toronto once.
In Toronto, you are exposed to people from all across Canada, and indeed, the world. They are you. They are me, and they are people from countries I will never visit.
We hear this Toronto bias and Toronto schlock crap argument from you all the time. You know what it is? It’s bigotry, pure and simple. Now, you’ve got a wonderful example of yet more Toronto attitude coming from somebody. Run along and make sure it feeds your close minded, knee jerk, fact free whingeing.
The television industries in this country have converged in Vancouver and Toronto because that’s where the talent is. You want to try to score cheap and sleazy jealousy points by slinging Toronto-bashing, go right ahead.
It’s not Toronto that’s the problem, my friend. It’s close mindedness.
It’s you.
Denis, there was fuss in the news because they said the first six shows were shot in SK, and the rest were moved to TO. Who’s right?
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I hope LMOTP catches up with Corner Gas, but that Corner Gas doesn’t suffer.
Why does everyone hate Toronto? Its awesome, in every way!
GO LEAFS GO!
LOL
I hope Little Mosque can continue its success!!!!!!!!
Denis:
Goodness gracious, and speaking of twaddle … Let me fully elaborate on my points in my above post to clear up any of your misunderstanding, and respond so some of your post in the process.
-“Where do you think all those people working in Toronto come from? In my time working in Toronto, I’ve worked with the best and the brightest from Quebec, Winnipeg, Regina, Saskatoon, Vancouver, Calgary, Edmonton, Montreal, Ottawa, St. John’s, Fredricton, Moncton, Victoria and Halifax. And those are the cities. I’m not even going to get into the small towns and rural places people come from.”
First I think we need to review some basics. Different parts of the world, and different parts of Canada, have significantly different cultures. When a person moves from one place to another they bring a part of that culture with them, but they also begin to take on the culture of their new home. This is in fact a fairly central theme for LMOTP, is it not? So if, as in the case of this short run of shows, a show is produced in Toronto but has as its major creative contributors people who aren’t based in Toronto or who have just arrive in Toronto, then it won’t have absorbed much of the local culture yet, and even less of it will have seeped into the show. If you fast forward LMOTP 20 years with all the same characters living in Mercy, then most of them will have absorbed a great deal of the local culture. Likewise if someone has been in Toronto for years, or Calgary or Vancouver for that matter, they come to represent the culture of that city a lot more than when they just arrived
The CBC used to be very cognizant of this phenomenon and even for the shows it hosted out of Toronto it was carful to hire people who generally were from elsewhere in Canada. This is no longer the case, however. In my previous post I referred to Gill Deacon and indirectly George Strombo… from The Hour. I’m not sure how long Gill has been in Toronto but I’m guessing that it’s been a number of years. George, otoh, has essentially never been anywhere other than Toronto. He has spent essentially his entire 35 year life in Toronto, and yet the CBC hired him to host a “national” pop culture show. Do you see the problem there? I hope that you at least have travelled enough and lived other places long enough to understand the importance of getting out there and learning that your little part of the world isn’t the whole world, but George has never done this, and he’s not alone at the CBC. At least four of CBC’s top pop culture shows are hosted out of Toronto, The Hour, DNTO, GO, and Ghomeshi’s new show, and two of them are hosted by people who have essentially never spent any significant amount of time anywhere in Canada other than Toronto, George and Jian who is 40 and has never spent any significant amount of time in Canada anywhere other than Toronto. Do you see how outrageous that is, and how disrespectful and necessarily very misrepresentative of Canadians and Canadian culture that show will be? A third is hosted by someone who spent much or her working career at MuchMusic, a show based on the Queen Street West subculture, and the fourth is hosted by Brent Banmbury, who has been in Toronto for a number of years now and is sounding more and more like a Torontonian all the time. (Not that long ago he featured Amos Garret guitar solo, but he clearly didn’t know that Garret is a Canadian, which shows that at the very least he’s not keeping up on even prominent western Canadian artists and that he’s not even doing simple research on people he doesn’t know. His musical guests and other guest are also hugely skewed toward Toronto and Southern Ontario.)
Then there are the news shows like the morning show, The National, and even As it Happens which are all hosted out of Toronto. Apart from Colleen Jones, I would say that most of the people involved in those shows are long time Torontonians. Are you getting the picture yet? Toronto has 15% of the population of Canada, but the percentage of CBC’s programming that comes out of Toronto, particularly cultural and news programming, is far, FAR, higher than that, and that’s even if we don’t include recent arrivals to Toronto who won’t have been fully assimilated yet.
Just to explain fully, lest you have any more misunderstandings, culture comes through even in news shows, and not just in the continuos references to the Jays or Leafs, teams the vast majority of non-Torontonians don’t care about. It’s in the subtle references, the humour, the style of the shows, all the finer points I would expect an actor to be observant of and familiar with. It’s in the way Derek McGrath’s character doesn’t really capture the essence of a rural Saskatchewan Anglican minister. There are some genuine elements there, and even seeing that much is such a nice break from the avalanche of Toronto shlock that now exists on the CBC that they are a big part of what makes the character entertaining, so far, but if he doesn’t spend any time in Saskatchewan actually rubbing shoulders with the people he is trying to represent and picking up on the nuances, and he instead stays in Toronto and just acts out of whatever caricature exists in his mind for an Anglican minister in rural Saskatchewan is, then that’s when the show will start to devolve into just another piece of Toronto shlock, as so many shows before it have done. Are you understand this yet?
For completeness:
-“The point of having a city where people converge is just that: they converge. They bring their stories and experiences of the places they grow up. If Toronto is the problem, well then look in the mirror, because a great plurality if not majority of the people making the decisions came from outside of Toronto once.”
To borrow your word, twaddle, and nonsense. Your argument is that Toronto is Canada, which is the classic, arrogant, ignorant, Torontocentric view of the world. I’m now guessing that you have never spent any significant amount of time living outside of Toronto. Both Corner Gas and LMOTP, two of the most popular shows on Canadian television, are the brainchildren of Saskatchwanians based in Saskatchewan, although Butt spends a lot of time in Vancouver as well. Falcon Beach, which puts up better numbers than most CBC shows, is produced in Manitoba. There are currently many very popular shows made in Vancouver, and all of this isn’t just a coincidence. I think we’ve already dealt with the myth that the Toronto decision makers and hosts are all recent immigrants to Toronto.
-“In Toronto, you are exposed to people from all across Canada, and indeed, the world. They are you. They are me, and they are people from countries I will never visit.”
It would truly appear that you don’t get out of Toronto much. People in Vancouver, Montreal, Calgary, and yes even Regina, a point which is illustrated in LMOTP, are exposed to the same people.
-“We hear this Toronto bias and Toronto schlock crap argument from you all the time. You know what it is? It’s bigotry, pure and simple. Now, you’ve got a wonderful example of yet more Toronto attitude coming from somebody. Run along and make sure it feeds your close minded, knee jerk, fact free whingeing.
The television industries in this country have converged in Vancouver and Toronto because that’s where the talent is. You want to try to score cheap and sleazy jealousy points by slinging Toronto-bashing, go right ahead.
It’s not Toronto that’s the problem, my friend. It’s close mindedness.”
How ironic. First, let’s derail the attempted diversion. I haven’t said one word about Vancouver. Vancouver has historically created many great shows, and indeed I would say that it also is underappreciated and underused by the CBC. (A little known fact is that it is probably the world leader in producing Scifi shows, probably because of the CGI and other hightech expertise that exists there. I’m not really sure what all the factors are behind their success because their achievements are almost completely ignored by all those Toronto based news and pop culture people in the CBC. Is any of this sinking in yet?)
Next, let’s note the irony of the suggestion that all the talent is in Toronto when most of the top Canadians shows are not produced in Toronto and are made up of predominantly non-Toronto talent. A whole lot of the shlock comes out of Toronto, though.
Next, let’s do a little review. You are very high on exchanging ideas and multiculturalism, as long as they are the ideas and culture of your friends and neighbours in Toronto. Have I go that right? When it comes to the suggestion that the actors and crew of LMOTP should do the show in Saskatchewan, and actually rub shoulders and exchange ideas with the kinds of people that they are representing in the show, in the culture they are representing in the show, Saskatchewan, then you change your mind and show yourself to be a complete hypocrite. That’s not the kind of culture you’re interested in, apparently. You know, bigotry is a very good word indeed, as are arrogance and entitlement. You’re clearly not really interested in ideas or other cultures. Those are just your excuses and rationalisations, until they get exposed as hypocrisy that is, for keeping the gravy train flowing into Toronto. I think what you’re interested in is maintaining you sense of superiority, and perhaps in protecting your job and avoiding having to leave Toronto to, heaven forbid, do your job well. If you’re in the industry it must be a sweet deal to have all those tax dollars directed in a hugely disproportionate way into your backyard, eh? Who cares if what you put out is generic Toronto shock as long as you’re getting paid for it. Is that it?
Those may well be the three wellspring of this recent flood of Toronto shlock, in fact, bigotry, arrogance, and entitlement. (For the record, I’m not making a reference to the Conservatives’ use of the entitlement in the last election. I’ve never voted Conservative in my life. I grew up in a family that woke up to and had breakfast to CBC radio, and went to bed after The National, but in recent years I’ve been coming to the realisation that that CBC is dead, and attitudes like that of our friend Mr. McGrath here are a big part of the reason why. bigotry - arrogance - entitlement). Whatever the cause, the attitude you’ve displayed here, Mr. McGrath, is exactly why the CBC needs to kick people like you to the curb asap and get the heck out of Toronto, or it is in real danger of being kicked to the curb by Canadians. You are a piece of work, my friend, but sadly you are not alone.
You know what? You have perfectly encapsulated the utter lunacy of the “I hate Toronto” mentality. The only person who could possibly read your screed and nod their head is someone similarly deluded. It would be too exhausting to catalog the sheer number of factual errors in your post. I stopped at 10. Someone else wants to play “spot the crazy” — go right ahead.
In your rush to cast aspersions over people you’ve never met — including me — you’ve done a better job of proving my point than I could ever hope to do. Unfortunately, along the way you’ve also done a disservice to the many fine, thoughtful people I have met living, working, and traveling across this great country.
See, I don’t have to make huge leaps and speculate (based on nothing) about your character, as you’ve done for all the people you mention. I can just go off your words…And those words contain all the tropes of the small-minded eejit with an ax agin the big city…people who done leave become citi-fied…and can’t be trusted… in fact, if you ever stopped at Pearson Airport on a layover, yer suspect.
What. A. Maroon.
Here’s the thing: You’re both right. Which means you’re both wrong.
Born in Saskatchewan, raised all over the prairies, and finally transplanted to Ottawa myself…
Lively little debate, fellas, but off on a tangent and so out of date.
Please don’t tell me that you can feel the Vancouver oozing out of Ian Hanamansing. He might as well be in Toronto.
Most people who are pissed at Toronto productions just wish there were more jobs in their own town.
Schlock is not regional.
I’ll bet there’s an equivalent airhead named George in Vancouver as well.
Whatever. You guys deserve your bile. Doesn’t matter that Zarqa is actually from the UK, and the people the dude accuses of not being travelled — George, who’s crisscrossed and seen more of the country for CBC and Much than this guy could have hoped to see..Ghomeshi, who toured with his band and has probably talked one on one to more Canadians in more places than this guy has ever contemplated; Sook Yin, ditto, Me, ditto — The programs he complains upon, from The National to DNTO, are either produced out of Winnipeg (DNTO) or have tons of producers from everywhere BUT Toronto (The National) — In short, what we’ve got here is a screed from someone who doesn’t get a single fact right. But boy, he’s angry-like. Would that he saw more of the country and educated himself as much as those he slams, he might see how silly hes’ being.
but let’s not hold out much hope for that. It’s easier just to hate Toronto. And that way, you don’t have to let nasty things like facts get in the way.
See, in Toronto, we tend to look at things like facts as, you know..germane. But sure. Whatever.
I’m closing the posts on this since it’s turning into a flamewar and not really that productive or on-topic.