A late fall weekend. The leaves are falling and the Leafs in Philadelphia (Saturday, CBC, 7 p.m.). Possibly, you're enjoying the fading days and possibly you're winterizing your humble abode. Whatever your situation, remember there are others worse off. Consider the people in Conviction Kitchen 2 (Sunday, CITY-TV, 9 p.m.), those ex-cons with drug and mental problems being trained in the restaurant biz. This season the show - the best of Canadian reality series - is set in Vancouver. The two-hour season finale of So You Think You Can Dance Canada (Sunday, CTV, 9 p.m.) crowns Canada's favourite new dancer. Me, I plan listening to music (Gramercy Riffs, Sarah Slean) while doing the chores and, wouldn't you know it - there is a vaguely musical theme to the big items on this weekend's TV menu.
The Promise: The Making of Darkness of the Edge of Town Saturday, HBO Canada, 8 p.m.
After screening at some festivals this doc makes it to TV before it appears as part of a big 'ol Bruce Springsteen box-set next month. It's a must-see for Springsteen fanatics and of interest to others too.
Essentially it documents the making of one album of his - 1978's Darkness At The Edge of Town, the long-delayed follow-up to Born To Run. We get much footage of the studio recordings and home-rehearsals.
The doc is an odd sort of time capsule. Springsteen looks young and lean and the studio equipment seems primitive. And it's a moody rock star we meet. In contemporary commentary, he says that the album was meant to be thematic, about "A life of limitations and compromise." He says he was spooked by the popularity of Born To Run.
"The success brought me an audience but it also separated me from all the things I'd been trying to make connections to, my whole life. It frightened me." There was a deliberate retreat from radio-friendly rock songs, something that caused the E-Street Band to wonder about the Boss's direction.
As drummer Max Weinberg says, "All the success, all the rock 'n' roll dreams I'd had a kid had finally come true."
The Instrument Bank Sunday, Bravo 8 p.m.
This new doc takes us to the Canada Council's famous Musical Instrument Bank and into the extraordinary competition to borrow its magnificent instruments - a collection of some 15 instruments and bows, worth a total of $27-million. The monetary value is not what matters, though. It is the quality that, when played by talented young musicians today, raises the level of performance several degrees.
We meet some of those who compete to borrow the instruments and some of their stories are as compelling as the history of the instruments themselves. A young woman who has won the competition twice talks about her father, who was imprisoned during the Cultural Revolution in China for playing music. The finesse of her playing on a rare violin worth millions of dollars has a very profound resonance. A young man, about to compete, tries to explain his devotion to the cello and then stops, saying, "Ah, I'm so nervous about this, I can't explain."
While this takes viewers to a place of classical music that seems remote, we still begin to feel for, and root for, the competitors.
Boogie: Lee Atwater, King of Dirty Tricks Sunday, CBC NN 10 p.m.
It's been on before, somewhere, but if you missed it, this is a great background program to see before the coming U.S. midterm elections.
It's a cheerfully negative doc about Atwater, the late Republican operative who taught the Republican National Party how to "go negative." He was Ronald Reagan's deputy campaign manager in 1984 and George H.W. Bush's campaign manager in 1988 - Atwater is responsible for the infamously negative Willie Horton commercial.
Here, in a film by Stefan Forbes, we're told a lot about the Southern politics that spawned Atwater, how he was doing dirty political tricks in college and how, apparently, he taught Karl Rove everything. He loved to play guitar, loved the blues and Southern-fried rock.
A Newsweek reporter says, "Lee sometimes reminded me of a wolverine, chewing through the plywood. And he had a vaguely marsupial look about him, always sniffing the air." He rocked but he was loved and loathed in equal measure. And his legacy is still unfolding in all that Tea Party polarization-politics.