Jared Keeso in Season 5 of Shoresy.Supplied
Shoresy, Crave
I’m writing this edition of What to Watch a few weeks in advance owing to the paper’s holiday production schedule, so have yet to screen the new batch of episodes of Jared Keeso’s hockey-themed Letterkenney spinoff - but the continuing saga of Blueberry Bulldogs has never let me down and I don’t expect it to this time around. Judging from the trailer, the plot of Season 5 revolves around Sudbury’s Senior AAA-level ice-hockey team facing off against some sort of European team in a battle for the soul of the sport and pitting physicality against finesse. “The North American game is dying,” Shoresy, the frequently concussed retired player played by Keeso, says in the trailer. “Or is it?”
Two new episodes land on Crave on Christmas Day – and then one at a time come out each Thursday after.
Rick Mercer went on a 21-city tour this fall and filmed the Saint John performance.Naomi Studio/Supplied
Rick Mercer Stand Up for Canada, CBC Gem
Elbows up? This Newfoundlander comedian’s arm joints have been hoisted in the faces of our neighbours to the south since Jean Chrétien was prime minister and Talking to Americans was a regular bit on This Hour Has 22 Minutes.
This fall, Mercer – who post-22 Minutes hosted the Rick Mercer Report for 15 years – went on a 21-city comedy tour across the country with fellow Canucks Sophie Buddle, Mayce Galoni and Julie Kim in tow to punnily “stand-up for Canada.” The Saint John performance on Oct. 17 was filmed in front of an audience – and is set to land on CBC and CBC Gem on Dec. 28.
Today’s Special: Christmas, YouTube and archive.org
One of the pleasure of having kids – or just having kids around – during the holidays is getting to revisit the TV specials from your childhood and, in some cases, your parents’ childhood with them. I’ll always steer them toward the CBS’s 1966 How the Grinch Stole Christmas! voiced by Boris Karloff over the many newer, busier versions of that Dr. Seuss story.
But many Canadian Christmas specials of my youth are trickier to find. I did, however, track down the 1983 Christmas special from Today’s Special on YouTube and archive.org – as that classic TVO puppets-and-humans kids show is not officially streaming anywhere else. In this two-part episode, magic mannequin Jeff (Jeff Hyslop) is initially left alone in the Toronto Simpson’s department store on Christmas Eve – but, soon enough, window dresser Jodie (Nerene Virgin), night watchman Sam (voiced by Bob Dermer) and mouse Muffy (voiced by Nina Keogh) return to keep him company.
It’s a very gentle, ambling hour of entertainment: The plot revolves around a couple of Santa’s mischievous elves (director/choreographer Madeline Paul and Canadian musical theatre legend Grant Cowan) playing tricks on the gang. Sam is briefly arrested by a Toronto police officer who thinks he’s drunk – and lots of carols, and original songs composed by Clive VanderBurgh and Jim Betts, are sung quite beautifully.
Aidan Turner plays Declan O'Hara in Rivals.Robert Viglasky/Supplied
Rivals, Disney+
Last month, at the International Emmy Awards, this British show set in the changing TV industry during the Thatcherite 1980s won best drama series – inspiring me to catch up on its first season on Disney+. I discovered Rivals could easily have won best comedy as well. The story centres on an Irish BBC presenter named Declan O’Hara (Aidan Turner) who is lured away from public broadcasting to host a talk show on a commercial channel called Corinium Television based at a studio deep in the Cotswolds. There, Declan and his family end up in the middle of a long-running rivalry between the station’s nouveau-riche managing director, Lord Baddingham (David Tennant), and a posh womanizing former show jumper and Tory MP named Rupert Campbell-Black (Alex Hassell). Based on the “legendarily filthy” (per the Financial Times) novels of Dame Jilly Cooper (who died in October at 88), the campy show starts with a close-up of the bottom of Campbell-Black – a character who was inspired by Andrew Parker Bowles, Queen Camilla’s ex – before he has sex in the toilet of a plane about to go “supersonic.”
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Yule logs, every streaming service
Obviously, you should log off screens this long weekend and spend time actually talking with your friends and family. But there’s no reason not to do that with a log on the screen in your living room.
Virtual fireplaces and looped video of burning Yule logs regularly land on the Netflix top 10 this time of year – and, this holiday season, the streaming service has a new one themed to K-Pop Demon Hunters (it actually shows the soul-devouring fire Gwi-Ma) along a hearth inspired by Stranger Things (which is dropping its penultimate three episodes on Christmas Day). To cut to the chase, Crave, CBC Gem and Paramount+ all offer up an animated Paw Patrol Holiday Hearth, while Disney+ has long offered an Arendelle Castle Yule Log to warm your Frozen heart and, new this year, A Very Jonas Christmas Movie one too (in which the baseball-interrupting brothers make cameos to hang up their stockings). YouTube has YouLogs galore, of course, including a Lego one featuring a bunch of brick people miraculously not melting in front of a fire. Happy holidays!