Friday, August 15, 2008

Seeing Your Home Town on TV

This might not be a big deal for most people, but I live in Toronto and a lot of movies and TV shows are filmed in Toronto. Thing is, usually these same movies and TV shows are set someplace else. So, they avoid shots of the skyline and change the mailboxes from red to blue and put trash in the allies.

Funny story, and I don't think it's an urban legend... During the filming of one particular Toronto-shot, NY-set film, the crew left their downtown alley set and took a break in the wee hours of the morning and came back an hour later to find the lane they'd been filming in had been cleaned up... So they needed to cover it with trash again. LOL.

So, why this post? CBS is showing a CTV show right now called Flashpoint and it's not only filmed in Toronto, it's set in Toronto, so there are lots of nice shots of the city. Fun. And the mailboxes are the right colour and the police cars are real Toronto police cars etc.

Supposedly this show is getting good ratings both north and south of the border... but frankly, it doesn't have much competition right now. Hope it lasts. Cop shows aren't usually my thing, but I like how this one works through all the psychology of the situations and how most of the situations aren't so black and white. Fun to see all the Canadian actors, too. If you watch BSG you'll recognize a lot of actors... In fact, Col Tigh's (Michael Hogan) real life son (Gabriel Hogan) was in the first episode and I thought he was going to be a series regular, but haven't seen him since the first one... It's a nearly all Canadian cast, though. The only series regular who isn't Canadian is the girl, I think... (Oh, I also like that they have a girl SWAT team member... And that they aren't called SWAT, because that's not what it's called up here... They're called SRU (Strategic Response Unit). I like that they don't try to just make it American.)

Plus, I really like seeing the shots of the T dot.

4 comments:

Unknown said...

Love this show. I've seen three episodes and I'm hooked.

What I like: it's quieter (for lack of a better word?), less OTT drama than most other cop shows which makes it feel 'realer'

Also like the fact that the cast doesn't feel contrived - you know... The African Amercan, The woman, The gay, The hunk, The cowboy, (insert personality type here), etc...
There is a good variety of characters, yet they've managed to avoid stereotypes.

Maureen McGowan said...

I agree Val. The characters are great and it does seem more "real", yet still very tense.

Annette Gallant said...

I saw it advertised the other day but didn't realize it was Canadian. Very cool about the Toronto setting. A lot of films are also shot in Halifax but staged to look like New England etc... And with the Cdn dollar dipping down again, I expect there will be even more in the upcoming months.

L.A. Mitchell said...

A tidy lot you are up there. I couldn't believe how clean everything was when I visited last.

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