By Robert Lloyd | Television Critic at Los Angeles Times
That we still speak of TV seasons testifies to the ongoing preeminence of broadcast television, however little it’s covered in the press or memed in the socials. With actors and writers on strike and no end in sight, it’s hard to say exactly what the fall may bring, outside of confusion, but it is only summer now, and in the broadcast cosmos summer means summer replacements.
It’s a time of year when networks have traditionally looked abroad for content, and whether Canada counts as abroad exactly — sharing a language and a border and artists we are happy to think of as American, from Joni Mitchell to Catherine O’Hara, Neil Young to Michael J. Fox — it is at least marginally another sort of place, with its own show business, actors and writers and networks and so forth.
From a chauvinistic perspective, it would be convenient to believe that they make an inferior product up there, but series from “SCTV” to “Schitt’s Creek,” from “Degrassi Junior High” to Tegan and Sara‘s “High School,” from “Slings & Arrows” to “Orphan Black” prove that wrong. One might say, at least, that Canadian series share a certain modesty, a naturalism, a simplicity, an amiability perhaps not unrelated to being produced outside the walls of Hollywood.
The CW, already running the second season of the Canadian legal drama “Family Law,” with Jewel Staite (from “Firefly,” Canadian) and Victor Garber (also Canadian, though you might not guess it from his numerous Broadway and Hollywood credits), is turning over an hour and a half of its Monday schedule to three Canadian family comedies; each has aired two seasons at home, with a third on order — which is to say, a substantial resource, should resource be needed. If not typical for the CW brand, more often associated with superheroes and the supernatural, these series are very much the stuff of broadcast TV, historically speaking: good-natured, comparatively wholesome and easy to consume as a block, one, two, three.
Only a pilot episode was available for each, so I can’t address issues of plot or character development, but, as episodic comedies, they will likely be more about things that sustain than things that change. I like some more than others, as a matter of taste, but I have nothing bad to say about any of them. Each in its own way has the capacity to improve your life for half an hour.
Created by comedian Mark Critch, with Tim McAuliffe, “Son of a Critch” (premiered July 24 and whose next season the CW will reportedly co-produce) is most easily described as “The Wonder Years” in 1980s Newfoundland. Yet with a nerdy, naive central character in the bosom of a slightly eccentric family, I’m reminded more of other narrated-from-the-future, semi-autobiographical period pieces like “The Kids Are Alright,” “Moone Boy” and “Everybody Hates Chris” — which you can consider very much a recommendation. (Critch narrates and also plays his own father, who reports local news.)
The pilot finds young Mark (an excellent Benjamin Evan Ainsworth) pleading illness to avoid his first day of junior high, a Catholic school run by severe nuns, where he knows no one and, as anyone can tell, will not easily fit in.
“I know you’re worried about getting picked on, and beaten up, and made fun of,” says mother Mary (Claire Rankin), not quite helpfully. “Everyone might think you’re strange, but you are the sweetest boy I know. And nervous or not, if you don’t get on that bloody bus I’m going to pick you up like a bloody baby and carry you onto it and then they’re going to make fun of you even worse than they already will.”