YANOFSKY HITS HIGH NOTES WHEN NOT HITTING THE BOOKS

These are busy times for Nikki Yanofsky. In February, she sang ‘O Canada’ at the Opening Ceremony of the Winter Olympics – for which she had already recorded the hit theme song, ‘I Believe.’
This was followed by promotions and appearances ramping up to the release of her first studio album, ‘Nikki,’ in late April in Canada and early May in the U.S. Those appearances included a visit to ìCanada AMî and a U.S. launch event at Dizzyís Club Coca-Cola in New York. Now she’s heading into a summer that includes performing at jazz festivals in Toronto, Vienna, Nice, and Napa, Calif., and back-to-back TV concerts on Bravo! Canada and on PBS in the U.S. ‘Nikki Yanofsky, Live in Montreal,’ which is also being released as a DVD). Her ‘At the Concert Hall’ appearance airs Tuesday, June 29, on Bravo! and features most of ‘Nikki,’ including several songs she wrote with Ron Sexsmith and co-producer Jesse Harris.
“Ron was in the audience,” she says. “I was so happy he came. Having him there added energy to the songs. It was the first time I performed them live for him. It was really, really awesome.”
And as if all this weren’t enough, like any other Grade 10 student, she had year-end exams to contend with. “My school’s really supportive,” she says. “They make it easy on me. But with all the singing and stuff – that stuff is a lot easier for me, because it comes more naturally than having to know all the facts of history.”
Despite a schedule hectic enough to break many adults, the 16-year-old student recently admitted to New York magazine that she was carrying an 86 average. That might give us some idea of just how naturally music comes to her. Yanofsky has been singing since she was a child. She made her stage debut with her fatherís amateur combo, singing Aretha Franklinís ìRespect,î at the age of 11. A year later, she became the youngest performer ever to headline at the Montreal Jazz Festival.
The years since have been marked by a contribution to an Ella Fitzgerald tribute album; a live CD/DVD of Fitzgerald songs, ‘Ella … Of Thee I Swing’; collaborations with Marvin Hamlisch, Herbie Hancock and Will.i.am; and a performing schedule that took her around the world.
So you might think Concert Hall would be just another day on the job. But the two TV concerts were “as exciting for me as the Olympics,” she says. “Because it was for TV, there were a number of breaks, and I entertained the audience by performing songs I had never sung live before – just fooling around with the band.”
Much has been made of the fact that many of Yanofsky’s earliest performances were of Fitzgerald, and comparisons have gone so far as to describe her as channeling the jazz great. Writer Judith Dobrzynski described ‘Ella … Of Thee I Swing’ as sounding as if it ìwere recorded by an artist 30 years older – 60 years ago. Yet Yanofsky refuses to allow herself to be categorized strictly as a jazz performer. “I would say I’m a jazz singer,” she says. “But I’d also say Iím an R&B singer. I think when you identify yourself with one genre, youíre shooting yourself in the foot, because thatís all people expect from you.” Nikki Yanofsky performs on ‘At the Concert Hall’ Tuesday on Bravo!

Parker inspires ‘Work of Art’ on Bravo

Most artists arenít in it for money … but if one can walk away with $100,000 thanks to Sarah Jessica Parker, so much the better. The actress is serving as an executive producer of a New York-based competitive reality series that pits artists against one another for a Brooklyn Museum exhibition of their work, as well as for the cash prize.  The Wednesday show Work of Art: The Next Great Artist, finds 14 talents from Miami to Saigon, and from pursuits ranging from painting to photography, delving into one anotherís specialties while staying true to their own. Model and actress China Chow (The Big Hit) serves as host, and also as a judge, as the contenders get guidance from art auctioneer Simon de Pury in carrying out each weekís task. Parker says, “My husbandís mother was a wonderful artist who painted in obscurity, as most artists do. Every now and then, she would have a show – and a year after she died, somebody discovered her paintings, and they’re now being shown in a prominent New York gallery. Itís unfortunate timing,” Parker reflects. “I thought about how rarefied that world is, and about the relationship Americans have with art, and also how artists arenít supported. And I wondered how I could address that in a way that would be exciting and interesting to an audience.”

The result is Work of Art, which premiered at the start of this month.  Dan Cutforth of Magical Elves is another of its executive producers. He explains, “We had been talking about doing an art competition, then we heard that Sarah Jessica was also working on a show in the art space. ìWeíd worked with her on Project Runway, and we decided to team up on it. To have her name on the show, in combination with her passion for art, was just a great opportunity for us.î So far, Parker has appeared only in the first episode of Work of Art; she returns in the Aug. 11 season finale, which has been taped already. Having addressed all the contestants at the start of their quest, Parker recalls, ìI wanted to tell them that they were selected from thousands of candidates because we were excited about what they had to say and how they wanted to express themselves.”While the U.S. doesn’t have the sort of arts funding that it should, I wanted them to know they were going to be supported.  Iím not a fan of competition, and I wanted them to know we knew that this was anathema to what they had been doing alone in their studios, and that it was a big leap they had taken in trusting us with their work.”

Any television competition needs its judges, and in that sense, Work of Art also has the potential to make stars of some major players in the art universe. Among them are gallery owners and art critics. “They’re often the curators of the art world,” Cutforth says. “They figure out what people will want to buy, then put it out in front of the people who can buy it. Appealing to gallerists also is an important part of an artistís job, if he or she wants to have that career.”

Parker appreciates the investment Bravo is making in Work of Art, since she notes the show’s theme “isn’t obvious. For some reason, fashion and cooking get a much more immediate response.  Art is this sort of intellectual exercise for people, and I want to express that we all have art in our home, whether you save a postcard from a friend or put your sonís or daughterís drawings up on the wall.  Thatís art, and you are part of it …  and it shouldn’t be any less accessible to you than to anyone else.”

THE DAYTIME EMMYS

Actors and talk show hosts. First-time nominees and previous winners. Series that will continue and others now canceled. There’s a little bit of everything at the Daytime Entertainment Emmy Awards, as the 37th annual edition will have when CBS televises the event from the Las Vegas Hilton on Sunday, June 27. Many familiar faces will be on hand – afternoon-drama queen Susan Lucci among them – as this year’s lifetime achievement award is presented to Agnes Nixon, creator of the ABC staples “All My Children” and “One Life to Live.”
Just as last year’s Daytime Emmys marked a last hurrah for a CBS serial that seemed to have run forever – “Guiding Light” – so it is again this time. “As the World Turns” ends its 54-year run Sept. 17, and among those who have earned one of the show’s final 13 nominations is daytime drama veteran Jon Lindstrom (“General Hospital,” “Port Charles”), who has played the ever-ambitious Craig Montgomery since late 2008.  Lindstrom ironically has landed his first-ever Daytime Emmy bid, for outstanding lead actor in a drama series, for a job that’s soon to end.  His last scenes as Craig were slated to be taped just before the ceremony, and he says that though he has no idea how Craig’s story will conclude, “I just hope somebody throws him under a bus, or he fi nds some way to change his ways spectacularly, so that it’s authentic as well as creative.”
Preceded in the role by several other actors, Scott Bryce and Hunt Block being the longest-running, Lindstrom notes that he replaced another performer in a soap role “once before, way at the beginning of my career, but it wasn’t a really well-known show nor a well-known character. The fact was that I was doing my first regular job on television, and I just wanted to get it right.
“This time, though, I have to admit that it was like stepping into the shoes of James Bond or something.  Everybody had their opinion about the character and believed they knew how he should be played. If I was doing it differently than what they expected, I was greeted with either a surprised smile or a look of utter befuddlement, as if to say, ‘How could you possibly interpret this character that way?’
“In order to make your way as an actor,” Lindstrom reasons, “you have to make everything your own, and you have to do it against unbelievable odds to begin with.”
Among Lindstrom’s rivals for his potential Daytime Emmy are his “As the World Turns” co-star Michael Park, as well as Doug Davidson (CBS’ “The Young and the Restless”) and James Scott (NBC’s “Days of our Lives”). Also up for it is Peter Bergman, who’s won the honor three times as Jack Abbott on “The Young and the Restless.” He claims his 16th Daytime Emmy nomination for the role is no less special.
“That year’s going to come when I’m not a nominee,” Bergman acknowledges, citing the current status of daytime drama in general.  “We’ve been hearing about the end of it for a very long time, and I doubt there’s an actor in daytime television who isn’t saddened, either because they have friends who are on the shows (that have ended or are about to) or because they happen to be on the top floor of this slowly sinking ship. It gets a little more perilous.”
Still, the ratings for “The Young and the Restless” are “doing just fi ne in comparison to last year,” says Bergman, who scored his first Daytime Emmy bid in 1983 as Cliff Warner on ABC’s “All My Children.” “While we’ve lost something,” the actor refl ects of the cancellations of some daytime shows, “we’ve also gained something. It’s considerably more efficient now. Everyone realizes now that it’s about the writing, so the writers are more engaged.  For a long time, you could coast, and you can’t do that anymore.” It could be another big year for Rachael Ray at the Daytime Emmys, too. The vivacious food expert’s eponymous, syndicated weekday show is up again for outstanding talk show/entertainment, which it won for two of its three past nominations in the category. Ray herself has her third chance to win for outstanding talk show host.  “I think our show is unique,” Ray says, “in that we’re truly a mixture of a cooking show and a chat show.  What I’m most proud of is that people see a lot of themselves in the show. We’re not totally celebrity-driven; we’re thrilled to have the celebs on and have them sit at our kitchen table and make chitchat, but we have so much else, like our Human Labs and our Ambush Makeovers and all our parenting pieces.
“We were up in our ratings a bit recently, and that’s hard to do in the daytime landscape,” adds Ray, who typically spends her summer hiatus from “Rachael Ray” working on her Food Network projects (now encompassing a new one for the spun-off Cooking Channel, “Rachael Ray’s Week in a Day”).
“We’re just thankful for our jobs, and we just go to work to make the show the best visit that we can. People will let us know if that changes.”

TOFFEE-NOSED HOME DESIGN…

Imagine a blend of Martha Stewart and Princess Anne, and you begin to understand the brew of condescension and competence that is Kirstie Allsopp. The co-host of Location, Location, Location, which begat Relocation, Relocation, has the posh, aristocratic British manner of … well, what she is: a posh British aristocrat. So it is with some bemusement that we approach Kirstie’s Homemade Home, airing Saturdays on HGTV.  This is one of those how-to shows that assumes that people who make things for themselves do so not because they have limited money but because they have unlimited time. In one episode, Allsopp is learning how to sew her own cushions like a pro making things that can become family heirlooms, she assures us. In another, she’s bargaining down the price of ebony doorknobs ó to the pound-sterling equivalent of $83 a pair.  The show’s premise is that Allsopp has purchased a cottage in Devon, in southwest England known for a slow economy and an even slower pace of life. Through the course of this series, she renovates and decorates it using found products and restored antiques of local origin, as well as items she makes herself in traditional ways.  The good part of the show is the fact that Allsopp frequently teams up with local craftspeople to learn how to make candles, do decorative stitching or fashion mosaic tile. She also travels around looking for inspiration from homes, cottages and stately mansions along  the British and Cornish coast (”Doc Martin” country) which  makes for some wonderful visual material and fascinating home design ideas.

New TV role ‘Huge’ for film star Nikki Blonsky

There’s not much shock value these days in a TV show that opens with scantily clad teenagers prancing about in the sun. But the teens in “Huge” aren’t the sort you usually see fl aunting their physiques.  Set at a weight-loss camp, the ABC Family comedy-drama, which airs Mondays beginning June 28, follows a group of heavyset teenagers trying to get themselves healthy in both body and mind. Girth aside, they tend to fall into the usual high-school types — the pretty girl, the rebel, the shy one, the jock, the artsy outcast — and they often have to navigate the same kinds of cliques and social hierarchies that await them back in their everyday lives. As star Nikki Blonsky puts it, “Even at fat camp, some girls are bigger than others, so that separates them.”
Blonsky, who shot to instant fame by nabbing the starring role in 2007’s “Hairspray,” leads a cast of young actors who don’t fi t the Hollywood ideal of beauty and are often relegated to friend roles or comic relief. “Huge” puts the focus on them and delves into their characters beyond defi ning them solely by physical appearance.
It also offers Blonsky the chance for people to see her as someone far different than the sweet, bubbly Tracy Turnblad. Her character, Will, is a rebel without a cause, determined not to conform to the skinny image her parents want for her. In addition to not dressing like someone from a wealthy family, Will is looking to actually gain weight while at Camp Victory, and she immediately establishes a black market of candy bars and junk food that she sells to others. Yet her inner confl ict shows through in a memorable introduction, where all the campers are made to get their pictures taken in their swimsuits in an effort to get them to confront the reality of their bodies. Will turns it into an act of defiance, stripping off her clothes while belting out a sexy tune and grabbing the attention of anyone who will look. Then, seconds later, she wonders aloud, “Why did I just do that?”
“It’s not all about weight,” Blonsky says of the problems the characters must work through. “We think in terms of exercising and eating healthy, but there’s a lot more that goes into a fat camp. There’s a lot of mental stuff that happens. We’re dealing with huge emotional issues, family issues, relationship issues.  … It’s still something that kids who don’t have weight issues can really come in and find something they’re going through in our show as well.  Ultimately, it’s inner change that leads to the outer change that some of them are seeking.”
Co-star Raven Goodwin, who plays the mousy and withdrawn camper Becca, puts a finer point on it, saying, “Being overweight can mean a lot of things. It’s more than physical. Look at Gina Torres’ character, Dr. Rand. … She’s a very in-shape woman, but her character carries around a lot of weight. Just like we’re at Camp Victory, she’s at Camp Victory. She’s the leader of the camp, but she’s … one of us in a way, because she’s still carrying around that weight.”
But body image certainly is a large factor in these characters’ lives. Hayley Hasselhoff (daughter of David) plays Amber, who has posters of skinny models on the wall that serve as her “thinspiration.” Another character leaves camp after it’s discovered she was bingeing and purging. There are stories of kids who lost weight one summer at camp only to gain most or all of it back. The weight can also come between friends, when one is successful in shedding pounds and dress sizes while the other isn’t.  The ability to play such richly drawn characters is part of why Blonsky was happy to make the transition from the big screen to television. She’s turned up in a few projects since “Hairspray” — an adaptation of the Broadway musical that plucked her from her job at a New York ice cream shop to singing and dancing with the likes of John Travolta, Michelle Pfeiffer, Queen Latifah, Christopher Walken and Zac Efron — but “Huge” could be the role that shows she’s in for a long career.
“ ‘Hairspray’ was the gift of all gifts,” she says. “It was incredible.  But the amazing thing about this industry and this business is that we have the opportunity as actors to play different roles and different characters. (In a TV series), we get to be the characters all day long, and live with them and really nurture them and create them, and then take them home with us and study them so that we’re prepared for the next day. It’s a fantastic experience.”
Raven Goodwin, Harvey Guillen, Ari Stidham, Nikki Blonsky, Hayley Hasselhoff and Ashley Holliday (from left) star as teens at a weightloss camp in “Huge,” premiering Monday on ABC Family.

MMVA’s TURN 20

The MuchMusic Video Awards are turning 20 this year, but they’d rather we didn’t mention it.
It wouldn’t do for a youth-oriented, pop-music network to start looking back. After all, when the network itself turned 25 last year, we didnít hear so much as a peep of celebration. In fact, Much made a point of not paying attention to the passage of time. Brad Schwartz, VP/MM of  Much MTV, said, “We’re in the young-person business, not the looking-back business. So when the MMVAs air Sunday, June 20, on MM, don’t expect candles, noisemakers or funny hats.   Everybody uses the past as a guide,î says Craig Halket, snr. programmer, who joined the net as a VJ in the mid-’80s. But we’re always looking at whatís happening now because that’s what our audience is paying attention to. In three weeks it may not be what they’re listening to.”
While we’re on the subject, a co-host of this year’s event is Miley Cyrus, and rising Jian Gohmeshi-mentored star Lights is a nominee and presenter. Among the scheduled performers are Justin Bieber and Katy Perry.
When it comes to right-nowness, there isn’t much that can touch Bieber.
“When you look at his track record, and how he was discovered, it’s such a great story,” Halket says. “He was discovered by people watching him on YouTube. And then to be discovered by both Timberlake and Usher. Then there’s almost a bidding war between the two on who’s going to sign him. And Usher wins.”
A year later, heís a headliner at the MMVAs. Perhaps the act that most highlights the changes in the music industry is Drake, the Degrassi star-turned-hip-hop sensation. “Everyone has embraced this guy because he has genuine strong talent,”  Halket says. “When his record comes out, it’s going to be phenomenal.
Heís had music out there, and  itís being shared.”
The MMVAs have grown since 1990 from a typical industry event to a three-ring party. MuchMusic lives in a funky old building on Toronto’s Queen Street; for the MMVAs, the street is closed to traffic and streetcars and open to any fan who wants to come down. The building’s big garage-door-style windows can open up for street-level performances, and the adjacent parking lot is turned into an open-air concert venue. Tune in Sunday and join the party!

THE BORGIAS

Bravo! and CTV have announced the addition of renowned stage actor Sir Derek Jacobi

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Derek_Jacobi>  to the highly anticipated series THE BORGIAS. Jacobi is signed on to play Cardinal Orsini in the first two episodes, set to premiere in 2011 on Bravo! and CTV. Also joining the cast are David Oakes <http://members.madasafish.com/~shakespeare/>  as Juan Borgia and Holliday Grainger <http://www.troikatalent.com/CMcC/Grainger_Holliday.htm>  as Lucrezia Borgia. The new cast members join distinguished actors Colm Feore (FLASHPOINT, 24), Jeremy Irons (Kingdom of Heaven, Being Julia), and up-and-coming Canadian actor François Arnaud (I Killed My Mother, YAMASKA) in the series.
THE BORGIAS revolves around a powerful and corrupt 15th-century Italian family headed by patriarch Rodrigo Borgia (Irons), who became Pope in 1492. Feore plays Rodrigo’s arch nemesis Cardinal Giuliano Della Rovere and Arnaud is cast as Cesare Borgia, Rodrigo’s ruthless son. Production is slated to begin in Hungary this summer.
Jacobi is a pre-eminent classical actor whose impressive body of work spans theatre, film and television. He has appeared in such stage productions asHamlet, Uncle Vanya, Oedipus the King and received a Tony Award® for his performance in Much Ado About Nothing. Jacobi has also enjoyed a successful television career, appearing in the critically praised adaptation I, CLAUDIUS, for which he won a BAFTA, the acclaimed medieval drama series BROTHER CADFAEL and THE GATHERING STORM.  Jacobi has appeared in countless films such as Henry V, Gladiator, Gosford Park, The Golden Compass and Hippie Hippie Shake.
British actors Oakes and Grainger have signed on to play brother and sister inTHE BORGIAS. No stranger to period drama, Oakes television credits include HENRY VIII: MIND OF A TYRANT. He also stars in the long-awaited miniseries, THE PILLARS OF THE EARTH this summer. Grainger’s long list of movie and television credits include The Scouting Book For Boys, Jane Eyre, ROBIN HOOD and Season 1 of CTV’s MERLIN respectively. She has also been tapped to join Robert Pattison, Cristina Ricci, and Uma Thurman in the feature film Bon Ami, due out in 2011.

A con artist clan goes straight in ABC’s frisky ‘Scoundrels’

In youth-obsessed Hollywood, you rarely hear an actress say, “You know, what I’d really like to do is play a mom.” As it turns out, though, that was one of Virginia Madsen’s primary reasons for signing on for “Scoundrels,” the promising ABC dramedy premiering Sunday, June 20.  Adapted from the New Zealand TV hit “Outrageous Fortune,” the series stars  the Oscar-nominated actress (”Sideways”) as Cheryl West, a Palm Springs, Calif., wife and mom who finds her family of small-time criminals turned upside down when hubby Wolfgang “Wolf” West (David James Elliott, “JAG”) gets sent to prison for a longer-than-anticipated stretch by a judge seeking re-election. At first, Cheryl’s chief assignment while Wolf is away is just to hold down the fort, managing the family’s pawnshop – where, unbeknownst to her, a good percentage of the stock is hot – and keeping the kids in line: beautiful but ditsy model wannabe Heather (Leven Rambin), aspiring screenwriter (and accomplished blackmailer) Hope (Vanessa Marano), and identical twin sons, newly minted attorney Logan and deadbeat slacker Cal (Patrick Flueger in a memorable dual role).  It’s not long, though, before circumstances place one of her kids in harm’s way, forcing Cheryl to decide the family is going to clean up its act – even if that puts her at odds with Wolf, who is trying to continue running the family business from the clink.
A canny mix of comedy and drama, it boasts a showpiece role for Madsen, who had been searching in vain for a mom role that was well-written and steered clear of cliches. “I just feel that I am so much more comfortable and I actually have better roles at this age than when I was an ingenue,” says Madsen, 48. “(Being a mother) is a huge part of my life that I do well and not well, and to be able to play with that at work is just a dream for me.  “But it’s hard to find a mom role that’s real. They’re so often stereotyped, and this one had sort of everything, including comedy, which I have been studying for the past three or four years, so that was also a bonus for me, knowing that I could learn so much at work.”
Certainly the last place that the actress expected to find a role like this was on network television, since her experience on the 2006-07 CBS caper dramedy “Smith,” in which she played the wife of Ray Liotta’s professional thief, was both short-lived and creatively unsatisfying.  “In that one, I was the mom, but I was continually the pancake maker,” she says, sighing. “I kept thinking, ‘Where’s my gun?’ Every week I would read the script and go, ‘Auugh, I’m in the kitchen again!’ It just wasn’t real, and I never got to do any cool stuff. In fact, I hardly ever got any scenes with Ray.”
Enter the three “Scoundrels” executive producers: Francie Calfo, who had held the show as a passion project for three years, and former “Nip/Tuck” scribes Lyn Greene and Richard Levine, the team Calfo hired to bring the show to life. After Madsen read the script, the three took her to lunch and dazzled her with their commitment.
“As a parent, I just connected with this woman in the original that I thought was really interesting,” Calfo says. “And for me, a professional woman with three children, to make that kind of connection to a woman like Cheryl West, I thought immediately said something. So I scrambled and begged and bargained and prayed that I could get on that project and I finally did, then I found Richard and Lyn to come write it for me.”
Levine, who has known Greene since their teen years and worked with her extensively, says they both were attracted immediately to the complexity of this unusual but very charismatic family. “We love doing something that is like life, in that it can be funny or also serious and deep. This property affords a very wonderful range and we are excited about it,” he says. “Family is where you get ruined for life,” Greene adds. “That’s where it all starts and stops. Everything else is just an add-on. I really felt the basic heart of it was wonderful even in its original state, and we had to fight a bit to keep it in its present form because it’s not formulaic in the sense that a lot of pilots are.”
Although Madsen and her TV kids shine in the series, it’s Elliott who may startle viewers the most with his funny, scary, uninhibited bad-boy performance that is lightyears away from his buttoned-up work on “JAG.”
“There is tremendous chemistry between me and David, like fireworks going off on the set,” Madsen says, laughing. “I worry almost that I am going to gush about David too much and there will be rumors, because I know he is a happily married man, and I’m not that kind of girl, but I really do blush when he walks on. “He’s amazing, just so masculine. We have seen a lot of boys with clean chests and six-packs on TV, but David is a man, and his energy is manly. He holds himself like a grown-up, and he doesn’t preen in front of the mirror. He just explodes onto the stage and steals every scene, and I gladly allow him to do it.”
Madsen also has bonded strongly with all three of her TV kids, who threw her an impromptu homemade Mother’s Day dinner when production in Albuquerque kept her from spending the day with her 15-year-old son in Los Angeles. “They were so proud of themselves, and I just thought, ‘These are young people who really, genuinely like each other,’ ” she recalls.  “There’s no competition between them; I don’t know how that happened, but one of the reasons that I really do hope we get picked up is so we can still be together. It’s very rare to experience this on a project.

Rookie cops turn streets ‘Blue’ in new ABC police drama

Being a police officer can have its challenges – and particular ones when you’re new to the job. A group of novice cops experiences many of them in the ABC drama series “Rookie Blue,” premiering Thursday, June 24. An American-Canadian co-production as is CBS’ “Flashpoint,” the Toronto based show is an ensemble piece, but the debut focuses largely on Andy McNally (Missy Peregrym, formerly of “Reaper” and  Heroes”), a rookie with a lot to prove.
Not only does she want to be taken seriously, she’s driven to surpass the legacy of her ex-cop father (Peter MacNeill), who fought his own professional demons. Andy ends up having a very eventful first day on the
beat, attracting a homicide detective (Eric Johnson, “Flash Gordon”), then trying to talk down a suspect who takes her hostage at gunpoint.
Gregory Smith, remembered by “Everwood” fans as brooding piano prodigy Ephram Brown, also stars as another of the newly minted officers-in-blue. Charlotte Sullivan, Travis Milne and Enuka Okuma round out the cast as police academy graduates now putting their training to work … or trying to. “The saving grace is that we really had no idea what we were doing, so we got to play into that,” Peregrym recalls of starting production on the show. “We didn’t have to have it all together. I think it would have been terrifying if I was supposed to have played a veteran of the job who’d been doing it for years. We weren’t cool about anything we were doing. I mean, we couldn’t even put the gun in the holster properly. Because I didn’t grow up dying to be an actress, it’s been a learning experience for me right from the beginning,” adds Montreal-born Peregrym, “and it’s the same with this show. After playing Andi on ‘Reaper’ – which was amazing for me, since I got to be home and spend time with my family (in BC)- I was ready for something that had more depth. I just couldn’t say ‘No’ to this, though I was nervous, because I didn’t know what would be asked of me.”
Peregrym notes that she and the other “Rookie Blue” actors had “one day of training where real officers came in and showed us how to handcuff someone, how to hold a gun, etc. There was so much to learn. You go to an academy for five months in real life, and we had one day to maybe understand the tools we would need to use. This show isn’t about procedure, though, as much as it is about how the job affects the characters and defines them as people.”
Beyond the appeal of working in his native Toronto, Smith also was lured by the characters-first approach of “Rookie Blue,” since he allows that “Everwood” left him “very particular” about signing onto another series.
“That show was such a major investment,” he says, “and took so much out of me because it was so dramatic, I knew that if I was going to make that kind of commitment again, it would have to be to something that was going to be more fun.”
Indeed, Smith’s new alter ego, Dov Epstein, is a risk taker much looser than Ephram of “Everwood,” by any standard. The actor says “Rookie Blue” permits his “energy to be up, whereas with ‘Everwood,’ Ephram’s angst thing really started to really seep into my life. This show is about all five rookies, but the emotional center absolutely is Missy, and I get to have the funny story lines.”
“Rookie Blue” has many women on its staff – including the show’s creator, Tassie Cameron – but Peregrym isn’t sure how essential that is to the integrity of her role. “I’ve also done things where men have written for female characters and have done it really well,” she says, “but there is a certain depth to our communication about this character and where we want to see her go. Obviously, a woman understands a woman, so I think it was easier to get there.”
A major “co-star” in “Rookie Blue” is what the actors have to wear. Peregrym says that when she first tried on a police uniform, “I really got excited to play this character for the first time. I’m truly the biggest faker in every way when it comes to being an officer, but you feel like you have authority with that on. You stand taller, and you walk differently. “The most irritating thing is that it takes 15 minutes to get out of it, so you watch how many liquids you drink. That’s actually in one of the episodes.”
Smith adds, “You always have a game plan in your head as to how you want to play a character, and I wasn’t quite sure which direction I wanted to go with this. I put the uniform on, I looked in the mirror and had a picture taken, and I didn’t have to think about it anymore. A story that develops in the show is that I’m a pretty small person to be a cop, and the uniform helps with that, kind of boosting my stature.”
Being athletic by nature aided Peregrym greatly in playing a gymnast in the 2006 movie “Stick It,” and she confirms it also helps in the running and other physicality that “Rookie Blue” requires of her. “The humidity killed you,” she says of filming the initial episodes. “As great as the uniforms are, I’m super-grateful ours weren’t 30 pounds, with the bulletproof vests and all. It hurt just to fall on my plastic gun! It only increases the respect you have for the actual officers.”

Salvage crews step up when the ships are down

If you blended “Deadliest Catch,” and “Monster Machines,” this is what you might come up with. Except these guys don’t even go to work unless something, somewhere, has gone terribly wrong. In the world of “Salvage Code Red” – debuting Wednesday, June 23, on Discovery Canada – every job is unique and cursed by nature. Every assignment involves a whole new set of engineering and science problems. And one miscalculation could cost your employer millions of dollars – or kill someone. “Because every single thing is such a new problem, even the civil authorities don’t have systems for this type of thing,” says Stavros Stavrides, who co-produced and cowrote the series and directed two of the episodes. “Did we have a system for 9/11? There’s never any system in place.”
The people who do this work may look heroic – or crazy – to us, Stavrides says, but they’re “like stuntmen,” who carefully measure risk and then plan to eliminate it. “You look around, and if the experts aren’t nervous, then I don’t get nervous,” he says. “If the captain starts to sweat, then I start to sweat.”
The show focuses on two salvage companies, the European giant Smit and the foremost North American salvager, Titan. Featured personnel include Gert-Jan Langerak, a marine firefighting expert, and an international Titan team that includes American Jim Conroy, Brit Mike Wood, Swede Niel Lundquist and Brazilian Rui Teston.
These companies get called – usually without warning and on a very tight deadline – when things get ugly on the high seas. The salvagers usually end up trying to figure out how to get a ship out of circumstances it was never designed to handle, Stavrides says. Each situation involves an engineering problem that may even need custom machinery to solve. In one case, a ship had to be cut into pieces and carried away after it was literally broken in half by a salvage attempt. “There are some ships that had been sitting there for some years while insurance companies fight, and finally authorities make them get it out of there or else,” Stavrides says. “These are mostly ships that have run aground. That’s most of the ship emergencies, unless there’s a fire or a sinking. We haven’t got a capsized one. We got ships in distress or grounded.”
Each episode tells the stories of two ships that have been abandoned by their crews. When salvagers are sent in, it’s almost always to refloat a ship or to try to prevent one from sinking. Jobs range from extinguishing a fire aboard a Turkish freighter in the Adriatic  to refloating a giant truck ferry stranded on the beach in Blackpool, England, and cutting up and removing a coal carrier that has been sitting aground for a decade on the Oregon coast. Some of the situations were tremendously dangerous. Fire turned the Turkish freighter into a maze of flash fires and gas chambers. In Blackpool, the ferry was sitting at a 45-degree angle with dozens of fully loaded transport trucks secured to the deck only with thin chains – poised to roll over and kill anyone in their way. In most cases, the camera crews had to go through these extremely hostile environments right along with the salvagers. “There are no formulas in this business because every ship is unique,” Stavrides says. “So you have to keep an eye on the people in charge and just follow their lead. They’re the safest people around because they know what they’re doing.”
Sometimes, Stavrides says, it seemed like a miracle that no one got hurt over the course of the shoot. “We had to crawl through greasy crawl spaces. We were ankle-deep in diesel at one point, down in the bottom of a hold. And there were other dangers, like getting on and off these ships. You arrive by tugboat, and there are eight-foot swells, and you have two boats going up and down like elevators, and you have to time your jump, and if you mistime it, you’re going to smack into the hull of the ship you’re jumping onto or fall too far onto it, or fall in between them.”
The ships may look large and sturdy, Stavrides says, but the most striking thing about them is how fragile they are when they’re out of their element. “As heavy and as industrial and as strong and tough as they are … they’re only good when they’re floating,” he says. “Take that away, and you have a useless piece of junk that’s unmanageable. Once it’s turned over or has hit land or a barrier reef … it wasn’t designed to sit like that. So extracting a ship or self-righting a ship is never in the design of the ship. The design of the ship is simply to float under perfect conditions and to get where it’s going. Other than that, it’s a disaster.”

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