LIFE FAIRY-TALE ROMANCE

If the Walt Disney Co. were producing the news, this is what it might come up with.
Friday, April 29, Prince William of Wales and Kate Middleton will be wed at Westminster Abbey in London, and CBC Television, CTV and Global Television Network will all be there to capture the pomp and magic of the occasion.
“Everybody believes in some form of the prince and the fairy queen and all that stuff,” CBC’s Peter Mansbridge says. “It’s playing out in real life: golden-crested coaches and long trains of horses pulling a coach through the streets of London, from one of the most famous churches in the world and then back to the most famous palace in the world. Then the balcony scenes. It’s monarchy, celebrity and a happy story.”
Mansbridge is expected to anchor CBC’s team, which will include royal watcher Ciara Hunt, former editor-in-chief of Hello! Canada magazine.
CTV plans to have future national anchor Lisa LaFlamme heading up a news team and “Canada AM” providing daily features.
Global has Cheryl Hickey from “Entertainment Tonight Canada” scheduled to co-host with national anchor Dawna Friesen — a nod to the blending of celebrity, politics and fantasy that the wedding represents.
Hickey says “ET Canada” is planning a week of features on the couple, looking at such things as how they met, how they’ll live, their favorite London hot spots, and how Kate and William came to be the people they are today. She’ll also be having high tea with Debbie Travis at Travis’ London home.
“I think it’s a genuinely happy time,” she says. “There doesn’t seem to be any scandal surrounding it. It just seems to be a great, true, fairy-tale Cinderella love story.
“Little girls read stories and watch movies about this sort of thing, and in our lifetime, we’re going to get to see this. It’s just wonderful.”
Coverage of the wedding itself will be provided by a pool feed that all three networks will pick up. However, CBC, CTV and Global will have camera crews and reporters along the procession route to Westminster Abbey and back to Buckingham Palace, interviewing spectators and catching footage of such invited celebrities as Elton John and his Canadian partner, David Furnish.
Breaking with tradition, Middleton is expected to arrive at the ancient Gothic church by car rather than carriage.
After the ceremony, in which Kate and William will be married by Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams, they will ride to Buckingham Palace in the same carriage that carried William’s parents on their wedding day in 1981.
Mansbridge, who covered the wedding of Charles and Diana, says the contrasts are as striking as the similarities to William’s parents’
wedding.
“There was always a strange suspicion — especially the way Charles answered some of the questions in their prewedding interview — that something was kind of off,” he says. “And I can remember looking at
(Diana) that day, because I was at the palace and she went by, and she looked like a deer in the headlights.
“This wedding doesn’t look that way at all. Kate looks like she knows exactly what’s going on, and she’s up for it, ready for it and quite excited by it all. And they’ve had a much different run-up to marriage than the other two did. These two do look ready to get married. Back then, they didn’t look ready. Something didn’t seem right.”
CBC is sharing a spot directly across from the Abbey with CBS, which Mansbridge describes as “the absolute preferred location.”
As well, all three networks will have people scouting the procession route for interesting characters — and, of course, the Canadians, who Mansbridge says are usually easy to find.
“We’ll have our own cameras outside to get the shots we want and focus on Canadians in the crowd, who are never shy about waving flags.”
Two prominent Canadians who were invited are Prime Minister Stephen Harper and his wife, Laureen. Mrs. Harper has said the pair will not attend the wedding, but it seems odd that the PM would pass up such a powerful campaign photo opportunity.
“Harper could do it,” Mansbridge says. “They could fly over Thursday night, go to the wedding Friday morning and fly back Friday afternoon.
They have a pretty comfy plane. “If everything else is equal, and no big scandals suddenly hit the campaign that throw them off their game, you’re looking for that extra push at the end.  Last year, we figured Harper might go after the Olympics, basing it in that momentum.”
As for the political implications of the day, LaFlamme and Mansbridge both say they doubt many young Canadians see this as more than a celebrity wedding.
“I look at my nieces and nephews, who love Wills and love Kate,”
LaFlamme says. “They’re all in their teen years, but they don’t really get the historical relationship between the royals and Canada, which I find fascinating.
“They think of them more as celebrities. I don’t know that young people look at it the way we looked at it when Charles and Diana got married.”

A sitcom about reality and television

Be careful what you wish for, goes the old saying, because you may get it. That’s the premise of a tween sitcom about a girl who gets her own reality show and then has to live in it. “Really Me,” airing Sundays on Family Channel, stars Vancouver newcomer Sydney Imbeau as Maddy Cooper, a 15-year-old who is determined to be famous and drags her friends and her family into celebrity with her.
“We want to explore the good and bad sides of reality TV through the eyes of a bright-eyed, exuberant 15-year-old girl, to see what she discovers,” says producer Tom McGillis (“Total Drama Island,” “6TEEN”). “A lot of what she discovers is awesome, and a lot of it is just brutal.”
In the series, Maddy and her best friend, Julia (Kiana Madeira), calculate to win a contest to become the stars of a reality show, which they think will make their lives wonderful.  When they win the contest, their friends and families find they also have to live with being stalked by a camera crew, and Maddy discovers there are some stark differences between reality and reality TV.  The series co-stars Wesley Morgan (“Unnatural History”) and Azer Greco as Maddy’s brothers and Neil Crone (“Little Mosque on the Prairie”) as her ex-hockey star father. This is McGillis’ second tween show dealing with reality television and the nature of celebrity. The first was Teletoon’s “Total Drama Island,” an animated series that spoofed “Survivor.”
“One thing we discovered doing ‘Total Drama Island’ was that our audience is incredibly mediasavvy,” McGillis says. “They’re smart enough to know that having your own reality show can be pretty sweet. The problem comes along when reality starts to interfere, or your attitude gets out of control, or your family starts suffering from your fame.”
If there’s a central moment in the show, it came in the first episode, when Maddy and Julia arrive at school with a camera crew, expecting to be mobbed by adoring classmates.
Instead, the kids run right past them and swarm the crew — which says lot about how seriously people today take the concept of 15 minutes of fame. “There are so many teenage girls who would love to be famous, because there’s this image of being famous that is amazing,” Imbeau says. “It’s like it’s perfect to be famous.”
Imbeau, 14, is from Vernon in the Okanagan Valley and has been acting since she was 9.
“I love playing Maddy,” she says.  “I feel like she and I are very similar in a lot of ways. She’s your average 15-year-old girl, and she’s really down to earth. She has a best friend who’s always with her and a family that’s a little nuts sometime.  “And that’s what I am. I have a best friend and a family who can drive me nuts. But in the end I love them.”
One big difference between her and Maddy, Imbeau says, is her attitude toward celebrity.
“I don’t have the drive to be famous. Of course, a lot of acting can turn out in fame and popularity.  But that’s not something I’m striving for. I just hope to continue on with the work.”
“Really Me” reflects a trend that some people might find alarming.  McGillis points out that surveys taken by the U.S. youth cablecaster Nickelodeon in the past few years have shown that kids are increasingly drawn to fame for its own sake.  “There has been a shift over the last few years in aspirations,” he says. “Boys used to aspire to being sports heroes or astronauts, or some kind of hero with a role that inspires adoration from people. And girls used to fantasize about being a singer or star.
“Those are still there, but overwhelmingly there has been a shift to being famous, without necessarily having any merit to it.”
The good news, he adds, is that kids tend to gravitate toward reality shows with a point and away from series that feature “adults behaving badly.” In preparing the show, the producers and writers researched teen and preteen taste in reality shows and found the ones that resonate with kids are shows such as “Survivor,” “The Amazing Race” and “Fear Factor.”
“We wanted to make sure we were speaking to them in their language about their reality show experience,” McGillis says. “Adults behaving-badly content is not at the top of our audience’s list. They’re still pure-hearted in that they’re attracted to stuff where the contestants are physically, mentally and emotionally challenged.”
In the end, McGillis says, the message is to be careful not to confuse performance reality with real reality. “Maddy’s central struggle in every episode is to be herself. She has to land in that place. And often, even the adults around her are getting caught up in the craziness. But she has to come to the realization that being herself is the only thing that really matters.”

Batter up for Season 2 of ‘Cupcake Girls’

Who would have thought cupcakes could make for such a sweet, easygoing confection?
“The Cupcake Girls,” in its second season Wednesdays on the W Network, was a surprise when it debuted a year ago — an engaging blend of documentary and comedy based on an equally surprising business success. Lifelong friends Heather White and Lori Joyce have admitted that they did everything wrong: They started a business without a plan, picked a product because it was something they liked and hired family.
Yet Cupcakes by Heather & Lori, begun as a dessert shop in downtown Vancouver, appears to be a roaring success. When we met them last year, White and Joyce had four stores going, were planning a fifth and were looking to expand outside the West Coast. Heather was a recovering alcoholic who had focused her obsessive tendencies on training for triathlons.
Lori, the married one, was determined to have a baby and was undergoing regular fertility treatments.  As the second season began, we found that Lori had become a mother, and Heather was in a new relationship and said she had no intention of becoming pregnant.
By the end of the first episode,
Heather discovered she was pregnant — something Lori had already figured out.
As with the first season, the key to the success of “The Cupcake Girls” is the blend of Joyce’s and White’s personalities. They’ve known each other so long that each almost knows what the other is thinking, and they can get away with saying things that would get a stranger slapped in the head.

‘Law & Order: CI’ ends on high note

A year ago, one of the longest running drama series in television history came to a close.
A year later, one of its spinoffs is ending, with the luxury of knowing in advance. And that may have helped get its original stars back.  After premiering on NBC in 2001, “Law & Order: Criminal Intent” has made its main home on USA Network since 2007. That’s where the Dick Wolf-produced show is wrapping up its run of original episodes with eight weekly stories that begin Sunday, May 1.
NBC will have second runs of them starting Monday, May 30 — and after a year’s absence, New York police detective partners Robert Goren and Alexandra Eames are back and reunited for the victory lap, played again by Vincent D’Onofrio and Kathryn Erbe.
In the first of their last new cases, they investigate a monsignor (guest star Neal McDonough) whose gun was used in a girl’s death, which could have been either a murder or a suicide. Jay O. Sanders (“Revolutionary Road”) becomes a regular cast member for the series’ home stretch as the new chief of the Major Case Squad, who’s a friend of Goren’s but sternly tells the therapy taking sleuth, “I’ve got your back. You respect my face. And don’t get in it.”
Also the mentor of the NBC spinoffs “Law & Order: Special Victims Unit” and “Law & Order: LA,” Wolf maintains he wouldn’t be surprised if “Criminal Intent” ultimately has a longer life span. “I’m always an optimist,” he says.  “I know this is supposed to be the final year, but I have a feeling the audience is going to be re-energized.  When I went to Vincent about it, I said, ‘Very few times do we get an opportunity to wrap things up with a bow.’ He was very excited, and getting (Goren) back to the cop he was in the first season is an interesting journey.”
The ripped-from-the-headlines approach of all the “Law & Order” shows remains in place for “Criminal Intent,” which has an upcoming episode inspired by Charlie Sheen’s recent escapades. Jay Mohr (“Gary Unmarried”) guests as the pseudo-Sheen, a bad-boy fashion designer.  “It’s a formula that has, knock wood, stood the test of time,” Wolf notes. “You’ve got great episodes going back to the very first year of ‘Law & Order,’ where everybody thought we were doing the story of the Menendez brothers (convicted of killing their parents), but our take on it was that it was a mob hit.” Goren and Eames were the sole “Criminal Intent” investigating team for the show’s first four seasons, then they alternated with a second duo in the four subsequent years.  Mike Logan, revived from the parent “Law & Order” (and played again by Chris Noth) was the male partner in seasons five through seven, with Zack Nichols (Jeff Goldblum) joining after that. Their female partners were portrayed by (in order) Annabella Sciorra, Julianne Nicholson, Alicia Witt and Saffron Burrows.  It was just Goldblum and Burrows in the ninth year, and now Erbe says she and D’Onofrio are “so excited to be back. I was devastated to be let go. I love the character, I love the job, and I love all the people I get to work with every day. We have an amazing crew, 95 percent of whom waited to come back to do these eight episodes with us, out of incredible loyalty. And the fans have been so amazingly supportive, it just feels good all around.”
Also a veteran of movies (“What About Bob?”) and theater (“The Speed of Darkness”), Erbe adds that had D’Onofrio not agreed to return for the swan song of “Criminal Intent,” she still would have been up for it.
“As a working mom, I need a job, and this is one that I know. As a woman in this business, it is not easy to have your life respected, and these people are incredibly supportive of my being a family person. They do their best to help me achieve that, and I don’t know where else I would find that. Vincent and I have such a history, we really get along well. We have a shortcut to everything we do; we really don’t even have to talk about stuff anymore. We just look at each other and know exactly what we need to do in certain situations, in terms of what might need to be punched up in a scene and how to handle it. It is such an amazing feeling to have worked with him for essentially 10 years and for us to know each other so well.”
If the 10th round remains the end for “Law & Order: Criminal Intent,” which has yielded foreign versions in France and Russia, Wolf says he’ll leave it with satisfaction.  “It’s a really good show, and I’m very proud of it,” he reflects. “And I think Vincent is the epitome of what you want in a television ‘star turn.’ In my mind, the best television stars classically have been character actors, even if you go back to shows like ‘Have Gun Will Travel’ and ‘Kojak.’ In series, I think audiences respond more to psychologically complicated characters than to matinee idols.”
Goren and Eames still will be seen in “Criminal Intent” repeats, some of which make up entire programming days on USA, but Erbe will picture their lives continuing. “I am choosing not to believe that this is the end of these characters,“ she says. “Whether they come back on another ‘Law & Order’ or in some other capacity, I feel they have given so many people so much enjoyment, I can’t really think about it in any other terms.”
Kathryn Erbe and Vincent D’Onofrio return to “Law & Order: Criminal Intent” for its 10th and final season, which begins Sunday on USA Network.

Melissa Leo goes to Big Easy

The most famous image of Melissa Leo is at the Academy Awards, letting the F-bomb drop while accepting her Oscar in a gown that defined old Hollywood. A far more typical image of the actress is of her on a recent blustery day. She’s in well-worn jeans, a gray sweatshirt, plain boots, no makeup and hair pulled back. Leo strides into a hotel on New York’s Bowery, and it would take a sharp eyed fan to recognize her, which suits Leo just fine.
Leo, who travels without an entourage, picks up borscht from a Ukrainian restaurant and offers to share. Just stopping by Vaselka proves what a downtown woman she is. Leo grew up in this neighborhood before it was chic. Settling into a club chair, Leo happily discusses playing a mule her first time onstage, what happened at the Oscars, and the return of HBO’s “Treme” Sunday, April 24, in which she plays Toni. “I have to say, I don’t think she’s a civil rights attorney,” which is how Toni is often characterized, Leo, 50, says. “She is a bleeding heart not just for left-leaning politics but for music, the sacred music of that city.” That city is post-Katrina New Orleans, and Leo refers to it, without malice, as “a beautifully backward town.”
She had shown up for work with her Oscar in her luggage, but airport security found it troublesome.  Leo won her Oscar for her portrayal of Alice Ward in “The Fighter.” “It’s very powerful,” she says of the statuette. “It’s not just an icon that we use as a term. It’s an actual, not a virtual, icon. Security in New Orleans didn’t know who he was or how I got him.”
She parked the statuette with her accountant (“my money husband,” she says) while her house in upstate New York undergoes renovations. It’s been five weeks since the Oscars, and Leo has had time to reflect. “I had a fair amount of practice to make a nice thank you,” she says. “I had noticed what a great big stage it was and I remembered being on the opposite side, watching Kate Winslet get hers. She was so dignified and thanked all the right people and it seemed so f… easy!”
Winslet and Leo worked together in the remarkable “Mildred Pierce,” also on HBO.
Just after the Oscars, in a separate interview, Winslet say’s, “I sent her a text message and said: ‘Is that f… you, Melissa, you motherf…  cow?’ And the b… hasn’t called me back! Everyone dumps all this s… on me, all the f… time!”
Yes, the great Kate speaks like a drunken sailor, but in a plummy British accent.
Incidentally, Leo did not receive the text message because she does not text. Leo apologizes again for what she said, and adds, “It is American vernacular, and I am sorry to offend.  Network television is not the time and place. The time delay is wonderful.”
With a glint, she adds, “Thank f…  goodness!”
As for the rest of that glamour soaked evening, Leo adores the dress created for her, which isn’t as heavy as the 70-pound dress she wore to the SAG Awards. And Kirk Douglas is still a sexy man, she says. They’re meeting for tea in Los Angeles.
Some of her recent characters, Lucy in “Mildred Pierce” and Toni in “Treme,”   are the sort of women other women want for a best friend.  There’s an iron core of loyalty and a can-do spirit about them. The common thread between them is that “both of these characters are inwardly happy,” she says. “They are living the lives they had envisioned for themselves.”
Leo also emanates that. As a child, attending nearby P.S. 122, which has since become an arts space, she knew she wanted to act even before she knew what to call it. She loves to work, which is why she’s hoping “Treme” is renewed and she continues working with series creator David Simon, for whom she worked on “Homicide: Life on the Street.”
Leo has been incredibly busy the last couple of years, racking up 24 credits. She downplays that number, explaining some were student films or two-day gigs.
If she could have her pick, Leo says, she would work “in European film,” she says. “That’s a pretty broad statement. No particular language, no particular country.”
Her other goal is to learn to play the guitar. Despite being tone-deaf, Leo bought Ani DiFranco’s guitar at an auction to raise money for New Orleans schools to buy instruments.
Though offers are coming in since her Oscar win, what she wants, meaty roles for women, aren’t common. Leo reflects on that last Sunday in February, when her life changed.  “Nobody could have told me that winning an Oscar would not be the cherry on top, but to get it from Kirk Douglas,” she says, beaming. “I am the luckiest girl who ever lived.” Melissa Leo stars in “Treme,” which returns for its second season Sunday on

Forget the face; listen to ‘The Voice’

Ultimately, it comes down to the voice. Strip away theatrics, choreography, costumes, arrangements and backup singers, and all that remains is singing, which is the point of NBC’s 13-week talent show, “The Voice,” launching Tuesday, April 26.  Christina Aguilera, Cee Lo Green, Blake Shelton and Adam Levine of Maroon 5 serve as coaches; Carson Daly hosts, and Mark Burnett produces. Coaches listen to hopefuls with their backs turned.
“I find so often everything is about packaging a look and digitally enhancing things, all technology has to offer,” Christina Aguilera says. “This is back to real music.” Though screeners were not available at this writing, each artist involved independently tells Zap2it how pure this contest is.
“It does bring a nostalgic approach to discovering and showcasing true talent like radio once was, before video killed the radio star,” Green says.
Before hopefuls audition, the show’s staff vets them. “Everybody who even steps foot on the stage is already very good,” Daly says.
Each coach picks eight singers.  If more than one coach wants the same singer, the contestant decides with whom to work. Each coach assembles a team of eight, eventually winnowing it to four, then America votes for who receives the recording contract and $100,000. “It’s all about talent,” Shelton says. “It takes all the bull crap out of the industry. I have selected somebody to be on my team, and I turn and woo-hoo, what am I going to do with this person? It could be a guy who looks like a sumo wrestler. The best part is I selected him because he is talented.”
“I never realized before doing this show how much you do listen with your eyes,” Shelton says. “Whether we like it or not, we are eliminating selecting persons on their looks.” Though Shelton had been on “Clash of the Choirs,” Levine says no one involved was clamoring to be on a show.
“If you had told me I would be hosting a music competition series, I would have told you, ‘You are crazy,’ but just focusing on somebody’s voice without seeing them or knowing anything about them is powerful,” Daly says.
Levine, a Burnett fan, says, “I would not consider myself to be a reality television enthusiast at all. Of all the people who signed on for the show, they had a previous indifference to the whole genre. That seems to be the common feeling.  I thought these people would not be involved if not for Mark. What was really exciting is this will be something different. This will be the anti-reality show.”
The coaches get along so well that while Shelton was talking, he was en route to a store to buy Levine “the cheapest bottle of tequila” he could find for his birthday.  Daly and Levine have a history; he gave Maroon 5 its first TV gig.  As the only woman on the show, Aguilera says, “It’s definitely me and the boys. I am just like, ‘What am I listening to between Blake and Adam’s banter talking about God knows what?’ Cee Lo is a bit of a ladies man, and the boys tell their dirty jokes off to the side. Mark Burnett says I am the voice of reason.  I have taken on this mama role of making them focus and concentrate because sometimes they just get so silly.”
As goofy as they get, all involved are serious about this show and how they expect viewers to connect.  “I hope they see themselves, and I hope it enlightens and encourages them to act on their abilities and talents,” Green says.

When dinosaurs ruled the North

Dinosaurs just keep getting more and more birdlike. It used to be that the prehistoric beasts were immobile, coldblooded, gray lumps that lumbered around palm-tree-dotted tropical landscapes dragging their tails behind them. But now the ancient beasts have come to be regarded more as prebirds, with feathers and brains and the ability to live just about anywhere they wanted, including the high Arctic.
And it’s those Arctic dwellers that are the subject of the two-hour animated film “March of the Dinosaurs,” airing Monday, April 25, on History TV.
This is a Britain-Canada co-production with a British director-writer, Matthew Thompson (“Primeval”), and a Canadian company providing the animation: the Montreal visual effects outfit Modus FX. “I believe this is the first feature length animation they’ve done, so it’s quite an ambitious project,” says the Canadian producer, Elliott Halpern.
“This is cinema-quality animation.  It’s really fantastic. I think this is a real revolutionary step in the quality of animation.”
The film is set mostly in the high Arctic of the Cretaceous Period, some 70 million years ago, when North America was little more than a series of large islands, and the far North was covered with redwood-type trees, a far cry from the bleak, treeless landscape of today. The temperature, however, wasn’t so very different from temperate parts of the modern Arctic.
Average annual temperature was around 6 degrees, with a midwinter average low of around minus 2.  Temperatures could drop as low as minus 10. Not much of a land for immobile gray lumps.
“One of the really cool things about this film is that it has a number of firsts in the way dinosaurs are depicted,” Halpern says. “It took advantage of the most recent, and genuinely revelatory, discoveries of dinosaurs in the high Arctic, and that they survived in these wintry places.”
The film is a bit of a blend of Disney-style animated nature drama and hard science.
It focuses on two young dinosaurs, an Edmontosaurus named Scar and a Troodon named Patch.  Scar is a member of a herd of large herbivores, and Patch is a small, pack-hunting carnivore.  “We wanted to work out a story arc that has narrative drama but remains completely faithful to the way life would have been for them,” Halpern says.
“There was a lot of research that really predated working out what the story would be, to make sure the science is really, really accurate.”
What makes these dinosaurs different is that scientists now know that Edmontosaurus migrated, like its bird descendants, thousands of miles each year, from the high Arctic to about the same latitude as southern Alberta, and that Troodon stayed in the North and hunted through the cold winter.  And paleontologists have just recently been able to identify the color of dinosaur feathers through analyzing tiny “organelles” in fossilized cells. We now know that Troodon looked a little like a cross between a wild turkey and a velociraptor: large eyes, a big brain, walking on two legs and using its forearms as vicious weapons, and covered with blue-gray feathers.
The story line follows the parallel narratives of these two youngsters through the crucial first year of their lives. One struggles to survive a long migration through harsh weather, hostile terrain and trailing predators, and the other fights to learn the hunting skills to stay alive through the long Arctic night. The story line is rooted in “state-of-the-art paleontology,” Halpern says. “The great migrations of dinosaurs makes this into a real epic adventure.”
The film was in production for more than two years, with half of the time spent on researching the science, Halpern says. “With all the geology in it, and all the flora and fauna, it all had to be scientifically accurate. There are no liberties taken with the way things would actually look, to the extent that we actually understand these things.”
Several leading Canadian, American and British paleontologists were consulted, including Philip Currie of the U. of Alberta and a number of experts at the Royal Tyrrell Museum in Drumheller.
And all of that research conspires to push our view of the dinosaur further and further from the gray reptilian lump stars of old movies and cartoons. “It’s a total revision of these drab looking, slow-moving, lizardlike creatures,” Halpern says, “to these very intelligent, quick-moving creatures that could inhabit bits of the world that we never, ever thought they could.”

Debt lady takes a broom to homeowners

 By now, most viewers will recognize Gail Vaz-Oxlade as the toughlove woman who drives people back from the brink of financial ruin. Now with “Til Debt Do Us Part:
Home Edition,” airing Tuesdays on HGTV Canada, Vaz-Oxlade is taking on people who are sinking into the money pit. These are couples who have either bought more home than they can realistically afford to own or have underestimated the costs associated with homeownership and are in danger of losing their houses.  In one episode, we met a couple who had purchased their dream home in the country. He’s a country boy who makes his living as a farm laborer, and she’s a massage therapist. The property is large and rural, and the house is beautiful but drafty and badly in need of repairs.
Consequently, on top of a large mortgage, the couple are paying some $700 a month in heating bills and looking at more than $7,000 in renovations that are essential but beyond their means. At the same time, by moving to the country and relocating her practice to a home office, the woman has seen her income drop by 50 percent. And as if all of this weren’t bad enough, they’re carrying $63,000 in debt, above their mortgage.  Vaz-Oxlade’s shows have always played like financial horror movies, with one economic blow after another delivered without warning to poor innocent spendthrifts, until Vaz-Oxlade steps in and slays the spending monster.
In the case of “Home Edition,” however, these people are often just ordinary home owners who have gotten in over their heads.

AMY PRICE-FRANCIS IS KING

If Columbo were reincarnated as a supermodel, he might look a lot like Jessica King. Played by Amy Price-Francis, King is a sort of Toronto supercop who is called in when other police can’t handle a case, and her style is the old iron fist in the velvet glove gambit, a blend of smarts, toughness and up-front sensuality that tends to keep the bad guys — and the good guys — off balance.
Debuting Sunday, April 17, on Showcase, “King” was created by actor-writer-producer Greg Spottiswood (“Shattered”) as a “delivery mechanism for human stories.”
The series aims to be more than just a procedural, he says, and focuses on the part of police work that’s “about human relationships.”
Jessica King is a rebel who ended up in the call center because she did a TV news interview denouncing a corrupt police chief, and it went viral on YouTube.
“The chief retired, and she ended up in the community complaints unit,” Price-Francis says. “She’s kind of a firecracker in that she really can’t keep her mouth shut, which is good fun but also gets her into trouble.”
A new chief has pulled her out of mothballs to run a special investigations unit, so now she has a job worthy of her sharp mind but one that is bound to put a strain on her marriage. The series co-stars Alan Van Sprang (“The Tudors”), Gabriel Hogan (“Heartland”), Tony Nardi (“Intelligence”), Suzanne Coy (“Dan for Mayor”), Zoe Doyle (“The
Border”) and Aaron Poole (“Cra$h & Burn.”) Jessica King is a classic crime drama character who hearkens back to cops with attitude such as Bullitt and Dirty Harry — the maverick who bucks an incompetent or corrupt establishment to get the job done.
Until now, however, these characters have all been male. Getting to put a feminine spin on the character is “all the more delicious for me,” Price-Francis says.
She plays King as a woman who is defiantly feminine — to the point that some other female cops think she dresses a little too sexy and maybe acts a bit too provocative.
“It’s what makes her different and draws different things from different people,” Spottiswood says. “I think that’s something that has been changing in police work over the years. There’s an increasing respect for difference within the ranks of the police service as serving a function. “If every cop is the same, dresses the same, interviews people the same, they’re all going to get the same results.”
In addition to hanging out with Toronto police and spending a day in “Cop School,” Price-Francis says she did some research with female police officers to get a feel for what it’s like to be a woman in a police environment.
“I was able to speak to a woman homicide detective,” she says. “And like Jessica, she doesn’t let it faze her. She enjoys being a woman; she doesn’t apologize for being a woman. She doesn’t feel the need, or see the need, to tone that down in the department.”
A graduate of the National Theatre School, Price-Francis divides her time between Los Angeles and Toronto and has had a lot of success lately in finding work on both sides of the border.
Her highest-profile Canadian work has been in the daily soap opera “Train 48” on Global Television Network and the political drama “Snakes & Ladders” and the comedy-drama series “Rumours” on CBC.
But it has been on U.S. TV where she has really made her mark in recent years, as regular or recurring characters in such shows as “The Cleaner” and “The Chicago Code” — which she had to leave to take “King.”
“I was actually in a hotel room in Chicago when I was told I had gotten ‘King,’ ” she says. “They didn’t kill me off, so I don’t know if there’s a possibility of going back. But they did have to write me out, at least for a period of time.”
Perhaps the show that got Price-Francis the most notice was “24,” in which she was cast against type as the vile terrorist Cara Bowden, a sort of Bond villain for the 21st century.
“That was a really nice experience,” she says. “She was a villain/terrorist, and it’s the first time I’ve ever played a character with zero conscience.”
As a “businessperson as well as an actress,” she says she plans to make the TV money while she can

GAME OF THRONES

The epic nature of “Game of Thrones,” a 10-part HBO series premiering Sunday, April 17, announces itself from the very beginning, as the camera dives and soars like a tipsy falcon over a living map of the Seven Kingdoms of Westeros. It’s a realm that encompasses both the balmy southland of King’s Landing, whence King Robert Baratheon (Mark
Addy) rules from the Iron Throne, and the frozen northland where the king’s warden and lifelong best friend, Lord Eddard “Ned” Stark (Sean Bean), maintains order from his home at Winterfell.
Several years before the series begins, Ned helped Robert, a fellow soldier, overthrow Aerys Targaryen, an insane monarch who was terrorizing and murdering his own people.  In the aftermath of that rebellion, the two planned to rule the Seven Kingdoms together, but their subjects needed a single monarch, so Ned and his family happily returned to the northland, where an ancestor of yore had erected the Wall, a massive structure designed to protect Westeros from the darkness to the far north.
Based on George R.R. Martin’s best-selling fantasy series “A Song of Ice and Fire,” “Game of Thrones” opens as Robert comes to Winterfell to entreat his old friend to come south to King’s Landing, which has deteriorated into a place of corruption and violence. There are rumblings that descendants (Harry Lloyd, Emilia Clarke) of the mad king are planning a rebellion of their own, but Robert’s biggest problem lies closer to home. At the urging of an adviser, he has married Cersei Lannister (Lena Headey), a ruthless beauty whose lust for power makes Lady Macbeth look like Betty White.
“What Robert didn’t realize is that he was marrying into possibly the most power-hungry family imaginable, including his wife and her brother, Jaime (Nikolaj Coster Waldau), who was known as the Kingslayer, because he killed the former king,” explains Addy, best known to American audiences from his role in the long-running CBS sitcom “Still Standing.” “He realizes too late that he has placed himself in a position where he is surrounded by enemies, and there is really only one man he can trust, Ned, because his advisers all have their own agenda as well. But by making Ned the Hand of the King, he is drawing Ned into the same dangers that he is in. It’s a real quandary for Robert, but he really doesn’t have a choice.”
Bean, an action movie regular who played the flawed hero Boromir in Peter Jackson’s “Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring,”
freely admits that he never had heard of Martin’s fantasy series before one of the producers on this project started talking to him about playing Ned, but he became hooked as soon as he started reading.
“The characters were just very rich and multilayered,” the actor explains.  “They’re there for a reason, not just for padding. I particularly enjoyed the relationship between Ned and King Robert because they’re old friends.
“It made things even more enjoyable that Mark and I have known each other for a long time in real life. … We were at drama school together, and I know some of Mark’s mannerisms and his laughter and stuff like this. I know his mind, so I can play off that. We have good chemistry, and it made the relationship feel more natural and spontaneous.  Mark and I are actually from the same county in England, Yorkshire, so that might have a little to do with it, too. We understood each other’s nuances and humor.” Both actors give the HBO creative team high marks for the rich detail of the production.
“They’ve just done a terrific job, all of them, taking elements that look familiar and make you think, ‘Oh, that looks medieval,’ and then you’ll see a vaguely samurai kind of look,” says Addy, a newcomer to the action fantasy genre. “They’re familiar, yet not specific, so you build up a world, or even a series of worlds, which are fully believable. You arrive on that set, and it’s a world you can believe in. You can become these characters without having to fi ght against Lycra or whatever crazy costume they put you in. Everything in this looks real and feels real and smells real.”
“I was fascinated because I would come onto these sets, and I would see a crack in the corner that had been painted in,” adds Bean.  “You might see it (on screen), you might not, but it was there, because someone cared so much about how it looked.”
The story line for the series also features secondary and very touching story lines involving two fascinating misfits: Jon Snow (Kit Harington), Ned’s illegitimate son who goes to help guard the Wall, and Tyrion Lannister (Peter Dinklage, who nearly walks off with the entire project, despite a free-range accent), the dwarf brother of Cersei and Jaime whose own painful life experience has given him a compassion and perspective that his siblings totally lack. Epic fantasy can be a dicey prospect for television, but HBO hasn’t hedged its bets with “Game of Thrones.” It’s a stunner from top to bottom.

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