THINGS KEEP GETTING BETTER FOR THE CFL

On paper at least, this season looks as if it could be the most competitive for the CFL in a very long time.
The regular season kicks off Thursday, June 30, with Anthony Calvillo and the defending champion Montreal Alouettes hosting the B.C. Lions in Molson Stadium, followed on Friday, July 1, by a Canada Day doubleheader featuring Winnipeg at Hamilton and Toronto at Calgary.
Again this year, the broadcaster will be TSN for all the games through the Grey Cup on Nov. 27 in the refurbished B.C. Place.
And finally, Easterners may have reason to realistically hope that Montreal won’t have a lock on a berth in the final.
If Hamilton keeps playing the kind of surprising football they did last year, and if the Argonauts can add an offense to their defense and special teams, the East will be at least a three-way race.
“We’ve been waiting forever for the year where Montreal doesn’t run away with the East, and where there isn’t a sad-sack team in the East, where there’s kind of a closing of the bottom and the top ranks, more to the middle,” says TSN football reporter and analyst Dave Naylor. “And that’s kind of one of the things you look at when you look at this season, with Montreal having lost (slotback) Ben Cahoon and with (running back) Avon Cobourne leaving. You combine losing players like Cahoon and Cobourne with some of their guys getting older and what appears to be an ever more competitive pack chasing them in the East.”
Meanwhile, judging from last year’s fascinating season finish, the Western season could play out like feeding time in the shark tank.
Last year the Western Conference started out so lopsided that by Labor Day, some commentators were writing off everyone but Calgary and Saskatchewan — with the smart money betting on Calgary.
There was even speculation that there might be a crossover Eastern team in the semifinals.
But in the East, the pigs never did quite learn to fly, and B.C. and Edmonton launched a surge that saw four highly competitive teams racing for the Western playoffs — ending with Saskatchewan in the Grey Cup.
Aside from an astonishingly clumsy performance against the Argos in last year’s East semifinal, Hamilton racked up a respectable season, vying for first place at one point and finishing with a 9-9 record.
Meanwhile, the Argos even seemed to be in shock themselves by finishing in the East final — also with a 9-9 record — mainly on the performances of those special teams and stubborn defense.
Toronto beat Hamilton
by three points in that semifinal — and quarterback Cleo Lemon never completed a pass beyond 12 yards.
As Naylor says, the Argos may be “the most resourceful team in the league.”
Now with Cobourne going to Hamilton and Toronto picking up quarterback Steven Jyles from Winnipeg, those teams have plugged their most gaping holes.
“And then you’ve got Winnipeg, which lost nine games by four points or less,” Naylor points out. “And that has to be some kind of statistical miracle. So you look at those three teams and look at how competitive they should be … the story line for me is, ‘Is this the year the East is more competitive than the West?’”

WOMENS WORLD CUP

In this World Cup, Canada actually has a team – and it’s one of the top-ranked in the tournament.  The FIFA Women’s World Cup takes place in Germany from Sunday, June 26, to July 17, and CBC Television and Rogers Sportsnet are teaming up to broadcast the entire tournament.
“This is the first time for the Women’s World Cup where every single game will be seen live in Canada,” says CBC executive producer Chris Irwin. “It speaks to the coming of age of the tournament and the level of interest in women’s soccer in Canada.”
All of Team Canada’s games and selected “key matchups” will air live on CBC and will be repeated in prime time, Irwin says. And every other game will air live on Sportsnet.
Team Canada’s first game – airing live Sunday on CBC – is also the opening match of the tournament, and it’s a big one: against defending World Cup champion Germany in the Olympic Stadium in Berlin.
At this writing, Canada was ranked sixth in the world and Germany second. So no matter who wins, don’t expect a blowout.
“You know it’s going to be a sold out stadium,” says CBC sports commentator Brenda Irving, who will be in Germany for the tournament.  “And the Canadians are ready for what they’re going to face. They know it will be a pro-German, very loud crowd.
“But they think they can do something special in that game.”
The Women’s World Cup began in 1991 (61 years after the men’s tournament was born) and has been contested only five times, with Germany and the United States winning top honors twice each, and Norway once. Unlike the Men’s World Cup, Canada has had a team in every tournament but the first – and in 2003 finished in fourth place.  That, Irving says, was seen as a fluke. And that team was nothing like the one that is going to Germany.  “Every team, ahead of the big game, will say, ‘Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. We’re going to do well,’ ” she says. “This time’s different. By the sincerity in the way they speak, I think they really think this is a special time for them.
“When they got that fourth-place finish in 2003, there was a feeling that they got lucky.”
One big difference with this team is the coach: Carolina Morace, a one-time star with the Italian national women’s team and a respected coach who is the only woman ever to run a men’s pro team. “Morace is really interesting, fascinating,” Irving says. “She’s a big star over there. I would ask people at the hotels, and they all know her because she used to be an analyst on television for the men’s game.  “She’s quite a celebrity. She commands instant respect.”
Morace has been head coach of the Canadian women since 2009, and she has brought the Italian ball control game to this team. “It’s a more controlled way to play, and definitely less chancy,” says former national team player Clare Rustad, who was briefly coached by Morace. She will be contributing analysis to CBC’s coverage.
“When you kick a ball 60 yards down the field, you’re not guaranteeing you’ll be the team to come up with it in the end. It takes more experience and practice to play a more possession-oriented game. And over the past three years, the team has had a fabulous amount of experience and practice, and they’ve gotten results.  I’m really excited to see what they’ll do in this tournament.”
Canada has two other games in group play, against seventh-ranked France on Thursday, June 30, and 27th-place Nigeria on July 5. Observers expect the Canadian women to make it at least to the quarterfinals, Rustad says, and perhaps even the semis. “I think their ranking of sixth in the world is not necessarily fair,” she says. “The way they’ve been competing in the last little while is well worth a ranking of maybe fifth place in the world.”
Even that thinking may be too conservative, Irwin says. “We’ve heard from (forward) Christine Sinclair that this is a team that knows they can win any game, even when they’re not playing their best soccer,” he says. “And that’s got them all excited. They’ve seen results over the past year. They’ve won multiple tournaments against some of the best teams in the world.
“I like the idea that a team with this much talent and this much confidence needs to meet those nations with one element of potential overconfidence on the part of their opponents.
“So for Germany and USA – and you could say for Sweden and Japan as well – they’re seeing Canadian success and not being sure whether Canada has caught up to them. And that probably plays to Canada’s advantage.”
Forward Christine Sinclair and the Canadian national team compete in the FIFA Women’s World Cup, which begins Sunday on CBC Television.
Brenda Irving provides commentary on the FIFA Women’s World Cup, which begins Sunday on CBC Television.

THE MARRIAGE REF

Somewhere between “The Newlywed Game” and “Divorce Court,” a show was aching to cover the trove of material that is marriage. “The Marriage Ref,” Jerry Seinfeld’s return to NBC last season, fell short, but the revamped version, returning Sunday, June 26, is more fun. Three couples mired in ongoing battles are filmed at home, then they visit the show’s New York set.  Three celebrity judges, who vary each of the 10 episodes, decide who is right. The audience picks among them the episode’s winner of the ultimate “I told you so”  – a giant billboard near the couple’s home with a photo and the message that he or she is indeed right.
In the season opener – in which Seinfeld, Julianne Moore and Ricky Gervais serve as the judges – one man complains his mother-in-law visits for long spells and breaks objects in his home. Of course, she was visiting from 5,000 miles away and cooked and cleaned for the couple.
Another is fixated on growing giant pumpkins, and his wife resents the time he spends with the gourds. He also wears a pumpkin hat and names them. The third couple has him constantly making harmless bets with his friends, but she bristles at his frat boy antics, which include running around the neighborhood in her sports bra and workout pants when he loses a bet.  Relaxing in the Olive Tree Cafe, a Greenwich Village comedy club where he regularly performs, host Tom Papa says, “I always felt the show should be like my comedy: a celebration of marriage and of everyday life.”
Wed for 11 years and the father of two girls, Papa knows how wonderful and difficult marriage can be, especially once kids arrive. “You end up being partners in a thankless nonprofit organization, and you need to bring in other employees to make decisions,” Papa says.
He mines his marriage for material but says he always prefaces his routines with how much he loves his wife. There’s a sweetness to his approach, which comes across on the show. Neither Papa nor the judges are making fun of the couples. Any nastiness is from the couples and directed at the spouses. Drinking water on a muggy afternoon in the cool quiet of the club, Papa reflects on some basic tenets of marriage.
Q: At what point does a couple need a marriage ref?
A: When you’re both digging your heels in so deep and you can see the footprints in the linoleum.  Q: When should a man know he’s in trouble?
A: On the first date.
Q: What are the worst things a husband can say?
A: Anything that disrespects her.  Doing this (he makes the nonstop talking sign with his thumb and fingers).
Q: What are the worst things a wife can do?
A: To think just because he is a big, oafish lug that he doesn’t need you and the things that come from a relationship. They will never, ever say, ‘I need you,’ or ‘I am lonely.’ Don’t think it’s because they don’t feel it; they do.
Q: What are the best reasons to stay single?
A: Some people are too selfish to get married, if you are too set in your ways.
Q: What is the best reason to get married?
A: There are two. Life is long and hard and lonely, and in my opinion it takes at least two people to get through it. And if you are going to make other people, it’s a really good reason.
Q: Just how long can a fight last?
A: Forever.

A bewitching season awaits ‘True Blood’ fans on HBO

For a rural Louisiana backwater, the tiny town of Bon Temps seems to be having a supernatural population explosion. During the first three seasons of “True Blood,” Bon Temps and its environs have seen an influx of vampires, werewolves and other shifters,
as well as an ancient Greek creature known as a maenad.
So who summoned the witches?  Series creator Alan Ball has entreated anyone writing about his show not to reveal several key surprises that come almost right out of the gate in the Sunday, June 26, fourth-season premiere of the smash HBO series, which makes writing about the first episode very tricky. So let’s try this:
When we return to Bon Temps, Sookie Stackhouse (Anna Paquin) is still on the outs with the two main vampires in her life, former beau Bill Compton (Stephen Moyer) and studly “vampire sheriff” Eric Northman (Alexander Skarsgard). Her brother, Jason (Ryan Kwanten), is now an apparently responsible deputy at the local sheriff’s department, which is a good thing, since acting sheriff Andy Bellefl eur (Chris Bauer) apparently is not quite himself these days. Elsewhere, last season’s Romeo and Juliet, Hoyt and his vampire belle, Jessica (Jim Parrack, Deborah Ann Woll), are starting to feel the strains of their unconventional love affair, while Merlotte’s waitress Arlene (Carrie Preston) harbors growing fears that her baby is a bad seed, and her boss, Sam (Sam Trammell), is struggling to control his recently revealed dark side while sorting through how he feels about his feckless brother, Tommy (Marshall Allman).
As far as the big picture goes, vampire spokeswoman Nan Flanagan (Jessica Tuck) frantically is trying to exert spin control in the wake of recently dispatched vampire monarch Russell Edgerton’s bloody reign of terror — and she has an apparent ally in the character who is now at the head of the Louisiana monarchy, a jaw-dropping change from the original Charlaine Harris novels that is sure to have fans buzzing.
But ah, yes: the witches. They’re a local coven, headed by an ungainly and near-inarticulate local woman named Marnie (theater great Fiona Shaw), whose initial meetings seem to be wholly in line with the nurturing Wiccan school of witchcraft, heavy on female empowerment, although their sessions also are attended by males including Jesus Velasquez (Kevin Alejandro), the nurse and witch who is eager for his current beau, Merlotte’s cook (and fan favorite) Lafayette Reynolds (Nelsan Ellis), to explore. But to what end? Alejandro freely admits he still has no idea. “Actually, finding the character of Jesus was kind of difficult for me,” the actor says. “I knew that he is a witch, so I studied what magic is, white magic and black magic.  Different people use witchcraft for different things, for healing and for spells to work negative things. It’s been difficult as the story unfolds, because you never know in what direction they’re going to take your guy. It’s hard to figure out that balance of is he good or is he bad without actually knowing.
“I researched everything from Wicca to possession to rituals for healing to putting curses on people -  kind of everything, because like I said, I wasn’t sure which way my character was going, and to this day I still don’t know how good or bad Jesus is. I’m kind of running a fine line right now, but I’m having a great time.”
Playing a character without knowing all his facets is nothing new to Ellis, who went through season one convinced that Lafayette, a fairly minor character in Harris’ books, would buy the farm at the end of that season, just as he was killed off in the final scenes of the first book. “And it was only after that table read that Alan Ball told me, in a very cavalier fashion, ‘Oh, you know you’re not dying,’ ” Ellis says. “So then I assumed the second season would be my year to die. I’m literally just now starting to think they might keep me around for the long haul, though.”
Ellis is thrilled to be sharing scenes with Shaw, the brilliant Irish actress who worked with students at the Juilliard School in New York while Ellis was a freshman and she was starring on Broadway as Medea – another witch, coincidentally.  “Fiona Shaw is a goddess to me,” he says, recalling her stage performance.  “She took the language of the play and made it somehow contemporary, and she made all these very dynamic choices that I never had seen in classical material.  I remember she was eating a piece a cake onstage that the Nurse had given her, and she was doing this long speech, filled with heightened, dramatic language, and she suddenly stopped and said, ‘This is good, isn’t it?’ I almost fell out of my seat, and the audience just roared in laughter.
“Her skill, this raw ability onstage, was magic, so to sit across from her at a table reading really gave me the jitters.”

Expedition Impossible’ goes off the road to Morocco ABC’s latest venture into reality

Expedition-Impossible’ goes off the road to Morocco ABC’s latest venture into reality programming, “Expedition Impossible,” premiering Thursday, June 23, has the hallmarks of a Mark Burnett hit: an exotic locale, demanding challenges and teams viewers will root for.
“What I was trying to set out to do here was to create a television show for ordinary Americans who have a common desire for big adventure,” Burnett says. “Their desire is probably bigger than their capability, but they are willing to suck it up and try it anyway.
Thematically I wanted them to feel an Indiana Jones kind of experience.”
So 13 teams of three, including “California Girls,” “The Football Players” and “No Limits” (which has a blind man) were brought to Morocco. In all they traveled some 2,000 miles, beginning their Moroccan adventure in Merzouga, going through the Sahara Desert and over the Atlas Mountains, and ending in Marrakech. Dave Salmoni hosts.
 “What you get in that area, by the Algerian border, is very classic Saharan desert, with almost 1,000-feet-high sand dunes going around them,” Burnett says. “As you approach the Atlas Mountains, there are canyons full of small, ancient Moroccan villages.”
Teams face challenges each of the 10 weeks, and the last to complete one is eliminated. Burnett’s sense of drama, history, endurance and loyalty are put to use. Contestants had to be fit.
“You had to show up and have a certificate for horse riding,” Burnett says. “And when they got there, prior to the race, we gave them stallions and wanted to see them control a runaway horse and how they deal with runaway Arabian stallions.  They had to show how they would right a capsized boat on a raging river and show how to read a compass and rappel down sheer cliffs. Our mountain guides were there and watched them all do it.” Contestants sky-dived, swam in rivers, kayaked, climbed mountains, and rode stallions, camels and donkeys.
Not surprisingly, growing up in Rockaway Beach, New York fire-fighter Rob Keiley was a stranger to camels. He signed up with two lifelong pals, Kevin Coursey and Mike Egan, also NYC firefighters.  “I had never seen a camel before,” Keiley says. “The closest thing I could imagine is what a dinosaur was — and they are massive.” Riding a stallion, Keiley says, “was the stupidest or craziest thing I have ever done in my life. You get on this animal you don’t have control over, and they are huge, and they just want to go.”
As firefighters these guys are in shape and accustomed to lugging around heavy loads because their gear weighs so much. They trained by running on the beach and running up and down stairs.
“We went to a local stable with a friend who owns a horse,” Keiley says. “It’s nothing like a stallion.  You’re riding this little New York City horse.”
The physical challenges are incredibly tough, and Burnett says, “There were major, major problems.  At some point in every stage, somebody wanted to quit. If one person on the team quits, the entire team would be disqualified.”
“Expedition Impossible” isn’t a big payday. Each member of the winning team receives $50,000 and a Ford Explorer.
“I did not want anybody showing up for the money,” Burnett says.
“That was really a priority. I didn’t want people who wanted to be on television. I wanted people who wanted an adventure.”
Which is precisely what the fire-fighter says he had. “We were doing these epic things doing things you never thought you would do,” Keiley says. Ultimately he learned how much he missed his family, and by comparison to Berbers and others he met, “what a spoiled life I lead.”

THESE IDOLS LET THEIR BODIES DO THE SINGING

You can’t accuse the judges of going into this season with a negative attitude. Season 4 of “So You Think You Can Dance Canada” debuts Monday, June 20, on CTV (and moves to Tuesdays on July 5). And, says choreographer-dancer-actress Tre Armstrong, this year’s crop of dancers are “supernovas.”
“They’re stars already in the package, as opposed to us creating them. They’re there. All we have to do is pick them up and give them a platform.” Not to be outdone, choreographer Luther Brown says this year’s contestants are “like bodies and stars and bringing skills to the game.”
“Every year I know we say the same thing,” Brown says. “But the talent level and the sexy level of these kids for this season is kind of off the chain. “We have a lot of strong dancers. The boys are crazy. The girls, on top of having performance skill, there are a lot of visually appealing people.”
Armstrong and Brown have been with the show since the first season, she as a permanent judge and he alternating with Blake McGrath from week to week in the rotating roles of choreographer and judge.
Along with them, ballroom champion Jean-Marc Genereux is back on the judging panel, and Leah Miller returns as host. As Armstrong and Brown have implied, over the course of its season, the show will feature some of the best young dancers in the country. And they’ll go through a week-to-week elimination process that will see them working in a variety of dance styles, many of which they may have never before encountered.
This year, auditions were held in Montreal, Toronto, Edmonton, Vancouver and Saint John, N.B., with some 160 dancers advancing to finals week in Toronto, where they were winnowed down to the top 20 who get to compete for the grand prize. “Our contestants really range,” Armstrong says. “Some of them have been Ukrainian dancers who have gone to Juilliard, such as Toronto’s Denys (Drozdyuk), who just won. Some have been young firecrackers from the West, like Tara-Jean
(Popowich) from Alberta. Others have been French Canadian, such as Nico (Archambault).
“It shows that our talent is very diversified every year. And our dancers are getting younger every year.”
Over its run, “SYTYCD Canada” has established itself as a launch pad for dance talent in the country – and not just for the winners. The first year’s winner, Montreal choreographer Archambault, appeared as Rudolf Nureyev in a TV movie about the Russian ballet star, and he and fellow first-year competitor Natalli Reznik danced with Janet Jackson.
Two other contestants danced with Lady Gaga at the 2009 MuchMusic Video Awards, which included the famous fire-bra performance of “Poker Face.” And Season 2 winner Popowich has crossed Canada and the United States and has been to Africa, India and Paris since winning the competition. The auditions have been attracting a stronger field every year, Brown says. The first year, a lot of people tried out on a lark.
But in following years, dancers came out knowing that the level of competition was going to be high. This year, Brown says, “there was a lot of cool growth. “You could tell some of the people had been training. We had a lot of people who had come out before, but we had a whole new set of kids that just came in with soul.
“Some people are like honorary tryout members. But you also have those that get better every year, and this is their year. “There were some people we had seen coming out before that totally stepped their game up. But there’s a lot of new kids, too. A lot of fresh faces.”
Choreographing for the competitors is a major challenge and a balancing act, he says. On one hand, you can’t “dumb it down,” but you don’t want to make it too easy either. “If you try to make it easy on them, your work looks like garbage, and they don’t really get pushed,”
Brown says. “But if you make it too hard on them, then your work can also look like garbage, and they look crazy.”
Often Brown doesn’t know the dancers or the music until the day before a competition, so he has to “kind of pull it out of the hat,” he says.
“You never know what you’re going to get,” he explains. “You never have a chance of prepping for certain people because you never know who you’re going to get, or what the talent skill is going to be like, until you get them. “And musicwise, you’re never really sure either.
So you have to be on top of your game. “It’s almost like you’re in the competition, too. You’re being put to the test as well.”

MUCHMUSIC VIDEO AWARDS

Sunday, June 19 at 6pm. Much HQ is the place to be, as the hottest show on the planet returns with performances by Avril Lavigne, The Black Keys, Bruno Mars, City and Colour, Down With Webster, Far East Movement ft. Dev, Fefe Dobson, Lady Gaga, Simple Plan, and co-host Selena Gomez. Also making appearances are the cast of  THE VAMPIRE DIARIES, Twilight’s Nikki Reed, Cody Simpson, Johnny Galecki, and many more. MuchMusic gives fans the experience of a lifetime by putting them as close as humanly possible to their favourite artists and celebrities at the 2011 MMV’S. With a star-packed Red Carpet special beforehand. Past years have seen kick-ass performances and appearances by Adam Lambert, Drake, Ke$ha, Justin Bieber, Katy Perry, Down With Webster, The Black Eyed Peas, Nickelback, Rihanna, Jonas Brothers, Hedley, Kellan Lutz, Kelly Clarkson, Miley Cyrus, Nina Dobrev, Paris Hilton, Pauly D, Snooki, Britney Spears, Avril Lavigne, Kanye West, Taylor Lautner, Brody Jenner, Ashley Greene, and many more. At the MMVAs, the audience is the priority; Much gives them the best seats in the house, whether a foot from the stage or a foot from a television, computer, or mobile phone. Fans should hit up Much regularly at muchmusic.com or Twitter @MuchMusic for the most up-to-date info about the event of the year.

‘Finding Sarah’ profiles a duchess in decline

“Finding Sarah” is the kind of soppy women’s-network-movie-of-the-week title that seems destined to put off viewers who aren’t devotees of Harlequin Romances, let alone anyone with a Y chromosome.  That’s a shame, because this six part reality series, currently airing Fridays on OWN Canada, makes for absorbing television in its chronicle of Sarah Ferguson’s desperate attempts, at age 51, to regain control of a life rocked by scandal and financial disaster.
Executive produced by Fenton Bailey and Randy Barbato, the team behind acclaimed profiles of Tammy Faye Bakker and Ellen De-Generes, among others, the series touchingly captures the Duchess of York 25 years after her fairy-tale moment when she married Britain’s Prince Andrew before a cheering nation. Looking back, she seems at a loss to understand how it all went so wrong so quickly.
For the first five years of their marriage, Andrew’s military duties kept the couple apart except for 40 days each year, and when Ferguson left her two young daughters with a nanny to visit her husband, the tabloids pounced on her as a bad mother, then gleefully dubbed her the Duchess of Pork when she began to gain weight.
After a divorce and several failed business ventures, Ferguson hit rock bottom last year when a tabloid caught her in a sting trying to sell press access to her ex-husband for half a million pounds.
“Finding Sarah” follows Ferguson as she meets with Phil McGraw, Suze Orman and other life coaches in a quest to understand why happiness and self-respect have eluded her. It feels painfully authentic and authentically painful. In context, maybe that title isn’t too bad after all.

NEXT FOOD NETWORK STAR

Serious foodies might quibble that “The Next Food Network Star,” which begins a seventh season Tuesday, June 14, on Food Network Canada, is as much about personality as it is about culinary skills.
After all, one of the channel’s most engaging personalities to emerge from this competition in recent years is Adam Gertler, who pretty much tanked a lot of the actual food but was so funny and endearing that he emerged as first runner-up and walked away with not one but two series (which, um, haven’t actually focused on his cooking).
It remains to be seen what the new crop of 15 would-be TV chefs have to offer (but please, kitchen gods, favor us with another entertaining wack-job like last season’s Dzintra Dzenis). Certainly Orchid Paulmeier, a barbecue specialist from South Carolina, scores points for her name alone, which may help explain why at this writing she was leading the fan favorite poll at foodnetwork.com before this season even started.
Among the other chefs: Colorado radio host Howie Drummond; New Jersey “culinary bad boy” Chris Nirschel; erstwhile stand-up comic Jeff Mauro of Elmwood Park, Ill.; culinary school graduate Alicia Sanchez and former engineering consultant Whitney Chen, both of New York; Las Vegas dishwasher-turned-executive chef Vic Moea; catering company owner Susie Jimenez of Aspen, Colo.; California food and fitness company manager Katy Clark; Atlanta-area chef Justin Balmes; and former attorney Mary Beth Albright of Washington, D.C.  Giada De Laurentiis, who joined the show as mentor to the chefs in season six, moves over this season to the judges panel with returning grillmeister Bobby Flay and network executives Bob Tuschman and Susie Fogelson.

SINGLE WHITE SPENNY

After six seasons of humiliations, Spencer Rice is trying to escape into a quiet, normal life.
Or at least he plays a character who is. After surviving six years of the reality-comedy series “Kenny vs.
Spenny,” he’s stepping into scripted comedy, but it’s a script grounded in real life. His new sitcom, “Single White Spenny,” airs Thursdays on Showcase. “I need to feel there’s some sort of personal connection in this,” he says. “That’s the kind of creative person I am. I need to feel there’s a connection to something that’s real in my life, no matter what I’m doing.”
“Single White Spenny” is about a guy who wants to succeed at love and romance and everything that involves but keeps messing it up, mainly because of all the baggage he carries around from past failed relationships and weird family connections.
“With this particular show, I think the core of it is you’re looking at a guy who is really trying to look for love and trying to embrace societal conventions: marriage, children, running a business, being a real grown-up man,” Rice says.
Rice created, co-produced and co-wrote much of the series, which co-stars Amy Matysio and Nikki Payne as Spenny’s long-suffering best friend and employee.
Debra McGrath (“Little Mosque on the Prairie”) plays his monster of a mother, who insists on having multiple DNA tests to try to prove she’s not related to him.
Though he prefers not to go into details, Rice says he was the product of an unconventional upbringing and when he was younger, rebelled by trying to be as conventional as possible.
“I can say, with complete love and support from my family, that’s where it comes from, this idea of being inept in the world of being a full-blown society-functioning man,” he says.
“I was rebelling against my parents, who were very unconventional. And I rebelled into convention, and I was having difficulty because I didn’t have the skills.
“Of course, it was never as funny as a sitcom. It was more terrifying and horrible.”
Though he says the character of Spenny “draws from a me of a time past,” his family’s unconventionality lacked some of the more brutal aspects of the show, such as a mother trying to disprove her maternal relationship.
“My relationship with my mother was all love,” Rice says. “My mother’s side of the family are kind of a wacky, lovable bunch of people.
“But I think the net result for me was to go the opposite way. I said, ‘I love these people, but I want to try whatever everybody else seems to be doing.’ ”
Rice was born in Toronto and grew up there and in Los Angeles, where he lived with his mother for a decade.
His stab at a conventional life was aborted when he found he was drawn to stand-up, improv, and TV and film comedy, he says.
He made his debut as a writer and director in 1993 with the short film “Telewhore,” which played the Toronto International Film Festival.
A year later, he collaborated with childhood friend Kenny Hotz on another short film. That led to the pair’s first large-scale collaboration, “Pitch,” a mockumentary in which they played two filmmakers peddling a project at the Toronto festival.

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