WHATS-ON-IN-VANCOUVER-ALCATRAZ

J.J. Abrams’ Alcatraz brings bad, bad men from the past into the present.

 When people muse upon the idea of meeting people from the past, it’s often someone along the lines of Elvis, Martin Luther King, Babe Ruth, maybe Abraham Lincoln or even Joan of Arc or Socrates.

In the new series “Alcatraz,” premiering Monday, Jan. 16, on Fox and Citytv, a whole bunch of folks pop through from the past into the present, but they aren’t singers, sluggers, emancipators or philosophers. But if you need a pocket picked, a safe blown up, a throat slit or a bank robbed, they might be the guys for you.

 Under the creative leadership of executive producer J.J. Abrams, “Alcatraz” focuses on the former prison, set on an island in San Francisco Bay, that was home to some of the most notorious criminals in American history until it was shut down in 1963.

 According to history, the inmates were evacuated and moved elsewhere. But in the world of the show, that “elsewhere” apparently lay somewhere beyond space and time.

 When SFPD Detective Rebecca Madsen (Sarah Jones) is assigned to a nasty homicide, a fingerprint leads her to a former Alcatraz inmate who supposedly died decades before.

 Since both her grandfather and surrogate uncle, Ray Archer (Robert Forster), were guards at the prison, Madsen digs into the case, only to have an enigmatic government agent, Emerson Hauser (Sam Neill), try to get in her way. She turns to Alcatraz expert and comic book enthusiast Dr. Diego “Doc” Soto (Jorge Garcia, “Lost”) to piece together the crime.

 A task force is formed to get to the bottom of the strange occurrences, and Madsen and Soto form a sort of oddball Starsky and Hutch.

 “We talk about chocolate and peanut butter here a lot,” says Jennifer Johnson, a writer on the show. “The two of them together are able to do what neither of them could do on their own. She’s got incredible detective skills, and he’s got a vast knowledge of Alcatraz. Both of them are driven to be on the task force for different reasons.

 “By the end of the first episode, she’s chosen this partner. The two of them are kind of underdogs, because Hauser doesn’t really want Rebecca there either, because she’s too young and impetuous.

Meanwhile, Doc – who’s a highly educated academic – is having the adventure of his life.

 For those who have seen such complex J.J. Abrams shows as “Alias” and “Lost,” which practically required notes, a folding map and an abacus, Johnson swears “Alcatraz” will be accessible to folks who just want to watch, and not study, their TV shows. “At the heart of this show is a procedural,” says Johnson, “and that’s the side of the story we break first in the writers room. “Hopefully, we’ll tell such a compelling story,” says Pyne, “that you could watch every other week and still completely understand what’s going on.” w

WHATS-ON-IN-VANCOUVER-O’LEARY’S-HUMAN

Dragon shows his human side

 Who would have thought: Kevin O’Leary has a heart. With “Dragons’ Den,” “The Lang & O’Leary Exchange” and his provocative commentaries on CBC News Network, O’Leary works tirelessly to brand himself as a one-man right-wing fringe. Now he comes along with “Redemption Inc.” which recently began airing Mondays on CBC Television.

In this reality series, O’Leary is using his TV persona to help ex-cons make it on the outside.

“When you’re caught for a crime in Canada, and you serve your time, what happens to you after that?” O’Leary asks. “You become basically tainted in perpetuity. You can’t get a job. You can’t borrow money. You can’t get a car loan. You can’t work in a public company. You can’t issue stock. You can’t do anything.”

“The end result is that we’re sending people to prisons, where they learn to be better criminals, and then dumping them out on the street where they have no way of making money other than as criminals.

O’Leary says the problem was “brought to my attention a few years ago.” Since then, he has become fascinated with the possibility of taking people who have honed their business skills on crime and seeing if they can turn those skills to something legitimate.

“I was completely unaware of the problem, and I’ve made it one of my causes now,” he says. “I’m putting my money where my mouth is.

“This system is completely broken. It doesn’t work at all. You’ve done your time. You’ve paid your price. Why can’t you start again?

“You’re absolutely worse than dead. There’s no way for you to support yourself.”

In “Redemption Inc.” 10 ex-cons compete for $100,000 in seed money to start their own business. Over the course of the series, the participants – eight men and two women – take on challenges until only one is standing.

O’Leary launched in business with a software company that he started in his basement – and which he later sold for a reported $3.7 billion.

With his three shows, his regular appearances as a news analyst on CBC, and the U.S. series “Shark Tank” and “Project Earth,” his face is all but unavoidable.

He talks about “Redemption Inc.” as if it’s a labor of love.

“This isn’t a charitable project,” he says. “I think the system is broken, and I want to do something about it.” w

WHATS-ON-IN-VANCOUVER-GRISHAM’S-“THE-FIRM”

 John Grisham is a brand name. Whether audiences have experienced “The Client,” “A Time to Kill” or “The Pelican Brief” in print or on film, the novelist’s law thrillers have had lasting impact. Now there’s fresh evidence: Almost 20 years after spawning a popular Tom Cruise movie, Grisham’s “The Firm” is the basis for a series that has a two-hour premiere Sunday, Jan. 8, on Global Television Network before settling into a weekly slot the following Thursday.

Grisham is an executive producer on the project being made by Entertainment One (“Rookie Blue,” “Haven”) in association with Sony, with Josh Lucas shifting from movies (“Sweet Home Alabama,” “J. Edgar”) to weekly television by assuming the former Cruise role of attorney Mitch McDeere.

The show picks up 10 years after the original story with McDeere believing he’s safe after a nemesis dies in prison, so he emerges from witness protection with wife Abby (B.C.’s Molly Parker) and their young daughter (Natasha Calis) and relocates to Washington, D.C.

Having barely survived his time with a corrupt Memphis firm, the attorney finds himself dealing with another law office apparently steeped in sneaky dealings. Tricia Helfer (“BattlestarGalactica”) plays the chief of that practice, which aligns with McDeere’s smaller office on cases he tackles with his ex-con brother Ray (B.C.’s Callum Keith Rennie) and street-wise assistant Tammy (Juliette Lewis, in the part that first gained Holly Hunter an Oscar nomination).

Thanks also to international sales, “The Firm” has a 22-episode guarantee, something very rare for a debuting series now.

Grisham’s “The Client” was turned into a 1995-96 show, and the author admits in a conference call that situation “certainly gave me great hesitation” about turning another of his books over for series purposes.

“It was such a dreadful show and painful experience, I didn’t want to do it again for a long time; I forgot about [doing] television over the years, though I never really forgot about film. The films have become difficult to make for a number of reasons, and I didn’t really think about ‘The Firm’ as a TV show until [fellow executive producer and former prosecutor] Lukas Reiter appeared on the scene and showed me a script. I thought it was very good, and I got excited about the idea of a weekly drama.

In becoming television’s McDeere, “Firm” star Lucas considers Grisham the viewer he must satisfy most. “There is a reason John Grisham is the massive-selling author he is,” the actor says on the show’s principal set near Toronto, “which is that he seems to have a literary respect that comes out of his iconic men. They have their failings, but their integrity is unwavering.

“There’s usually a great family sense to his stories as well, but consistently, the thing about his work is that it’s thrilling. That’s a difficult thing to drive forward in the world of procedural-based network television, and I pray that we do.”

If there’s any question Lucas is serious about his “Firm” work, consider the research he did for “The Lincoln Lawyer,” last year’s movie in which he starred with Matthew McConaughey (once a Grisham screen lawyer himself, in “A Time to Kill”).

“I went to the courthouse that was right near my house and just watched cases,” Lucas recalls, “and I really became fascinated, deeply moved a number of times.

“There’s such an extraordinary sense of life and death, it’s like the ultimate stage in so many ways.”

WHATS-ON-IN-VANCOUVER-DOWNTON-ABBEY-WW1

 

Characters who previously obsessed over planning a perfect garden party are struggling with life-and-death issues as “Downton Abbey” begins a new season Sunday, Jan. 8, on PBS’ “Masterpiece Classic” on KCTS.

The series, which bested such heavyweight competition as HBO’s “Mildred Pierce” remake to win Emmys as outstanding miniseries and for creator Julian Fellowes’ crackling scripts, opens two years after the conclusion of season one, with the Crawley family of Downton Abbey and its staff trying to cope with the challenges of World War I.

For Lord Grantham (Hugh Bonneville), that involves frustration over not being allowed to serve on the front lines and being relegated to serving as an aristocratic morale booster on the home front, while all three of his daughters — Mary, Edith and Sibyl (Michelle Dockery, Laura Carmichael, Jessica Brown-Findlay) — are forced by events to grow up and make personal sacrifices for king and country.

“That struck me as an interesting dynamic for the second series, taking these people that we know in peacetime from the first series where the big issue was whether someone had stolen a snuffbox,” Fellowes says. “Suddenly, we fling them into a war where the big issue is, are they going to be killed?”

Of course, a large share of the “Downton” fan base is going to be focused most keenly on the strained relationship between Lady Mary Crawley and her cousin, Matthew (Dan Stevens), the designated heir to the Downton estate. And as season two opens, things do not look promising for the couple.

“Mary returns from London, having spent time with Aunt Rosamund (Samantha Bond), and the first thing she hears is that Matthew is coming home, and Edith takes great pleasure in telling me immediately that he’s coming with his fiancée, which is a huge shock to Mary — and she discovers very quickly that Matthew has moved on, and she needs to do the same,” Dockery says of the first episode. “And she introduces the family to a new character, Sir Richard Carlisle (Iain Glen), with whom she pursues a relationship hoping that she can move on, too. It’s very clear, though, that they’re together not for the right reasons, for purely practical reasons, and she is still pining for Matthew.”

Even before “Downton Abbey” premiered last year, the cast members suspected they were part of something special. “You know when you’re onto a good thing,” Dockery says. “I don’t think I could ever have predicted how enormous it would be, though.”

It wasn’t long after the show bowed in the U.K. that all those involved realized they were part of a phenomenon, however. A few weeks into the run, Fellowes recalls opening the Times to see a huge picture of the three Crawley daughters and a headline suggesting that a Member of Parliament belonged in the outdated period of the show.

“It was a criticism of some bill he was trying to pass, and I thought, that’s the moment where you burst the banks and enter the zeitgeist, the national conversation,” Fellowes says.

As ratings for the show climbed with each successive episode, Stevens says he started noticing people referencing “Downton Abbey” in the oddest contexts, even in stories that had nothing directly to do with the show itself.

“It’s become kind of a cultural touchstone,” the actor says. “If you set up one of these Google Alerts to send you any articles that contain the phrase ‘Downton Abbey,’ the number of articles that come in (is staggering). It may be an article about, I don’t know, heating pipes or something like that and the first paragraph will be something like, ‘Well, it’s not quite Downton Abbey.’ It’s out there in the cultural vernacular now. It’s really strange.”

Unprecedented, perhaps, but maybe not really all that strange, given the acclaim heaped on the miniseries when it premiered on “Masterpiece Classic” in early 2011. Critics and fans alike seem to have caught on that Fellowes has created, for them, the best of both worlds: a sprawling period saga with vividly drawn characters that offers the opulence of the genre while moving at a brisk pace that defies a viewer to look away. It doesn’t hurt, either, that Fellowes isn’t shy about spicing up the dramatic brew with some sexual kinks that Charles Dickens and Jane Austen never could have dreamed of writing about, including a scandalous season one indiscretion on Mary’s part that still threatens to ruin innocent lives in these new episodes.

“Julian can actually slip in there and play a little fast and loose with the usual rules of period drama,” Stevens says.

“What’s different about Julian’s writing is that most people expect the pacing of a period drama to be quite slow and deliberate, but actually his writing has a very modern structure that keeps the audience riveted,” Dockery adds.

For his part, Fellowes says he is touched and grateful for the warm reception this program has received the United States, and he hopes audiences here respond to season two, even though it’s inevitably darker than last year’s episodes.

“It’s impossible that it’s not darker, but it’s still focused on Downton,” he promises. “It really is Downton at war, not England at war or the trenches.”

WHATS-ON-IN-VANCOUVER-ABORIGINALS’-HISTO

CBC Television embarks on a gripping and insightful journey into aboriginal country with “8th Fire,” a four-part miniseries premiering Thursday, Jan. 12, and continuing on consecutive Thursdays.

Hosted by musician and journalist Wab Kinew, the project takes its title from the Seven Fires prophecies of the Anishinaabe, writings that predate the European colonization of North America. Out of those prophecies comes the idea of an eighth: that now is the time for aboriginal peoples and the “settler community” to come together and build the Eighth Fire of justice and harmony.

Actually, in many respects, it’s past time for Canadians to confront and address an often uneasy relationship mired in prejudices, misconceptions and stereotypes, Kinew says.

“If you use the metaphor of the nuclear clock, we’ve already passed the critical point,” he says. “The reality is that children in the Far North are growing up, and children in the inner cities of Western Canada and even in Toronto are growing up, in situations that are past the point where we should have declared a crisis and taken immediate action on it. The reason I think it’s important for this series to come out now is that we are all in this together as Canadians, as people who live here together in one country. We have a shared destiny, and the well-being of young aboriginal people is going to be hugely important to the wellbeing of Canada in the future.”

That common destiny is the main topic of the second episode — titled “It’s Time! —which focuses on how reconciling native and non-native Canadians simply makes good economic and business sense, on top of everything else.

“Young aboriginal people are the work force of tomorrow,” Kinew points out. “This is where the population growth, especially in Western Canada — which is the part of the country that is driving the economy now — is coming from. So if we want to develop the economy, we have to make sure that young aboriginal people have opportunities to get educated and to work. Unfortunately, that is not the case, but the good news is that something can be done about it. Canadians by and large are good-natured, openhearted people who have compassion for their fellow human beings, and when you see attention shone on a given issue as this series will do, and as some of the coverage of Attawapiskat has done in the news, I think people are hungry and anxious to see change, to see something happen for the better.”

First, however, a lot of baseless myths and misconceptions need to be addressed and put to bed, something that is happening in part via programs that send consultants such as John Lagimodiere, a Metis from Saskatoon, and occasionally even Kinew himself into companies and other groups eager to understand more about Canada’s aboriginal peoples.

“I’ve done that here in Manitoba, go in and give two days of intensive training and teach them a bit about the history and the aboriginal culture and a bit about some of the contemporary issues that are happening in the community,” Kinew says. “There’s a growing demand for that.”

Almost invariably in those sessions, Kinew says, one of the first questions that arises is about the widely held impression that native people pay no taxes.

“I think it’s because it’s the one that seems most unfair to non-native people,” he explains. “But it’s not true. I get taxed at 45 percent of my income. I pay a ton of taxes — property taxes, income taxes, sales tax.”

WHATS-ON-IN-VANCOUVER-Programmed-to-be-fat?

It’s the New Year, and Canadians everywhere are seizing the occasion to make resolutions that will make themselves better, or at least more appealing to prospective partners.

But are their efforts in one department – weight loss – doomed to failure? Some scientists are starting to think so, as revealed in “Programmed to Be Fat,” a new episode of “The Nature of Things” premiering Thursday, Jan. 12, on CBC Television.

Thanks to research by a Scottish doctor who was frustrated because she couldn’t manage to lose weight, scientists are now looking at the notion that environmental factors may be programming fetuses to carry extra weight even before they are born.

Supportive evidence comes from studies of lab animals being tested with chemicals that disrupt the endocrine system.

“These are chemicals that fool the body into thinking that they are hormones,” explains Bruce Mohun, the director and co-writer of the film. “They can disrupt the system of glands that can release hormones into our bloodstreams. … And if that happens in a fetus, then the body is going to be changed possibly for the rest of its life because there is so much development going on at that time.”

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