BILL CLINTON NOT ALL THUMBS-UP

Even if you have a strong recollection of the Clinton years, seeing his life and presidency laid out in an unblinking, four-hour documentary puts him into perspective.
PBS’ “Clinton: American Experience,” which airs in two parts Monday and Tuesday, Feb. 20 and 21 (check local listings), does an excellent job of chronicling the first president to be impeached since Andrew Johnson in 1868. It opens on Dec. 11, 1998, with a somber Clinton in the Rose Garden.
“I am profoundly sorry for all I have done, in my words and deeds,” he says. “Quite simply, I gave into my shame.” If there is any fault with this documentary it is how much time — roughly a quarter — is devoted to the Monica Lewinsky scandal. “There’s a lot of time devoted, but it’s more how much time the press was devoting to it,” says longtime Clinton friend Harry Thomason, a TV and film producer who made “The Man From Hope,” which was shown at the 1992 Democratic National Convention.
Neither the former White House intern nor anyone close to her, or for that matter the Clintons themselves, are interviewed, which is in keeping with the documentary series’ format. However, some 70 others are, including those who worked with Clinton. Among those is Robert Reich, Clinton’s secretary of labor. Reflecting on whether the economy could have continued to boom as it did then, Reich, now a professor of public policy at University of California-Berkeley, says, “Alan Greenspan cooperated by lowering interest rates, and that combined with a solid recovery, which enabled the economy to do exceptionally well, with 22 million, net, new jobs created over those eight years.”
Yet there are regrets, Reich says. “We didn’t manage to alter the structure of the economy. By that I mean we didn’t invest adequately in schools, job retraining, infrastructure and basic (research and development) and opportunities for poor kids. So by the time the next downturn occurred, the nation was back where it was in the previous recession, and we did nothing to lift the real wages.”
He talks about the politics of trying to pass true reform and how a Republican Congress stymied Clinton. The film also focuses on Clinton’s personal life and examines his marriage. Hillary Clinton, now the secretary of state, knew about her husband’s infidelities early on, and this makes clear that whatever marital strife they endured since their October 1975 wedding, there is a deep love between them. She recognized immediately how advantageous it could be for her husband to go on TV after his endless speech at the 1988 Democratic National Convention. It was Thomason, at the urging of wife Linda Bloodworth-Thomason, who called Johnny Carson’s producer, Fred de Cordova, and asked him to let Clinton go on the “The Tonight Show.” Carson had a policy of not inviting politicians as guests. Thomason did not want to face his wife with the rejection so he called back de Cordova and suggested Clinton go on as a musician. Clinton played the sax, then became the first politician on a late-night show.
The timing for a full look at Clinton was right, says series producer Mark Samels. “Typically in the past, the rule of thumb was a generation needed to pass before you could really enter into the realm of history,” he says. “And we’re sort of in an accelerated period now.” One of the take-aways from this is that Clinton “is often depicted almost solely cynically,” says filmmaker Barak Goodman. “I would say both Clintons are fundamentally driven by idealism.” w

THE SIMPSONS 500TH EPISODE

The characters, which began as droopier versions in 20-second cartoons on “The Tracey Ullman Show,” have evolved, as creator Matt Groening and star Dan Castellaneta discuss in a long and very rare interview. First, though, consider some numbers. Now in its 23rd season, the show has won 27 Emmy Awards, is seen in more than 100 countries and has 37 million likes on its Facebook page.
Guest stars have included Buzz Aldrin, Anne Bancroft, Tony Blair, Rodney Dangerfield, Bob Denver, Stephen Hawking, Michael Jackson, Jack Lemmon, Jack LaLanne, Paul Newman, the Ramones, J.K. Rowling, Elizabeth Taylor and John Updike. It’s in the Guinness Book of Records for having the most guest stars.
Before they worked together, Groening loved Castellaneta’s improv work, and Castellaneta read Groening’s “Life in Hell” comics; the two still get a kick out of each other.
Question: Did you have any notion “The Simpsons” would have such a life or that it would provide your livelihoods?
Groening: I thought the show would be a hit. It was always defined even when they were 20- second cartoons on “The Tracey Ullman Show.” It was designed to be a TV series. However, I didn’t think it would be that successful. Maybe we would get it on the air. I didn’t think we would have it on the air 25 years later. I have been working with Dan since ’87, and I still can’t believe those voices come out of his mouth.I am always reminded of when Dan and I were in New Orleans and walking around the French Quarter, I would throw out ideas to Dan, and one was an idea (that has not been done) when the Simpsons get a pet baboon, and it’s very aggressive, and the Simpsons have to live on the first floor of the house.
Castellaneta: (In Homer’s voice) Stay there, Coco! Don’t play with that! That is the remote. That’s mine. I am beginning to think this is not a good idea.
Q: What are your favorite lines?Groening: My favorite line you ever said on the show was in the ill-fated monorail episode. The control panel opens up, and a mother possum is hanging by [her] tail, and Homer says, “I call the big one Bitey.” He doesn’t understand it is a possum. And he is perfectly happy that it bit him.
Q: Who have been some of your favorite guest stars?Castellaneta: Harvey Fierstein is really great. He played Homer’s assistant, secretary. It was a really interesting character, who basically would fall on a bomb for Homer. I thought it was pretty cool to meet a lot of these rock and roll stars that we had guest on the show, and going to London and meeting the Who.
Groening: The high point of my life was watching Dan crack up Mick Jagger.
Castellaneta: Mick Jagger said, “Homer, we want you to come to the concert.” But Homer thought he would play in the band. And Mick Jagger said, “We just need you to check the mic.” Homer said, (in Homer’s voice) “Can’t you do it?” Groening: No one ever said that to Mick Jagger. Q: Who would you still like to have on the show? Groening: Off the top of my head, it would be cool if Bill Cosby came on the show. … I would love to get Tony Bennett back. I think we could write an anthem for Springfield. Castellaneta: He was our first big name.
Q: Any other stories from guest stars? Groening: When Paul and Linda McCartney guested on the show, we made Lisa a vegetarian, and Paul said he would do it as long as Lisa
remained a vegetarian, not a vegetarian of the week, and it has given us a great deal of material.
Q: Are either of you ever surprised by what you can get on TV? Castellaneta: [Anchorman] Kent Brockman was on [the air]. The town split in two, and they drained the river and found gold at the bottom, so we can buy water so everyone can be taking golden showers. And Kent Brockman was snickering, and I thought, “That is never going to make it on.” And some of the most innocuous — you can’t show Homer’s butt crack more than twice. That’s because we don’t want anyone to get too turned on.
Q: When you’re clicking through stations, will you stop and watch? Castellaneta: I will watch. Groening: When you are working on these episodes, you are trying to make them as good as possible and spend long hours trying to make it look tossed off. To then be able to look at it years later, generally I find I like them more than I did at the time. Q: Why is the show a legend? Castellaneta: Certainly the length of the show, how long it has run. The show carved out new territory. I feel it has influenced a lot of movies and other television shows. You even think some Simpsons were blown up into movies. I have seen some plots of movies, and I have said, “Wait a minute, we did that five years ago.” But I am not saying “The Hangover” was taken completely from “The Simpsons.” Groening: It is fun to know that you entertain people over a long number of years, and some kids have grown up, their world has always been a world in which “The Simpsons” are always on TV. And that we have done this comedy that is basically a checklist of all of the different ways there are of doing jokes, parodies and homages to older movies and silent movies and cartoons and many autobiographical elements of whoever wrote the scene. w

WHATS-ON-IN-VANCOUVER-GRAMMYS

Ex-Degrassi Drake leads Canada’s 2012 Grammy Pack

 The Grammy Awards celebrate not only a given year’s recordings but the history of music in general.

So, there will be tight races in the many categories for contemporary music — such as the best rap/sung collaboration category where hip-hop phenom Drake is Canada’s best hope for a 2012 Grammy when Global and CBS air the 54th Annual Grammy Awards from Los Angeles’ Staples Center on Sunday, Feb. 12.

Rihanna, Coldplay and Foo Fighters join Sir Paul McCartney as 2012 performers.

Drake — a six-time nominee in the past — is one of two Canadians with a trio of nominations, the other being DJ-producer Deadmau5. Drake will be up against some stiff competition — including himself — in the three categories where he is nominated. The nominations include Best Rap Performance (“Moment 4 Life” with Nicki Minaj) and Best Rap/Sung Collaboration (DJ Khaled’s “I’m On One” and “What’s My Name” with Rihanna).

The 25-year-old Drake, whose full name is Aubrey Drake Graham, got his show-biz start playing Jimmy Brooks on the TV series “Degrassi: The Next Generation.” Success in the music world seems not to have cooled his acting ambitions. Interviewed recently while appearing at the Sundance Film Festival he told an interviewer that he wants to play Barrack Obama in a movie.

“I hope somebody makes a movie about Obama’s life soon because I could play him,” he said. “That’s the goal. I watch all the addresses. Anytime I see him on TV, I don’t change the channel, I definitely pay attention and listen to the inflections of his voice. If you ask anyone who knows me, I’m pretty good at impressions.”

Drake says that often he is offered roles as a rapper or basketball player, but that he is looking for something else that goes beyond what people would expect him to play.

Montreal’s DJ A-Trak also has received a nomination, along with his partner Armand Van Helden (together they are Duck Sauce), for Best Dance Recording. Their international breakout hit “Barbra Streisand” charted at No. 1 in over 12 countries and racked up 65-million YouTube views with arguably the biggest viral video of all time; a quirky, star-studded homage to New York’s downtown scene.

Toronto singer Melanie Fiona received two nominations: Best Traditional R&B Performance and Best R&B Song for her “Fool For You” collaboration with Cee Lo Green. Other Canadian nominees include Sum 41 for a hard rock/metal performance and Vincent Morisset for Arcade Fire’s Scenes From The Suburbs recording package.

As a counterpoint to the Grammys’ competitive excitement, several Lifetime Achievement Award recipients are named each year by the National Academy of Recording Arts & Sciences. Country-pop crossover star Glen Campbell will be one of them.

“It tickles me,” Campbell says of his latest Grammy honor, after winning two for “Gentle on My Mind” and another two for “By the Time I Get to Phoenix,” all in 1967.

“They’ve really been nice to me throughout my career. I just think you do your job, and you try to do it the best you can and try to think up some new things. That’s really what I’ve done.”

Now on a farewell concert tour as he deals with the early stages of Alzheimer’s disease, Campbell is part of an impressive Lifetime Achievement class that also includes fellow country star George Jones as well as Diana Ross, the Allman Brothers Band, Antonio Carlos Jobim, Gil Scott-Heron and the Memphis Horns.

“I guess when you get old enough, they lay all those accolades on you,” muses Campbell, who also will team musically with nominees Blake Shelton and the Band Perry on the Grammy stage.

With such hits as “Wichita Lineman,” “Galveston” and “Rhinestone Cowboy” in his catalog, Campbell also has made marks in television (“The Glen Campbell Goodtime Hour”) and movies (the original “True Grit” with John Wayne). He deems country music’s current state “great. I don’t know if I’d call it ‘country rock’ or ‘crock’ or what, but if you put a song out there, people know whether it’s good or not. That’s the way I always did it.”

Among this year’s Grammy nominees, Foo Fighters are back with six bids, with “Wasting Light” in contention for album of the year (their second time in that category) and best rock album (their sixth time).

“It’s been a really good year,” frontman Dave Grohl reflects. “I think we finally hit our stride in that confident, 17-year-old-band way. I don’t know what it is, but the shows got longer, and the audiences got bigger.” Grohl maintains that “you never really expect that kind of recognition” when it comes to the Grammys. “It feels good to be appreciated for what you do, but the group lives in such a simple little world. It’s right in the middle of the San Fernando Valley in an industrial section where nobody would expect us to be. Within that studio, we do everything, so we exist within this little bubble and don’t pay too much attention to what goes on outside it.”

Which isn’t to say Foo Fighters haven’t appreciated every nomination they’ve gotten. They’ll perform at this year’s Grammy Awards, and Grohl reasons the organizers “see us as guys who play instruments in a rock band — and these days, that is getting harder and harder to find. I never got into this for a career. I was a high-school dropout stoner who worked at a furniture warehouse and loved playing music on the weekends.”

The frontrunner from this year’s nominees is Drake mentor and friend Kanye West who leads the pack with an impressive seven nominations including Song of the Year and Best Rap Album.

The event has a host for the first time in seven years: rapper and “NCIS: Los Angeles” star LL Cool J. w

WHATS-ON-IN-VANCOUVER-LEACOCK

It’s always sunny in LEACOCK’S Mariposa

 The first thing CBC Drama ever produced for TV was an adaptation of Stephen Leacock’s classic short-story collection “Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town.”

That was in 1952, and though its stars included John Drainie and Timothy Findley, it was by all accounts a stagy, awkward affair that nevertheless ran two seasons. Such is Leacock’s enduring appeal.

This year is the 100th anniversary of the first publication of the book. And now, 60 years after the series ran and on the 75th anniversary of the corporation’s birth as a radio network, CBC is returning to the well — and taking a who’s who of Canadian talent with it.

The result, says the creator of this version of the classic, is that we’ll see a “very modern ‘Sunshine Sketches’ ” Sunday, Feb. 12, on CBC Television.

Considering that the writer of this TV movie is Malcolm MacRury — whose credits include such dark fictions as “ZOS,” “Cra$h& Burn,” and episodes of “Deadwood” — that could be taken as a given.

“It is a small town, as Deadwood was,” he says by way of placing “Sunshine Sketches” in the continuum. “I guess this is a lighter view of it.”

MacRury says he has been interested in doing something like this since he dropped out of grad school and started to write for humor — and came to the conclusion that all Canadian humor begins with Leacock.

To produce the movie, MacRury “lured” out of retirement Seaton McLean and Michael MacMillan, founders of the late Atlantis Films. Together or apart, they have been responsible for such TV and film productions as “A Child’s Christmas in Wales,” “Owning Mahowny,” “Traders,” “Lost in the Barrens” and the adaptation of Margaret Laurence’s “The Diviners.”

Though the material is a lot lighter and brighter than a lot of what MacRury does, he insists it’s in the continuum with his other work.

“We didn’t want to do ‘Anne of Green Gables,’” he says. “We wanted to do ‘Anne of Green Gables’ on acid.

The cast includes Gordon Pinsent, Jill Hennessy, Rick Roberts, Patrick McKenna, Donal Logue, Michael Therriault, Peter Keleghan, Colin Mochrie, Eric Peterson, Debra McGrath, Leah Pinsent, Sean Cullen, Ron James and Keshia Chante.

At 81, Pinsent is probably the only member of the cast old enough to remember the 1952-53 production.

“I don’t remember seeing it, though I certainly could have,” he says. “I certainly remember all those players.

“We had great writers from radio, and always great things, like Leacock, to draw from.”

MacRury has blended elements of Leacock’s biography into the “Sunshine Sketches,” which were set in Mariposa, Ont. (a fictionalization of Orillia, close to where Leacock lived as a boy).

The author grew up poor in 19th-century small-town Ontario, with a drunken absentee father and a proud, dignified mother (played wonderfully by Hennessy).

So the young Leacock and his mother are at the centre of a story that combines elements of several stories from “Sunshine Sketches” — mainly the struggle between temperance forces and imbibers over the local saloon and the sinking of the local cruise ship in six feet of water.

“We didn’t want to be totally faithful to (the short stories),” MacRury says. “What we wanted to do was bring it alive again — because comedy is an ever-changing target, and there are ever-changing tastes.

“The last thing we wanted to do was make a movie about the guy who created Canadian comedy and make it boring and unfunny.” w

712-FEATURE-SLAVERY-PBS-DOC

 PBS doc SHOWS HOW SLAVERY thrived INTO 20TH CENTURY

 The hideous chapter in American history had passed, and the slaves were freed — or so everyone thinks.

PBS’ gripping documentary “Slavery by Another Name,” airing Monday, Feb. 13 (check local listings), chronicles how slavery continued in the South well into the 20th century while the rest of the country ignored it. Laurence Fishburne narrates.

“What I really want people to take away is you can’t partition parts of our history,” says Dr. Sharon Malone, who is featured in the film. “There is not Southern history; it is American history.”

Malone, an obstetrician, is a sixth-generation Alabaman married to U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder. Her older sister, Vivian Malone, helped integrate the University of Alabama in 1963, protected by the Justice Department, which Sharon’s husband now runs. Malone’s uncle, Henry Malone, was arrested and served a year and a day in Alabama’s Monroe County under the peonage system. Precisely what, if anything, he had done is not known. The peonage system was how slavery continued.

Douglas A. Blackmon’s Pulitzer Prize-winning book, “Slavery by Another Name,” upon which the 90-minute film is based, details the peonage system. Though most people believe the Emancipation Proclamation ended slavery, blacks were re-enslaved to work, without pay, in coal mines, cotton fields and brickyards. They were shackled, beaten, bought and sold.

They were slaves.

And this was all done under the thinnest veil of legality. Though the 13th Amendment abolished slavery, there was a loophole: except in the case of punishment for a crime.

And crimes for blacks included talking loudly in the presence of a white woman, leaving one job for another, selling cotton after dark and walking along railroad tracks. Even the film’s director and producer, Sam Pollard, whose first assignment as a documentarian was “Eyes on the Prize II,” was not steeped in this period.

“Most of us — black and white — think of Reconstruction as a period of black empowerment,” Pollard says. “The whites were saying, ‘You are not really free. How can we control them? How can we get cheap labor to work in the mines?’ It becomes systematic oppression.”

The documentary does a magnificent job of showing the nameless men and women forced to work in mines, drink foul water and endure face lashings and abuse. The film uses photos, actors and interviews with descendants to tell the story.

It also features a moving interview with Susan TuggleBurnore, whose great-grandfather John S. Williams owned a plantation worked slave labor that was sanctioned under the peonage system.

Even after federal agents inspected his plantation and saw the shackles in the slave quarters, they gave Williams a pass because he had paid for the men’s bonds and gotten them out of jail, and they now were supposedly working off their debt. This was not out of the ordinary in that place and time. But Williams, fearing his world would change, decided to destroy the evidence and murder the 11 men working for him. In so doing, in 1921 he became the only white man convicted of killing a black man in Georgia since 1877. He died in prison in 1966.

“I always knew my grandfather died in prison,” Burnore says at a Pasadena, Calif., press conference. “My family told a story that was, forgive the pun, whitewashed — that he had, along with a lot of other men in Jasper County, Georgia, killed some escaping prisoners.

These were supposedly hardened convicts who had done terrible things and were being worked on the plantation.”

What was terrible was how the men lived and died. Some were thrown alive, tied to farm machinery, off a bridge.

The film is filled with such stories. Though this is not an easy topic to read about or watch, it is an important one. The documentary was just shown at Sundance.

“Vestiges remain, the industrial prison complex,” Pollard says. “Even when you go to the South today, you go down to Alabama and Mississippi,” it’s apparent. And it’s not just buildings where attitudes and the former law of the land linger.

Pollard recalls visiting an aunt in Mississippi in the summer of 1975, who still went the back way into stores.

“She was so used to it,” he says. “No black person would come through the middle of the street. It is not to say that life has not changed in the South, but there are still remnants.”

Though PBS documentaries about history don’t generate the sort of attention that antics on a reality show does, Pollard considers how to entice people to watch.

“You’ve got to say to people you will see the drama of how American history unfolds,” Pollard says. “You have got to know from whence you came to know where you are going,” Malone says in a separate interview. “It makes the progress of the African-Americans all the more remarkable.” w

WHATS-ON-IN-VANCOUVER-SHUE- CSI regular

 Shue RETURNS TO Las Vegas as A ‘CSI’ regular

 After earning an Oscar nomination when she left Las Vegas, Elisabeth Shue is returning as that city’s newest forensic sleuth.

Fictionally, that is. Known not only for “Leaving Las Vegas” but such other movies as the original “Karate Kid,” “Adventures in Babysitting” and the two “Back to the Future” sequels, the actress admits she’s stayed low-key with many of her recent projects. That changes in a big way when she joins the globally popular drama series “CSI: Crime Scene Investigation” Wednesday, Feb. 15, on CTV and CBS.

“It’s going really well,” Shue says of her first weeks on the “CSI” job, “and I’m very, very grateful that I have Ted Danson to work with. I’m just starting to work with the other cast members, but I’ve primarily started out working with him. He’s such a wonderful actor and so easy to be around … and very present in his work, which I always appreciate more than anything. We’ve been having fun.”

Shue comes into the series’ twelfth year as Julie “Finn” Finlay, who has a history with current Vegas forensic lab chief D.B. Russell (Danson). He needs her help on a case involving the murder of a man’s ex-girlfriend, but she’s reluctant because of her earlier working relationship with Russell: He fired her. Consider that she’s also just taken anger management training, and fireworks are bound to begin sooner than later.

Some have labeled Shue a “replacement” cast member on “CSI,” given Marg Helgenberger’s recent exit, but Shue doesn’t see it that way.

“I didn’t get to meet her, even,” she says. “She had left maybe a month before I came onto the set. I don’t think I’m replacing her at all; no one can ever replace any actor, every one is so unique. I just feel like this is a new character who happens to cross paths with this world.”

To operate within it, Finlay has to deal with her share of corpses. “I thought I would be queasy about tackling such scenes,” Shue allows. “I did have an initiation at a crime lab in L.A. and also at the coroner’s office. I got to watch an autopsy and be with many dead bodies, and that was so intense … really profound. I really recommend it to everybody, just to value your own life, and to appreciate and be grateful for every moment. I felt like I could have passed out.” w

WHATS-ON-IN-VANCOUVER-MESSING-SMASH

MESSING hopes for A ‘Smash’ – BUT WITH LIFE BALANCE

Combine Emmy and Oscar winners, an “American Idol” finalist, one of the top names in screen entertainment, and a programming chief who has switched networks.

What do you get? A “Smash,” they all hope.

Some may see it as NBC’s answer to Fox’s “Glee,” but considering Steven Spielberg’s involvement as an executive producer — plus such talents as producers Craig Zadan and Neil Meron (“Chicago”) and composer Marc Shaiman (“Hairspray”) — the peacock network clearly is aiming for more as it debuts its own musical-drama series Monday, Feb. 6.

The backstage turmoil of launching a Broadway show fuels the program, with “Will & Grace” Emmy recipient Debra Messing top-billed as Julia, the lyricist and co-writer of a musical about legendary screen siren Marilyn Monroe. Christian Borle (Broadway’s “Legally Blonde” and “Mary Poppins”) is seen as her writing partner, “Idol” veteran Katharine McPhee as favored Monroe portrayer Karen and Oscar winner Anjelica Huston (“Prizzi’s Honor”) as the maritally troubled producer.

The series also has impressive guests lined up: In a rare television appearance, Uma Thurman does a multiple-episode arc as a movie star interested in playing Monroe, and Tony Award winner Bernadette Peters appears as the Tony-winning mother of another contender for the Monroe role, Ivy (Megan Hilty, “Wicked”).

Additional “Smash” regulars include Jack Davenport (also a Messing co-star earlier in the movie “The Wedding Date”) as the musical’s director, Brian D’Arcy James as Julia’s husband and Raza Jaffrey as the McPhee character’s politically connected beau.

“It’s been a dream, honestly,” Messing says of making the show. “The moment I finished reading the [pilot] script and put it down, I called my representatives and said, ‘I have to be a part of this.’ Cut to my being offered the part, cut to our doing the pilot and having the time of our lives with the most thrilling creative team. Now we’ve all picked up and moved to New York (where the series is filmed), and it’s been an experience that has far exceeded my expectations.”

The same goes for McPhee, who claims “Smash” is fulfilling any Broadway performing ambitions she has, at least for now. The fifth-season “Idol” runner-up recalls that when she first heard about the show, “I didn’t know if there would be a part for me, but I said, ‘There has to be a part for me!’ My then-manager quickly calmed me down by saying, ‘You’ve got some time, but we just wanted to let you know it’s in the pipeline.’

“Every six months or so, I’d think, ‘I wonder what happened to that pilot.’ It came up again last year, and I just couldn’t wait to get my hands on the script. I kept turning the pages, and I think the actual product turned out even better than what was written.”

“Smash” has had a longtime champion in NBC Entertainment Chairman Robert Greenblatt, who brought the project with him when he moved over from Showtime. He’s credited with having “developed” the show after the initial pitch from Theresa Rebeck (“Seminar”), whom Messing deems “a genius. I’ve followed her career as a playwright forever, but her voice and her command of all of these characters is astonishing.”

Columbia Records will release songs performed on “Smash” by McPhee, who also has a solo deal with the label, and others. Many are crooned at various Big Apple sites, prompting Messing to term the show “a love letter to New York. We’re allowed to shoot all over, from Harlem to Washington Heights to Brooklyn to SoHo to Times Square. It’s really been exciting.”

“Smash” was held purposely until midseason so it could be teamed on Mondays with the singing competition “The Voice,” which begins its sophomore season a night earlier, immediately after NBC’s telecast of Super Bowl XLVI. Declaring herself a “Voice” fan, Messing finds it “very encouraging” to have that show paired with hers. “I couldn’t think of a better lead-in.”

As someone of notable voice herself, McPhee also likes the scheduling. The opening scene of “Smash” is of her character auditioning, but she maintains that filming it didn’t give her any “American Idol” flashbacks.

“It’s funny, I never once thought about that. There are hundreds and hundreds of auditions I’ve been on, and obviously, that was one that people remember because it was broadcast on national television.

“Reality show auditions are a little bit different,” McPhee adds, “because they’re kind of made for television. The ones I’ve been on the past four or five years, trying to get acting jobs, were the references I used.”

“Will & Grace” was very much an ensemble piece for NBC, where Messing has returned along with fellow Emmy winner Sean Hayes (an executive producer of “Grimm”), alias Jack to her Grace. “Smash” is a much bigger ensemble situation, though, and the actress says that’s why she’s able to be in it.

“I did one hourlong drama (ABC’s ‘Prey’) before I had a child,” Messing says, “and before ‘Will & Grace,’ and just from that experience, I knew I wasn’t built for that kind of schedule. The balance of my personal and professional lives is something I’m always struggling to maintain. Originally, this was going to be a cable show with 13 episodes a year … so I was like, ‘This is perfect for me!’

“Then it moved with Bob to [broadcast-]network prime time, where it could potentially be 24 episodes a year. That made me very nervous, but luckily, Theresa is also a mother, and everyone involved seems to respect my concerns.” w

WHATS-ON-IN-VANCOUVER-GREENWOOD-RIVER

Sometimes, if you go looking for magic, you may find it. Then the problem is — what do you do with it next?

On Tuesday, Feb. 7, ABC premieres “The River,” a drama series starring Bruce Greenwood (“Star Trek,” “John From Cincinnati”) as Emmet Cole, a wildlife expert and TV personality who heads up the Amazon in search of something unusual. When he doesn’t come back for a long time, his wife, Tess (Leslie Hope, “24”), and estranged son, Lincoln (Joe Anderson), set off on a rescue mission, funded by Cole’s cagey ex-producer, Clark (Paul Blackthorne).

They find Cole’s boat, the Magus, but what they discover aboard it makes no sense, and it quickly becomes apparent that what Cole was looking for was no new species of bug, bird or four-legged beast but something far stranger and more dangerous.

The show is shot with a foundfootage format in the style of executive producer Oren Peli’s 2007 film “Paranormal Activity,” itself inspired by “The Blair Witch Project,” which was in turn inspired by reality television shows, such as the fictional “The Undiscovered Country,” with host Emmet Cole.

“The audience has been so embracing of the reality format over the last 10 years,” says Peli, “so there has been a resurgence of foundfootage movies that the audience has embraced, but there hasn’t really been any TV show that was scripted found footage.”

Although, says Greenwood, Cole’s show isn’t exactly cuttingedge.

“‘The Undiscovered Country’ is a very old-style show,” Greenwood says, whose career began on the Vancouver stage in numerous 1970s Arts Club productions. “The music that we use, the graphics, it’s antiquated. He’s in that old mode, but he’s also an anthropologist and a scientist, and he’s deeply involved in the preservation of all these things he holds so dear.”

“He’s this guy who believes deeply in his family and in showing people the wonders which are all around us, the flora and the fauna, the physical wonders of the world. And he’s in love with the idea of people becoming more attuned to their natural selves. That drives his love for his show and informs the way he teaches his son and informs the way he communicates with his wife. Ultimately, over the years, he’s come to understand that not everything is as it appears.

“His catchphrase, ‘There’s magic out there,’ slowly comes to mean, to him, more than just face value. The magic eventually means there really is something supernatural, otherworldly, out there. So he goes on this quest down the Amazon thinking it’s going to be a short trip, thinking he has a couple of answers, a couple of clues that are going to provide answers to the big questions, and he gets sucked in. The more he discovers, the more he realizes that nothing is what it appears.

“And there may be as much negative power as there is positive power, and that’s what he has to protect. When he gets in the thick of it, he realizes that he can’t bring back this magic, because it’s weighted as much on the dark side as on the light side. Now he’s still trying to figure out what it is, and how he can get out of its thrall and protect his family at the same time.

“He knows they’ve come after him, so he’s trying to keep them at arm’s length and trying to continue his quest.”

Hope, a world traveler in her own right, has a few theories about what’s going on up “The River” (actually a brackish estuary on the Hawaiian island of Oahu).

“Nothing is what it appears,” she says, “not the circumstances, not the characters. I can tell you that the deeper in we go, the more that crazy stuff starts to happen. The rules bend; they don’t break, they bend.

“There’s stuff out there that we don’t understand, that we don’t know about. I experienced that myself anyway in Hawaii. That place is rife with spirits and all sorts of stuff going on. I know that, without spoiling it, by the end of our first season, there’s that much stuff going on. The more that is revealed about these characters, the more mysterious they become.” w

WHATS-ON-IN-VANCOUVER-WINTER

 ARE CANADIANS LOSING THEIR LOVE FOR THE great white north?

For a northern people, Canadians spend a lot of time trying to deny the existence of winter.

As we see in “Life Below Zero,” rather than adapting to the season that defines us, we try to avoid it — or we complain about it. The one thing we don’t do is embrace it and live in it. We put up with it.

The documentary, airing Thursday, Feb 9, on CBC Television’s “Doc Zone,” compares the attitude toward winter of four famous northern peoples: Canadians, Russians, Finns and Scandinavians. And it turns out that Canada is the only northern nation that refuses to accept that it’s a northern nation.

“We’re one nation bound together by wind chill,” says Josh Freed, who wrote and directed “Life Below Zero.”

A journalist and filmmaker (“China’s Sexual Revolution,” “Where Did I Put My Memory?”), Freed knows winter. He has spent his life in Montreal.

“There was always a sense when I was growing up that we were proud of being winter people — because we couldn’t avoid it. You couldn’t hide from it.

“Now we have the ability to just hide from it completely. We have ceased to romanticize it.”

As the film shows, Canadians are “the world champions” of escaping winter. We fly south by the thousands to sit on beaches in Florida and the Caribbean. We build skywalks and underground malls and walkways so we never have to go outside.

“Technology has allowed us to just escape,” Freed says. “We have beach volleyball indoors. We have surfing indoors. We play hockey indoors now. The outdoor rink across from my house is empty because all the kids play at the arena.

“It’s so easy just to be indoors and forget winter. Technology has just overwhelmed winter.”

We can’t even stand looking at the evidence of winter. We’re positively brilliant at getting rid of snow. If there’s a world record holder for snow removal, it has to be Montreal, where the snow removal starts with the first snowflake and doesn’t end until there isn’t a snowbank in the city.

“If there’s a little bit of snow left, we get very upset,” Freed says. “The idea that Scandinavia actually tries to have a winter look!

“That’s why I went to the other countries. I wondered if we were alone in our desire to get rid of winter, to obliterate it.”

It turns out other winter nations don’t try to escape winter. They love it. Freed talks to Russians, Finns, Norwegians and Swedes and shows the ways they have found to build their cities to be enjoyed year-round.

Russians hold outdoor barbecues and dances, go swimming in frozen rivers, and eat ice-cream cones outdoors — in temperatures that would make a Winnipegger shudder.

Finns take a sauna, followed by a bracing roll in the snow. Swedes and Norwegians heat their sidewalks to make them safe for all to use year-round. But they leave snow on the streets and lawns to maintain a winter ambience.

“The Scandinavians continue to enjoy winter by making the outdoors more comfortable,” Freed says. “We don’t create winter architecture. It’s as if we long ago decided to ignore winter and not be comfortable outdoors.”

Freed says the effects of global warming, and that the season seems to be fading from our consciousness, raised the question of “the fragility of winter” as a season and as a concept.

“The winter identity we had in my youth was so powerful,” he says. “I sort of sense that it is slowly vanishing. And some piece of me felt somebody should do a film about us and winter and our love/hate relationship with it — while we still have winter.”

As the film shows, Canadians used to embrace the season, as the Russians do, with winter carnivals, outdoor skating rinks, ice palaces and sleigh rides.

“We used to live through it and romanticize it,” Freed points out. “It was part of our mythology. We believed we were the great people who could overcome any storm.”

Now, to a certain extent, we’ve become summer people trapped in a frozen hell, from which there are a thousand ways to escape.

“We’re bombarded by endless ads for packaged holidays. And so much television is set in California. The sun and warmth have somehow become good, and cold has become almost evil.”

Yet winter festivals are springing up in cities such as Edmonton, Toronto and Montreal. Others — such as Ottawa’s Winterlude and Carnival in Quebec City — are enjoying a rebirth.

“The whole country is beginning to have this renaissance of winter festivals in the last two or three years” Freed says. “There’s a sense that we’re forgetting to use winter as much as we used to.

“If it’s there, we should jump into it, as the Russians jump into it.” w

WHATS-ON-IN-VANCOUVER- ‘LUCK’ WITH HOFFMAN

After bringing the worlds of late 19th-century South Dakota gold miners and 21st-century Southern California surfers to HBO, David Milch follows up “Deadwood” and “John From Cincinnati” with a multilayered, multifaceted portrait of the world of Thoroughbred racing.

Going beyond just the horses to trainers, jockeys, veterinarians, shady quasi-criminal types and degenerate gamblers, “Luck” creates a canvas of intense desperation, burning ambition, devastating peril and staggering beauty, all set against the lush backdrop of Santa Anita Park in Arcadia, Calif., near Los Angeles.

After a sneak preview that aired on Dec. 11 following the season finale of “Boardwalk Empire,” “Luck” – which pairs Milch’s acclaimed writing and storytelling with the producing and directing talents of Michael Mann (“Thief,” “The Last of the Mohicans,” “Ali”) – launches its regular run on Sunday, Jan. 29.

Dustin Hoffman tops the huge cast as Chester “Ace” Bernstein, a man with a questionable past who gets out of prison and embarks on a career as a covert Thoroughbred owner, with his loyal driver, Gus Demitriou (Dennis Farina), acting as his frontman.

Ace is a careful, deliberate man who plays things close to the vest. For Hoffman, that came out of choices made in preparing for the role.

“It wasn’t a conscious decision,” he says. “What you’re wearing or not alters you. It doesn’t take much. You learn your lines, you’re told a few things. They say, ‘Do you ever wear your hair straight back?’ ‘No.’ ‘Will you try that?’ And Michael Mann says, ‘Hey, I like it with your hair straight back.’ ‘Let’s see what suit you’re going to put on.’

“He has an image of the character, and you’re going with that image. You learn the lines, then they just come out a certain way, and you’re altered.”

Among those followed on the backstretch are trainers Walt “The Old Man” Smith (Nick Nolte) – inspired by, Nolte says, legendary trainer Jack Van Berg – and Turo Escalante (John Ortiz), who has more than a professional relationship with his vet (Jill Hennessy). There are jockeys on the way up, such as Irish Rosie (Kerry Condon), and those trying to come back, such as Ronnie Jenkins (played by jockey Gary Stephens).

On the fringes of the track life are the degenerate gamblers, including one group – whose most socially adept member, Jerry (Jason Gedrick), also has a weakness for cards – struggling to find a way forward after a life-altering bet.

Although Milch has followed racing most of his life, owned Thoroughbreds and laid down more than a few bets, it took him a long time to get around to writing about it all.

“Certainly,” he says, “I had an adequate exposure to it. I did a lot of research, but the deepest truths of that world – I won’t say that they had eluded me, but there’s an expression, the ripeness is all, and I finally was ripe enough.

“These are not characters who let themselves be easily known, and a lot of them are composites. … It takes a little while for the world to fully declare itself, but I hope they will hang in, because it’s definitely worth the trip.”

For Mann, who’s more familiar with racing cars than horses, it was a foray into a new reality.

“The thing that surprised me the most,” Mann says, “was the first time I was in a vehicle, and we were doing a tracking shot, and I was three or four feet away from a racehorse going full out – and it’s stunning.

“David talked quite a bit about a sense of nature and the spirit of being that close, involving yourself with the animal, like a trainer does, like Escalante would do – but when you’re actually up next to what feels like a 1,500-pound jack rabbit, that’s a whole different thing.

“The athleticism of it, the spirit … it’s not like you have to encourage them to race; you have to repress the instinct to race. All they want to do is race.”

But these days, the slow romance of race day, with its long pauses and brief explosions of action, is fading in a world of instant gratification.

“The pity is,” says Nolte, “that horse racing is losing the imagination of the public. The mythology and the connection of man and horse is being lost. Gambling’s taken over. They want to turn horse-racing tracks into casinos.” W

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