Watching This Week #101

Welcome to the February 27, 2023, edition of Watching This Week, the weekly newsletter from Where Can I Watch – covering the latest news on where TV shows and movies will be available in Canada.

Read on for our thoughts about the end of Teletoon as a linear channel brand, plus a few other odds and ends from a comparatively quiet week in TV news. That's after this week's listings.

What's new this week – February 27–March 5

Compiled from our monthly listings and/or any subsequent updates we've come across. We strive for accuracy but schedules may change without notice. Some series/seasons may have weekly rollouts; we won't list new episodes every week (though we may note significant episodes such as series finales). *An asterisk denotes programming added in past weeks that we've learned about (or has been rescheduled) since our last newsletter.

• Netflix: Too Hot to Handle: Germany (reality series – Tuesday); A Whole Lifetime with Jamie Demetriou (comedy special – Tuesday); Cheat (British quiz show – Wednesday); Promising Young Woman (2020 Universal film – Wednesday); Wrong Side of the Tracks (season 2 – Wednesday); Karate Sheep (animated series – Thursday); Minique Olivier: Accessory to Evil (doc – Thursday); Space Jam: A New Legacy (2021 Warner Bros. film – Thursday); Sex/Life (season 2 – Thursday); The Flash (season 9 – Friday); Next in Fashion (season 2 – Friday); Chris Rock: Selective Outrage (comedy special – Saturday at 10:00 p.m. ET); Divorce Attorney Shin (K-drama series – Saturday)
• Disney+: Call It Love (K-drama series – Wednesdays starting Feb. 22*); The Mandalorian (season 3 – Wednesdays); Still Missing Morgan (ABC News docuseries – Wednesday); Virgin: The Series (Hotstar series – Wednesday); Wild Crime (season 2 of the docuseries – Wednesday); Finding Michael (documentary – Friday); Soul of a Nation Presents: Black in Vegas (ABC News doc – Friday); Yilbasi Gecesi [New Year's Eve] (Turkish film – Friday); Schoolhouse Rock! 50th Anniversary Singalong (recent ABC special – Friday)
• Crave: The Weeknd: Live at SoFi Stadium (HBO concert special – Saturday, Feb. 25*); The Circus (season 8 of the Showtime U.S. political docuseries – Sundays starting Feb. 26*); The Grizzlie Truth (documentary about the NBA in Vancouver – Monday); Stay the Night (Canadian film – Friday); Barbarian (2022 film – Friday); Will (2017 TNT series? animated series – Saturday)
• Prime Video: Daisy Jones & the Six (original film – Friday); Coach Prime (sports docuseries – Friday); Federico Chiesa Back on Track (sports documentary – Friday); I Got a Monster (documentary – Friday); Luden (2021 German series – Friday); UnReal (2015–18 Lifetime series – Saturday)
• CBC Gem: Plan B (time-travel drama series – Mondays [also on CBC TV])
• Paramount+ (also available as a channel on Prime Video and Apple TV): Babylon (2022 Paramount period comedy-drama written and directed by Damien Chazelle, starring Brad Pitt and Margot Robbie – Tuesday, Feb. 21*); Durham County (2007–10 Canadian series – Tuesday); The Loudest Voice (2019 Showtime miniseries – Tuesday); Darienne Lake: Altered Boy (comedy special – Friday); The Friendship Game (2022 sci-fi film – Friday); Transformers: Earthspark (season 1, part 2 – Friday); Special Forces: World's Toughest Test (recent Fox reality series – Friday)
• Apple TV+: The Problem with Jon Stewart (season 2, part 2 – Fridays)
• BritBox (also available as a channel on Prime Video and Apple TV): Staged (seasons 1-2, previously on Hollywood Suite – Wednesday)
• CTV: True Lies (series based on the 1994 film – Wednesdays)
• Global (also on StackTV): Survivor (season 44 – Wednesdays)
• Citytv (also on Citytv+): Grand Crew (season 2 – Fridays)
• CNN: Glitch: The Rise & Fall of HQ Trivia (documentary – Sunday)

It's been unreal, Teletoon

Your humble proprietor can't recall for certain whether he first heard of Teletoon through watching CPAC's coverage of the 1996 CRTC hearings that resulted in the channel getting a licence (he definitely watched some of it but can't specifically remember Teletoon's presentation), or newspaper coverage, or pre-launch ads in the pages of Kidsworld magazine (a free and extremely ad-filled publication shipped to many Canadian elementary schools in those days).

Regardless, it's a channel that, after launching in October 1997, kids of a certain age might have considered to be a revelation in the days of limited children's programming options, even on cable – YTV, daytime programming on CBC and PBS, maybe Family Channel if your parents paid extra for it (though Family also moved to regular cable at the time of Teletoon's launch) – and occasional timeslots on other networks.

But, between the various repeats and new Canadian series like Pippi Longstocking and Caillou, you might have been aware that it was still just the Canadian cartoon channel, and that Americans would have had the actual Cartoon Network, which surely must be airing shows like Dexter's Laboratory or Cow and Chicken or The Powerpuff Girls much more frequently than they were airing on Canadian TV, plus even more cool shows like all those night-time shows... right?

Whatever you might have thought of Teletoon then or now, it's clear that it's a brand – wholly owned by Corus Entertainment since 2014 – that has had a good run in the Canadian marketplace, for the past several years co-existing with a separate digital channel under the Cartoon Network brand that was also owned by Corus and basically served as a sort of Teletoon 2, not to mention the more recent Adult Swim channel that supplanted Teletoon at Night.

But the history of Teletoon as a linear channel brand in English-speaking Canada will end on March 27, with Corus announcing it will relaunch the channel under the licensed Cartoon Network brand on that date, though it doesn't appear there will be significant immediate changes to the programming in the current Teletoon channel space.

The existing Cartoon Network will simultaneously rebrand under Warner Bros. Discovery (WBD)'s secondary animation channel brand Boomerang. In the U.S., Boomerang was originally just a classic cartoons channel like the former Teletoon Retro, though it has moved towards a focus on newer versions of the classic Looney Tunes and Hanna-Barbera characters rather than rerunning the original pre-1990s cartoons.

Teletoon+, Corus' kids streaming service which only relaunched under that name from Nick+ a few months ago, remains as-is for now, as does the French-language channel Télétoon.

Why the change now? It's hard to say, as we're not privy to whatever ratings data might have informed the decision. Corus has also certainly been leaning much harder into licensed channel brands in recent years. But it wouldn't shock us if this specific move was driven more by WBD than by Corus, as a condition of extending its programming agreements.

Programming news

• We've received (or otherwise seen) March programming listings for most of the major streaming services, including Crave and CBC Gem. We're working on collating these into our usual monthly post which should be available in the coming days.‌‌
   
  Note that while Jurassic World Dominion remains on the Crave 1 schedule for March 11 as of this writing, it was not included in Crave's listings for March, and the page for the film on Crave's website has disappeared in recent days.‌‌
   
• In our February listings, we noted that Paramount+ would be premiering a stand-up special on February 24 featuring drag performer Peppermint. This turns out to have been the first in a series of six similar stand-up specials filmed at last year's Tribeca Festival, which will roll out over the next several Fridays, featuring Darienne Lake (March 3), BeBe Zahara Benet (March 10), Jinkx Monsoon (March 17), Ginger Minj (March 24), and Monét X Change (March 31). The specials were produced by Comedy Dynamics and are distributed in Canada by LevelFilm.‌‌
   
• Quebecor and Paramount have confirmed that Club Illico is now the new French-language pay-1 home of Paramount Pictures films in Canada, under a deal that came into effect in December but was only announced this past week. That suggests it's unlikely Paramount+ will begin adding any significant French-language programming in Canada in the near future. (On the other hand, there is no indication of any agreement for other Paramount-owned programming, such as Showtime content.)

Other notes

• The Global TV streaming platforms have now officially added TV Everywhere access to two more Corus channels for cable subscribers: the licensed Canadian versions of Lifetime and Magnolia Network. (Lifetime is also available on StackTV, while over-the-top streaming access to Magnolia content continues to be restricted to Discovery+.)‌‌
   
• BBC/ITV joint venture streaming service BritBox informs us they have reached three million subscribers worldwide (not including the UK, where operations were recently acquired outright by ITV and integrated into its own streaming platform). The service says this represents 300% growth in under three years. No breakdown of subscribers per country was made available.

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