Watching This Week #114

Welcome to the June 19, 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.

While it was a notable week in the Canadian media industry (specifically at Bell Media, as we note below), it's been a slow week for programming news – but we did have a time to respond to a few mailbag questions about shows like Frayed, Les revenants, and Cruel Summer. That's all after this week's listings.

What's new this week – June 19–25

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: Animal Kingdom (season 6 – Monday); Not Quite Narwhal (animated series – Monday); 85 South: Ghetto Legends (comedy special – Tuesday); Break Point (part 2 – Wednesday); Glamorous (comedy-drama series – Thursday); The Perfect Find (rom-com film – Friday); Through My Window: Across the Sea (romance film sequel – Friday); King Richard (2021 film – Sautrday); Titans (season 4 – Sunday)
• Disney+: 9-1-1 (season 6 – Wednesday); Secret Invasion (Marvel Studios miniseries – Wednesdays); Station 19 (season 6 – Wednesday); Jacinta (2021 TV doc – Friday); Revenant (Korean series – Friday); World's Best (family film – Friday); Protectors (Argentinian series – Sunday)
• Crave: And Just Like That... (season 2 – Thursdays); Evil Dead Rise (2023 New Line horror franchise film – streaming on Max U.S. on Friday and likely to do the same on Crave, airing on Crave 1 Saturday*); Mrs. Harris Goes to Paris (2022 film – Friday); Prancer: A Christmas Tale (2022 direct-to-video film – Friday); Sullivan's Crossing (season 1 – Friday);
• Prime Video: Hello Kitty: Super Style! (animated series – Tuesday); That Peter Crouch Film (British soccer doc – Thursday); I'm a Virgo (fantasy-comedy series – Friday); Murilo Couto comedy special (Friday); Cocaine Bear (2023 film – Saturday)
• CBC Gem: Bend It Like Bollywood (British doc – Monday); Jump, Darling (2020 film – Friday)
• Paramount+ (also available as a channel on Prime Video and Apple TV): Moesha (1996-2001 sitcom – Tuesday); Duran Duran: A Hollywood High (doc – Wednesday)
• Apple TV+: Carpool Karaoke: The Series (season 4, part 3 – Friday); Swagger (season 2 – Fridays)
• BritBox (also available as a channel on Prime Video and Apple TV): Call the Midwife (season 12 – Wednesday)
• CTV: Battle of the Generations (Canadian game show – Mondays)
• Global (also on StackTV): LA Fire & Rescue (Dick Wolf docuseries – Wednesdays*)
• Smithsonian Channel (also available as a channel on Prime Video and Apple TV): ArtNation (arts docuseries – Tuesdays)
• AMC (available on AMC+ on Prime Video and Apple TV): You Are Here (Colman Domingo travel series – first two episodes Monday, remaining two episodes Friday, June 30)
• Hollywood Suite (also available as a channel on Prime Video): Erin's Guide to Kissing Girls (2022 film – Sunday)

This week in deals

As a reminder, we may get an affiliate commission for services you sign up for through links in this newsletter, which helps support our site maintenance, at no additional cost to you. Prices are in Canadian dollars before applicable sales taxes, and may change in the future.

• The current Crave offer we mentioned last week for six months of direct-to-consumer service for $89.94 (equivalent to $14.99 per month) remains ongoing through July 7. Additionally, we've heard that some existing monthly Crave Total ($19.99 per month) subscribers are getting offered 50% off for three months if they try to cancel online.
   
• While there's no discount per se on Amazon Prime at the moment, the service recently introduced a partnership with DoorDash for one free year of the latter's DashPass subscription service, which offers reduced fees on most DoorDash deliveries. Both new and existing Prime subscribers can use this offer. The regular price of DashPass is $9.99 per month, the same as the current monthly price of Prime itself (and less if you're on an annual subscription), so this may be a great value even before considering the streaming content available on Prime Video.
   
• If soccer is more your speed, you may be interested in sports-focused streaming service Fubo, which is currently offering a $40 discount on its Soccer Annual plan (regularly $219.99 per year, on sale for $179.94 for the first year, equivalent to $14.99 per month). This includes Fubo's exclusive Canadian rights to the full upcoming Premier League season, as well as Italy's Serie A, and more through BeIN Sport (Ligue 1) and OneSoccer (Canada Soccer).
   
• Finally, this Apple TV+ offer for two free months for "new and qualified returning subscribers" is still in effect for a few more weeks, until July 7.

Programming news

• Global has added or confirmed more series airing this summer, including docuseries LA Fire & Rescue as noted above, as well as expected returning CBS simulcasts like Tough as Nails (this season filmed in Canada!) and Big Brother (delayed to August to help offset the effects of the writers' strike).

Other notes

• BCE, owner of Bell Canada and Bell Media, announced last week that it would be cutting 1,300 positions across the organization, of which about 30% are unfilled vacancies. The cuts were widely misreported as referring solely to Bell Media, but the media side is getting disproportionately hit with 6% of positions cut, amounting to over 300 positions (the division's end-of-2022 headcount was 5,645) – with significant staff cuts particularly in news. As well, nine of the company's AM radio stations (some, but not all, of which had already been reduced to placeholder automated formats) are being shut down or sold.
   
  The open letter linked above specifically called out the new Warner Bros. Discovery programming deal, which is a good sign of where Bell Media's financial priorites lie these days.
   
• Separately, we meant to mention last week that Bell Media reportedly recently acquired a minority stake in Sphere Media. In addition to being a producer of series like Sort Of and Transplant, Sphere is also a film distributor, so it stands to reason that films distributed by that company will continue to land on Crave in the pay-1 window for quite some time to come.
   
• Disney+ had been looking at starting to commission Canadian programming, but it seems they have put a pause on those plans until at least the end of this year, as the new post-Online Streaming Act regulatory framework takes shape.

Mailbag

Here's some of the reader questions we've received recently by email (hello@wherecaniwatch.ca). We welcome questions of general interest, and publish a few of them (and our answers) from time to time; messages may be edited for brevity and clarity.

Trevor: I have three questions. (1) Will Season 2 of Frayed air on Showcase any time soon? (2) Has season 2 of the French show Les revenants ever aired in Canada? (3) Showtime shows have been leaving Crave but many aren't yet available on Paramount+, when can we expect to see them on streaming again?

WCIW: For Frayed, it looks like Showcase may have given up the rights entirely, considering that season 1 is no longer available to stream. That does seem weird to us considering it appears to be distributed by Sky / NBCUniversal which Corus has an output deal with (and has maintained streaming rights to several series from), but perhaps the fact that it’s an Australian series means it’s exempt from Corus' regular terms, or perhaps Corus made a deliberate decision to give up the series.

For Les revenants, the series is old enough that unfortunately it’s hard to tell if the second season ever was available to stream here. We found some references to the series having aired in French on CBC-owned specialty channel Ici ARTV, but we can’t tell whether that was both seasons or just the first.

Regarding Showtime, it's up to Paramount to decide when to add those series to Paramount+ Canada, once they've left Crave. But there are two issues that may be at play. The first is that Paramount+ doesn’t yet seem to have the ability to promote the Showtime brand in Canada yet – we assume that this is a transitional period as some of its shows remain available on Crave, and are still branded as Showtime shows there. So Paramount might be holding off until it can fully promote its service as the home of Showtime in Canada to launch more classic programs from that service.

The second factor: it’s possible that, much like services in the U.S. have been removing shows – including, incidentally, Showtime – Paramount may ultimately decide not to add some lesser-viewed Showtime shows in Canada, in order to reduce residuals and/or intra-company licence fees.

In the meantime, many of those Showtime shows remain available for digital purchase.

Shane: Where is season 2 of [Freeform's] Cruel Summer in Canada and why is [Corus-produced] ET Canada promoting it if it's not even accessible here?

WCIW: Cruel Summer is currently airing Monday nights at 10:00pm ET on ABC Spark, the licensed Canadian version of Freeform (formerly ABC Family) operated by Corus. Based on current scheduling, it appears ABC Spark has been airing episodes day-and-date with Freeform since the new season started on June 5 (which we missed at the time, unfortuately).

Unlike most other major Corus-owned channels, ABC Spark remains exclusive to cable subscribers (and not available on StackTV), at least for now. The current season should be available on-demand to cable subscribers for a limited time. The first season of the show remains unavailable to stream anywhere else (apart from the French-language dub, which remains available on Noovo.ca for Vrak subscribers), but it is available for digital purchase.

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