This Week in WCIW #26

Welcome to the June 14, 2021 edition of This Week in WCIW, 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 news about the Canadian networks' fall schedules, and other programming coming to Corus' specialty channels.

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On the grid

The fall schedules for the remaining major Canadian networks – CTV, Global, and Citytv – were released last week. We provided some analysis in our What's Next newsletter for paid subscribers this past Friday, but to roughly summarize:

• CTV, while still Canada's top-rated network, had a lot of holes to fill and will be taking some fairly big swings, including The Big Leap, La Brea, and Our Kind of People.
   
• Global had fewer holes to fill, and apart from the long-planned Canadian series Family Law, it's mostly sticking with new iterations of franchises that have worked well in the past, like FBI, NCIS, and CSI.
   
• Citytv will be similarly focusing on franchises, like Law & Order, Chicago, and The Bachelor/ette, including the newly-announced Bachelor in Paradise Canada. It also announced a new iteration of Canada's Got Talent which will premiere in spring 2022. However, it will be dropping most of the Fox "Animation Domination" lineup, and it's not clear yet where it will end up in Canada (beyond remaining available on cross-border Fox affiliates).

Separately, Global parent company Corus confirmed a large number of new series coming to its specialty channels.

Many of these are Peacock Originals that we would have expected under Corus' output deal with NBCUniversal – including Dr. Death, MacGruber, Dan Brown’s The Lost Symbol, One of Us is Lying, Bel-Air (the dramatic reboot of the Fresh Prince franchise), the Queer as Folk reboot, Bust Down, Baking It (a baking spinoff of Making It, which remains on CTV), and Ex Rated with Andy Cohen. You might be able to guess which Corus channels these shows will end up on, but officially that information is currently TBA.

Other confirmations of shows coming to either Showcase or W Network include Chucky (the Syfy series based on the Child's Play film franchise), Naomi (another CW series set in the DC multiverse), and the new season of A Million Little Things, which was dropped by Citytv. W Network will also be leaning even harder into Hallmark Channel programming, with a branded weekday block from 6:00 a.m. to 1:00 p.m. ET (which makes sense, as that timeslot has typically been filled by repeat Canadian movies anyways).

YTV will have Paramount+'s Kamp Koral: SpongeBob’s Under Years and the Rugrats reboot, and Teletoon will have HBO Max's Jellystone! and Tom and Jerry in New York.

Programming news

• Per Deadline, Endeavor Content has pre-sold Canadian rights to Conversations with Friends, the upcoming Hulu / BBC Three miniseries adaptation of the Sally Rooney novel, to Amazon Prime Video Canada, among other international rights sold to Amazon, WarnerMedia and others.
   
  While widely described as a follow-up to Normal People (available in Canada on CBC Gem), and sharing a production company (Element Pictures), Conversations was published first, and as far as we can tell the stories are unrelated.
   
• WildBrain-owned Family Channel has picked up Canadian rights to Baketopia, the HBO Max baking competition series hosted by Rosanna Pansino, and a spin-off of sorts of Craftopia (which remains available in Canada on Crave). The series will air Mondays at 7:30 p.m. ET/PT starting tonight (June 14).
   
  While we assume Crave would have had first right of refusal for Baketopia, it's hard to argue against Family being a better Canadian home for that series – and possibly for future seasons of Craftopia as well. The latter series premiered on Crave as part of the launch lineup of HBO Max Originals, but otherwise, with rights to WarnerMedia's animated programs tied up with Corus, the lineup of family-oriented programs on Crave has been fairly sparse.

Recent updates on WCIW

In addiiton to our latest What's Next newsletter for paid subscribers, we've added posts about the UEFA Euro 2020 [sic] and Copa América 2021 soccer tournaments, which got underway over the weekend.

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