Watching This Week #87

Welcome to the November 7, 2022, 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.

What's new this week – November 7–13

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). The most notable premiere for each service (in our rough estimation) is bolded. *An asterisk denotes programming added in past weeks that we've learned about since our last newsletter.

• Netflix: Neal Brennan: Blocks (stand-up special – Tuesday); FIFA Uncovered (docuseries – Wednesday); The Crown (season 5 – Wednesday); Falling for Christmas (Lindsay Lohan rom-com film – Thursday); State of Alabama vs. Brittany Smith (short doc – Thursday); Warrior Nun (season 2 – Thursday); Down to Earth with Zac Efron (season 2: "Down Under" – Friday); Capturing the Killer Nurse (doc – Friday); Is That Black Enough for You?!? (doc – Friday); Lost Bullet 2 (French action film – Friday)
• Disney+: Revenge of Others (K-drama series – Wednesdays); The Stolen Cup (Argentinia series – Wednesdays); Zootopia+ (spinoff series – Wednesday); Fire of Love (volcano doc – Friday)
• Crave: Don't Worry Darling (drama film – Monday); Kings of Coke (Canadian doc – Monday); The Big Brunch (Dan Levy HBO Max reality series – Thursdays); The Bob's Burgers Movie (animated film, also on Disney+ – Friday) [rescheduled to Nov. 25]; The Middle Man (comedy film – Friday)
• Prime Video: Savage X Fenty Show, Vol. 4 (fashion show – Wednesday); The English (Western series – Friday); Mammals (dramedy series – Friday)
• CBC Gem: Extraordinary Portraits (art reality series – Monday); The Noodle Group (short doc – Wednesday); Guest of Honour (drama film – Friday); Sorry for Your Loss (season 2 – Friday); My Grandparents' War (season 2 – Friday)
• Paramount+ (also available as a channel on Prime Video and Apple TV): Behind the Music (new episodes – Tuesday); Transformers: Earthspark (animated series – Fridays); Yellowstone (season 5 – Sundays); Tulsa King (drama series – Sundays)
• Apple TV+: Circuit Breakers (family series – Friday); Mythic Quest (season 3 – Fridays)
• BritBox (also available as a channel on Prime Video and Apple TV): The Curse (drama series – Monday)
• History (also on StackTV): Our War (doc miniseries – Friday)
• Starz (also available as an add-on/channel on Crave, Prime Video, and Apple TV): Wolf Hound (war drama film – Friday)
• Hollywood Suite (also available as a channel on Prime Video): Tales From the Gimli Hospital (new 4K restoration of the 1988 Canadian film – available to stream now; linear premiere Wednesday on HS 80s Movies)

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.

• Apple TV+ is currently offering two months free to new and "qualifying returning" subscribers, in connection with the release of the documentary Selena Gomez: My Mind & Me. It's not clear what the criteria are to be able to take the offer if you've previously subscribed. The code is available to use until December 2, though similar offers on other Apple services have occasionally ended early if the promotion's capacity is exhausted.

Price hike season

If you use a lot of streaming services, you may be seeing more of your subscription costs creeping up.

Apple TV+ recently bumped its prices worldwide for the first time since its launch three years ago, saying it now has an "extensive selection" of programming that justifies the higher price. In Canada, that means the monthly rate is going from $5.99 to $8.99.

Then on November 1 (though telegraphed in a recent contest prize listing), Paramount+ Canada announced it would bump its monthly price for the first time, from $5.99 to $9.99, referencing the increased range of new movies, series like Yellowstone, and more.

Disney+ will be increasing prices in the U.S. on December 8, when its new ad-supported tier launches in that country. No changes have been announced yet for Canada, where prices were last hiked in February 2021, but when we checked the service's Canadian landing page this past Thursday, it briefly had a comment referencing the U.S. Disney+ and Disney Bundle price increases (it's since been removed), so it's not entirely outside the realm of possibility.

And of course, those are in addition to price bumps earlier this year on most Netflix plans in Canada (January), as well as the Canadian price of Amazon Prime (April).

Crave hasn't changed direct-to-consumer prices for its two main tiers since November 2018, though it recalibrated those tiers slightly late last year. Of course, throughout that time, its most popular tier with full HBO programming and device support has had a premium price point at $20 a month, and the fact that it sells many of its subscriptions through TV providers might affect how quickly it can make changes.

We'll leave the nitty-gritty analysis to others, but our sense is that there's a combination of causes to all this, none of which are particularly specific to Canada. First, macroeconomic challenges like high inflation rates and (to some extent) supply chain issues around the world means that production, staff, and maintenance costs are going up across the board, even with the cost-cutting that some companies have tried to do. So the owners of these services think they can justify price hikes, which of course will also allow them to maintain (if not improve) profit margins and keep shareholders happy.

Second, post-pandemic, streaming is now in a much slower subscriber growth phase – some of that being due to those same inflation and cost-of-living issues – and service operators have to try more things than just marketing to grow revenues. It means lower-priced options like ad-supported tiers that might attract or retain a few more subscribers, but it also means services will try to get more out of those that are already subscribed, through price hikes. Even if a few cancel when prices rise, those companies are basically betting that enough will stay to offset it.

So in short: expect more of this to come.

Programming news

• In case you haven't heard by now, Netflix recently made a deal with NBCUniversal for "co-exclusive" global streaming rights for the first two seasons of Peacock comedy series Girls5eva, while ordering a new third season that will be available on Netflix exclusively.
   
  We assume this means that Corus, which aired the series in Canada on W Network under its Peacock output deal, will still be allowed to stream the first two seasons of the series on StackTV – whether they actually will is not yet clear – but the wording of the press release suggests that Netflix will be free (err, four) and clear to stream both past and new seasons in Canada going forward.
   
  The move comes as Peacock seems to be pivoting away from offbeat comedies like Saved by the Bell and Rutherford Falls, and instead leaning into the kind of programming that has done well on cable TV in recent years, like Bravo reality series and a newly-announced Hallmark Channel hub.
   
• On another Peacock programming note, Pitch Perfect: Bumper in Berlin, a spinoff series from the film franchise focused on the Adam DeVine character, will premiere in Canada on W Network (and presumably StackTV) on Thursday, December 8.
   
• After previously selling the U.S. rights to The Continental to Peacock, Lionsgate has sold most of the remaining international streaming rights, including in Canada, to the John Wick prequel series to Prime Video, with an expected premiere in 2023.
   
• Bell Media has confirmed that CTV Comedy will air Miracle Workers: End Times – the fourth season of the anthology series starring Daniel Radcliffe – Mondays starting January 16.
   
• George & Tammy, a Paramount-produced limited series about country music power couple Tammy Wynette and George Jones originally commissioned by U.S. cable provider Charter for its now-discontinued Spectrum Originals slate, has moved to Showtime in the U.S., and will stream on Paramount+ outside the U.S. and Canada – strongly implying that Crave will have the Canadian rights.
   
• Hollywood Suite is presenting two restorations of Canadian classic films this month. In addition to Tales From the Gimli Hospital (premiering this week as noted above), 1977 film Skip Tracer will premiere on November 29.
   
• Super Channel is once again co-presenting a hybrid version of Blood in the Snow (BITS), a Toronto-based film festival devoted to contemporary Canadian horror films, with movies airing nightly on SC Fuse from November 21 to 26.

Mailbag

Here's some of the reader questions we've received recently by email (hello@wherecaniwatch.ca) or Twitter (@wherewatchtv). 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.

Shane: I’m sure you’re following the latest on the Nasim Pedrad TBS show Chad [the first season of which aired in Canada on CTV Comedy] and how The Roku Channel has picked up the second season. Might Chad fall into an unavailable-to-stream limbo zone in Canada similar to what happened with Evil and SEAL Team [Global / Paramount+]? I imagine Bell Media has no incentive to assist with sorting out the rights.

WCIW: It's hard to say, but it may be worth pointing out here that Bell's rights for TBS/TNT's in-house series have generally been much more limited than, say, for HBO programming (despite also originating with the former WarnerMedia), or even compared to what Corus had for the two series you mentioned (which had multiple repeats on other Corus specialty channels). Series like Claws and Miracle Workers haven't streamed on Crave and have only had limited-time availability on the CTV app. So the kind of stalemate that occurred between Corus / Paramount seems a bit less likely to us here, but it's possible.

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