Watching This Week #88

Hi! This is the November 14, 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.

It's been a slow week for the kind of programming news we cover, but we do have a couple of items, plus we try to answer reader questions about Hellraiser, PGA Tour streaming rights, and Netflix's timing for adding new series. That's all after the listings for the coming week.

What's new this week – November 14–20

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(s) 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: Stutz (doc about the psychiatrist – Monday); Teletubbies (2nd reboot – Monday); Deon Cole: Charleen's Boy (stand-up special – Tuesday); Due South (1994–99 series – Wednesday); Mind Your Manners (etiquette series – Wednesday); The Wonder (period film – Wednesday); 1899 (German series – Thursday); Christmas with You (rom-com film – Thursday); Dead to Me (season 3 – Thursday); I Am Vanessa Guillen (true crime doc – Thursday); Pepsi, Where's My Jet? (docuseries – Thursday); The Cuphead Show! (part 3 – Friday); Elite (season 6 – Friday); Inside Job (part 2 – Friday); Slumberland (fantasy film – Friday)
• Disney+: Ben Gri (Turkish series – Wednesdays); Limitless with Chris Hemsworth (Nat Geo series – Wednesday); Fleishman is In Trouble (FX drama miniseries – Thursdays); multiple ESPN 30 for 30 documentaries (Friday); Best in Snow (snow-sculpting special – Friday); Disenchanted (musical film sequel – Friday); Mickey: The Story of a Mouse (doc – Friday); The Wonderful World of Mickey Mouse autumn special (Friday); Elton John Live: Farewell from Dodger Stadium (concert film – Sunday)
• Crave: Master of Light (art doc – Wednesday); A Christmas Story Christmas (comedy film sequel – Thursday); The Sex Lives of College Girls (season 2 – Thursdays); Canada's Drag Race: Canada vs. the World (reality spin-off series – Fridays); Gremlins (1984 film – Friday); The L Word: Generation Q (season 3 – Fridays); The Pope's Apology (CTV News special – Friday); The Score (musical heist film – Friday); Ziwe (season 2, part 2 – Fridays); 2022 Rock & Roll Hall of Fame Induction Ceremony (Saturday)
• Prime Video: The People We Hate at the Wedding (comedy film – Friday); Sugar (crime drama film – Friday); Where the Crawdads Sing (mystery thriller film – Friday)
• CBC Gem: Sort Of (season 2 [also on CBC TV] – Tuesdays); The Cuban (drama film – Friday); Documentary Now! (season 4 – Fridays); Express (Spanish series – Friday); Grand Designs Australia (season 10 – Friday)
• Paramount+ (also available as a channel on Prime Video and Apple TV): Moment of Truth: Defining Stories of the FIFA World Cup (docuseries – Tuesday); Blue's Big City Adventure (kids film – Friday)
• Apple TV+: Spirited (musical comedy film starring Will Ferrell and Ryan Reynolds – Friday); Fraggle Rock: Back to the Rock holiday special (Friday); Interrupting Chicken (preschool series – Friday)
• BritBox (also available as a channel on Prime Video and Apple TV): Crossfire (action miniseries – Tuesday); past seasons of various British cooking reality series (Friday)
• AMC+ (also available as a channel on Prime Video and Apple TV): Gangs of London (season 2 – Thursdays)
• Starz (also available as an add-on/channel on Crave, Prime Video, and Apple TV): Hot Seat (action film – Friday)
• Adult Swim (also on StackTV): Rick and Morty (season 6, part 2 – Sundays at 11:00 p.m. ET)

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.

• Crave Total, the direct-to-consumer version of Bell Media's streaming service that allows for 4K streaming on multiple devices, is currently available for $119.90 for a one-year subscription, or $89.94 for a six-month subscription, for "new, reactivating, and upgrading" subscribers. The former is $80 off the regular one-year subscription price for that tier, and only $20 more than the annual price for the single-device Crave Mobile tier. The deal is available until end of day (Eastern time) on Tuesday, November 29.
   
  Interestingly, the wording of the offer suggests that the service will renew at the reduced price indefinitely, though we wouldn't treat that as guaranteed.
   
• BritBox is currently offering a "pre-Black Friday" sale – one year for $59, a $40 savings off the regular annual price, with promo code EEA-49 – which ends tonight (Monday, November 14) at 11:59 p.m. Pacific time.

Programming news

• UK reality competition series The Great Big Tiny Design Challenge, hosted by Sandi Toksvig, will air in Canada on Makeful, Thursday nights at 10:00 p.m. ET/PT beginning this week (November 17), according to a release we received from the channel.
   
• A couple of readers did write in to point out that the subject of The Roku Channel's Weird: The Al Yankovic Story has seemed to tacitly endorse other ways of accessing the film.
   
  All we'll say on the matter is that, if you happen to be, um, travelling in the U.S. any time soon, you should be able to watch the movie on the web for free by using this link (which is geoblocked in Canada). Alternatively, as we've noted before, you could just get a Roku device.

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.

Morgan: Any word yet on if or when the new Hellraiser movie will be available in Canada? It was released on Hulu in the U.S. on October 7.

WCIW: We touched on Hellraiser a few weeks ago, but in short, it’s our understanding that the international rights are owned by the producers – Spyglass Media – not Disney, even though it’s on Hulu in the U.S.

We did check this past week and saw a listing on the Apple TV / iTunes Store indicating that digital purchase will be available starting December 2, though at a fairly steep price to start ($19.99).

It might still come to a subscription streaming service in Canada at some point, but it’s not yet clear to us where or when.

Jim: Why is Netflix so slow in picking up recent seasons of shows it already has?  I think of Fargo, New Amsterdam, This Is Us and Better Call Saul as the biggest disappointments in terms of time between season instalments.  Is it just an issue of licensing?

WCIW: As far as we know, yes, it's just part of the licensing terms. We'd assume that, all else being equal, Netflix would be happy to add those shows as soon as the studios / distributors make them available.

Some of the delays may be related to contracts with those series' first-run broadcast homes. But the delays for the final seasons of some shows have occasionally been longer. In the case of This Is Us – a series that ended this past spring which was produced by a studio now owned by Disney, even though it aired on the U.S. on NBC – it's possible one side or the other is deliberately dragging things out to maximize its benefits under the existing contract.

Sylvain: Warner Bros. Discovery just announced the upcoming closure of its standalone GolfTV streaming service at the end of this year. Does this mean that the streaming rights of the PGA will be coming to Discovery+ Canada?

WCIW: Discovery Inc. and the PGA Tour (which is distinct from the PGA of America, which has its own broadcast deals for its events like the PGA Championship) announced a twelve-year agreement covering international broadcast rights to the tour, including in Canada, in early 2018 that took effect in 2019 and is scheduled to run until 2030. GolfTV – not to be confused with the NBC-operated Golf Channel cable service – emerged as a result of that deal, but its closure does not seem to have come as a surprise given WBD's recent statements on standalone services like CNN+.

Since Discovery's deal took effect, it's our understanding that Bell Media has been sublicensing a portion of those PGA Tour rights from Discovery, which is how weekend coverage of tour events has continued to air on TSN (and broadcast coverage of events like the Canadian Open moved from Global back to CTV/CTV2 in 2019). If you watched closely during the commercial breaks in these events, these broadcasts had been including promos for GolfTV.

Our take: even though Discovery+ does have sports coverage like the Olympics in Europe, at this point WBD won't want to rock the boat too much with Discovery+ Canada, at least until it knows what it plans to do long-term in the Canadian streaming market. Adding one sports property to what, in Canada, remains a reality-focused streaming service doesn't really make much sense.

Most likely, those rights could be added on to the sublicensed rights Bell / TSN is already getting, for streaming on the TSN app. Or, depending on the state of the Bell–WBD relationship (or if TSN just doesn't want them), WBD could sublicense to another service like DAZN, which has had short-term deals with the PGA Tour in the past. But moving that coverage to Discovery+ Canada seems unlikely, except as a last resort.

Recent updates on WCIW

Ahead of last night's season premiere, we've posted an extensive rewrite of our article about Yellowstone – new episodes of which are now exclusive to Paramount+ in Canada.

This past week, we also made a few updates to our article about Wheel of Fortune and Jeopardy!, mainly to help viewers in the Maritimes locate the two shows' broadcast home among the Boston TV stations they may get, specifically on Fridays during football season.

Thanks for reading – we greatly appreciate your support. If you like this newsletter, please consider forwarding to a friend who might be interested, or if you're in a position to do so, support our hosting costs with a paid subscription, which includes access to our movie streaming rights database, or on a one-time basis via our Buy Me a Coffee page.

If you're new to Watching This Week, you can catch up on past editions here, and sign up to receive future editions on our website at https://www.wherecaniwatch.ca/newsletter/. Or, if you're reading this on the web, you can use the form directly below.

We'll see you again next week.