Watching This Week #93 [Updated]

Update: A few hours after posting this week's newsletter, we realized we'd overlooked an announcement sent to us late last week by Hollywood Suite, confirming that they would carry the Ethan Hawke-directed HBO Max docuseries The Last Movie Stars, starting January 12. We've updated our existing article about the series with more information.

Welcome to the December 19, 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. Read on for news about winter programming plans on CTV, Citytv, and W Network, and an attempt to answer a mailbag question about the year ahead.

Just a heads-up: Barring significant news, this will be our last full edition of this newsletter until January 9. You will still get a newsletter next Monday morning, but it will only contain listings for that week, as we do not expect any significant programming news between now and then. We'll then send our monthly listings for January the following weekend.

What's new this week – December 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). Particularly notable premieres (in our rough estimation) are bolded. *An asterisk denotes programming added in past weeks that we've learned about (or has been rescheduled) since our last newsletter.

• Netflix: The Seven Deadly Sins: Grudge of Edinburgh Part 1 (anime film – Tuesday); Emily in Paris (season 3 – Wednesday); Alice in Borderland (season 2 – Thursday); Mathieu Dufour at Bell Centre (stand-up special – Thursday); Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery (Rian Johnson film – Friday); After Ever Happy (2022 film sequel – Sunday); Roald Dahl's Matilda The Musical (film – Sunday); The Witcher: Blood Origin (prequel miniseries – Sunday);
• Disney+: Homeland (season 8 [previously on Crave] – Tuesday); Grails (sneaker industry docuseries – Wednesdays); Game of Sharks (Nat Geo Channel series – Friday); Strange World (2022 animated film – Friday)
• Crave: Call Me Miss Cleo (HBO Max doc – Thursday, Dec. 15*); Sex Diaries (HBO docuseries – Fridays starting Dec. 16*); Clerk. (2021 doc about Kevin Smith – Monday); Acting Good (season 1 of the CTV Comedy series – Friday); Eraser: Reborn (2022 action fim – Friday); The Outfit (2022 thriller film – Friday); Peace by Chocolate (2021 Canadian drama film – Friday); A Christmas to Treasure (2022 film – Sunday)
• Prime Video: Jack Ryan (season 3 – Wednesday); The Invitation (2022 horror film – Saturday)
• CBC Gem: Call the Midwife (season 11 – Thursday)
• Paramount+ (also available as a channel on Prime Video and Apple TV): GameStop: Rise of the Players (2022 doc – Tuesday); Munich Games (thriller series – Tuesday); Top Gun: Maverick (2022 action film – Thursday)
• Apple TV+: The Boy, The Mole, The Fox and The Horse (animated film – Sunday)
• BritBox (also available as a channel on Prime Video and Apple TV): Carols from King's 2022 (Saturday)
• Super Channel (also available as a channel on Prime Video and Apple TV): Upright (season 2 of the Australian dramedy series – Sundays starting Dec. 18*)

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.

• Deals that we've mentioned in past weeks that remain available include: gift cards worth $100 for Crave for $75 (through Jan. 4); two months of CBC Gem Premium for $1 per month (through Dec. 20); and two free months of Apple TV+ for new and some returning customers (through Jan. 13).

Programming news

• There were more winter programming announcements from the major Canadian broadcasters this past week.
   
  Let's start with CTV, which, in addition to the previously announced Alert (debuts Jan. 8), Night Court (Jan. 22), and True Lies (Mar. 1), will be adding crime drama Will Trent (20th Television for ABC – Jan. 3); reality series The Parent Test (Eureka Productions for ABC, based on the Australian format – Jan. 5); RuPaul-hosted game show Lingo (All3Media-owned Objective Media for CBS, based on the 2021 UK reboot of the 1980s format that also inspired Wordle – Jan. 11); comedy Not Dead Yet (20th Television for ABC – Feb. 8); drama The Company You Keep (20th Television for ABC, based on the Korean format – Feb. 19); and drama Found (Warner Bros. for NBC – Feb. 19).
   
• Much of Citytv's winter schedule will continue to be taken up with franchises like The Bachelor, One Chicago, Law & Order, and Hockey Night in Canada, leaving little room for much else. But new Canadian cop show Wong & Winchester debuts January 17, and the network will be the new Canadian home of the Golden Globe Awards when the supposedly rehabilitated ceremony returns after a year off of TV on Tuesday, January 10; the last televised ceremony in 2021 aired in Canada on CTV (it remains on NBC in the U.S.). The Globes telecast is produced by Dick Clark Productions, which already sells the Canadian rights to New Year's Rockin' Eve to Citytv.
   
  More interesting is the launch of three series listed as being "exclusive to Citytv+", the network's paid streaming channel on Prime Video: comedy series Paul T. Goldman (Annapurna / Lionsgate for Peacock – Jan. 1); Australian comedy Colin from Accounts (CBS Studios for Foxtel – Jan. 2); and mystery drama Poker Face starring Natasha Lyonne (T-Street / MRC for Peacock, distributed internationally by Paramount – Jan. 26).
   
  Before cable subscribers start racing over to Prime Video though, it recently came to our attention that Leopard Skin, an action series starring Carla Gugino that seems to be in the same vein as her previous Cinemax series Jett, and is available on Peacock in the U.S., has been promoted as available on Citytv+, but is also on-demand under the CitytvNow folder on some providers including Rogers Cable, though it is not available on the Citytv website or app (and, to our knowledge, there are no plans to air it on any Rogers linear channels). It's possible that these three other series might be handled similarly, but we may not know for sure until January.
   
• W Network has also announced its winter lineup, which includes Canada-set Hallmark Channel series The Way Home starring Chyler Leigh and Andie MacDowell (premieres Jan. 22); original movie anthology series The Love Club (Feb. 6); and Peacock limited series The Best Man: The Final Chapters (Mar. 16, a few months after its U.S. release). As usual, there are plenty of new Hallmark Channel movies, while season 2 of One of Us is Lying premieres on January 19 (after its Peacock release in October).
   
• Finally, some streaming services are starting to announce programming plans for January, including CBC Gem (which is adding, among other programs, British series Death and Nightingales and I Hate You), and Netflix (which, in addition to its various original programs, is adding the final seasons of NBC/CTV's This Is Us on Jan. 4 and AMC's The Walking Dead on Jan. 6). We don't have full listings for Crave yet, but it appears it will be carrying Universal/DreamWorks' The Bad Guys starting January 1, and Focus Features' The Northman on January 6.

Other notes

• As we noted last week was in the works, Corus Entertainment's streaming package StackTV has now added Disney Channel, Disney Junior and Disney XD, alongside existing Disney-partnered Corus service National Geographic Channel. (The other channel we speculated could be included, ABC Spark, was not added after all.)
   
• In addition to its own website/app, the ad-free version of Discovery+ is now also available in Canada through Prime Video's channels marketplace. (Ignore the part of the press release referring to content from channels like A&E and History, which still doesn't apply in Canada.)
   
• Meanwhile, in other Warner Bros. Discovery news, the company has been continuing to pull content off HBO Max, including series such as Westworld, The Nevers, and Legendary, as well as Lionsgate-produced series Minx and Love Life, as part of another (and supposedly last possible) round of merger-related tax write-offs.
   
  The WBD-owned series in that set will, according to multiple reports, be packaged together with the rights sold to a FAST platform, which will generate revenue, but apparently that will not be significant enough to prevent WBD from being able to take the write-offs.
   
  None of this, however, seems likely to impact existing international rightsholders like Crave, which as of this writing is still hosting all of the above-listed series. We suppose that that also counts as "insignificant" revenue for accounting purposes.

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.

Jim: There seems to be quite a lot of wheeling, dealing, price increasing and general consolidating going on amongst the current streaming services south of the border. Does this bode well or ill for us Canadian subscribers in 2023?

WCIW: We're not sure the amount of deal-making has changed significantly year-to-year, though it’s perhaps been more visible in the past year as certain parts of the streaming market start to shake out. Certainly, the scale of some these deals has grown over time.

In the short term, we think things will continue to move fairly gradually here – perhaps more gradually than many in Canada would like – at least for now. The impact of the deals of the past year or so, like the Warner-Discovery merger, will take a few years to become clear here because of existing content sales agreements, and there will be some effects from regulatory changes like the Online Streaming Act (Bill C-11) which will take time to work through.

But even compared to a few years ago, clearly many of the major studios are getting more aggressive in bringing content into their in-house services, or to consistent international homes (as with BBC Studios selling Doctor Who rights to Disney+).

Now, is that shift good or bad? It depends to some extent on how much content you consume and how much you pay for it – were you content to pay a flat rate from a TV provider (or a couple of services like Netflix or Crave) for a wide selection of programs from numerous sources – or are you happier being able to pick from among the numerous, but individually less expensive, direct-to-consumer options that are coming on the market? To be clear, this particular trend isn't that much different in Canada compared to, say, the States, but the extent of the shift hasn't been as pronounced here until this past year or so.

But in short: it's complicated.

Doug: I tried this week to watch the last season of Better Things on Disney+, but the entire series has been removed from that site. Seasons 1-4 are still on FX Canada. I know the entire series was on Disney+, including the final season 5, as I started watching an episode there a few months ago? Any idea what's going on?

WCIW: We can confirm the same results when we looked for Pamela Adlon's FX dramedy series, and we agree, this is odd. It seems to remain available on Disney+ in other countries. If forced to guess, we'd wonder if there’s something in Rogers’ current FX Canada / Citytv+ deal that gives them temporary exclusivity on these older seasons for pre-determined periods of time, but even if that was the case, why would season 5 be missing from both?

We'll continue to keep an eye on this.

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