Some of the hundreds of millions burned on Quibi went to a 14 episode remake of The Fugitive, which has been deemed the show’s first bad version. But star Kiefer Sutherland is making the promotional rounds, and he hopes everyone can just get back to work. As for Quibi, what was launched as a paid app is now flirting with being offered for free.
Nostalgia for the fuzzier future
Virtual roller-coasters were the best Canada’s Wonderland could do while awaiting Ontario’s approval for its reopening plan. But since this style of park was deemed too risky until all of the province reaches Stage 3, it’s written off operations for 2020. Marineland was permitted to reopen in Niagara Falls, but without rides or shows.
Alan Thicke’s musical legacy is entering the Canadian Songwriters Hall of Fame. The themes for Diff’rent Strokes and The Facts of Life will get their proper due, along with the original Wheel of Fortune opening—which was one of several game show themes Thicke wrote. The posthumous induction ceremony for Thicke will be televised Friday.
Stanning gone beyond Avonlea
Friends of Canadian Broadcasting have seized upon the Anne with an E cancellation uprising to argue that Netflix pulling support of the series reflects the need for more intervention from Ottawa. The phenomenon of more than a million signatures to a petition to revive it, however, reflects a new level of absorption that transcends watching a show:
A brutally botched undercover operation turns into a deal with Apple TV. Robert Downey Jr. will co-produce an adaptation of the saga of Alan Dale Smith, the Oshawa, Ontario, man acquitted in 2014 after being coerced into confessing to a 1974 murder. Michael Lista’s recent Toronto Life story about the case provides grist for the series.
Finally, the theme of quarantine
Powfu, the basement recording identity of Isaiah Faber, a 21-year-old from Vancouver—whose dad was a Cancon pop punk star earlier this century—climbed many charts with his simplistic sadboi song. It remains to be seen if fame lies beyond “Death Bed (Coffee For Your Head),” but it was an inevitable commercial for a doughnut shop: