Men With Brooms for 2010
The new faces of curling in "Long Bay, Canada"
As we’ve known since last fall, and first revealed back in February, a new half-hour TV comedy based on the 2002 curling movie Men With Brooms has been brewing.
Yesterday, Canada’s CBC-TV announced their fall show lineup and MWB is one of only two new shows featuring next season.
What’s more, the new edition of Brooms stands a good chance of capturing eyeballs, as it will air Monday nights immediately following the results show of Battle Of The Blades, last season’s runaway hybrid hit of ex-hockey players in figure skates.
Incidentally, Blades is a property of iSport Media and Management, rights-holders to the Capital One Grand Slam of Curling event series. But we digress.
There’s all kinds of media today on the new Brooms, such as this brief Q&A with original movie maestro Paul Gross – now executive producer, narrator and occasional cameo guy – and some of the new stars (click on photo to increase size).
The Globe and Mail also kicks in with this piece, from which we quote (with editing for accuracy):
Gross said he had an eerie sense of déjà-vu walking back into the curling rink outside Hamilton, where production took place for the pilot.
“When I first went back into the curling rink, I got this Pavlovian reaction, and I thought, God I’m exhausted ... because that’s how I felt making the movie most of the time. I was exhausted,” Gross added.
“But the series has a lovely sort of charm. I thought the pilot was fantastic and the script was really funny. Funnier, actually, than the movie in parts.”
We also like these quotes from producer/writer Paul Mather, from Canadian Press:
“It’s set in the same small town, it’s got the same kind of spirit of the movie but what I keep saying is, it’s a little bit like 'Star Trek: The Next Generation’, ” says Mather.
“We’re not going out of our way to reinvent anything but we’re not matching the art design of the original film. We’re taking some license with that.”
Hmm. We smell a Photoshop contest coming on... captain Jean-Luc Picard gone curling, perhaps?
You can read much, much more from Gross, Mather and others directly from the set of Men With Brooms in our first fall print edition of The Curling News, which will be published in late October.
