Original sketch-comedy series Sunnyside, created by award-winning comedy writers Gary Pearson (This Hour Has 22 Minutes, The Ron James Show, MADtv) and Dan Redican (The Kids in the Hall, The Jenny McCarthy Show, Puppets Who Kill), is shooting new shows. Production on seven half-hour episodes began May 14 in Winnipeg and will run until June 23, completing a full 13-episode first season to air this fall on City.
Sunnyside is co-produced by Toronto-based Counterfeit Pictures and Winnipeg-based Buffalo Gal Pictures. It stars an all-Canadian ensemble cast made up of the industry’s brightest and hottest comedic talents: Kathleen Phillips, Pat Thornton, Alice Moran, Kevin Vidal, Rob Norman and Patrice Goodman. It is set in Sunnyside – a not-so-typical fictional neighbourhood where anything can happen, and almost always does.
Six episodes of Sunnyside aired on City earlier this year, receiving high praise from television critics. Here’s what a few of them had to say:
“It only takes a few minutes to grasp that Sunnyside is a sharp little satire of contemporary urban life – of precious parenting, social-media obsession, yoga and all those other bourgeois traits. As such, it’s a breath of fresh air.”
— John Doyle, The Globe and Mail —
“It isn’t stretching the point to say that Sunnyside is probably Canada’s best sketch-comedy TV effort since Codco and The Kids in the Hallarrived in rapid succession in the late ’80s. And when it comes to Canuck funny biz, that’s about as high as praise gets.…”
— Brad Oswald, Winnipeg Free Press —
“Broken into several vignettes, Sunnyside plays like an absent-minded doodle of a community where walls bleed mysteriously, Satanists run coffee shops and drug addicts fancy themselves the women from Sex and the City. And then there are the ponies. You can’t forget the ponies.”
— Melissa Hank, Postmedia News —
Anton Leo, Shane Corkery and Dan Bennett from Counterfeit Pictures and Phyllis Laing from Buffalo Gal Pictures serve as Executive Producers, Rhonda Baker from Buffalo Gal Pictures as Producer, and Paula J. Smith as Supervising Producer. For Rogers, Nataline Rodrigues is Director of Original Programming, and Hayden Mindell is Vice President of Television Programming & Content. Sunnyside is produced with the participation of Manitoba Film and Music and the Rogers Cable Network Fund.
