10:13 – Barbara is out doing the first major yard work of the season. I’m working on taxes.
CBC announced yesterday that there will be a season 8 of Heartland. Shooting starts next month, so Heather Conkie and the rest of her team must already be working madly on scripts. CBC also renewed another of its flagship series, Murdoch Mysteries, for an eighth season. Barbara and I have already watched the first five series on Amazon streaming, which is all they have available. Series six released on DVD last autumn, so I suspect it should be available soon on Amazon streaming. It’ll be interesting to see the first batch of episodes that were produced under the aegis of CBC after Rogers Media canceled it at the end of series five and CBC picked it up. Given the money crunch at CBC, I was a bit surprised that they elected to renew Murdoch Mysteries. As a period drama set around the turn of the 20th century, it must be very expensive to produce.
Speaking of production costs for Canadian TV series, we were discussing this recently in the comments. My position is that Canadian series pay much, much lower salaries to the actors. And that was confirmed by an interview I read recently with Hélène Joy, who was one of the lead characters in earlier seasons of Murdoch Mysteries. The interview took place four years ago, and she mentioned that her annual income had finally made it into six figures. And even with the leading role in Murdoch Mysteries, she was still working a side job of renovating houses for resale.