Hank For Mayor

CTV's new comedies - Hiccups and Dan For Mayor - have been going for three weeks now. I've yet to tune into Hiccups, but I've caught every episode of Dan For Mayor.

The main reason? Well, it was filmed in Kitchener/Waterloo, so I wanted to see familiar settings on the small screen.

In that respect, the show succeeded. The fictional Wessex City Hall is quite obviously Kitchener's distinctive city hall. The bar where Fred Ewaniuck's titular character works is the Huether. A lot of outdoor scenes are shot in Victoria Park. Kitchener mayor Carl Zehr has fulfilled his lifelong dream of wearing an orange sweater in a cameo appearance on national TV. And so on.

The main character is Dan, a bartender who enters the Wessex mayoral race. Initially seen as a joke candidate, Dan has now risen to 'underdog' status.

I don't remember this being referenced on the show, but according to the show's Twitter feed, Dan's last name is Phillips. Despite the fact that this blog has its own Dan Phillips, who was once a bartender and has spent plenty of time in Kitchener and Waterloo, I do not believe that the character Dan was based on the real Dan.

Moving into the less superficial aspects of the show...it's a little early to tell for sure, but it seems pretty good. (Cue mandatory "especially for a Canadian show") disclaimer.)

DFM's hardest test was going to be giving Ewaniuck a character that made people forget he was the lovable, buffoonish sidekick Hank in Corner Gas. They succeeded. You still get the sense from time to time that he is a little too obviously playing a character, but this character a) isn't a blatant ripoff of Hank, and b) still doesn't seem miscast with Ewaniuck.

Given Ewaniuck and Mark Farrell's involvement with both shows, it's hard not to compare DFM and Corner Gas. The big difference is that Corner Gas was completely episodic - you could watch the shows in any order and not miss a thing. DFM obviously cannot be completely episodic - there's a running plot of Dan running for mayor, so some story progression is a necessity - but it's doing its best. Subplots especially - think Dan's borrowed cat, the Blu-ray player, and so on - seem to be dropped after one episode. I'm not sure whether it's a strength or a weakness, but it does make the show seem like Corner Gas with a new cast and one running plot.

Trying to avoid spoilers here, but I really hope the 'something gets hit by a bus' thing is a couple of isolated incidents and not a running gag. Although come to think of it, Dan's comment that "anytime a bus hits something, I come up aces" does lend credibility to my theory that this is the real-life Dan in a thinly-veiled disguise.

My last comment is an extremely minor nitpick - how old are these characters, exactly? Neither Dan nor his ex-girlfriend nor her fiancee look particularly north of 30, yet one of Dan's co-worker characters is clearly meant to be a generation younger and making fun of all the old people. Moreover, in the first episode, Dan talks about how awesome the Pac-Man arcade game was in the 80s - if he was old enough to remember the 80s, surely he must be at least 35? Seems weird.

Overall though, it's a show I'm very much enjoying, and one I'd keep watching even if they moved the filming to Moncton.

--Ryan

P.S. I'm planning a new online project. Stay tuned.