via Lifebuoy
The taxpayer funded CBC (Canadian Broadcasting Corporation) has been pushing this show like few I've seen before. I think the CBC would ultimately like to rid itself of its only ever successful somewhat world famous program "Hockey Night In Canada", featuring Don Cherry's latest jacket. But are Mommy boobs at 9:30 the answer?
35-year old actress-producer-writer-director Catherine Reitman [1][2][3][4] Nude Debut (Breasts), 36-year old Canadian actress Dani Kind [1][2][3][4][5][6] (Breasts) & 35-year old Juno Rinaldi née Ruddell [1][2] (Breasts), Katherine Barrell, Jane McLean & Nikki Duval in Workin' Moms [S1E1]
Mega.Co.Nz
An article critical of Workin' Moms, which confirms my suspicions about Reitman's Beverly Hills upbringing and that she can't relate to average Canadian women.
John Doyle: CBC’s Workin’ Moms reeks of entitlement and privilege
The new and heavily promoted CBC comedy Workin’ Moms (Tuesday, CBC, 9:30 p.m.) is not so much a comedy as it is a celebration of middle-class mothers going back to work after maternity leave. This is a tad confusing: See, it’s not funny.
“Eat a bag of dicks,” Kate (Catherine Reitman, also the show’s creator) mutters to a group of moms with strollers who just want her honkin’ big SUV to move so they can cross the street. It’s a peculiar moment in the show’s second episode. Why is she insulting these other moms? One gets the impression it’s because they are not bourgeois, working at an advertising agency and driving that big honkin’ car.
The core characters, those “workin’ moms” are Kate, Jenny (Jessalyn Wanlim), Anne (Dani Kind) and Frankie (Juno Rinaldi). We meet them at some sort of yoga/therapy class. Two are discussing their postbaby boobs. Yes. We get a look. It’s that kind of show.
Kate, who features heavily, is eager to get back to work at the agency. Husband Nathan (Philip Sternberg, who is also Reitman’s husband) is all for it, but issues mild warnings about Kate taking on too much. At the office, Kate meets her boss (Peter Keleghan, doing his patented, unctuous smoothy) and right away there is an issue with Kate, her breast pump and a meeting. Naturally, Kate triumphs, impresses the client and outmanoeuvres a male colleague. It’s utterly predictable. Anyone who thinks the material is funny is delusional.
Frankie is a successful real estate agent and struggling with depression. A least it might be depression. It’s hard to tell because there is a lot of emphasis on how kooky Frankie is.
Anne is a blunt-taking psychiatrist who figures she is done with having kids but, then, fate intervenes.
This is one of those shows set in a world in which neither birth control nor abortion seem to exist.
Jenny, who we really get to know in the second episode, is an IT specialist, and reluctant to return to work. Her partner is not pleased, because he wants her to work while he writes his screenplay about vampires. Glumly back at work, she is bored, and a colleague e-mails her a sexy story about a plumber. While Jenny does the breast-pump thing at the office, she masturbates too. It’s that kind of show.
Thing is, mind you, exactly and precisely what kind of show this purports to be isn’t all that clear.
The moms represent only a very specific, urban-bourgeois type. Their troubles are tiny, they live in luxury and their only contact with anything approaching the reality of contemporary life is via their nannies. A nanny is fired fairly promptly, by the way.
Me, I have every sympathy for working mothers. And the show asks us to have sympathy for the characters, but where the funny comes into it is beyond me. The series just reeks of entitlement and requests us to have sympathy for elites.
Oddly, to me, Workin’ Moms celebrates what was mocked with deft scorn by the Baroness Von Sketch series and the Canadian comedy Sunnyside. So, whose side are we supposed to be on? If it’s these appallingly smug people, heaven help us all.
Granted, a huge industry has been built around new motherhood and a vast online world is devoted to discussing and exalting the arena of breast pumps, back-to-work issues and finding the balance between baby, work and partner. Perhaps there is a ready-made audience for Workin’ Moms in that world. Perhaps not – maybe that audience too will be appalled by the smug shallowness and the privilege being revered here.
Leanne Delap: Catherine Reitman takes maternal power back in Workin’ Moms
Reitman’s CBC comedy tackles postpartum depression, mommy guilt and workplace humiliation.
How long is too long to look at three sets of naked mom boobs onscreen? This question tormented Catherine Reitman, the creator, executive producer, star and also a writer and director of Workin’ Moms, which debuts Tuesday, Jan. 10 at 9:30 p.m. on CBC.
The best comedy involves leaning into the exact place where discomfort is maximized.
“I’ve seen it cut more than 75 ways,” says Reitman. “Turns out five seconds is the magical mark.”
The breasts in question appear in the opening scene for the pilot of the 13-part, half-hour original comedy series. They belong to three of the lead actors in the four-woman ensemble cast, and each pair has nursed two boys in real life.
“To be clear,” says Reitman, “that is six young boys breastfed by the three of us.”
They are visual punctuation in a frank discussion about the ravages of childbearing. The setting is a mother’s group circle, which happens to already be one of the most awkward situations in the world.
“We made a law never to show nudity in reference to sexuality,” says Reitman. “This shot is about vulnerability. Breastfeeding takes a toll on your body. . . your spirit.
“I think that’s why sitting shoulder to shoulder in a tableau shot for the opening image of our show, alongside these brave women, excited me. It was in many ways a way of taking our power back.”
Reitman, 35, knows a thing or two about taking power back. The Los Angeles-based daughter of Canadian directing icon Ivan Reitman (and sister of producer/director Jason Reitman), says before she wrote stuff for herself, she was always cast as “the best friend or the villain.”
She is best known for her roles on Black-ish and It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, as well as movies such as Knocked Up. She has also created a plucky, acerbic movie review web series called Breakin’ It Down with Catherine Reitman.
Workin’ Moms, aside from its four-female friends ensemble format, also has some of the pop-culture envelope-pushing of both Sex And The City, where we first learned about Brazilian waxes and female ejaculation, and Girls, which gave us cringe-y hipster dinner parties, copious masturbation and parents caught having sex.
Workin’ Moms mines such tricky domestic territory as postpartum depression, judgmental nannies, ornery grandparents and workplace resentments, humiliations and flirtations. And on a macro level, it examines the effects of being simultaneously scrutinized from the outside while lacerating yourself with mommy guilt from the inside.
But at its heart, this compulsively watchable series is about the big, fat identity crisis that comes with the baby they hand you at the hospital door. When Jenny, played by Jessalyn Wanlim (Orphan Black) is asked, “Why don’t you try being yourself?” her response is: “I don’t even know what that is.”
The narrative conceit here is that these friends have not chosen to be friendly, rather they are all a part of a mother’s group each has to stick with in order to get her offspring into a choice preschool.
“This isn’t a mom-com,” says Reitman. “I hate that word!”
Instead, her risk was in making moms, the last great sacred cows, unlikeable.
“Flaws are really interesting,” she says. “We only see female protagonists who are likeable, with one cute flaw, such as adorable clumsiness. I’m fed up with it. Humans are incredibly selfish. And in parents, flaws become hyper focused.”
She sees the show as an antidote to the forced-sunniness of the Mommy Blogger era we just survived, wherein domestic perfection was Instagrammed by Stepford robots.
Reitman herself secretly feels those types are living lives of quiet desperation. She made one of the peripheral characters in the mommy circle “perfect,” and thus the least relatable of the bunch.
The cast also includes Anne, played by Dani Kind (The Good Witch), a magnificently angry, truth-telling shrink with a difficult preteen daughter, a baby and an unplanned pregnancy. And Juno Rinaldi (The Killing) plays Frankie, whose lesbian marriage is shaken by her postpartum depression.
That last situation was something Reitman mined from her own life. (She quit her own preschool-stream mother’s group when she brought up her dark feelings only to have the moderator pave her over for a discussion about baby yoga.) This whole series is art imitating life: Reitman’s real life husband, Philip Sternberg, is a co-executive producer and plays her husband in the series.
The pair got news the series had been green-lit the day after they found out Reitman was expecting their second son; their first son is now 3. She went into the (all-female) writer’s room heavily pregnant, giving birth at the end of May before principal shooting began in August.
Of course it is hard, she says, and she misses her sons “every hour,” on the 18-hour days on set. To make matters worse, guilt-wise, she spent a great deal of time with the twins who played her onscreen child. Reitman in fact really piled on some extra filming challenges, shooting with four sets of twins, a dog and a 1,400-pound bear.
“The unrealistic expectation is that you stop caring about who you are. I haven’t stopped developing, but it feels selfish to ask for that. Society expects us to hit a brick wall. A whole lot of honesty, and a whole lot of my own experiences, went into this. But there is humour in the dark places.”
The city of Toronto is also a character. For a place that stands-in for some many metropolises, Reitman and her team set out deliberately to shoot on location around town, from the Rosedale ravine to the Beaches to a burrito joint on Queen West, from Flock on Harbord to Lee’s Palace. The home of each character is shown, adding a neighbourhood real estate fix to the mix.
“You can feel the real, and it adds roots to these worlds,” says Reitman.
Reitman’s own roots in the city are just down the street from the CBC building she is speaking in.
“I got ready at my Mom and Dad’s condo this morning,” she says, of the place the Reitmans keep in the TIFF Bell Lightbox complex.
The land underneath, formerly a parking lot, was donated for its current use as the epicentre of TIFF by the family after the death of her grandparents, who originally ran a dry-cleaning business on the spot.
Today, their entertainment-business progeny bring their new film and television projects to share on the very same land.
Audrey Goodson Kingo: This New TV Show Opens with Three Topless Women, and We Totally Approve
Actresses Jessalyn Wanlim, Dani Kind, Catherine Reitman and Juno Rinaldi play four working moms in a new Canadian TV show.
A new TV show will debut on Jan. 10 featuring three topless women in its opening scene, and no, it’s not a scandalous drama on HBO or Cinemax. It’s a series on the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation called Workin’ Moms, and the nudity is meant to prove an important point.
“Bringing up a child, you lose a certain amount of privacy with your body and what happens to your body is incredibly humbling,” says Catherine Reitman, the show's creator, executive producer, writer and star. (You may recognize her as Anthony Anderson’s slyly funny coworker on Black-ish.)
“To create a show about a mom where you don’t witness what happens to a mom’s body felt inauthentic to me… to not show it in a raw and honest way,” she continues. “It’s funny, but I also find heart and truth in it.”
The show begins with a scene that is familiar to many working moms: Three women chat at daycare, holding their babies and lamenting how motherhood has done a number on their breasts. Suddenly, the next shot shows the ladies with their tatas completely exposed.
And lest you think this is another case of dazzling Hollywood actresses pretending to have mom bods, think again: Reitman and the actresses who co-star in the scene, Dani Kind and Juno Rinaldi, all have kids.
In fact, Reitman cited her experience as a new working mom as the inspiration for the show—like the time she broke down crying in front of her male colleagues shortly after returning from maternity leave. Her character Kate does the same, and faces other common working mom dilemmas, from breast pumping (and squirting!) in the bathroom to reluctantly leaving her little one with the sitter.
“I think that’s part of being a mother and a parent,” Reitman says. “There are moments of comedy and moments of pain. But, usually, in those moments of pain you have to laugh.”
Let’s give credit to our Northern neighbors for daring to bare it all—it’s hard to imagine this happening on an American television network. Here in the U.S., we still see breasts largely as objects of sexual desire. After all, it was only a few years ago that Facebook revised its policy to allow moms to post breastfeeding photos that revealed a nipple. (Hey Facebook, men have those, too.)
Remember Nipplegate and the brouhaha that resulted from Janet Jackson’s “wardrobe malfunction” at the 2004 Super Bowl halftime show? The message is clear: Breasts are intended for male satisfaction, and baring them is inherently a taboo act.
But Reitman is right. Those societal constraints don’t jibe with the reality of becoming a mother, when modesty takes a backseat to necessity. During pregnancy, we get poked and prodded where the sun don’t shine too many times to count. And nudity is the least of our concerns during labor. For breastfeeding moms, boobs become something different altogether: all at once a blessing, a burden and a mundane method of delivering sustenance.
As a breastfeeding mom myself, I’ve grown completely nonplussed about whipping the girls out whenever and wherever necessary. The park? No problem. With friends? They’ve seen boobs before.
At church? Hey, the Pope approves.
I’m a big believer that baring it all—from C-Section scars to struggles with fertility—is key to lessening the stigma that surrounds so much of motherhood. Finally, there’s a TV show revealing the unvarnished truth about being a working mom. Now, how can we get it to come to America?
Bridget Liszewski: Dani Kind on Anne’s Unapologetically Frank Attitude in Workin’ Moms
Q: Workin’ Moms boasts a predominately female cast and crew. What was that like for you as an actress, especially when you are filming scenes that are very raw emotionally or that involve some nudity, such as the opening scene of the series?
DK: I’ve had to do nudity on sets before, but it was nudity that related to sexuality. This was a different kind of nudity, this related to breastfeeding, which I have experienced twice with both my sons. I think regardless if the crew was filled with men or women, the kinds of people we had on our show were so generous and really kept the space safe for all of us actors. That’s the thing that made such a difference.
Though I can say, I have never worked on a set with this many women before and on our very first day when I walked in, and saw an entire main unit camera team of women, I felt extremely emotional. It hit something very deep in me, it was important.
Darrell Hookey (2009): Stories of the Scientific Nude
Yes, they know it is cold in the Yukon.
The cast of Studies in Motion has been checking out the temperatures here daily.
Yet they will all be nude sometime during the play when it shows at the Yukon Arts Centre March 24 to 27.
"I was already nude on that stage a couple of months ago," Jonathon Young says bravely. "It was fine."
That would have been the occasion of his solo performance in The Invisible Life of Joseph Finch.
This time, he has a lot more company as he will be joined by 11 other cast members as they examine the life of pioneer photographer, Eadweard Muybridge.
"You couldn't do a show about him without nudity," says Young over the phone during a break from rehearsal in Vancouver.
If you see a series of vintage still photographs of a nude man or woman performing a mundane task, it was likely taken by Muybridge.
"The fascinating thing of these motion studies is that the people are completely naked and doing acrobatics, walking up stairs, throwing spears, spanking children, and they all look slightly self-conscious about it.
"They weren't so different than us.
"You then get past the portrait, where the subject is staring into the camera and all dressed up in button vests, and you see them as more vulnerable."
And the question of the day, as it is so often today, was, "Is this pornography?"
"He got around it by claiming this is a scientific study and we would understand the world better," says Young. "Doctors and scientists would use these studies."
And yet Muybridge would push the boundaries by recording a woman beating another woman with a broom, two women flirting and opening the chest of a turtle to see its beating heart.
"Kevin [Barr, the playwright] is playing with this man who is trying to understand human nature by breaking it into small, reliable pieces," says Young, paraphrasing a line from the play.
And just as Muybridge examined the nude within a scientific context – filming nudes walking in front of a grid – the play has a parallel effect of making the audience comfortable: "None of it is sexual nudity and it is something you get past quickly," says Young.
"Let's put us in a catalogue with all of the other animals and see what we have in common ... see what unites us."
This pre-occupation of Muybridge's did, after all, begin with the study of a horse's trot. Did all four hooves leave the ground at one time?
Leland Stanford hired Muybridge to settle the question (legend has it there was a $25,000 bet involved) and, with the innovation of a chemical developers and an electrical trigger for a shutter, he was successful in contributing toward the development of motion pictures.
His own Zoopraxiscope projector was used to show moving pictures at the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition and is considered to be the first commercial movie theatre.
It is this blending of science and culture that has found another parallel with Studies in Motion: Robert Gardiner, a professor with the University of British Columbia's Department of Theatre, Film and Creative Writing, approached Electric Company Theatre about his vision of using film projectors as a lighting source for the stage.
The Muybridge story was already being considered and was determined to be the ideal play to join the two ideas.
Writers and designers and choreographers worked together to bring the play to the stage.
"The play is set on a grid," says Young. "It goes back and forth from the well-ordered scientific approach to understanding ourselves and the chaos of his past actions."
These past actions include killing his wife's lover, claiming he was innocent from a well-documented brain damage, but getting off due to "justifiable homicide".
And, although none of the actors are dancers, there are "physical sections that are dance-like" that were built in, says Young. These were choreographed by Crystal Pite.
All female "A" Camera crew
cheeks_unit (Oct 29 2016): Thank you to these wonderful women who brought their tremendous talents, skills and amazing energy to the first season of #workinmomscbc. And what do you know! Seems we made a bit of history when we became IATSE 667's first ever all-female A Camera team. The power of friendship and support is a real thing. Thank you @lainieknox, @wojocam, @sea_bean, Madison, Savannah - and of course B Cam friends LB, Mark and @travisgreywolf. And to the inimitable @reitcatou, the creative giant who brought this miracle project into our lives, thank you forever.