The Red Green Show is a Canadian half-hour sketch comedy television show produced by Steve Smith and Rick Green. Smith stars as the titular character, Red Green, and the show also features many other characters. The Red Green Show is a self-proclaimed parody of many country fishing and handyman TV shows. The show ran in Canada between January 4, 1991 (although filming began in 1990) and April 7, 2006 and had exactly 300 half-hour episodes in total, including several holiday specials. The show was also broadcast on PBS in the United States, beginning with a test run in the early 1990's on WTVS, the PBS affiliate in Detroit, Michigan[1], and reruns of the show are still broadcast in some areas. Reruns can also now be seen on Heartland, an American digital subchannel network, which added the show to its lineup (airing Tuesdays and Thursdays from 7 PM-8 PM Eastern) in September 2018. For a brief time, the show was also broadcast on Foxtel in Australia and Mercury Television in New Zealand.[2]
A full-length feature film based on The Red Green Show, Duct Tape Forever, was also produced, and the entire series is available on DVD.
Format[]
The main setting for The Red Green Show is the Possum Lodge, in which a television show by the same name is being produced. While the real show encompasses fictional characters and settings, the fictional show is structured as a fishing and handyman show in which Red is the star. The fictional show is produced and directed by Red's nephew Harold until season 9, when Harold leaves Possum Lodge to work at a company in the city. In most episodes, the plot of the fictional show is the same as that for the real show. However, some episodes particularly in the first season, where Harold is critical of Red's "boring" stories center more around the fictional show's production than the stated plot or storyline. For example, in The Network Deal, Harold attempts to line up a contract between the show and a major American television network, and in the premiere episode of the 8th season, Red agrees to start paying Harold to produce the show.
Seasons[]
Main article: Episode Guide
| Number | Episodes | First air date | Last air date | Title | Network |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 24 | January 4, 1991 | 1992 | The Red Green Show | CHCH-TV |
| 2 | 1992 | 1993 | |||
| 3 | September 22, 1993 | March 2, 1994 | CFPL-TV YTV | ||
| 4 | September 24, 1994 | March 4, 1995 | The New Red Green Show | Global | |
| 5 | September 30, 1995 | 1996 | |||
| 6 | September 30, 1996 | 1997 | |||
| 7 | 17 | 1997 | 1998 | CBC | |
| 8 | 14 | 1998 | 1999 | The Red Green Show | |
| 9 | 17 | October 8, 1999 | December 17, 1999 | ||
| 10 | 18 | October 13, 2000 | 2001 | ||
| 11 | 17 | October 12, 2001 | January 25, 2002 | ||
| 12 | 18 | October 18, 2002 | March 7, 2003 | ||
| 13 | October 24, 2003 | March 5, 2004 | |||
| 14 | October 1, 2004 | February 25, 2005 | |||
| 15 | 19 | October 28, 2005 | April 7, 2006 |
Production Notes[]
The Red Green Show was produced for 300 half-hour episodes, first on CHCH-TV in Hamilton, Ontario, And then, on CFPL-TV in London, Ontario and then, by the Global Television Network, to finally end on CBC Television for Season 7.
The series finale, Do As I Do, was filmed on November 5, 2005, at Showline Studios in the Port Lands neighborhood of Toronto, since CBC was, at the time, locking out Canadian Media Guild members, thus rendering the usual Canadian Broadcasting Centre soundstages unusable.
As of 2019, The Red Green Show is the longest-running Canadian sitcom (The Beachcombers, despite having 17 seasons and 387 episodes, is considered a drama by most sources). It is also one of the longest-running sitcoms in the world, 3rd behind the British sitcom Last of the Summer Wine (31 seasons and 289 episodes during its 1973-2010 run) and the Fox series The Simpsons (30 seasons and over 650 episodes as of 2019). (The CBS series The Big Bang Theory, which was recently regarded as "the longest-running multi-camera series in television history," actually has fewer episodes and seasons than The Red Green Show, with 12 seasons and 279 episodes during its 2007-2019 run.)
In the fall of 2014, the transcripts for the 2003-2005 seasons were released for pay download on the Red Green Shop. Since then, transcripts for previous seasons have been released for pay download as well.
References[]
See Also[]
- Official Red Green website
- The Red Green Show on the Internet Movie Database
- Official The Red Green Show website at the Wayback Machine (archived May 5, 2009)
- Official The Red Green Show website at the Wayback Machine (archived November 29, 2002)
- Official The New Red Green Show website at the Wayback Machine (archived December 27, 1996)
- The Classic Red Green Page, a fan site on The Red Green Show, from which this wiki derives most of it's information
- The Red Green Show on Wikipedia