Son of a Critch, a comedy based on the memoir by Canadian comedian Mark Critch, debuts on The CW July 24. The series details Critch’s boyhood in Newfoundland back in the ‘80s. Benjamin Evan Ainsworth portrays young Mark, Malcolm McDowell plays Mark’s grandfather, who he shares a bedroom with, and Mark Critch plays his father Mike, a radio personality.
As the show begins, Mark is 11 and terrified of the new school year, and a school full of cooler, tougher and typically larger kids.
The first two seasons of Son of a Critch, which is shot in Newfoundland, aired on CBC in Canada. Critch and Tim McAuliffe created the show.
Critch spoke with B+C about his unique home base, what McDowell brought to the set, and what it means to him to launch a show in the U.S.
An edited transcript follows.
B+C: What makes the show right for America in summer 2023?
Mark Critch: We've all been in our own little bubbles for so long, so maybe it's time to watch somebody else's family for a while. This is going back to 1986, in Newfoundland, an odd little island in the middle of the Atlantic. So it may seem like an odd, very specific place and time, but it seems very relatable to a lot of people.
A lot of families watch the show together. People were telling me when the show first premiered that everybody would get together and watch it. The parents would watch it for nostalgia, and the kids could watch it because it's about teenagers, and they relate to those characters. A lot of the kids would watch it actually on analog TV like we did back in the ‘80s, and then would say, after the first episode, I liked that one, play another. And then the parents said, you can't, you have to wait a week. They're like, oh mom, you're so stupid. No, you just click Next!
So for a lot of 12-year-olds, I think it was their first, everybody's-gonna-watch-the-show-at a-certain-time experience. It's sort of like a play-along-at-home game.
B+C: Tell me how you settled on Benjamin Evan Ainsworth to play Mark.
MC: We wanted kind of an old-soul 12-year-old who could do some comedy and not just play in the sitcom kind of a world, but also be this kid who's fascinated by all these old-school comedians and show business and stuff, and also play some really dramatic moments. And we looked at a lot of kids from all over the place, and a lot of the kids we saw were kind of Disneyfied. It's like a gosh, gee whiz! kind of high energy, almost Broadway-musical kind of thing. We thought, oh boy. We were having a hard time finding him.
Then we found this wonderful casting agency who had actually done the UK and Ireland casting for Game of Thrones. They sent all these kids over from the UK who had auditioned and [Benjamin] was number three. And I remember getting to the third audition and then just writing them and saying, the third kid is the best, right? And they're like, yeah, he's the one.
I saw him on the TV show [The Haunting of] Bly Manor, which is a horror show on Netflix. He was brilliant. And he had just finished filming Pinocchio with Tom Hanks. And I thought, oh boy, we're never gonna get this guy.
But he’s a bit of an old soul himself, Benjamin. He really related to the material and he and his team chose this over a lot of other projects they were looking at, like The Crown and Indiana Jones. This was something that really spoke to him.
Then at the same time, these casting folks were like, oh, by the way, do you think Malcolm McDowell might play the grandfather?And I'd say, oh my God, could we just get actual people who might do it? Then they sent [a script] to Malcolm and then Malcolm asked for another script, and then he asked for [Critch’s memoir]. Then we had a Zoom meeting, and by the end of it, Malcolm was in too.
They were very much a one-two punch that really gave the show a lot of soul depth.
B+C: Tell me what Malcolm is like to have on the set.
MC: Oh my gosh, he's amazing! He can switch back and forth between a sweet kind of grandfather guy to telling you some story about him and Kubrick and the Rolling Stones, or he'll say, I'm at a party with Michael Caine and Peter Sellers, and I'm like, what?
He and Benjamin get along quite well because they're both fans of the soccer team in Liverpool. So they'll have arguments about the team and stuff.
It's a real family atmosphere. It's amazing how well the parents of the kids, plus all the actors, get along. We all really enjoy spending time together. Like, nobody's in their own trailers. Everybody's in one little area with a bunch of chairs in a circle, telling stories.
[Malcolm] is very much the ringleader for that. And he’s a great example for the younger actors. I love the scenes with him and Benjamin together. You've got a guy who's 80 years old and a guy who's 12 and the two of them are just connecting on so many levels. It's just really unique.
B+C: How much of your actual childhood is depicted in the show?
MC: A whole lot. There's stories from, say, kindergarten to 12th grade in there, but all kind of truncated into that year and then the next year and the next year. Things may have happened at different times in my life, but the spine of every story is true. And the purpose of telling it all, every episode, something that happened, which is weird in that when you're writing it, you're really writing it from your memory. And then it's a series, and then you're casting people and you kind of forget it's about you, until I play my dad in the show.
One day I'm dressed like my father. The costume and wardrobe and sets people took a look at pictures and they recreated a lot of stuff. It is fairly close to the way it was. And I kept saying, look, I'm not Churchill. Nobody's gonna know that settee isn't right. But they're like, no, we're gonna make it anyway so we'll make it look like it.
A lot of the furniture from my parents' house–they're both passed away now–is furniture that's on our set. The house was torn down in the ‘90s, but I'll be sitting there in the kitchen looking over the dining room, which is actually their dining room from the ’70s and ‘80s. It's quite odd. It’s a real kind of out-of-body, in-body experience, if that makes sense. And it can be a little melancholy at times because you think of your family and they're not here and what would they think? But then I'll hear Benjamin and Malcolm joking and laughing, and Claire [Rankin], who plays my mother, laughing or singing a song, and it's like filling the house up again with more memories and laughter.
BC: What would you consider an influence on the series?
MC: A Christmas Story, even though it was set in the ‘40s and it was a nostalgia thing. And then of course The Wonder Years. When I was the age Mark is in the show, I would watch The Wonder Years. I was in the same grade as the character in The Wonder Years. It was a different time period, but I related to that kid as if it was a modern show. And those things never change– the falling in love, the being bullied, the anxiety of going to school and all that stuff.
B+C: I don't think I'd ever heard Rush’s “Tom Sawyer” in a TV show before. Tell me how that ended up in the pilot.
MC: We're big on buying the actual music of the time. We’re Canadian, so [“Tom Sawyer”] was a big rocker. I always look at it as if it was a Star Trek episode–the house is the Enterprise and school is the planet you beam down to. You know, you fight the green alien and then you escape back.
I grew up really old school, loving Dean Martin, loving Sinatra, a bit of the Beach Boys and all that stuff. But everybody else was into AC/DC or Rush or Van Halen at my school.
So we wanted to definitely show the two sides of Mark's life.
I had to write a letter to Dean Martin's daughter, Deana Martin, to try and get “Ain't That a Kick in the Head.” Then we wrote a letter to Paul Anka–we have “Diana” play in season one–and got a response back saying, ‘Anything for another Canadian entertainer, knock 'em dead, kid!’ And I was like, Yes! Paul Anka wrote an email. That was pretty exciting.
B+C: Did you shoot much in Newfoundland?
MC: Every second of it pretty much is in Newfoundland. We did one day in Ontario, but that’s it. Growing up, I’d watch all these great American shows with so many American influences coming across the border. And that was TV.
Now, I'm able to leave my house and walk six minutes up the road to where the school set is. If 12-year-old me could figure out that I'd be walking to shoot a show about him that would one day air in the United States, that's unfathomable. It was all the dream world, that place you knew existed, but didn't really exist, we were so far away from it on the other side of the glass of the TV set. So to be broadcasting in the U.S. is not even a dream come true, because I could never have dreamt it ever happening.
B+C: Tell me something about Newfoundland that those from outside of it might not know.
MC: People would know it from a Broadway musical called “Come From Away”. It tells the story of how all those planes that couldn't fly on 9/11 had to be diverted and went to a small town here in Gander, quadrupling the population of the town within a couple of hours. All these people had to figure out how to take care of these people. It was an amazing story.
[Newfoundland] joined Canada in 1949. During the war, there were a lot of American bases here and we almost joined America. That was on the ballot.
We were a colony. Then we became the dominion of Newfoundland, our own country with our own passports and our own currency up until 1949. And we decided to join Canada. So we're one of the only places in the world to vote ourselves out of existence. It was a 51 to 49 vote, so that was a big deal.
We had an incredible connection with the United States. My dad worked with the American military all during the war, on their bases. He took around Frank Sinatra when Sinatra came to sing for the Yanks. All these wonderful servicemen came, big American smiles and nice tans, and took away all of the pretty girls–they all married these American servicemen and left.
During the war, Dad actually shared a desk with Hal Holbrook, the famous American actor. John Williams, who scored the Star Wars films, did his first film here, for the American servicemen during the war. So there were little bits of showbiz around that people may not even realize.
We were discovered in 1497, pretty much the first stop into the new world. And in 1949, we joined Canada. We’re sort of like Canada's Hawaii, without any of the sun or hula skirts or anything like that. And much colder.
