Television Shows
In 1992, he created and performed his second show, I've Killed Before, I'll Kill Again, which was also a popular touring show. Also in that year, he began to work with former CODCO members Cathy Jones, Mary Walsh, and with fellow Newfoundlander Greg Thomey, to create a new television series for CBC Television which became This Hour Has 22 Minutes.
In the first eight seasons of 22 Minutes, Mercer provided some of the show's signature moments, including an Internet petition (on the 22 Minutes website) to force Canadian Alliance leader Stockwell Day to change his first name to Doris.
Mercer's tightly scripted and performed two-minute "rants," in which he would speak directly to the camera about a current political issue, shot in a style similar to those Denis Leary used in MTV commercials, quickly became the show's signature segment. In 1998, he published a book, Streeters, which compiled many of his most famous 22 Minutes rants. It quickly became a national bestseller. In 2007 he published his second book, Rick Mercer Report: The Book.
In November 2010, Mercer contributed a rant he had previously recorded in 2007 on the subject of teen bullying in high schools to Dan Savage's It Gets Better Project.
Read more about this topic: Rick Mercer
Famous quotes containing the words television and/or shows:
“So by all means let’s have a television show quick and long, even if the commercial has to be delivered by a man in a white coat with a stethoscope hanging around his neck, selling ergot pills. After all the public is entitled to what it wants, isn’t it? The Romans knew that and even they lasted four hundred years after they started to putrefy.”
—Raymond Chandler (1888–1959)
“Sometimes a neighbor whom we have disliked a lifetime for his arrogance and conceit lets fall a single commonplace remark that shows us another side, another man, really; a man uncertain, and puzzled, and in the dark like ourselves.”
—Willa Cather (1873–1947)