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Exclusive: Canada’s Cream Productions has made some changes to its development team.

Veteran exec James Farr has been promoted to Executive Vice President of Development, and will lead a team comprising former Blue Ant Studios producer Zachary Frank, who has joined as Vice President of Development, and Jane Churchill-Smith, who has been upped to Director of Development.

Farr’s expanded role at the Age of Samurai: Battle for Japan producer will see him creating and developing programs for broadcast and cable nets, with a focus on true crime, history, pop culture and paranormal.

In a decade-long spell at Cream, Farr is credited with developing the likes of Netflix series Age of Samurai, CNN’s History of the Sitcom, ABC series The Game Show Show and History Canada’s The World Without Canada. He also worked on shows such as ID’s Murder U and Fear Thy Neighbor, as well...

“Why is it that only those who have never fought in a battle are so eager to be in one?” Yoshii Toranaga (Hiroyuki Sanada) asks at one point in FX’s Shōgun. It’s a question that resonates not only with the show’s characters but may strike at the heart of our long-standing fascination with samurai.

Its resonance is all the more profound because Shōgun is loosely — very loosely — based on real events from the end of Japan’s Warring States period that pushed the nation into a new era. Taking historical events and crafting drama from them is something the show has in common with many Chanbara or samurai films. The riveting and often bloody history has provided fodder for countless films, including Hiroshi Inagaki’s Samurai trilogy, Sekigahara, Samurai Assassin, and The 47 Ronin.

However, these narrative films can obscure the complex history behind the events. Fortunately,...

Steve Allen, the co-creator and first host of The Tonight Show, largely was responsible for late-night television as we know it.

Remember Johnny Carson’s Carnac the Magnificent? Well, take a look at Allen’s The Question Man (below).

“Steve Allen was the generator of a lot of ideas that were ahead of its time,” says Billy Crystal in CNN’s documentary series The Story of Late Night.

The six-part series is a historical deep dive into the origins of the genre that still resonates today as well as a love letter to the medium. It has been overseen by Bill Carter, a man who knows a thing or two about late-night, as the former New York Times media correspondent and author of The War for Late Night and The Late Shift.

Carter is currently a CNN contributor and his involvement helped Cream Productions, the Toronto-based production company behind CNN...

Yasuke is a groundbreaking new anime that fuses fact and fiction. The six-episode original series streaming on Netflix now is the brainchild of comic artist and animation director LeSean Thomas. The titular role in Yasuke is voiced by Oscar-nominated Lakeith Stanfield who is also one of the producers. Yasuke comes from Japan’s animation house Mappa (Maruyama Animation Produce Project Association) who also produced noteworthy animes like Attack on Titan, Rage of Baphomet, and Punch Line. Grammy-nominated artist Flying Lotus (a.k.a. FlyLo) provides the soundtrack and is also another producer.

Yasuke is somewhat in the same vein as Afro Samurai or Samurai Jack in propelling an iconic Samurai figure into a rich fantasy world.

“It just sits right alongside Afro Samurai and Samurai Jack,” acknowledges Thomas, “They’re going to be compared regardless because those are the only three that are being pushed to the Western entertainment. So,...

Exclusive: Cream Productions, the company behind Netflix’s Age of Samurai: Battle for Japan and CNN’s The Story of Late Night, has made a number of promotions to its creative team.

The Canadian company has promoted Patrick Cameron to SVP, Operations and has handed out promotions to trio Shawn Gerrard, Matt MacLellan and Francine Dibacco, who will report to Cameron.

In his expanded role, Cameron will work with Cream Productions CEO David Brandy and President Kate Harrison Karman to manage the company’s day to day operations.

Now Cream’s Head of Post-Production, Gerrard has worked on series for Netflix, BBC and PBS. He will run Cream’s post-production department and work with Cameron to develop control systems and implement new technologies while supervising all deliverables for the company’s full programming slate. He previously served as post producer for Age of Samurai and Story of Late Night.

MacLellan...

Age of Samurai: Battle for Japan, a new historical documentary series on Netflix, is being billed as a “real-life Game of Thrones” but it’s much more than that. This is actual history, which is far more compelling than fantasy because it really transpired. “It is like something out of a movie,” says showrunner Matt Booi. “If you wrote this down, no one would believe it. And if you saw it, I think you’d say, ‘Nah.’ But it happened.”

According to Booi, the show covers one of the most violent periods in Japanese history. The six-part series begins in 1551 with the death of feudal lord Oda Nobuhide and follows the rise of three of Japan’s most influential warriors: Nobuhide’s son, Oda Nobunaga (Masayoshi Haneda), Tokugawa Ieyasu (Hayate Masao), and Toyotomi Hideyoshi (Masami Kosaka). Japanese historians, as well as dedicated fans of Samurai movies, will be all too...

Exclusive: Late-night television is the subject of an original documentary series for CNN.

Conan O’Brien, Jimmy Kimmel, Whoopi Goldberg, Billy Crystal, Trevor Noah, Seth Meyers and Lorne Michaels are among the contributors to The Story of Late Night, from Canadian producer Cream Productions (The Dictator’s Playbook).

The series will track the history of late-night TV from its inception, featuring stories about hosts such as Johnny Carson, Jay Leno, David Letterman, O’Brien, Jimmy Fallon, Kimmel, Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert. It will lift the curtain on some of late-night’s most memorable moments as these legendary hosts tackled politics, pop culture and entertainment.

Other interview subjects include James Corden, Chelsea Handler, Hasan Minhaj, Andy Richter, Ray Romano, Busy Philipps and Andy Cohen as well as executives including Paul Telegdy, George Cheeks, Jeff Zucker, Warren Littlefield, Rick Ludwin, Debbie Vickers, Lloyd Braun, Nina Tassler, Jeff Ross, Dick Cavett and Merrill Markoe.