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Jim Gaffigan is preparing to play former Toronto mayor Rob Ford in a scripted series currently in the works at AMC, Variety has learned exclusively.

Jesse McKeown will write and executive produce, with Ed Helms and Mike Falbo executive producing under their Pacific Electric Picture Co. banner. Michael Dowse will executive produce and direct.

The dark comedy series would detail the rise and fall of the controversial Ford, who served as the mayor of Toronto from 2010 to 2014 after many years as a city councilor. He was infamously caught on video smoking crack cocaine during his reelection campaign and was known to suffer from other substance abuse issues.

Should the project move forward it would not be the first onscreen depiction of Ford. Damian Lewis played Ford in the film “Run This Town,” which debuted at SXSW last year.

Gaffigan is best known for his stand up comedy career, having released specials like “Beyond the Pale,...

Director Warren P. Sonoda's film about an amateur cage fighter who gets a shot at the big time is stylishly filmed and has plenty of action in the form of impressively staged brutal fight scenes. The first half of the screenplay, however, too often favors naked pole dancers over meaty drama and has scenes that feel like they have been drawn out to fit the music. The result is a film that, clichéd plot notwithstanding, feels like it could have been much better.

As it is, Unrivaled keeps your attention without triggering much of an emotional response. Hector Echavarria creates a sympathetic loser-turned-hero in Ringo Duran, while Nicholas Campbell (the Da Vinci in Da Vinci's Inquest and Da Vinci's City Hall) gives his usual standout performance, this time as a grizzled trainer, a.la. Burgess Meredith in Rocky.

As for the rest of the cast, the acting is of variable quality,...

TORONTO -- Adam Beach (Windtalkers) and Nathaniel Arcand (Da Vinci's City Hall) on Wednesday joined the cast of Moose TV, Canada's first sitcom produced entirely by native Canadians. Shooting in and around Montreal has begun on eight half-hours of Moose TV, which is slated to air on Showcase Television in early 2007. Tim Southam is directing the all-native cast in a sitcom set in a fictional town in northern Quebec where a young man, played by Beach, returns from the big city and revives an abandoned local TV studio with his childhood pal, played by Arcand.

TORONTO -- After calling for homegrown dramas that draw more viewers, the Canadian Broadcasting Corp. faced calls for the resignation of its two top executives. As the annual Canadian Film and Television Production Assn. conference wrapped Friday in Ottawa, performers union Alliance of Canadian Cinema, Television and Radio Artists joined with the Friends of Canadian Broadcasting, a group representing 66,000 domestic TV viewers, in urging the newly installed conservative government to fire CBC president Robert Rabinovitch and Richard Stursberg, the network's executive director of English television. "These guys are incompetent," ACTRA national executive director Stephen Waddell said of Rabinovitch and Stursberg after the CBC last week canceled three dramas -- Da Vinci's City Hall, This Is Wonderland and The Tournament -- to make room for new series on its fall schedule.

TORONTO -- After calling for homegrown dramas that draw more viewers, the Canadian Broadcasting Corp. faced calls for the resignation of its two top executives. As the annual Canadian Film and Television Production Assn. conference wrapped Friday in Ottawa, performers union Alliance of Canadian Cinema, Television and Radio Artists joined with the Friends of Canadian Broadcasting, a group representing 66,000 domestic TV viewers, in urging the newly installed conservative government to fire CBC president Robert Rabinovitch and Richard Stursberg, the network's executive director of English television. "These guys are incompetent," ACTRA national executive director Stephen Waddell said of Rabinovitch and Stursberg after the CBC last week canceled three dramas -- Da Vinci's City Hall, This Is Wonderland and The Tournament -- to make room for new series on its fall schedule.

TORONTO -- The Canadian Broadcasting Corp. said Monday it is canceling three primetime dramas for weak ratings. The axing of Da Vinci's City Hall, The Tournament and This is Wonderland follows the public broadcaster in early February hiring Kirstine Layfield away from the private sector to become its top programmer. CBC spokeswoman Ruth-Ellen Soles said the national network invested heavily in all three series, only to see their audience numbers underwhelm. "The audiences for all three series have been in steady decline as they did not resonate with Canadians," Soles added.