November 18th, 2024

Sakamoto’s show launch postponed due to COVID-19

By MO CRANKER on March 23, 2020.

NEWS FILE PHOTO - Hat-born author Mark Sakamoto talks to a crowd of roughly 800 people at Medicine Hat College during a 2018 Author Talk. Sakamoto's show 'Good People' has had its launch postponed due to the COVID-19 outbreak.

mcranker@medicinehatnews.com@MHNmocranker

Longtime Hatter Mark Sakamoto’s television show has had its premiere postponed due to the COVID-19 outbreak.

The show, “Good People,” was set to hit CBC streaming platforms today, but it has been pushed back to an undecided later date.

The first season of the show will consist of five, 30-minute episodes. Sakamoto and his camera team travel to different destinations in the world to look at problems like homelessness, addiction and gun violence. They then travel to ‘solution’ cities – places that are finding positive solutions to problems.

The opportunity to host a show came to Sakamoto after winning CBC’s Canada Reads in 2018. Filming began later that year and continued into 2019.

The first episode of the show will look at how Medicine Hat is using a housing-first approach to tackle homelessness.

Sakamoto says the show aims to share a message of hope.

“We want to show that people are able to turn around their lives,” he said. “There’s actually a lyric by Leonard Cohen that reads, ‘there’s a crack in everything, that’s how the light gets in,’ and I saw so many people living in dark circumstances just surviving day to day.

“It was their resilience that was so apparent and you could tell they were hanging on and waiting for that crack and that light to appear.”

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