Nirvanna the Band the Show - "The Big Time"

Notes:

"The Big Time" is the fifth episode of Nirvanna the Band the Show, a Canadian mockumentary series created by Jay McCarrol and Matt Johnson based on their 2007-2009 web-series Nirvana the Band the Show.

Nirvanna the Band the Show (or NTBTS) has had a really difficult broadcast history. The series originally debued in Canada on Citytv on February 2, 2017 but was quickly shafted over to newly-formed Viceland after one episode. The series would also simultaneously air on Viceland in the United States. When Season 2 premiered in October 2017, American Viceland decided not to air the episodes while Canadian Viceland did. As of 2021, there has been no official release of Season 2 outside of Canada (aside from streaming in Australia and formerly the United Kingdom). Near the end of Season 2's broadcast, Vice and Rogers Media announced that their partnership was terminated and Canadian Viceland would be shutting down. The network went off the air on March 31, 2018.

NTBTS sat in a very awkward position for a while. American Viceland seems to have been the only network still rerunning the show at the time but could only air the eight Season 1 episodes that had premiered in the United States. The status of the series sat undetermined for over a year until August 2019 when the CBC acquired the show from Vice. With this, NTBTS vanished from American television. I can't find a concrete date of when it left our Viceland (probably sometime in Summer 2019) but the latest airing I can find via Battle Creek Enquirer (Battle Creek, Michigan) is March 13, 2019; 9:30 a.m.

Currently, there haven't been any new episodes of the show since February 2018. Season 3 has currently been in-development for ages now but hasn't been released in any form. As an American viewer, it's incredibly hard to watch the series without resorting to piracy, which, co-creator Jay McCarrol literally endorses as a method of viewing considering how scarce the series is outside of Canada. I'm a big fan of NTBTS and watched it through my upperclassmen years in high school so it's a shame that it may never return to American television. It's definitely one of the greatest shows to release in the last 5 years and hopefully CBC is treating it better than Viceland did both here and in Canada.

I had a hard time telling when this episode premiered. Most sources list it first airing on March 2, 2017. My DVR listed the recording as being from March 3, 2017; 12:00 a.m. Usually episodes of Nirvanna the Band the Show would premiere at either 10 or 10:30 p.m. so I was really at a loss when making this capsule. I did a little more research and apparently the episode did in fact premiere on March 2, but at 11:59 p.m. Pretty much every episode after this through Season 1 also premiered at 11:59 p.m., making their airdate one day prior to the day a majority of the episode actually premiered. Very odd.

I haven't uploaded any commercials from Viceland yet so instead I've embedded "Pop Looks Bach" which is used as an unofficial theme to the series.