Mutilated Hyde Park Corner trees to be restored after they were cut to clear a Showmax billboard for The Handmaid's Tale.

Photo: Tree Works

by Thinus Ferreira

Praise be! Hacked off trees mutilated to clear space for bigger visibility of a Showmax billboard will be restored says the Hyde Park Corner shopping centre in Johannesburg following an utter arbour uproar.

Motorists and the public were shocked when around 8 indigenous and mature Fever trees were horrifically "trimmed" to the point of destruction last week outside the shopping mall in Johannesburg's elite Hyde Park suburb.

The fever trees that were destroyed were those in front of a Showmax billboard for the American The Handmaid's Tale drama series. The specific line of trees were cut down since they were blocking the concrete wall advertising billboard facing towards motorists on William Nicol Drive. Trees not in front of billboards were left intact.

A posting by Tree Works went viral on social media and reached over 11 000 people within days on Facebook.

Hyde Park Corner shopping centre says that butchering the fever trees was not the intention and blames the people the centre pays for landscaping maintenance. "The trees were trimmed, however there was a miscommunication and they were cut shorter than we would like. The service provider has apologized and will be donating trees overseen by the Johannesburg City Parks".

"We had an arborist assess the trees and we have been assured that they will grow back. Hyde Park Corner takes enormous pride in its landscaping and the heritage of its trees," the shopping mall says.

A Showmax spokesperson said to TVwithThinus on Wednesday that "Does Showmax support the butchering of trees? Absolutely not".

"We were as horrified as the public to see what happened to these beautiful trees. Hyde Park Corner has since explained what happened and thankfully the trees are going to be OK".

DAILY TV NEWS ROUND-UP. Today's interesting TV stories to read from TVwithThinus - 20 September 2017.

Here's the latest news about TV that I read, and that you should too:

■ "Haunting, chilling, peerless, plausible." How The Handmaid's Tale changed television.
Everybody is now buzzing about the drama that won the best Emmy. South Africans haven't been able to watch it - and still can't.
- The Handmaid's Tale win validates online video streaming services as an equal competitor to traditional TV.
- M-Net (DStv 101) will finally start to show it - a month and a half from now on 30 October. South Africans likely would perhaps have seen it sooner already if M-Net and DStv didn't dump the M-Net Edge channel at the beginning of the year.
- Shonda Rhimes calls the Emmys "embarrassing".

■ The Murdoch's global television ambitions.
The Murdochs is interested in taking over pay-TV broadcaster Sky in the United Kingdom, but they and their 21th Century FOX have their sights on much larger, international TV goals - specifically India. And they want Europe, South America, Africa and Australia.

■ FOX News (StarSat 261) accused of blacklisting.

■ Poor SABC says it can't afford to broadcast all national sports matches.

■ "Patriotic" American TV shows are falling out of favour in the rest of the world.
American TV studios now deliberately toning down the over-done "America first" tone of dramas.

■ New video takes viewers behind-the-scenes of the new Star Trek: Discovery.
But it's not available to viewers in South Africa and Africa - although the show will be made available on Netflix Africa and South Africa from the end of this month.

■ Zambia tries to assure Zambians that StarTimes' decoders are safe.
Subscribers are also complaining about the bad video and sound quality of StarTimes channels - something that TopStar admits.

M-Net adds The Handmaid's Tale after the Hulu show wins the 2017 Emmy award for Best drama series.

Impossible for South Africans to watch anywhere, M-Net (DStv 101) has now acquired and added the post-apocalyptic show The Handmaid's Tale that will start on the channel on Monday 30 October at 22:00.

With Game of Thrones not eligible this year, The Handmaid's Tale swept The 69th Annual Prime Time Emmy Awards and became the toast of this year's Emmy awards with multiple wins as it also beat out Netflix to become the first-ever video streaming TV series to win the Emmy in the highly-prized Outstanding Drama Series category.

Here's the interesting part: It's the first time ever since America's Prime Time Emmy Awards TV ceremony has been broadcast on South African television that the show that won the best drama series category has not been broadcast somewhere on South African television.

It's yet another indication of just how fast and unpredictably the TV industry globally and in South Africa is changing that even legacy broadcasters and new subscription video streaming services are unable to keep up.

The Handmaid's Tale, the 32-year old story based on  Margaret Atwood's post-apocalyptic book that struck a cord with Hulu viewers and Emmy voters has not been accessible to South African TV viewers despite the large number of TV services available that South African viewers can pay for.

Before its Emmy win, The Handmaid's Tale hasn't been seen anywhere on MultiChoice's DStv or StarTimes Media SA's StarSat's collection of TV channels, M-Net, the SABC, e.tv or the fast-growing flurry of subscription video-on-demand (SVOD) services like Netflix, DEOD, Showmax, ONTAPtv, Kwesé Play or Amazon Prime Video despite the growing TV watching options available to South Africans.

Out of 13 nominations, The Handmaid's Tale won 8 Emmy awards after extremely positive reviews from TV critics the past few months.

The bigger publicity and Emmy wins will undoubtedly spur some South Africans on to now use illegal online torrent sharing and downloading sites to watch episodes since The Handmaid's Tale - a show from the Hulu streaming service in America - isn't available to watch legally in South Africa anywhere.

The show's first season of 10 episodes that was filmed in Toronto, Canada, will roll out on M-Net a month and a half from now. It's not yet clear if M-Net has any plans to speed up the starting date and bring The Handmaid's Tale to South African viewers sooner following its big Emmy win on Sunday night in America.

The Handmaid's Tale is set in a near-future America, renamed Gilead - a type of oppressive, totalitarian and futuristic yet Middle Age type world destroyed by environmental pollution and sexually transmitted diseases.

As a result women's rights have been taken away as fertility plunged, with the few women who can bare children - called handmaids - being ruthlessly controlled in a new hierarchical regime of social classes.

It's in this world that June Osborne, renamed Offred - and played by Elisabeth Moss who won the Emmy for best actress in a drama series - finds herself.

Vulture nicknamed Elisabeth Moss "the Queen of Peak TV".

DAILY TV NEWS ROUND-UP. Today's interesting TV stories to read from TVwithThinus - 19 September 2017.

Here's the latest news about TV that I read, and that you should too:

■ A new satellite pay-TV service, TStv, says it plans to launch on 1 October in Nigeria - but will it?
TStv blatantly plays on MultiChoice's DStv name, and promises a mix of TV channels already available on DStv and StarSat/StarTimes - but how will that work?
TStv even promises English Premier League (EPL) soccer coverage - but how?

■ Why the series finale of the vampire drama The Strain on FOX (DStv 125 / StarSat 131) ended with a glimmer of hope.
"Bleaker versions were discussed" but the producers felt the audience would "feel too depressed" and that it "just didn't seem like it would be very satisfying".

■ Sean Spicer on his surprise Emmy stage appearance.
He explains how it came about, what scared him - and a lot of interesting details of what happened afterwards. And even more fascinating insight in another first-hand report with details from what he said afterwards.

■ The viewership of the 69th Annual Prime Time Emmy Awards 2017 remains at a record-low. Viewers don't see the air-conditioners blowing outside to keep the red carpet cool, while Allison Janney ironically complained about global warning during the show.
- And how The Handmaid's Tale - a 32-year old book, became a timely TV show and the toast of this year's Emmys.

■ The programming bosses of America's big TV networks reveal the strategies
in a MUST-READ on how they plan on turning around falling ratings for the new TV season.

■ The ratings of kids TV is falling sharper than any other viewing demo in America.

■ Corporate paranoia is growing inside ESPN, the American sports channel that dumped Africa a few years back and is now trying to worm its way back to the continent through Kwesé TV.
ESPN is embroiled in ongoing embarrassment that current and former ESPNers describe as "self-inflicted wounds" as inside angst grows.
-While ESPN's problems keep piling up, ESPN seems confused about what is really happening.

■ Yet another American TV critic is a gonner.
Jeff Jensen is out at Entertainment Weekly - and he finally burns it down in a MUST READ as he reveals how trash Warner Bros. was in deliberately excluding Entertainment Weekly from its media strategy for launching the Harry Potter movies.
Of course EW did a cover story anyway and scooped the rest to serve its readers. Warner Bros. realised its time to crawl back and play nice.