New TV comedy filmed in popular northern New Brunswick pub

If you are from – or have been to – Miramichi, N.B., the setting of a new TV show is sure to be familiar.

The comedy series “O Dons” was recently filmed and named after O'Donaghue's – a popular Irish pub in the city.

The bar is the type of place that many Maritimers would no doubt love to spend time in -- and that’s exactly what producers of the show are hoping.

“Bell called me about a year-and-a-half ago and said, ‘Hey, would you like to create a television show in your community?’ And as an unemployed actor and a comedian in my community, the answer is always yes,” says co-creator and star Jimmy MacKinley.

“Luckily Erica McLean was pitching me this television show for years because she use to work at a few pubs, including O'Donaghue's, and now we had this conduit to make this a reality.”

The show is about the ins and outs of working in a restaurant.

“Notably an Irish pub in the Irish capital of Canada, which is, in real life, Chatham, New Brunswick,” says MacKinley. “But we’ve made a fictional town called Port Mcgee, New Brunswick.”

MacKinley says the name of the show is the only similarity to the real life bar.

“The crazy characters that exist are in our show are very far removed from the actual people that work there now,” he says.

“The pub gets taken over by an out of town, we can call him a swindler, who thinks it’ll be a quick flip to basically buy the pub, and take advantage of this small town, but he kind of finds the opposite of that.”

Mackinley plays the chef in “O Dons.”

Jimmy MacKinley is pictured outside O'Donaghue's Irish pub in Miramichi, N.B. (Courtesy: Jimmy MacKinley)

“I really hope servers and chefs and pub owners themselves can have a laugh at the satire that we’ve created about the restaurant industry and sort of poking fun at it,” he says.

“It’s very character-driven, so I think people are really going to fall in love with a lot of these characters, even the antagonists in the story.”

“O Dons” will be available on Bell Fibe TV1 on January 15.

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