Take one award-winning broadcaster and one chart-topping reality star. Toss ‘em in a blender with years of network experience, a time-tested friendship, and a pinch of weed, and voila! You’ve got LadyPants Productions, the new venture from Fiona Forbes and Mary Zilba.
Separately, Forbes and Zilba are established personalities in the Vancouver media scene. Forbes has conducted upwards of 30,000 interviews over the course of her career, most recently as the host of Fiona Forbes on Shaw Television (for which she’s nominated for a 2016 Leo Award for her interview with John Cleese of Monty Python fame).
Zilba is a pop star, producer, and television personality, best known for her participation in the first season of Slice’s The Real Housewives of Vancouver.
The duo has been best friends for nearly a decade (“We bonded over bad break-ups, as girls do,” says Forbes in a call with Reel People and Zilba), and now they’re redefining what it means to be BFFs with LadyPants Productions.
“It’s so funny when people say LadyPants out loud,” laughs Forbes.
“It’s particularly funny when we’re signing a serious business contract,” adds Zilba. “Pull up your lady pants!”
LadyPants has more to show for itself than its zany name. On April 20, Zilba and Forbes announced LadyPants’ first three shows: a slate of digital series that all explore some aspect of cannabis culture.
These series include Baked: Cooking with Mary Jean, which features Vancouver’s Mary Jean Dunsdon (the pin-up model, comedienne, and pot activist otherwise known as Watermelon) cooking an array of dishes that highlight the versatility of cannabis.
There’s also Marijuana Minute, a news program hosted by Forbes’ longtime collaborator Michael Eckford (“It’s everything you wanted to know about marijuana but you were too paranoid to ask,” says Forbes), and Stoners in Stilettos, which shines a spotlight on the women who work in the upper ranks of the multi-billion dollar marijuana industry.
Though vastly different from each other, the three series seek to entertain and inform while dispelling stereotypes about the uses and users of cannabis, says Zilba.
“Doctors use it. Lawyers and educators use it. It’s people that you would never expect,” says Zilba. “And it’s a miracle plant when it comes to the way that it’s helping diminish seizures in patients, and helping people overcome their illnesses.”
With full legalization of marijuana just around the corner, there’s no time like the present to be thinking about cannabis safety and best practices, according to Forbes. These concepts are central to Baked, where Dunsdon advocates for proper portioning while she’s demonstrating cannabis culinary techniques.
“You hear stories all of the time about people taking too much when it comes to edibles,” says Forbes. Thus, the first season of Baked includes a “couple of episodes that are tutorials about how you can cook with marijuana responsibly and get the proper dosage so that you can actually eat a whole cookie,” she says.
LadyPants is producing these weed-centric shows in partnership with New York’s Jerrick Media. The three series will all be available on the Potent.Media web site, with the cooking show scheduled to make its debut in early June, and Marijuana Minute rolling out this summer.
Both Forbes and Zilba are veterans of the television world, but they’ve found the emerging digital one to be rich with possibilities and creativity.
“I think we’re on the precipice of something very new,” says Zilba. “Companies are now building these huge verticals and web sites that you go to for education and content. It’s opening up a whole new area of content and programming for us.”
Although LadyPants’ initial projects are intended for the digital realm, they’re also developing shows appropriate for traditional network television (and Zilba mentions that they’d love to bring Baked to a traditional network when the timing is right).
The LadyPants ladies have been taking meetings on both coasts, and recently signed a first-look deal with Great Pacific Media, an arm of Thunderbird Films and Lionsgate.
And contrary to the high THC content of the initial shows, LadyPants isn’t only all about the bud. Future projects will touch on a range of topics and themes beyond cannabis culture.
At the moment, neither Forbes nor Zilba appear in any of their LadyPants projects, but that could change.
“We haven’t cast ourselves in anything that we’ve written because we love being on the other side of the camera, but we have been entertaining doing some things on camera as well as producing the shows,” says Zilba. “You may see us on the tube again in some capacity.”
• Baked: Cooking with Mary Jean will hit Potent.Media in early June. For LadyPants Productions updates, follow @fionaforbes and @maryzilba on Twitter
