How Corner Gas Ruined Everything

[CANADIAN TV] The narrative used to be easy. It went like this:

"Canadians don't want to watch Canadian shows."

That statement was a powerful defence. It's the reason why, in 1999, the broadcasters successfully got the CRTC to relax Canadian Content regulations on homegrown comedy and drama.

Actually, what they did was allow networks to count things like lifestyle shows and light entertainment and reality toward their CanCon quotas. The result, by now, is well known. There were eleven drama series on the air in 1999 on the various Canadian networks. Those numbers dropped by half within a year or so. These days, you'd be hard pressed to find more than one drama or comedy show on any of the Canadian networks at one time or another. The private networks continue to make their money by buying U.S. shows at the L.A. screenings, programming them at the same time as the U.S. networks, to take advantage of their promotional spending and then, as a final gift, the CRTC allows them to substitute their signal over the American networks, so that even if you watch the NBC show on NBC, you're actually watching CTV or Global, and their commercials. Then, they fill out their schedule and CanCon with cheap shows like ET Canada or E Talk Daily -- which they sell as -- and here's the final insult -- a way to promote Canadian stars!

At the time, Canadian creatives tried to make the case that maybe the reason people weren't watching had something to do with a lack of promotion, bouncing the few series they did do around the schedule to accomodate money-making U.S. simulcasts, dumping homegrown series in unflattering slots where they were designed to fail (like scheduling TRADERS for years against E.R. which was then Canada's Number 1 show.)

But the Canadian Association of Broadcasters (the broadcaster lobby group) had a powerful, though passive ally: viewers themselves.

Because they could also point to viewers and hear things like, "Canadian shows look cheap." "They're not good." "There's no one in them that I know."

That's a hard thing to hear -- and unfortunately, it's often true. I'll return to that later.

So how did Corner Gas ruin everything?

By exposing the fracture and fiction points that underpin the laughable toy that is the domestic Canadian broadcast industry.

Let's take the first canard out. More than a million people watch Corner Gas in Canada every week, and have since it came out. Most week it's closer to 1.5 million. To give context to that number, remember that Canada is a nation of 30 million people. So this is roughly equivalent to over 30 million viewers a week in the USA -- which is way, way, way better than most of the shows that are considered hits in the USA. Better than Lost. Better than Prison Break. Better than House.

What's more, viewers have followed Corner Gas whenever it's been moved. It's been bounced around the schedule on CTV a lot. And viewers always find it. They want to watch it.

They've released three Corner Gas DVD sets. They sell incredibly well. Brent Butt tours across Canada to sold-out shows on the strength of the recognition he gains off Corner Gas.

Yet no one -- and I mean no one -- asks what does Corner Gas does right that everybody else gets wrong? This show shreds the argument made by the CAB -- that no one wants to watch Canadian shows -- but they still make it. And no one challenges them.

Why?

Because there are other people who don't want to face up to what Corner Gas does, and does well. And does differently. Because if they did, they might have to change what they do, and how they do it.

So what does Corner Gas do differently?

Well - first off, they do in the neighborhood of 20 shows a year. Not 8. Not 6. Not 13. So there's an actual industry involved in producing them. People who work on the show make good money for their efforts, so they attract the top talent. Corner Gas has a writing staff, four or five strong, who write in story rooms. They break stories together, just like U.S. shows do. There isn't one writer pumping it all out by themselves in a room, and they don't have to write it all themselves just to make enough money to live for four months. It's not a freelance situation where the scripts get written, passed off to the producers, and then the writers go home and aren't involved in the process when the thing gets made. The producers listen to the writers. They focus on making the show. The writers are there in Saskatchewan while the thing is being made. They are also working while they're shooting, which means that courses can be changed, things punched up, even as the show goes to the floor.

In other words, part of the reason Corner Gas works is because it's made in the same way that a U.S. show is made: hire top talent. Have a writing room. Do enough episodes. Have everybody on hand to make sure it all goes well.

Now, what about the content? How is Corner Gas different than other shows made in Canada? For that, let's turn to John Doyle, who wrote this in response to the news that Gas has been sold to syndication in the U.S. and lotsa countries 'round the world...including, interestingly, Iraq.

Corner Gas is our kind of humour and its success is also an inconvenient truth for many people in the Canadian TV racket. People in the racket who think they're smart and sophisticated sneer at Corner Gas. The deft, light sophistication of it escapes them. In truth, many are livid and seethe with envy and resentment. Corner Gas is eight characters in the middle of nowhere, affably swapping absurdly daft jokes.

Doyle comes perilously close to touching the third rail here... but he doesn't come out and say it. I will.

A lot of Canadian TV creative types are snobs. They are out of touch with the Canadian viewing audience. And that's why they make bad shows.

I love TV. I love quality shows like The Sopranos, and I love lowbrow, well executed stuff like that first glorious season of The O.C. Sure, I'll be snarky about the stuff I don't think is worthy, like According to Jim or JAG or whatever...but I know that people like them, and you know what? That's fine.

But often when I move and shake (in the former case, slowly, like a manatee, and in the latter, kind of like the Michelin man) at industry functions, I find myself out of step. Because a whole lot of people want to talk about making something "groundbreaking" and "important" and "not like you usually see on TV" and not something "entertaining" that people "want to watch."

And this bias is nowhere more nakedly exposed than in attitudes toward Corner Gas. In the leadup to the execrable Rumours, my former boss Moses Znaimer was widely quoted as saying that show was going to be "the anti-Corner Gas." Well, it certainly turned out that way, didn't it? A couple weeks back, The Sun ran an article with cast members from Rumours blaming the audience for no one watching the show.

That's right. The audience is the problem. We should blame the audience. Because, (all together now!) "Canadians don't want to watch Canadian shows!"

Except Corner Gas.

Oh. Doesn't count. Right.

I've stood around with writers from Corner Gas as people at industry events have pooh-poohed their show and its success. I wouldn't have believed it if I hadn't seen it with my own eyes, and heard it with my own ears.

Below, I linked to an article from the Edmonton Sun, where Brigitte Bako was talking about her show, G-Spot. Here's that link again, and here's a quote from that article, below:

While the show is set in L.A., it's filmed in Toronto, which wasn't a problem for Bako, just so long as the show didn't look like a Canadian production. Touting shows like North of 60 and Corner Gas as benchmarks, the best Canuck TV has to offer, is a sad joke, she contends.

"I've actually lived in the U.S. longer than Canada, but I love my country. You should see me during the Olympics; I want everyone to die except Canada.

"But in production meetings with my crew, I'd say, 'If this looks like a Canadian show, I will shoot myself and then all of you. We have so much talent in Canada, we can do better.'

"I have no competition, in my opinion. I happen to think most stuff in Canada sucks ass, and you can quote me on that. I don't like one Canadian show. I watch it because that's what I'm supposed to do, to see what's out there. It's not funny, it's very politically correct and nobody steps outside of the box. And I don't know why, but when things are shot in Canada they sort of look like they were shot in a tin can."

Now, let's be clear here. G-Spot, which is a Canadian take on Sex in the City, is shown on TMN and Movie Central. It's about to enter its third season.

And no one cares.

There is no buzz around G-Spot. Whatever I think of actors writing shows, the blithe way in which Bako dismisses a show that reaches 1 to 1.5 million viewers a week, and praises her own work, reveals all. And yet I would have never thought to criticize Bako or her show. Except. Except. The attitude she shows, and the way no one challenges her on it, says everything about the bizarro world of Canadian TV. Bako feels free to say something like she doesn't watch a single Canadian show.

Well, you know what?

Corner Gas. Davinci's Inquest. Intelligence. Slings & Arrows. Trailer Park Boys.

I watch em all. Because I love'em. Some are connecting and high rated, some are merely critical darlings. But they're all great. And they're all shows that are completely unlike anything you see in the USA. Unlike, say, a Sex in the City clone.

On a smaller scale, the snobbery that surrounds Corner Gas and its success is even more pronounced toward Trailer Park Boys. It doesn't matter that the guys get mobbed everywhere they go. It doesn't matter that a thousand people turn up to a personal appearance in a Toronto theatre, people of all ages, people who look like they're working class and young and old and brown and white and asian...you know, like Canada...it doesn't matter that there's a movie, because the cabal that rules the roost here still want to get their money for producing highbrow, "important" or "different" fare that doesn't connect. And the only way they can keep doing that is by running down the shows that do connect.

Nobody asks, really, why TPB connects, either. Except maybe, again, John Doyle:

As any fool knows by now, Trailer Park Boys is terribly sweet. It's just that there's a lot of swearing, drinking, and dope-smoking, and occasionally there's utterly innefectual gunplay. What it shares with Corner Gas is the sweetness.

I get the sweetness. The TPB movie, for all its greasy madness, is very sweet indeed. The Christmas special is actually touching.

Yes, we in Canada are regulatorily beset. But the other dirty part of the equation is this: the people who've gotten the funding for too long, have been exactly the kind of people who hate things like Corner Gas. The show's success, and the indifference with which they treat the fact of its success, shows that they don't care about the audience.

And the CAB types are more than happy to cynically throw their lot in with these types, because so long as they keep making these shows that no one wants to see, the more they can keep funding requirements at bay, keep pushing the "Canadians don't want to see Canadian shows" canard, and focus on how they make their real (easy) money: buying U.S. fare and having big brother protect them while they filter it to a Canadian audience, and reap the advertising rewards.

Understand this: I'm not saying you can't like Corner Gas. I've made this point before, but it always bears repeating. Being professional means separating out your personal taste from your professional opinion. I don't watch Ugly Betty, or listen to Cedric The Entertainer comedy records, but I understand why they work. I would personally never choose Leno over Letterman, but I understand what his appeal is to those who do so. Understanding the audience is my job. It has to be. And if you work in the business, no matter where you work in the business, it's your job too. And that's why I have no problem saying this:

If you can't learn from Corner Gas, I don't think you should be in this industry.

For the way it exposes the hypocrisy at the heart of the Canadian domestic production industry, well...I think that's the most important way in which Corner Gas ruined everything.

And maybe, just maybe...it points to the way out.