The Weekend Round Up: Where Jack Is a Very Dull Boy

Well, I've been pretty much working about 10 hours a day since I returned from NYC. Before that, I was churning out a first draft for a week or so. So by my count, by the time Monday rolls around, I will have written or rewritten about 160 or so pages over the last 2-3 weeks. That tends to knacker one out.

I have a final stretch to do to get the scripts in, then there's the pause that refreshses, before production and notes start dictating rewrites. I've spent so much time in my condo for the last 10 days or so that I'm starting to feel like the Phantom of the Condo.

So I'm doing the kind of thing that I've always wanted to do. Work necessistates that I spend the weekend writing, missing yet more of what really seems like a lovely Toronto summer. But it doesn't say where I've got to do the writing. And yeah, you gotta eat. But that doesn't mean you gotta cook.

Screw it.

I'm checking into a hotel for the next two days. I'm going to write til I can't, then enjoy the scenery and the accoutrements. I will not be doing an Aaron Sorkin writing The American President, but I'm hoping it will be fun and make work more manageable.

Whatever gets you true, right?

Anyway, with that being said, the TV biz is in the midst of the TCA critics tour down in L.A. Lots of news out there, some of it interesting.

HBO Prez defended "that scene" in Rescue Me at the HBO session. (note to Canadians, spoilers for the third season which starts airing on Showcase Aug 29.) He also revealed that, due to Jimmy Gandolfini's knee surgery, the final 8 Sopranos won't come til March. But the 2nd -- and final -- season of Rome debuts Jan. 7.

I also haven't written about Brotherhood, whose first ep aired last week on Showtime in the USA and TMN in Eastern Canada. I loved it. I love it where you don't have to explain everything. I love when things are hinted at in TV and not spelled out. I love stories about two brothers. I think this show is going to be a new fave for me. I mention it now because the pilot is going to be replayed on CBS tomorrow night, Saturday, at 10pm. Way to drum up business for the pay channels. Sneaky, sneaky.

I just clicked over to the Futon Critic for other TCA (Television Critics Association) news and the sheer volume of stories there spiked my procrasto-meter. I don't have the time to read any of that stuff right now, but feel free to talk about whatever you read in the comments below. I'll weigh in when the monkey's off my back.

"Hello? Room service?"

Dick Cavett: Comic Legends

I'm not old enough to remember Dick Cavett when he was on the air. I mean, I kind of remember him from my childhood, but I was a toddler when his various shows were on ABC.

But thanks to Zip.Ca, I've been dipping into the compilation of "Comic Legends" DVD's they put out last year. I've been through two discs already, and they're mighty revelatory, especially if you presided over the shrinking of the TV talk show through the 80's and 90's.

I think once before I remarked on how weird it was to see an interview with Paddy Chayefsky about Network on the Dinah Shore Show. Weird because it was a) a screenwriter on tv and b) actually a rambling, interesting conversation about ideas, and not the setup-punchline-plug Kabuki that passes for "couch interviews" today. (Even Jon Stewart, in the quest to get laughs, ploughs through his interviews.)

But the Comic Legends series is something different. They're actually a chance to see kind of a master class, and learn about the craft.

The first disc featured two appearances by Groucho Marx -- this is just before he started going downhill. It's an amazing interview, really a time capsule from another time. He talks about trouble at the Democratic convention at one point, and you realize, right, this is from 1969 -- that convention was last year.

Marx's stories about Margaret Dumont and his brothers and how they approached things are just priceless. Then there's a show featuring Woody Allen. The show with Bob Hope is remarkable not just for its length, but for the fact that Hope actually speaks very seriously; it pretty much could stand as one of the definitive autobiographical documents of his life.

But the next disc, again featuring Woody Allen, from right around the time of the release of Bananas, is the truly enlightening one. It's fun, too. He plays jazz clarinet with the band, which is the only time I've seen him do that on TV.

It's startling to see the young Woody -- especially in a context you haven't seen him in before. I guess I've internalized his film performances so much by now that they're retina-burned. But to see him on the couch there talking to a guy who is genuinely his friend, swapping in jokes about coming up as joke writers, is thrilling to see.

Also, Allen explains his dilemna about wanting to do serious things but having no one take him seriously. There it is, the thing that's going to dog him the rest of his life. He talks about the precision and the joy he gets from writing prose. Cavett and Allen talk about their neuroses with women, and how that fuels them. Allen discusses how he tries not to watch comedies, because he's a believer in not being influenced, and then goes on to dissect the nature of his comedy.

The conversation is meandering and never less than amusing. Seventy-five full minutes. I haven't watched the Bill Cosby interview, but I'm sure it's similar stuff.

If you're a student of comic writing, it's well worth renting.

Wow.

I picked a pretty good week to not pay attention to the news.

Canadian Merger Mania hits CHUM

Well -- this is not really surprising. The Globe and Mail and 680 News are reporting that CHUM limited, the parent company of Citytv, Muchmusic, Space, Star, Bravo! and the A-Channels, is going to be sold to Bell GlobeMedia, the corporate parent of CTV, TSN, oh...and MTV Canada. (That should be interesting, considering Muchmusic...)

The last time a big merger like this happened, they created a huge fund for new programming. (The CRTC extracts that pound of flesh for the privilege of consolidation.) So it may be good news for creatives. Or it may be bad news. Or both. Ultimately, it's too soon to tell.

Oh. Oh Dear.

One of my good friends, R.S., is a very talented writer currently working on Corner Gas.

And one day I may forgive him for sending me this:




Wash your eyes out after. The burning, left untreated, could scar.

I Am A Bad Man

Which is why this photo makes me happy. Oh so happy. Id: 1 Better Angels: 0
Sorry, Abe.

Meetings With Stakeholders

This is a phrase you hear a lot about in Canadian Broadcasting. You hear it when discussing the CRTC, and a review that's being done here or there. You hear it when talking about the Canadian Television Fund or Telefilm.

What's significant to me, and always has been, is exactly who those stakeholders are. And who they're not. The Academy of Canadian Cinema and Television is non-political. They don't take stands on things, mostly. They just sponsor the Gemini and Genie awards. Things like that.

The private broadcasters in Canada have something called The Canadian Association of Broadcasters. They lobby on the Broadcasters' behalf. Usually for things like, oh, we want to ease restrictions on foreign ownership, or sell more ads, or not have to do so much for our licenses.

Producers in Canada have the Canadian Film and Television Production Association. They negotiate with representatives of the Directors Guild of Canada, Writers Guild of Canada, and ACTRA, the performers' union, on labor issues.

There used to be a Canadian Cable Television Association. But I think it disbanded. Richard Stursberg used to run that too. Before he bounced to Telefilm, then the CBC.

There are Friends of Canadian Broadcasting and Our Public Airwaves, who mostly complain about the CBC.

Stakeholders, stakeholders, stakeholders.

The problem with the whole stakeholders thing is that the biggest stakeholders in all of this mess are the ones who really are never consulted.

They're called The Audience.

The problem with not consulting the audience is that you start to have people speaking for the audience, which runs into all sorts of problems. You have squeaky wheels saying they're the audience.

Justin, who's a hardworking guy I know and like and have met on several occasions, posted this below in an ongoing thread about Canadian TV. Basically, his contention is that shows Like Canadian Idol are not Canadian shows...just ripoffs of American shows. Justin's speaking for a point of view that would like to keep the CBC "pure."

I don't consider the Office an American show, it's a cheap rip off and not done very well.

Elitist or not Steve Martin isn't the pink panther and I don't consider Canadian Idol, Canada's next top model or 'the One' to be Canadian shows regardless of where they are made.

Now this is, in actuality, a pretty radical view. I mean, most critics have come around on The Office, and I know a lot of people love these kinds of Reality shows. I don't watch any of the Idols, If I watch The One at all it'll be to see how George does. (On the other hand, flipping around last night I caught fifteen minutes of "Hell's Kitchen" for the first time, and I howled. My God that man is entertaining.)

Now, Justin's engaging in a fine old tradition of stating a taste that's contrary to the mainstream. We all do this. People who hate Pop Tarts talk about Radiohead like everyone should listen to Radiohead. Jazzbos sniff at rockists. Classical music fans look down on all of us.

The problem is, in Canada, the only "audience" view that ever gets through is the skewed, likely-to-write-a-letter-to-the-CRTC-or-Globe kind. Essentially, Private TV in Canada has been allowed to just chase eyeballs using cheaply purchased (because we're an ancillary market) U.S. shows, and Public TV is being fought over by a small, elitist group that doesn't really represent the audience at large. That's a big problem.

Now -- here's another view from the audience, direct from a meeting of a lot of the stakeholders. This might be the most devestating thing I've read about Canadian Television all year.

Now that I'm motivated to at least be aware of what's out there in Canadian television so that I'm not overlooking programs I might enjoy and programs that might reflect stories I wouldn't otherwise see, I find that Canadian television does not seem to see me as its future.

At the Banff festival, I attended a town hall session on the future of Canadian TV with representatives from funders, regulators, content producers, and broadcasters, talking to an audience of the same. Now I think I understand another layer of the invisible networks problem. Listening to executives talk about my own country's product, I felt completely invisible. The discussion was focused on everything but the Canadian television viewer.

I'm not necessarily the typical viewer. At this point, I'm probably more motivated than average to seek out Canadian programming. Unfortunately, the reason for my recent motivation is not a reproducible marketing strategy: I got addicted to the blog of a Canadian television writer who's insightful, passionate, and funny about a wide range of subjects, but particularly the industry he works in. And he kept talking about shows I'd never heard of, like Jeff Ltd., Billable Hours and The Jane Show.

I started to be conscious of the fact that all these Canadian shows were appearing without a blip on my radar and wondered why. Was I just not paying attention? Or was the industry not paying attention to me?

Now -- Diane, of course, is a friend of this blog. I've plugged her site a lot, and even interviewed her about her viewing habits, in an attempt to try and formulate what exactly we are all doing wrong here in this great big country that's not the United States but might as well be for all the homegrown culture that is not on our airwaves. So yeah, she's not exactly the average viewer. But I'm going to guess that there are actually way more Dianes out there than there are Justins. (And I'm not picking on Justin. He and I agree about things -- including TV -- more than we disagree. The difference is as a working writer, I recognize that the health of my industry depends on having things out there that do not appeal to my personal taste, and where my personal taste conflicts with something that's good for the health of the industry, I swallow my bile and move on.)

There are Dianes out there who sold out the Bloor Cinema in January of 2005 to meet the Trailer Park Boys. There are Dianes who did grow up watching Degrassi, and there are Dianes or Daves or Stews who were the ones who caught the CBC flatfooted when they almost got rid of Ron McLean from Hockey Night in Canada a couple years back. The CBC was surprised by the reaction. Why? They don't know what the audience really cares about -- because they never talk to those people.

The reason why the Dianes aren't being listened to? I think it has to do with the defeatist meme that's rife in the industry: "Canadians don't want to watch Canadian shows."

That's an article of defeatist faith among a lot of "stakeholders" in this country. I have an alternate theory. "Most of the shows we've done thus far simply aren't good enough to hold an audience."

I've seen numbers. Lots of Canadian shows premiere big. People tune in because they're curious. And then they go away. If, as Diane suggests, the audience is invisible, that's only because it's actually easier to blame the audience for not watching, than it is to look inward and ask if the product is really good enough.

So if you're going to Meet with Stakeholders, pretty please guys, can you try to get a few more Dianes in the mix? Cause right now, the Diane's aren't feeling the love:

Listening to executives fretting about international markets felt a little insulting. What about me? Wouldn't they like to make a TV show I might want to watch and then let me know about it so I can watch it? I heard "let's protect Canadian content in the scary new world of the unregulated Internet, but let's not make it too Canadian or we can't sell it."

I heard it suggested that successful shows like Corner Gas and Trailer Park Boys might be too Canadian for international markets, despite the fact that the former had just signed a US distributor, and the latter is broadcast on BBC America. Not to mention the apparently unimportant fact that Canadians like to watch them, too.

I had to wonder if, in their hunger for the secondary markets of the future, they'd forgotten their primary audience of the future, an audience that in the past made shows like Degrassi, Slings & Arrows, and DaVinci's Inquest successful within our borders before they were embraced outside them.

The future of Canadian television also seems to overlook the primary product in the zeal to create secondary products. The suits talked about how to entice viewers through means other than television – that is, how to use new technologies and media to drive people to programming and vice versa. They talked about audiovisual content on the web, cell phone videos, and the need to train and support more Canadian artists to produce this new multi-platform content.

..

The Banff panel threw around the word "quality" a lot: "We have to make a quality product." But I didn't hear how the Canadian television industry plans to meet that goal of creating more quality shows, strategies to overcome barriers to making quality shows, or what happens when a quality show falls in the forest and no one is around to hear it.

Diane's full article on the Invisible Canadian Audience can be found here.

Note to Pinheads

I'm tired. I'm cranky. Some people are dumb. Note to dumb people:

Guess that bullshit about The One sounds pretty stupid now, hey, mofos? That's right. Your boy -- YOUR BOY -- is the one fronting the brand. CBC haytas, you can bitch all you want about firing all the publicists, and hiring nothing but new layers of management (because clearly that will fix anything) but this particular development is nothing but good for the CBC.

Unless, you know, they fumble the Strombo. Good for George. Let's see how fast CBC screws things up and loses him.

First bet?...they'll do something moronic like not tapping him to host the Canadian version.

Then there's this.

Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, if you're aiming a show at kids, you put together a website. And not a bullshit website. Honest to god. Spend money. Return calls. Keep sites up to date. PROMOTE YOUR SHIT.

Crazy One Eyed Dolphins, Mad Cows, and Whale Heaven, Oh My!

It's a rainy day here in Toronto. I've got a Gemini jury for a couple of hours this afternoon. I'm giving notes on one script, taking notes on another, and revising a third -- all of which swirls and kicks and has to be done magically by Friday. And the weird thing is: I know it will be. Just the way it goes.

But just because I can't blog my heart away for too long, doesn't mean that you guys should be shortchanged. So maybe it's time to hand it over to the next generation of storytellers.

Salon's Video Dog site is always a great place for interesting, curated videos, but rarely does a clip tickle my fancy like this one, animated by Ian Stewart.

Go watch Crazy Dolphins vs. The Mad Cows. For an extra-special bonus, pay attention to the voice of the third kid. That's pretty much how I sounded when I was nine. Awesome.

Look Up in the Skyland. Wait. It's gone.

Promoting Canadian TV is even harder than Diane thinks. By accident yesterday, post World Cup head-buttie and post-dinner woozy, I happened to come across a show that I'd written that was airing for the first time.

Skyland is a Canada-UK-France co-pro. I wrote three scripts for this last year, and the first of mine, "King For a Day" came up yesterday. I tried to find airdates for this a few weeks ago, but beyond the first few eps and a repeat, they had no listings, even on Wikipedia.

Here lieth the Canadian TV problem.

Anyway, it's always strange to just stumble upon your work on TV. It's equally strange to think that something that people worked so hard on spills onto the air without fanfare.

In the end, I recognized quite a bit of my script - though not all of it. I chuckled at some of the things that had been softened because of notes, and I had to admit that the strange lifelessness of that CG mo-cap look nevertheless does not diminish the beauty of the show's look. It's beautiful looking, that is for sure. Simplifying the MacGuffin in the episode kind of worked. I guess. And miracle of miracles, even one or two of the jokes I put in there made it through story editing (when you're dealing with international co-pros, the jokes never make it through.)

Anyway, it was a fun show to work on, and all the people involved with the Canadian side of the production that I met were extremely professional and wicked nice.

If I was a 10 year old kid I'd think Skyland was a really cool show. I mean, I loved Battle of the Planets when I was 10, and that show made absolutely no sense whatsoever.

Still. Zoltar rules.

Skyland airs in Canada on Teletoon, weekends at 7:30 p.m. In the USA it can be seen on Nicktoons.