Reprint: Gettin Schooled

(Originally published Dec 1, 2006)

THUNKA THUNKA THUNKA.

That's rain outside my window that looks suspiciously like it wants to be snow. This is the kind of weather that makes a rewrite much, much easier. Blueglow will be relieved that I shant be haunting the coffee shops today. (Still gotta write about that.)

So the better to get to work, and ease into the weekend, I need something easy to write. Hmm. Let's see. Here we've got an email from Nicole. Nicole is a journalism student somewhere here in the fine Province of Ontario, and she writes:

For my final assignment I am doing an article on Canadian media—specifically how America affects Canadian television and Canadians viewing habits. If you feel like you could give me any insight or views into this subject, I would like to interview via-email.

Sure Nicole, sounds fun. And since everything is repurposed for content here at Dead Things Labs, let's have a giggle and share Nicole's questions and my answers to the group, shall we?

Here are my questions..thank you so much for taking the time and helping me out. You rock!

I really don't. At best, I sway. But Thanks. Shoot.

Do you think there is any difference between writing tv for Canadians as opposed to Americans? Explain.

I think so. There's several ways to answer that question. First, though I truly believe there is a difference, I'm not sure our industry has done a very good job of exploiting what that difference is, yet.

On a basic level, the difference is that Canadians are not as insular as Americans are. The great bulk of Americans have very little curiosity about other cultures or an international perspective. (They have more now than they did five years ago, to be sure, but it's still tied up in post-9/11 fear and a sense of threat, not genuine curiosity about the world.) Americans tend not to be too interested if the show isn't about Americans, or something happening in America. I have a hard time explaining this to Canadians, a lot of the time, but Americans tend to kind of be isolationist as a people. (Their government's experiments in imperialism notwithstanding.)

What that means is that I think you can write a bit more about the situation in the world, or feel free to set something other than Chicago or New York, or have a character from a different part of the world in a Canadian work, rather than an American work.

The peculiar thing about Canadians, of course, is that they spend their whole lives absorbing and observing a culture that they're intimately familiar with, of which they aren't really a part. I think that might make Canadians more introspective as a people. So maybe characters who are more thoughtful, and more considered, rather than "men of action" could play here, more than in the U.S.

If you believe the ratings, smarter shows that use irony do a little better with Canadians. God bless'em, the great bulk of the American people don't really cotton much to irony. They didn't get it when Mark Twain tried it a hundred years ago, and they don't get it now. Irony rules the internet, and snarky magazine pieces, but not that mass TV audience.

On a more practical level, the differences have to do with social pressure. Because the religious right isn't quite as militant or influential in Canada, you can portray things that you simply can't in the USA: teenagers can have sex on TV here, without immediately getting pregnant. If they do get pregnant, they could actually have an abortion, not be forced to keep the baby or have a magic miscarriage. Degrassi actually had lots of trouble getting some of their shows past the N, though it's their most popular show. Shows that aired here and were no big deal were too hot to handle down south. That's telling. The Sopranos runs on CTV here unbleeped. Dropping an F or an S bomb won't be thought of as bringing the whole of western civilization to a halt. And, of course, Canadians are mostly allergic to jingoism, that kind of "My country right or wrong" rah-rah stuff you see in a lot of CBS shows. Oh, and people here who smoke pot do so without immediately trading up to heroin. They are not necessarily evil.

But on the other hand, there are lots of things that are going to be similar in writing TV for Canadians. They demand the production values, pacing, and quality they see from the best U.S. shows. And so they should. That's the place where, sadly, we have to do better. And it's a challenge, because we're never going to have the money most U.S. shows have.

That's a long answer, Nicole. But that's what you get for asking a complicated question.

What do you think makes a successful Canadian show?

I don't think there's a magic bullet or yardstick. And again, that question needs to be parsed a little bit, because are you talking success in terms of ratings or revenue, or in terms of being artistically successful? I'm going to assume the latter, because I think it's a more interesting answer and I'm the one answering the questions here, Nicole, let's not forget that.

Oh..you're getting a text message? I'll wait.

There. (I'm kidding, of course, this is an email interview. I've never even met Nicole, though I think she has superb taste in interview subjects.) John Doyle, the TV writer for the Globe and Mail, thinks there's a gentleness to it. And I tend to think that's part of it. American comedies really evolved to a place where we were laughing at people being nasty to each other. Corner Gas is a lot more gentle, and a million and a half people watch it every week, which is a huge number for Canada. The people on Corner Gas tolerate each other, and may get annoyed from time to time, but there isn't nastiness. Trailer Park Boys has a ton of swearing, but the characters form, in their own way, a sweet, supportive family. (One of my favorite things in TPB is the way they handled the gay relationship between Mr. Lahey and Randy. Nobody cared. It was just matter of factly revealed. Nobody has a problem with the two of them because they're gay. It's a far bigger deal that Lahey is always drunk and Randy never wears a shirt.) Degrassi, in all its incarnations, was successful because it spoke to its audience about subjects that U.S. TV wouldn't touch, and it didn't judge or talk down to them. So that's something.

I think successful Canadian shows come out of not replicating U.S. formulas -- but in trying to speak to the parts of the Canadian psyche that don't get represented on U.S. TV. Sometimes that's executed in a clumsy or unsatisfying way, but when creators here do a series with the audience in mind, and not so focused on "what they want to say," that helps. And being different because we're different -- not being different than American shows for the sake of merely being different, is huge, too. I don't know if you see that there's a huge difference between those two things, but there is. If you take another Canadian show that I think works, Rent-A-Goalie, the obvious, surface thing is that it's about hockey. But the thing that makes it work isn't that -- it's the gentleness underneath the fart and jock jokes; the sense of family, just like Trailer Park Boys.

How is Canadian TV affected by America?

Profoundly. We're the only country in the world that receives U.S. network feeds in their entirety on our cable systems. So their shows are all on at the same time as in the USA. No other country has this burden, and it is a burden, because in many ways we really are what Hollywood would like us to be: an extension of the U.S. domestic market.

The USA is the largest and most successful exporter of culture the world has ever known. And we're right next door. In other countries, people love U.S. shows, but they also love their own cop shows, their own lawyer shows, or family dramas, or soaps, or talk shows. Canada is an anomaly in the sense that most of our top 20 shows are American.

What makes it even stranger is that you'll see lots of Canadians stand up and wave the flag for Canadian music, or Canadian books, -- hell, they'll get all misty eyed at Hockey Night in Canada and the "I Am Canadian" beer ad, but they're more than happy to watch another nation's values and obsessions on TV every night. It's a disconnect, to be sure. I just happen to think it's a disconnect that we in the Canadian TV industry have sometimes made worse.

The new season of Degrassi seems to be sexed up. Do you think this is this a way for CTV to compete with American shows kike the OC?

I really don't think so, no. I think it's just a function of where those characters are in their lives right now. I actually haven't watched Degrassi for a few years, so when I tuned in I was shocked by how old they've all gotten. No wonder they're all sexed up -- they're all 19 and 20 years old and totally hot.

Degrassi always aged the kids in real time. And now that they're practically adults, well, all those hormone stories aren't so taboo anymore. And the great truth that Canadian TV can say that U.S. tv can't is that by the time kids get to the end of high school, the majority of them are sexually active -- at least in some fashion.

What is your opinion on the Cancon mandate?

I think it's important. There are some really radical people in my industry who think that we should have a quota system like France where I think 60% of their prime time has to be homegrown fare. I think that's totally unrealistic, and you'd probably have a viewer revolt, and the Canadian networks would really suffer. And Oh My Lord that would mean a whole lot of crap on the air. So I don't favor that at all.

But the arguments that people make against Cancon quotas are exactly the same arguments they made against forcing stations to play Canadian music. And for a few years, yeah, that meant playing the same bad stuff a little too much...but the industry matured. And now, I think you've got to say that Canada's domestic music scene is arguably more vibrant and interesting than the U.S. scene, especially since we're ten times smaller. Whether you're talking bands that only really succeed domestically like Blue Rodeo or Tragically Hip, buzz bands that are indie music darlings in the U.S. like Broken Social Scene, Feist, Arcade Fire. K-os, Sum 41 -- hell, none of these bands would be around if not for the regulations that allowed Canadian artists to get a toehold and not be overwhelmed by the much larger American market.

If there's a consistency to support for Canadian TV, we'll get to that place, too. Because people will be able to get better, get more experience, move up in the ranks and not have to go south to work in TV, which is what happens now. In fact, if they hadn't changed the rules in 1999, I bet we'd have more hits on the air right now than Corner Gas. It takes a few years. But I think we saw with the rule change where the Networks' priorities are. Once they didn't HAVE to put Canadian drama and comedy on the air...boom...they stopped. Overnight.

I also think this is contingent on separating the Canadian Film and TV industries a bit. Canadian Film is arthouse film. Nobody wants to see arthouse TV. The people who should be creating TV shows here should be people with a commercial, audience-entertaining sensibility. These people, in the past, haven't been the ones getting TV shows here. So, like David Shore (House,) Hart Hanson, (Bones, Judging Amy) and a bunch of Simpsons writers-- they went to the USA.

What do you think the CRTC must do to ‘save’ Canadian TV?

Go back to the carrot and the stick. Right now the networks are asking for carriage fees, so they can charge cable operators to carry their signals. Which are mostly simulcasts of U.S. shows, which is a big fat joke on the Canadian public. Try explaining to the Canadian public that they have to pay 10 bucks more a month for cable just so they can watch CSI on CTV and not CBS. See how far you get.

They also want more ad time, they want to count infomercials as CanCon. It's pure greed. Utterly silly.

The CRTC should restore a quota: 7% of private broadcasters revenues have to go into Cancon, period. They should also stipulate a number of hours a week in primetime that has to be devoted to homegrown scripted programming. That's the stick. Then offer the carrot: breaks or credits on Adtime for spending money to actually promote these homegrown shows. There are people smarter than me that probably have better ideas about this, but the bottom line is that Canadian networks have treated their homegrown shows as a nuisance. Something has to be done to force them to really try to invest in these programs' success. Broadcasting licenses in this country are not a right, they are a privlege, and they have to step up as corporate citizens here. They're crying poor, but broadcasting in this country has been and continues to be ABSURDLY profitable. All we're asking for here is our fair share -- and 7% is not a lot, in context. Networks who spend 300 million a year on U.S. shows and then balk at spending more than 90 million on homegrown shows just aren't credible.

What do you think about the CRTC hearing going on this week?

It would be nice if the commission showed some teeth. The broadcasters have gotten their way for so long that I think they just expect to get whatever they ask for. It's outrageous that they're standing up there, asking for even more breaks and protection, and then out of the other side of their mouth whining that there's no room to spend money on domestic shows. I hope people finally wake up and realize that these guys want to charge them more every month for stuff that they're already getting, and not give anything back to anyone. We'll see.