The Border Bias?

SO A COUPLE of interesting articles in the last few days take on the subject of THE BORDER and its politics and approach. First, there's Robert (Wedgie) Fulford, writing in the National Post. Canadians' anti-American tendencies is one of Fulford's favorite subjects -- he wrote pretty much the same column about Intelligence earlier this year:

While Americans typically rush toward reckless judgements, Canadians are like McGowan's solid, level-headed Major Mike Kessler. Our guys move with care and consideration, lest they make a mistake that might harm someone.

The Border, which started its season on Monday, is the kind of show that makes you proud to be a Canadian -- especially if, like McGowan's Mike, you're also really, really boring. The script expresses what J.L. Granatstein, the historian, described the other day (he was writing about Liberal and NDP policy on Afghanistan) as the "sanctimonious, opportunistic anti-Americanism" that crops up so often among Canadians.

Peter Raymont, the executive producer of The Border, has said his show resembles Kiefer Sutherland's 24 -- "but with a conscience." You can't get any more CBC-sanctimonious than that.

Among TV heroes, Mike is a straight arrow. He's a solemn, one-dimensional and painfully upright leader of Immigration and Customs Security (ICS). He has the official rule book, and probably the Charter of Rights as well, engraved on his brain pan.

This is the third anti-American drama on the CBC schedule this season, the others being Intelligence and H2O, a miniseries that unveils two new programs, jointly titled The Trojan Horse, in March and April. All of them depict public-spirited Canadians fighting off the influence of greedy or just plain vile Americans. Apparently, our immigration department's real enemies aren't terrorists or smugglers. They're Americans.

It's strange when someone looks at the world and leaves out the most important part. I'm sure there are those (I'm going to go out on a limb here and suggest, oh, say, a few Albertans) who will agree with Fulford 100%. You don't need a lot to activate the bleating of "left wing bias! left wing bias!" from Canada's own contingent of Bill Reilly wannabes.

What Fulford's leaving out, of course, is the current context. At this point, dramatizing Americans as the bad guy can't simply be construed as knee-jerk Anti-Americanism -- not in the six years since Abu Ghirab, extraordinary rendition, Valerie Plame, signing statements, Scooter Libby, Cheney's secrecy, illegal wiretaps, Patriot act extensions, Gitmo, The Unitary Executive, Iran saber rattling and a failed war that recognizes neither the reality on the ground nor the lessons of history. For John Bolton at the United Nations alone, we are in a despairing point in history where most of the world, and even, now, a majority of Americans think the USA is going in the wrong direction.

Divorcing that reality from the context of The Border isn't just tone deaf, it's irresponsible. The knock on Canadian dramas in general and the CBC in particular is that they never seem fresh or now -- they're period pieces, or feel like they've sat on a musty shelf for a year or more. (Most of the time, because they have.) Say what you want about The Border, because of course there are flaws -- but you can't say it's not current. And it's a little hard to sell the notion that the show itself is anti-American -- at least to yours truly, born New York City, voted in every Presidential Election since 1988..)

Interestingly enough, you can see the evolution of the kind of treatment extended to the Americans not on The Border, but on another TV program readily available on DVD. Though for the sake of shorthand, a lot of press has drawn comparisons to 24, the show that the writing staff of The Border was most inspired by was MI:5, the British spy show known as Spooks in the UK.

If you track the evolution of the American presence over the years on that program, you see a much clearer shift in the storytelling zeitgeist. In Season One, the main character had an assignation with a comely CIA agent assigned to the American Embassy. Many of the stories revolved around the U.S. in some way or another -- but they were crazy, outside elements of U.S. society, not the government itself.

In subsequent seasons, the American presence in the show has gotten much darker. The MI-5 squad has had to deal with meddling in internal British politics, and cleaning up American-made messes. I'm watching series 5 right now, which has just been released on DVD, and the transition is complete: an American trade ambassador at a summit is the villain of an episode, and the U.S is portrayed as an arrogant hyperpower, sacrificing short term strategic gains for long term horror.

Now, is that anti-American, or is that following what a lot of people, you know, read in the newspapers?

If anything, The Border's vision of American interference is still far more benevolent. Sofia Milos' Bianca LaGarda character is not monolithic, and she takes some surprising turns as the season progresses.

And it's not like Canadians get off scott free, either. In next week's episode, the first that I wrote, there's even a sneaky subtext running through the whole piece. As much as the U.S. creates a mess and wants to smash it with a hammer, the Canadians are shown as, well, a little bit underequipped and underprepared to deal with it. Which, you know, is the reality a lot of the time.

A similar, if slightly more interesting take on the show came from Jim Henshaw last week. The whole post is really worth reading, but I'll just excerpt this part below:

More to the point, while I'd been assured "The Border" signified a new dawn for Canadian TV, what I saw was the same smug "we really are better than Americans" cant that I've endured from Canadian programming all my life.

I've written about the Canadian Superiority Complex before and despair that we can't finally cough up that vile hairball and get on with defining who we are instead of constantly reminding everybody of what we're not.

But, no, the message from CBC drama and comedy is always the same. We're nicer than they are. We're smarter than they are. We're more compassionate and caring and accepting.

But we're not. No more than Canadians are better than Australians, Swedes, Afghans or anybody else. And pretending that we are is one of those obscene lies that reveals just how immature and uncertain of ourselves we really are.

Jim at least places The Border into a context that Fulford does not: in the light of the hope sparked by Obama's Iowa win, (a result that met with incredulous coverage from print media in Europe) what does that bode for the future of that back and forth, that American viewpoint in the show?

It's an incredibly intriguing question. And a great problem to have.

What's more, I agree with Jim -- up to a point. Part of living your life in Canada when you're an American means that you see some of the standard American jingoism through Canadian eyes. Americans say a lot of things that make Canadians crazy -- even Obama, when he says, "this could only happen in America!" made a few Canadians I know bristle. It's maddening to think that the same kind of weird optimistic, confidence-based-on-nothing that's led the USA down a dark road in the last few years, the same thing that allows them to think, "we're number one!" when things are falling apart -- is exactly the impulse that leads to American greatness. But there it is.

Americans assume that they've got the best way of doing everything, and are disturbed when they finally figure out that they don't. Contrast that with Canada, where when outside validation, like say, a U.N. Report calls the country the best place to live in the world -- everybody beams. And when the next report knocks Canada's position down a peg or two, there's actual chagrin.

Living in Canada with a somewhat American sensibility means being able to see Canadian myths and tropes for the fictions they are, too. And where Jim's right is -- them tropes don't evolve much. And pointing them out to Canadians, even in a friendly way, well -- it does NOT go over well.

All of this swirls down to one creative question, for me: how do you frame and tell mythic stories to speak to a culture that isn't really sure what it is, that wants outside validation so badly? Do you tack toward that validation, or away from it?

I'm really jealous that The Arcade Fire and Tragically Hip and Broken Social Scene don't have this problem. But there you go.

I'm fairly certain there isn't a whole lot of objection to the portrayal of Americans in MI-5 in the UK. But then again, they also stuck it pretty good to Tony Blair, too -- whereas in Canada, we can have former Prime Ministers investigated for outright fraud and sleazy bribery and nobody really blinks an eye or gets their dander too far up. It's weird.

Writing in The Globe and Mail, John Doyle comes at the cultural question from another direction today in his column about the return of Degrassi:

It's been a most interesting 10 days in the Canadian TV racket. CBC delivered four new shows. Some people watched them and others just rolled their eyes, acting all "Canadian TV drama? Who needs that hopeless stuff?" Yep, even with a writers strike stopping the flow of the usual American network fare, there's a bunch of people who just won't watch Canadian-made TV. It's U.S.-made or nothing. Even inside the TV racket there's doubt and self-loathing. Are these shows good? Would a U.S. broadcaster air them? In a few weeks, in some room in Ottawa a hearing will start about the merits and the problems with the Canadian Television Fund. Arguments will go back and forth about whether Canadian TV productions should be given seed money by cable companies and taxpayers. Some cable companies who have accumulated vast profits by simply delivering U.S. channels and shows to Canadians, will argue that the CTF hasn't done a bit of good. What they mean is that the Canadian shows don't look American enough. The thing is this - as usual, when in doubt, we crave endorsement of our pop culture by the United States. Hardly anybody says it out loud, but we see the legitimacy of our popular culture as being derived from U.S. acceptance.

Doyle goes on to categorize that Degrassi works in the U.S. because it is, in fact, distinct. American audiences appreciate the seriousness and dignity with which teenage issues are addressed, with a candor that would never be possible on U.S. tv.

Because Canadians don't have the same myths about teenage life as Americans do.

Here's the rub, though. Even when we punch through those myths, with a Degrassi or a Corner Gas or a Trailer Park Boys, you're still going to have some yahoos here running them down -- whether it be Jim Shaw, or Bob Fulford, or anyone else who wants to drive whatever tortured agenda they can through. It's not enough for The Border or MVP or anything else to be a good show, or an enjoyable show....it has to carry the flag, too. It has to somehow maybe be noticed -- but not too noticed.

At least Doyle gets down on The Border a bit for being "obvious" and not "subtle." Which at least is a criticism based only on content. (Though I'd have to ask: is it less subtle than, say, oh, 24 or MI:5?)

Canadians crave U.S. validation and success. We resent it when the U.S. ignores us. We hate it when we put out a show that's a copy of a U.S. show. Some of us hate it when we do something that's different. We sell a show abroad to say, "see! it's good!" And the part of the homegrown audience that shrugs, goes, "we don't care, because you don't have U.S. stars and glamor." And if we do? Shrug. Whatevs. It's a completely schizophrenic reaction, that makes it very, very, very hard to program to.

In the USA, you have all sorts of groups that will greet any show through whatever prism they choose: ethnic or religious, or regional or economic or sexual or demographic. You can pretty much guess what prism which group will view the show through.

Not so in Canada. We have all of those prisms -- plus we have people who want to make shows to prove something. And we have viewers who are highly ambivalent about approaching the show because, well, it's too American. Or...It's not American enough...

It's...it's....

...enough to give you a big, big Advil headache.

Which is why, in the end, I just default to:

Do I think this is entertaining?

Because I can't think of any other way to negotiate the crazy that is Canada, Canadian culture, Canada's attitude toward the USA, and Canada's attitude toward the USA's attitude toward us.

Oh my God. I just reread that last sentence. Never mind the Advil. Hand me the Bourbon.

(-Why Bourbon? Isn't Canadian Club good enough for...

No. NO it isn't. Now get out of here. Daddy has to rest.)


THE BORDER continues -- with the introduction of Sofia Milos -- tonight at 9pm on CBC.

[*NB* I should note that the above, like everything on this blog, represents my opinions and does not necessarily reflect the views or opinions of anyone else connected with the creative of The Border]