ACTRA Got It Wrong

THERE ARE CERTAIN inevitabilities to the problem of Canadian TV. But none are more reliable than the duelling press releases of Friends of Canadian Broadcasting and ACTRA, the national performers' union. It's gotten to the point where you don't even have to read them, because when any news event happens you pretty much know what they're going to say.

Here's the latest, on the subject of CBC cancelling MVP (whose name they get wrong), JPOD and Intelligence:

CBC'S CANCELLATION OF INTELLIGENCE, HOCKEY WIVES, jPOD
ANOTHER DEVASTATING BLOW TO CANADIAN DRAMA

March 10, 2008 - Toronto - The CBC's decision to cancel three shows for the fall season - Intelligence, The Secret Lives of Hockey Wives, and jPOD, is a clear example of inexperienced CBC executives who don't understand their mandate to support Canadian programming, especially drama.

"CBC is a public broadcaster, and they have a responsibility to actively support and promote Canadian critically acclaimed series like Intelligence, and work to build a bigger market share for new, distinctive and creatively exciting programming like MVP: The Secret Lives of Hockey Wives and jPOD, " said Richard Hardacre, ACTRA National President.

The CBC has an unfortunate history of cancelling quality Canadian productions before they have had a chance to build audience share - and without announcing replacements thereby abandoning their audience. Past cancellations include Da Vinci's City Hall, This is Wonderland and The Tournament.

"It appears that CBC executives don't even understand the basics of marketing and how to support distinctive Canadian programming. CBC's mandate is different from that of private broadcasters, that inundate us with U.S. production, yet the CBC's idea of supporting Canadian production is to kill it before it's given a chance to grow, "said Stephen Waddell, ACTRA National Executive Director.

"Canadian TV screens are swamped with U.S. programming that private broadcasters are spending hundreds of millions of dollars on to buy and market in Canada. We need our public broadcaster to show more commitment to supporting Canadian production, which is critically acclaimed around the world," added Waddell.

ACTRA has been sounding the alarm about the crisis in Canadian television drama for years, and demands that the CRTC fix its disastrous 1999 Television Policy. ACTRA is calling on the CRTC to set a regulatory minimum expenditure of 7% of broadcaster ad revenues on English-language drama.

You have to hand it to journalists, though. Sometimes when you have only the predictable way to respond, you gotta work hard to find your fresh angle. And -- heh heh -- Rob Salem in the Toronto Star today did a bang-up job doing just that.

Leafs blamed for CBC cancellations

It has not been a good season for hometown hockey wives – real or imagined.

Along with the hopes and dreams of long-suffering local fans, the Maple Leafs' characteristic end-of-season fizzle has allegedly had a devastating impact on the CBC prime-time lineup. Including, oh-so-ironically, the sexy, soapy MVP: The Secret Lives of Hockey Wives, whose final episode airs tonight at 9.

A CBC news release issued Friday trumpeted the new and returning series that were being picked up for next year, with the critically acclaimed Intelligence and the freshman efforts jPod and MVP noticeably absent from the list.

Unofficially, the inevitability of another Leaf-less playoffs, expected to cost the national broadcaster some $10 million in potential ad revenues, is being blamed.

Later in the article, Salem does quote the ACTRA position. So what's wrong with it? How did ACTRA get it wrong?

Well, first of all, they're wrong on the facts. Take this paragraph:

The CBC has an unfortunate history of cancelling quality Canadian productions before they have had a chance to build audience share - and without announcing replacements thereby abandoning their audience. Past cancellations include Da Vinci's City Hall, This is Wonderland and The Tournament.

Yes. DaVinci's City Hall was a one-season spinoff/retool of the once-mighty DaVinci's Inquest. The problem is that the show did not invigorate the ratings for DaVinci, which had been on a steady slide for years. Taken together, the two incarnations of DaVinci ran for something like eight seasons and 104 episodes. It went from being a hit of around a million plus viewers an episode to nearly a third that. How is that not giving the show a chance to build audience share?

This is Wonderland was canceled after its third season, with 39 episodes in the can. It was drawing around 300 000 viewers max. How is three years not giving the show a chance?

Intelligence. Now, at the risk of angering the passionate fan base of this show, of which I count myself a member -- there were two 13 episode seasons and one pilot movie. They never did better than slightly over 400 000 viewers, and in the end, the show on the main CBC network was being regularly beaten (as in EVERY episode was being beaten) by the ninth and tenth reruns of Blue Murder on Showcase -- a cable channel in less than half the homes reached by CBC.

We can quibble about ads and advertising support. And believe me, we have. But if you want to try to convince me that ads in every break would have pushed that 250 000 number back up to 700 000, I'm sorry, I don't buy it.

In the case of Intelligence, in fact, I'm afraid we have the most painful situation in the world. A really, really, really good show that the public, for whatever reason, simply did not buy into. That's life. It did get 26 episodes and a movie. And yes, I fully expect we will be talking about it in five years. But you have to ask yourself if ACTRA's position here is fair. DOES the CBC have a responsibility to keep on shows nobody's watching? Well? Um...Why again?

Because people are always gunning for the CBC. "Look no one is watching these expensive dramas," can become, "why are they making expensive dramas no one watches' in a heartbeat.

How can you save Intelligence if you canceled This is Wonderland, which was getting more viewers? What's the rationale there? Everyone's quoting Sophie's last number because it was a huge dip, but that's pretty unfair, since up to then the show has pretty much hit a rock-solid target and stayed remarkably consistent week to week. (And drew about 3 times the audience of Intelligence, by the way.)

There's a problem with campaigns to save our show in Canada, and it's this: they generally don't come from fans. They come from producers and interested parties, like ACTRA. And the act of condemning the CBC for trying to build on successes and cut losses is tremendously alienating to the one constituency that should really matter: The audience.

What does this attitude lead to? Something vaguely like what Jaime Weinman wrote here, (complete with an excellent clip from the Kids in the Hall):

This is dangerously close to advocating that the CBC should be airing series even though nobody watches them, which verges on unintentional parody of the traditional Canadian TV mentality (the mentality that it's not important to have good or popular shows as long as they're Canadian). MVP was a bad series that deserved to be cancelled; jPOD had some potential but not enough to make people like it. Intelligence is a sadder case because it was a terrific show, but its lack of popularity wasn't some kind of myth invented by the evil CBC for the purpose of destroying Canadian content; it really wasn't popular and shows that aren't popular tend to get canceled. If we want a stronger Canadian TV industry we have to accept one of the things that go with such an industry: the fact that shows can't just hang on indefinitely without being successful.

What else did ACTRA get wrong? Well there's this quote, for one:

"It appears that CBC executives don't even understand the basics of marketing and how to support distinctive Canadian programming."

This just takes whatever credibility ACTRA has managed to build up and shoots it straight out the Air Farce's chicken cannon.

Because anybody who actually watches CBC, or takes public transit in the three cities that were heavily targeted with outdoor for the current season can tell you that this winter, CBC's launch efforts were exemplary. Studies showed that people were more aware of their efforts. If they hadn't yet bought in ... they at least had been made aware.

The basics of marketing, at least where marketing of TV and films are done well, proves that you do what you can to support something, but you cut your losses if it doesn't work.

Question: when was the last time you saw saturation ad coverage in the second week of a release for a film that opened at number 14?

Answer: Try never. They pull the money. They cut their losses. That IS marketing.

Because in Canadian TV we're never going to have the money to pay for programs and not run them at all, like they regularly do down south, the closest we can get to cutting our losses is not spending two or three seasons on something the people do not watch. And CBC, finally, has done that. They've made hard choices. ACTRA can say that they were "abandoning their audience" (who weren't watching) by not announcing replacements -- but in the very press release they were responding to, CBC announced that they were going to announce their new shows in a few weeks.

Note to ACTRA: When ABC or NBC cancel a show, they don't immediately announce a new show. It's not a quid pro quo. That's NOT how marketing works.

So long as we keep mixing these things together -- bad calls like, "You should keep these shows that no one watches indefinitely" with "Broadcasters should spend 7 percent of their revenues on production," you're going to hurt the cause of creatives. Because there are a whole bunch of structural reasons why the latter is probably a good move. But if I'm a viewer, and I hear the former coming from ACTRA -- it sounds like Crazy Talk. So I'm going to think that everything that comes from ACTRA is crazy talk.

Because that's human nature, dood.

Alex Strachan's got a much better analysis of the CBC moves here. As does Brioux, here. And then there's Bill Harris in the Sun, here. Do I agree with everything they have to say? Hell no. But at least they seem to understand the medium they're commenting about.

ACTRA, on the other hand...