Crafty Canadian Musing: Terminal City vs Breaking Bad

The Canadian-made series TERMINAL CITY gets its U.S. premiere tonight on the Sundance Channel, the boutique cable co that made a splash a couple years back through another Canadian acquisition, the much-praised (if little watched, at least in Canada) SLINGS & ARROWS.

What's interesting about some of the critical reaction to Terminal City by Our American Cousins, is that they find it intriguing precisely for the same reasons some Canadians reject Canadian programs -- their markedly different feel. The slight torque that makes them feel, well, less like American shows. (That's also the most common reaction Americans have when they see things like Intelligence, or DaVinci's Inquest.)

In other words, what in Canada leads to what I call the Foley, Really? principle, in the USA, winds up being a bit of a selling point -- at least to the type of boutique audience that the Sundance Channel chases.

Take Heather Havrilesky's recent review in Salon. (Scroll down, halfway down the page.)

We're supposed to understand, early on, that Katie and Ari are people who make odd, unconventional choices. Take the second episode, when Ari tells his wife, "[W]e can get dressed up, but we're not doing horse tranquilizers." Now imagine that line on an American drama.

Katie makes another odd choice when, halfway through the first episode, she brings her 16-year-old daughter, Sarah, along with her when she goes to her breast biopsy. When Katie steps out of the procedure room, there's a TV camera in her face, filming a reality show called "Post-Op." Instead of mumbling an excuse and moving on, Katie lights up and shows the camera her tumor (which includes baring her naked breast). The show's producer, Jane, calls her boss with an idea: Let's fire our lame real-life-doctor host, and hire Katie to host the show instead.

This very off-kilter drama is nicely cast, beautifully shot, and the mix of desperation and joy presented here is about as ambitious as a TV show can get. Of course, with ambition and smarts comes pretentiousness -- the writing can get more than a little precious at times. After Katie's TV appearance, for example, Sarah admonishes her mom about her language on camera.

Sarah: Mom, you said fuck!

Katie: I know ... and I should use that more often, because it's a great expletive.

Sarah: What's that?

Katie: An expletive? It nails life! My life and your life, too.

If an expletive nails life, having your lead character say that an expletive "nails life" doesn't nail life at all -- it nails unnatural, queasily cute, overwritten dialogue onto an otherwise worthwhile backdrop.

What's interesting to me here is that Havrilesky, who's a pretty discerning reviewer I generally agree with, manages to zero in on exactly what I didn't like about this series, while giving it an entirely different spin. Same basic conclusion, different overall impression.

I have to confess: I hated Terminal City -- though I watched every episode. I was kind of duty bound to do that, since I had business with one of the companies that made it. (The series apparently did A-Okay without my lovin -- hence the American sale.) I will say that I found the Television subplot excrutiatingly arch, and hamfisted and yes, pretentious. (When a movie made in 1975, Network, manages to say more about reality tv -- a genre it anticipated, than a tv series made 30 years later that got to observe the trend, you know the arrow's missed the mark.)

That being said, the final episode of Terminal City, which plays almost like a one act riff on the play Our Town, is original and quite lovely. I just wish I'd enjoyed the characters and the journey leading up to the coda a little more.

The pretentiousness of the dialogue, unrealistic feel of the characters and situations surrounding the TV broadcast Katie comes to host sunk my enjoyment largely because, of course, I found myself viewing it through the same unfair prism that creatives always do in this country: "how will reaction to this one show affect the perception of Canadian TV as a whole: will it make it better or worse?"

That's a hell of a thing to put on one little television show. And I'm guilty of it as anybody else. In many ways, it's the en famille version of Foley, Really? I struggle to try and let go of it, and don't always succeed. So it's interesting to read a review from a critic who approaches it without that baggage.

Now, on the other hand, that doesn't mean that U.S. critics are universally raving about the show. Take this review in the Hollywood Reporter as a fr'instance:

This light dramatic series -- which premiered in 2005 on Canadian television and now comes to Sundance Channel -- doesn't always succeed. It's serious stuff, all right, because it focuses on a fortysomething wife and mother who learns that she has breast cancer. But when it tries to be humorous, it hits some rough patches. It's hard to balance the serious stuff with the lighthearted, and not many have succeeded at it. Also, "Terminal City" has a somewhat colorless delivery, and that often makes it seem to be falling off the screen.

The first episode, directed by Rachel Talalay, is pretty slow going, as if unfolding under water. Of course, it takes time for the setup, which includes our introduction to Katie's family and then to her illness. It could, however, use more snap. Creator-writer Angus Fraser infuses the series with a seriousness that often overtakes the humorous situations Katie and her family find themselves in. Even as the opening credits roll, Thomas Burstyn's cinematography offers serious, natural images that collide with Schaun Tozer and Ben Mink's rather lighthearted music.

Hmm. There it is again, that critique that does seem to be pretty common about Canadian shows -- they start too slow and take too long to get going. (I can clearly remember, with horror, several development meetings where a Canadian D-exec asked, "could we maybe slow this down a bit, and get to know them more?" Canadian D-execs sometimes seem to be allergic to plot.)

Anyway, I actually found myself thinking quite a bit about Terminal City in the last few weeks, even though it's been three years since I've seen it. I think that has to do with Breaking Bad.

(Spoilers for Breaking Bad, eps 1-5 ahead)

I wrote about Breaking Bad right after its premiere. But it was a few episodes later when it dawned on me that it followed a lot of the same thematic script as Terminal City. Bryan Cranston's character in the first episode, Walter, finds out that he has terminal lung cancer.

He, too, makes an odd choice. But unlike Katie's choice -- deciding to become the host of a reality TV show, Walter's choice -- using his knowledge of chemistry to go into the crystal meth manufacturing business -- actually seems more plausible, even though really, at the heart of it it's just as outlandish.

There are two craft things that set the two series apart, right off the top. You find out that Walter character is definitely terminal barely ten minutes into Episode 1 of BB. Katie thinks she has Cancer, but isn't really diagnosed for sure (she won't call her doctor back) until Episode 3 of TC.

So much for starting fast.

Where Breaking Bad also pulls away, I think, is through finding a away to tack away from the expected. Once Walter makes the choice to start cooking meth, things spin wildly out of control. You think this is going to be a show about freeing yourself through transgressive behavior, a la American Beauty. But Creator Vince Gilligan throws an interesting curve ball. You might even call it a very Canadian kind of curve ball -- he slows the action down in the next few episodes to deal completely with the implications of the actions Cranston takes in that first episode. It makes the series zig instead of zag. And though I've heard from several people that they found the detour into cancer drama offputting -- I was held by the inexorable series of circumstances that drove the character back to the place we shockingly saw him in Episode 1 -- deciding to transgress completely, and set up shop as a meth dealer. To me it didn't feel like a backtrack. It took a character who made a choice that most of us would never make, and bit by bit, sucked you in to make you see why, and how, he's making the only choice he could make.

(The final piece of the puzzle, that makes the main character flawed and compelling? He's actually offered an easier way out, which he doesn't take because of pride. Which you learn, more or less, has been his problem his whole life. Neat.)

Episode 5 of Breaking Bad contains as wrenching, as emotional, and as real a dramatization of the agonizing choice of the Cancer patient as I've ever seen on Television. To me, it rang true and delivered in a way that nine out of ten hours of Terminal City did not.

I've been trying to figure out why for a couple weeks now.

As near as I can figure it, I think it's a question of focus. Breaking Bad wants to be about a man dealing with Cancer, and about the politics of meth, and the insanely difficult choices people face in dealing with the cruelty and dysfunction of the American health care system. Those are all big, huge, potentially enormous capital S subjects. But the stew that Gilligan cooks works because all of these issues are writ small: the scenes of family drama are small; the choices made on the way to becoming a meth dealer are small (except for one huge choice, which, fittingly, takes most of two episodes to play out.)

In contrast, everything in Terminal City attempts to be huge, and writ large. Katie is larger than life to begin with. Cancer doesn't really seem to change her. There are subplots about hate crimes and holding onto ancient hatreds, and (this being a Canadian drama -- a weird sex subplot or two... gotta get those in before C-1o.)

All of these huge actions seem to happen independently of each other, without any sort of connection. And oh yeah, we also try to indict the entire genre of reality TV.

Breaking Bad, in contrast, is a story about a man who never really lived up to his potential, finding out that he's run out of time. Cancer, and meth dealing, and the vagaries of marriage all find their riffs and rhythms in the drama -- but the big issues are given weight through small, easily understandable choices leading to outrageous, but inevitable actions.

And that to me is the essential difference, that makes Breaking Bad far more thoughtful about Cancer, and life, than Terminal City. We are asked to walk in the main character's shoes. In Terminal City, Katie is always kept at arm's length.

But you know, that's just my opinion. If you get the Sundance Channel, tune in tonight and see what you think. Terminal City premieres at 9pm.

Breaking Bad airs on AMC Sundays at 10pm.