Underdogz

YESTERDAY WAS SPENT in a Writers Guild of Canada Council Meeting (coughing into a green handkerchief, yes, ladies he is available...) and there was some interesting stuff -- not all of it bad, believe it or not. Hopefully I'll get into that later.

But here's what caught my eye on the old Google Alert this morning:

Re:10 best U.S. shows you're

probably not watching, Dec. 2

It would be nice if Rob Salem were also to write about Canadian shows you probably aren't watching. One show I never miss is The Border on CBC Monday night. It is every bit as good as CSI and Law & Order but never gets into the Top 10 listed each week in the Sunday Star.

It has well-written stories, top notch acting, lots of action and even sex etc. Anybody I mention the show to usually replies that they [don't] watch CBC. What a shame. They don't know what they're missing.

Albert Speisman, Toronto

Albert was writing in regards to this article on the "10 Best U.S. Shows You're Probably Not Watching."

Now, Rob Salem at the Star is a good guy. Nobody likes TV more than him and he writes what he thinks his audience legitimately wants to read about, same as all journalist/critics. But Albert's letter does poke a bit at something that is an ongoing problem (one of many) when it comes to domestic Canadian product. I write about what writers have to do, and what Canadian creatives have to do all the time. But whenever I point out the fourth estate's shortcomings, I hear grumblings from certain quarters. No matter. People hate to be told they should be doing better... that's just human nature.

I can't speak to other cities in Canada. Thanks mainly to TV, Eh? I do see a lot of their articles, but there's that thing where you don't connect them all together in a pattern like you do with your homegrown stories.

For what it's worth, my impression is that over the last little while, The Toronto Star has slacked off a bit on covering homegrown stuff -- and slacked off in the most important department, which is covering the homegrown stuff right along side the U.S. stuff. I'll get to that in a minute. Alex Strachan in the Canwest Papers gives Canadian shows a good shake, and by far the fairest and best coverage comes from The Globe and Mail. (John Doyle, for instance, has made no secret of the fact that he really doesn't like The Border -- but he has written about it, and plugged it, quite a bit -- and he also is a consistent champion for more domestic tv.)

For most of the rest, they tend to rely on the Canadian Press, when they write a story on something homegrown.

Now, of course, you have to view all this within the context of the very, very serious contraction that's going on in the newspaper business. It seems that intelligent writing about TV, from a local perspective, is going the way of Newspaper Classified Ads. I think that's a huge mistake. Having a local guy like Sepinwall from the Star Ledger or Maureen Ryan from the Chicago Tribune write about something most people do for over 20 hours a week is an important part of connecting with your audience; but that's me. I don't run the presses.

The Globe and the Canadian Press both recently ran stories on the state of Canadian domestic television, with a cautiously optimistic spin. Both articles are informative, as far as they go. I'm not going to knock either one.

But the problem is that that's the only kind of article that Canadian TV gets. Usually in the paper it's treated as a thing apart. In fall preview articles, they spend lots of column space on U.S. shows, and if you're lucky, the Canadian stuff gets covered in a sidebar. In discussions of how the business is changing, Canadian writers may write all about Jay Leno, and the fortunes of NBC, but even for a Canadian audience they don't mention things like the upcoming CRTC license renewal hearings, and how that might affect what homegrown shows there are to watch.

Articles about Canadian TV, when they appear, are also exclusively the province of the Arts sections of papers. In the Business section, they're never, ever discussed -- even when the article is about the pressures facing the industry, Canadian or American. To read an article on Canadian TV networks, in the Globe Report on Business, you'd think that one hundred percent of the point of broadcasting in Canada was to re-broadcast American shows. It's ninety-five percent, true. And Lord knows, they'd probably like for it to be 100 percent -- but it's not. Not yet.

By hiving off and making sure that Canadian TV is usually only talked about in this separate bubble, it subtly reinforces the point of view that it's something different, something, in the stentorian tones of my long-gone Catholic youth: something slightly unholy.

This kind of disconnect and separation is what allows a lot of the misapprehensions and fictions to keep bubbling through; it's what allows some people to turn up their noses at Trailer Park Boys and talk about it like it's an object of shame, and not a show that brings hordes of fans out every time the actors make a personal appearance. It's what allows a double standard where Canadian shows are judged (sometimes) by a harsher yardstick -- and 'judged' is probably the wrong word, what I really mean is "dismissed."

Oh, don't get me wrong. There are a whole host of things that creatives still need to fix about Canadian shows -- at the development level, the production level, and certainly at the promotional level. But moving the needle of the public's opinion is made ever more difficult when there's the subtle intimation that there is TV, and then there is Canadian TV.

What prompted me to write this was a happy accident. I watched my colleague Sarah Dodd's episode of The Border on Monday night. When Sarah was writing this ep and prepping it and putting it together, I was deep into getting the next episode ready -- so I didn't have a lot of familiarity with the material. I think I read the script a couple times, and gave a few notes and suggested a few lines. But it changed in production, as it always does. And I never did watch an early cut. So when I tuned in Monday, I got the closest experience I've ever gotten to seeing an episode of The Border purely as a viewer does.

I was pretty entertained. John Fawcett's an awesome action director. And Sarah's script was emotional, with good personal subplots and stakes. There was a way cool neck-snap at the end that had me going, "whoa!" Fun. The episodes of The Border that weren't written by either of the Senior Writing Producers, Janet MacLean and David Barlow, were always supervised by one of them. This happened to be a Janet episode, and I could see some of the touches that she brings to it - things that she thinks are important to convey. My instincts are not always the same as Janet's, but to watch the finished episode, you can definitely see some choices that I know she pushed for that made the episode better. But... there's Sarah's voice too, and John's and there's Jonas rocking out a few very funny Slade lines, and some fine work from James McGowan, and everyone doing their level best and in the end, it adds up to a very exciting hour of TV, with a nice bittersweet coda.

I did a guest teaching stint at Humber College's Film and TV writing program this week, and one of the things I told them was that it's a miracle that anything good ever winds up on TV, since every single episode of every single show requires about sixty people to do what they do and not screw up at all.

From the couch, it was an entertaining ride. I enjoyed it way more than this week's House, for instance, which I found manipulative and schmaltzy. Isn't that funny? Even in my head, even with all I do to try and argue the opposite, I've got a bit of that double standard at work in my own brain, too. I was surprised that I enjoyed The Border more than House. I don't know why. But I was.

I remember years ago going to a video store and seeing all the Canadian films in the Foreign section. And I thought that said a lot. And I think the editorial "separateness" of Canadian TV accomplishes the same thing. I don't know how to fix it. But it certainly is a factor.

One among many.

EDIT. Wicked. And from the "look how au courant we are" spy this little story in today's Globe. Turns out there's a huge RCMP investigation into gangs infiltrating Canadian airports. Sarah's Border episode, which was written two months ago -- spins out from a gang that has infiltrated the Airport. Score another one for The Border crystal ball!