A Whole Bunch of Questions Without Easy Answers

I'VE BEEN DOING a lot of work or thinkin or whatnot with the WGC lately. Between that and my own development stuff, I find myself in the peculiar position of having a whole, whole bunch I would LOVE to talk about here, but simply can't.

This isn't a new phenom. It's been building like a slowly-boiling lobster in the pot for more than a year now. And I suppose it's inevitable when you try to both be inside an industry and comment on it too. In many ways, I'm envious of my friend (and mentor) Howard Bernstein, who sketched out for me twenty years ago, at the beginning of my career, what he'd say about the business as he knew it, if only he could do so in some sort of column or what have you.

Well, Howard's retired now, and he's doing it, in spades, and pulling no punches and I think that's grand.

Meanwhile, I have to put up with the swirling of the "things that should be said" and the very careful dance of trying to figure out how much I can say. And I do so with the ongoing, angry-making knowledge that there's just so many people out there who could very well join in, add to the discussion, help make things better, but don't because good old fashioned Canadian timidity gets in the way.

So I sit, stumped, starting posts in my head and very quickly getting to the, "are you fucking kidding? You can't actually say that" point, trying to tell myself that it's OK, you do what you can, and hell, you still go way further than those Producers who seem to email John Doyle after every column he writes in the Globe.

But the ju-jitsu is getting a bit exhausting, frankly.

Which is why I'm so happy to find somebody else who writes thoughtfully, and who takes a look at things going on in the biz and isn't afraid to do more. Peter Typing Faster is a blog by a recent CFC Prime Time TV writing graduate. He's a pretty smart cookie and has something great to say all the time.

Recently, he's posted a number of articles that put fresh eyes on an old subject in TV Land -- eyeballs vs. demos. He hangs his musings on some of the frankly, astonishing data that's started to come back about FX's Sons of Anarchy.

In Canada, the switch to Personal People Meters is quietly rippling through the biz and it's got everybody talking; nobody knows what it means. Yet. The truth is, that Canadian Broadcasters are so conservative that any innovation in how they slice, dice and sell the numbers probably won't catch on here til long after it's figured out down south. But change doesn't just come in the "it's all moving to the web variety." There are real, actual things to pay attention to in conventional TV. There's life in the old girl yet.

Also, for anyone keeping score and track of the ebb and flow of prediction and pundrity...what is there to make of the fact that, we've heard about the decline of comedy for the last four years now? Article after article proclaimed the genre just about dead. And yet what's performing well this fall? Hmm. Curious. Curious indeed.

If changes like that can happen and upend the conventional wisdom so quickly, let's all take a pill and a grain of salt and pause before we worship at the new gloom-line that advertisers are gone for good and never coming back to TV.

Really? Like the dead half hour comedy? See, smart people know it's never that simple.

One final, final thought -- Battle of the Blades is now consistently way, way higher than any scripted show on the CBC. Mercer comes close, and that's it.

So what are those two shows giving the audience that the scripted fare isn't? And what does it mean that other scripted stuff on the CBC is trending down, but Being Erica seems to bounce around like a pinata, with 20% jumps and drops from week to week?

That's all I can say. Really. Talk amongst yourselves, chickens.