The WGC on the CRTC Hearings

FINALLY, AFTER THE cablers and broadcasters whining, the WGC today made its case for Canadian programming for Canadian viewers. (Yes, you love your U.S. shows. But you already get those, remember.)

This release went out this morning:

The Writers Guild of Canada appeared today at the CRTC’s licence renewal hearings for private over-the-air broadcasters. After several days of the broadcasters expressing their desire for ‘flexibility’ in the regulatory system, the WGC called on the CRTC to reassert the primary place of Canadian programming in the Canadian broadcasting system.

The WGC applauds the CRTC’s recognition of the imbalance between broadcasters’ spending on Canadian programming and American programming in its proposal of a 1 to 1 spending ratio. “We agree that the system is out of whack, with the ludicrous amounts these companies are spending on American programming,” says Maureen Parker, Executive Director, WGC, “and we want to work with the CRTC to refine the 1 to 1 model. The last decade tells the tale: without specific regulation, broadcasters will not do local programming and they most certainly will not make the kind of high-quality Canadian shows that audiences want and deserve.”

In 1998, private English OTA broadcasters spent 5.1% of their ad revenue ($73 million) on Canadian drama. Last year, they spent just 3% of ad revenue ($50 Million) on Canadian programming – and this included benefits spending from consolidation. Over those same years, the amount the English OTA broadcasters spent on foreign drama has increased, rising steeply in the last years as they entered into bidding wars with each other for American programming.

“There’s no one with more skin in the game than the creative community,” says Ms Parker. “In fact, since 1999, we’ve been flayed in the interests of flexibility - but we know now that ‘flexibility’ is just code for less Canadian in our broadcasting system.”

The WGC requested that while the CRTC addresses the immediate issue of local programming, they hold the OTA broadcasters to 2008 expenditure levels on quality Canadian programming like drama. Ms. Parker added, “the status quo is still a loss for us, but let’s save the complex policy issues for the 2010 hearings when we will have the time and facts to address them fully.”

On this note, the WGC also called on the CRTC to require broadcasters to provide the disaggregated data necessary to making informed arguments about revenue and expenditure levels across station groups. Broadcasters have refused to provide the disaggregated data required for a full discussion of the issues instead focusing on immediate relief in the form of fee of carriage and reduced levels of Canadian content.

“Canadian programming, especially drama, has been getting the short end of the regulatory bargain, when it should be the very raison d’être of Canadian broadcasting,” says Rebecca Schechter, President, WGC. “Without quality Canadian programming, the Canadian broadcasters are nothing but network affiliates of the American stations. If they’d prefer to just air U.S. programming, let’s do away with their protections and subsidies, and we’ll get the American shows directly from the U.S. sources.”

"I Love You" only means "I Do Not Hate You"

I'M CATCHING UP on my blog reading and missed this til now, but SERIOCITY did a great piece last week on the neurotic calculus of staffing season.

I put together a list of rules to help you make it through:

1. If someone says they love you, that only means they don't hate you. It does not mean that they will hire you. Quite the contrary.

2. No matter what level you are, you will always be too expensive.

3. Even if you have twenty different samples, you will never have the exact right one.

4. The studio or network list doesn't mean anything if you're on it, but it does mean something if you're not.

5. Most people don't know how to recognize good writing, which is why having the exact right sample is so crucial.

6. You will always knock a meeting out of the park on a show that doesn't get picked up.

7. There is always one show that gets picked up that makes everybody in town go, "Where the fuck did THAT come from?" That show never lasts.

8. The rumors you hear only come true if they diminish your chances of getting a job.

9. Somebody in one of your meetings went to college with that psychopath you worked for.

There's much, much more. Go read the full post here.

Hold Your Nose and Pass The Smelling Salts

I'VE MANAGED TO pull up sick in the last forty-eight hours, just as we get into the meat of storybreaking. Bleah.

Of course, at least some of that queasiness should be reserved for the subject that never goes away and never gets better: the whingeing and moaning over Canadian TV.

Ten years since broadcasters were allowed to re-define "priority programming" to include crappy magazine shows nobody gives a shit about. Ten painful years trying to make inroads with creative dramas and comedies. Some successes. Some failures. But a drop in the bucket to the big tent show: Broadcasters vs. Cablers.

The latter are making all the money. The former are mad. Both, in their time, have complained about homegrown programming not "being competitive" in the midst of their very, very much-protected industries.

In the sideshow this week, Jim Henshaw comes out in an entertaining post for Team Shaw. I tend to feel more like one of his commenters, who compares consumers' role in this little fight as being Poland caught between Germany and the Soviet Union in WWII.

Except, of course, the Poles actually had a sense of their own culture.

Ooh. Low blow. I know. Cranky. I'm in a hotel for night nine. Gimme a break.

The display at the CRTC has been weird, with Cable co's offering interesting speculation about how to re-align the industry, as the conventional broadcasters continue their single-minded pursuit of Carriage Fees. Or, As Henshaw puts it,

Despite ample opportunities offered by Commission Chair Konrad von Finckenstein for input on how the broken conventional model of television could be fixed, Fecan offered nothing but “give us more money”.

Seemingly unable to articulate how that money could be spent, be it on local news or maybe even drama, to bring back both audience and advertisers, he raised the same question a lot of people have been asking about auto industry bailouts -- “If nobody’s buying the product, how does keeping the company afloat a while longer solve that problem?”

Even when von Finckenstein mentioned that it’s been a downhill slope for “ten years”, Fecan couldn’t come up with one idea on what might change things.

Anybody remember what happened ten years ago? 1999? The year the nets won a reprieve from doing expensive dramas in favor of cheaper to produce and mostly unwatchable pap?

And throwing more money at this guy, just like the CRTC did back then, is going to make it all better. Uh-huh.

So Jim Shaw made what he knew was a winning bet, and immediately further pissed on Fecan’s parade by stating that his Kenora station (another small market outfit) had managed to end up $200,000 in the black last year.

Huh?

You mean local TV can make money?

How come the CTV affiliated Globe & Mail never mentioned that? Is there some odd reason Canwest’s National and Financial Posts both missed it as well? Whatever could cause such a journalistic lapse?

Jim says $200,000 isn’t a lot of money. Maybe not to him. But it’s more than GM or Chrysler made last year. And suddenly a lot of people who pay Cable bills or work at the CRTC have begun wondering just how well those other stations could be doing if they weren’t saddled with a schedule of lame celebrity magazine shows and derivative reality offerings their viewers can already get elsewhere.

If you choose to read beyond Jim, please give a moment to consider that today is yet another wonderful Canwest D (for 'Debt') day. What will happen? You got me.

Meanwhile, on the public side, sometimes the CBC's Richard Stursberg is a tough guy to like. He can be high-handed. I'm not the guy's publicist. ( I also sure as hell wouldn't want his job.)

And though I know it's easy to point at me at this point as a guy who's worked on CBC shows now and for the past two seasons and declare me biased -- I don't deny it -- I wonder how someone could read this little article Stursberg wrote for the Star and not have a little pause. It articulates a point of view that makes quite a bit of sense, in context.

The CBC is the only television service in the country devoted specifically to Canadian programming. Our 8 p.m.-11 p.m. prime-time schedule is entirely Canadian; those of our competitors are overwhelmingly American. If this does not make us "distinctive," what would?

Ah, say our critics, we're not "distinctive" because CBC shows are made within the same narrative and format conventions as many U.S. television shows. They argue that the Canadian privates could make these shows.

Maybe. But they don't. CBC spends more on Canadian drama and comedy than all the privates combined.

But, say the critics, it's not "high quality" and a public broadcaster needs to focus on quality, not popularity.

Here is the root of the matter. Some people believe there is a mutually exclusive choice to be made between popularity and excellence. If a show is successful, it must necessarily be coarse or vulgar. For some, in fact, television itself is an unworthy medium.

This is patronizing, disrespectful and untrue. They are the views of those who haven't paid attention lately to shows like Little Mosque on the Prairie, which has been inducted into the Television Hall of Fame in New York and sold to more than 60 countries around the world. Or Being Erica, cheered by critics here and abroad. Or other programs that Canadians love to watch, like The Tudors, The Border, Heartland, Rick Mercer Report, This Hour Has 22 Minutes, Dragon's Den and The Week the Women Went.

In Lausanne this year, The Rose D'Or Awards are devoting an entire day to celebrating the CBC.

When the pundits describe what they want on TV, it's more "high brow," more "educational" and more "mandate." They want it to be a university lecture, a ballet, or a treatise on world hunger. While television can sometimes portray these, it is none of those but rather much more: the greatest popular art form in the world.

Every serious public broadcaster, including CBC, aspires to make great national television.

The BBC is packed with wonderful, popular soap operas, sitcoms, reality shows, game shows, police procedurals and comedies. They are all relentlessly British and relentlessly focused on attracting audiences. The BBC makes no apologies. It celebrates television for what it is.

In English Canada, it's sometimes argued that we've fallen away from CBC's Golden Age in the 1970s and 1980s. Not true. A typical prime time from 1982 was mostly American shows of little cultural distinction: Mork & Mindy, WKRP in Cincinnati, Dallas or Joanie Loves Chachi.

Our Golden Age, arguably, is now. Our prime time is Canadian. It's also attracting more Canadians than Global, CITY, the A Channels or the E Channels. For the first time in history in English Canada, a Canadian schedule is beating an American one.

Yes, CBC is a rorschach test for everybody in the industry. No matter who you are, you tend to project your own concerns, biases, and needs onto it. Still, the defense that Stursberg makes needed to be said. And he said it pretty well.

Speaking of saying it pretty well, from the truth to power department, if you can tear yourself away from the "local TV is dying" kabuki sideshow going on at the CRTC, save a little energy to cheer on Team WGC as they present on Thursday -- along with Canadian showrunner Cal Coons. (Murdoch Mysteries.)

Michel Arpin may look on that presentation as the bleating of a self interested group. You may look at it a little differently. I certainly do. I think Thursday we'll get to see the only people at this whole hearing speaking out for a greater choice for consumers, and a greater voice for Canadians on the airwaves we all supposedly own.

Now, if you'll excuse me, I gotta go. That ColdFX has to be somewhere.

Spinning Plates

EVERY DISCUSSION of "Hey, um, you think they know what they're doing on LOST?" seems to get queasier and queasier as the eps tick down. The NYTimes tackles the subject again, with Lindelof offering answers that might evince a few nods from anybody who's ever been in a writer's room, and puzzled head scratches from everybody else:

There’s so much organizational power, especially now. The less episodes there are, the more you have to go, like, “Oh my God, we have to do this. When are we going to do that?” We always get asked iterations of the same question which is, “Are you making it up as you go along?” It’s a very complicated question to answer, but ultimately, we have all the story but we don’t know what order we’re going to tell it in. So it’s like “Pulp Fiction.”

There was always an option in past seasons which was, “Let’s hold it for next year. I don’t think they’re ready for that,” or “That’ll have more emotional impact later.” And then there are also actor deals to contend with – what’s the stable of regulars you can maintain at any one time? Next year, I feel like for the first time we’ll have the entire box of crayons to color with, without having to worry about the mechanics. All our ducks are in a row.

I think one of our biggest concerns is reaching the climax of the story too soon – you have to time it right, you have to walk that line between giving a steady supply of story and character pathos and mysteries being answered along the way, so that the audience doesn’t feel like it all comes in one big chunk. But then if you do it too soon, they kind of feel like, “I got everything that I cared about halfway through the season, so why am I still watching?” And it’s terrifying. Finally, we’re going to do it. There’s no excuses, we don’t get to say, “We didn’t get to end the show on our own terms. They kept us on the air three years longer than we wanted to be. Blah blah blah.” It’s like “Galactica,” you have to say, “Here it is, do you like it? I hope you like it.” There’s a lot of second-guessing going on. I think the show will end exactly as it began. There’ll be people who love it, there’ll be people who hate it. There’ll be people who’ll be confused by it, there’ll be people who love being confused. It’ll end on its own terms.