This Canadian Press article on Rumours ran in both the Toronto Star and the Toronto Sun in the last few days.
An excerpt:
"The audience craves quality programming, but we have to make it for less money and then we have to promote it for less money, and then, after doing that, there's this pre-judgment from the media and the Canadian public that it can't possibly be any good," she adds.Then, in today's Globe, this article:
Meanwhile, Haydn-Jones points out, shows that were cancelled in Canada due to poor ratings are going gangbusters in syndication in the United States, especially the CBC's Da Vinci's Inquest, scrapped in Canada but now one of the top-rated syndicated shows south of the border.
When The Eleventh Hour went off the air in March of 2005, Globe and Mail television critic John Doyle elegized it as a "show that was always lively and should have had a longer life." Despite barely making it to a second season, it was nominated for 41 Gemini Awards, and won best dramatic series in two of its three seasons. It had great reviews, featured recognizable Canadian actors, yet failed to find an audience, drawing an average of 500,000 viewers, not enough to justify the reported $1.1-million it cost per episode. Now, 18 months later, much of the creative team behind that critically acclaimed drama has reunited for Would Be Kings, an original, $7-million miniseries, the first from CTV since 2004's Lives of the Saints.I like the idea of a mini based on Henry IV. That's kind of cool. I hope it's great.
I guess I just don't have any rant or riff left in me today. I wanted to post those two articles and ask my Canadian readers, "what do you think about the points raised in them?"
Maybe I'll offer my take. Maybe I won't. But I'd like to hear yours first. I'm a little Cassandra'd out right now.
18 comments:
Okay I will de-lurk.
On the Rumours thing: they should have thought through their publicity before it started airing. I don't remember seeing much on the initial launch but after the first numbers came in they reacted and bought big expensive-looking ads in the globe and mail and the national post, and now they've got the cast out doing promotion. Which is great but they should have done that at the launch instead of just reacting.
Sounds obvious but they didn't do it.
Also: I haven't seen many of the shows so I won't comment on quality, but the idea of doing a sitcom without a writing staff, which I don't think they have, makes very little sense to me. Yes, it's based on successful Quebec scripts, but sitcoms are about wordplay pacing and language; it doesn't directly translate it has to be written.
My two cents. Worth essentially that.
No rant, just sometimes it's not a Canadian problem. It's just tv. Lots of good things don't catch on. So, just getting something Canadian to air, even if it's good and done right, doesn't guarantee success.
I thought it was too bad about Eleventh Hour. It was a good show. But the fact that it was cancelled is just tv, not Canadian tv.
Sorry to be Johnny obvious here.
signed,
Johnny Obvious
The two articles you posted are two different takes on one of the fundamental problems this industry faces and that is one of committment to a series. Example one illustrates the no promo problem. This happens when a network makes a show and then does its darndest to make sure that nobody other than blood relatives knows that it's on.
Now it is entirely possible that Rumours sucks and no one would watch it anyway but who the hell is gonna be able to make that judgement if they do not know that it exists.
Look at Jozi-H for example. A network decides to to a canada/sa co-pro. Whether it's a good idea or a bad idea is not under debate right now. The fact is the network commissioned it, were obviously comitted to airing it, but have decided for reasons unbeknowst to anyone outside the escher painting that is the CBC to do their very best to make sure that no one has the slightest clue when it is on, who is in it or what it is about.
Maybe the new folks at the CBC do not want to be associated with the projects commissioned by thier predecessors, I dunno but for whatever reason they have decided not to get behind this series.
Again like Rumours, maybe it bites, I dunno but the point is there is no committment to the project from the network.
Kings might be very good. sounds like it could be. but it points out another problem. and that problem is -- it's only six fucking hours long. In less than five years I've gone from being hired to do 26 one hour eps, to 13 and now down to 6. and if you're at the CBC that number might be one.
And the spin is -- hey we're making special event televison like the BBC, it's about prestige blah blah blah. But of course the trouble is, because there is no promo what ends up happen is Joe TV only finds out about this "special event" in time to see the last episode.
I agree with blueglow. I felt Eleventh Hour was promoted well, as opposed to...well, promoted. It just didn't catch on.
As for Rumours I heard about it more in June ("the antidote to Corner Gas") than in October. And now they seem to be promoting the fact that no one is watching it. Interesting strategy. (as someguy pointed out in his comment)
I'm also happy that the blueglow-comment-full-of-venom-and-bile is back. I don't enjoy the kinder, gentler blueglow that showed up in later comments of other posts.
But maybe that's just me.
Johnny Obvious
For me, part of the problem is you've got people from a show I thought was a prime example of horribly bad Canadian TV - trying and failing to imitate some snappy, glossy US-style show, except without the actual snap and gloss - whining about how everyone assumes Canadian TV is bad.
(This makes two critics/reporters who are full of praise for Rumours, which makes me almost want to take another look to see what I was missing in the first two episodes I saw. But I just can't bring myself to go back there. You can't make me.)
Desperation does not sell, in dating or TV. Industry people making shows no one wants to watch complaining in the papers that no one will give their poor little show a chance is part of the problem, not part of the solution.
Publicity is a huge problem, but there's no dire conspiracy in the CBC publicity department. They have no money. They have no people. They fired them all. Like the American networks, they don't put equal bucks behind all their shows – they put their money on one or two or whatever horses and hope the rest limp to the finish line under their own steam. Unlike the American networks, their unequal bucks are paltry.
I heard about The Eleventh Hour but didn't watch it. Why? It looked like another earnest drama full of the same actors we've seen in a million other stale, US-style-wannabe series. That's a completely unfair assessment of the show itself, maybe even of the promos for the show – I don't remember them specifically - but it's an accurate assessment of the audience attitude about Canadian TV.
I'm a convert, I've seen the light, I'm consciously putting those prejudices aside, but my church is not large.
Less public whining, more TV that compels me to watch, please. (And the usual disclaimer - I mean public as in the media, not here.)
Diane: I agree about the whining not working.
CBC bucks are obviously small compared to the Americans. But for the third (I think) episode of Rumours they dumped a lot of dough into full-page ads in the star, the post, and the globe and mail. (It was a full-page ad shared with Intelligence.) That costs some dough; if they were going to do that they should have done it at launch.
My guess is someone read the numbers and went oh shit maybe we should actually promote this thing.
'Rumours' article: whining...from the actors of all people. What else are they going to say?
'Would Be Kings' article: we Canadians have no money and have difficulty making AND marketing tv series so we'll reduce it down to a long miniseries and call it special event programming so really, how can we or the network screw that up...but in essence dodging fact that the bulk of tv prime time is one hour and half hour episodic drama/comedy (or reality or gameshows) - so unless dozens of these limited series are being commissioned, the void will still be there. One limited series will not 'build audience' - not for a show, but for a network.
How did they get funding to do a story about Henry IV?
Don't they have to be telling Canadian stories? Or is this some Canadian wheat barron named Henry IV I've never heard of?
Okay.
I was glad to see others come up with a lot of what I would have had to say on the subject. I sometimes feel like I'm out on a limb here, by myself, sawing off the branch behind me.
Briefly: you build an audience two ways. You execute an effective publicity plan to drum up interest leading up to the premiere, and then you take your initial tune in and hope it leads to word of mouth.
Rumours premiered low. And then it had a slight uptick in viewers, which led some to believe that there was a chance for some positive word of mouth building...and then the ratings dropped off a cliff.
To me that says two things: not a lot of people tuned in, and when they did tune in, they didn't like what they saw. Didn't tell their friends. Didn't build.
Floating an alternate theory in the media: there's a bias, blah blah blah -- is sour milk and spilled beer. It doesn't focus on why you watch the show. They even manage to raise, from an uncritical reporter, a fact that's just flat-out wrong: that DaVinci never did well in Canada and now does well in syndie in the States.
Davinci ran for seven seasons. It lost audience toward the end, but once upon a time it actually did draw good numbers for CBC. The comparison is not apt.
The CBC doesn't need to look too far to find a success and a case of how word of mouth works. Dragon's Den -- it's not a program concept I particularly like, or watch -- but its numbers have been going up, and building every week. I've heard from a few people now that they watch and enjoy it. That's word of mouth. That's how you build an audience.
Not by blaming the audience.
The other article is just silly. Miniseries are not the answer. One of your problems is proper promo and now you want to try and promo a whole bunch of miniseries, trying to get a buy in over and over and over, starting over with each new concept?
The Eleventh Hour is a bit of a whitewash of history too. The reality is that when that show premiered, it had a huge rating, which tumbled in weeks after. Why? People tuned in. They didn't like what they saw. They didn't come back.
The unchallenged narrative: it was great TV that nobody watched, is one theory. But it's not helpful for the way forward because it's largely not true.
Eleventh Hour stumbled horribly out of the gate. The first few episodes were not structured properly. The people had not written TV before. You had soft act outs, confusing and unsatisfying plots.
I was one of the people who stopped watching.
Then one day I brought in one of the writers to my Ryerson class and he screened his episode. And I was shocked. It was one of the later episodes from the first season. And it was very, very, very good.
They'd figured it out. But by then the audience was gone and they weren't pouring on the publicity.
But the show got renewed, and I vowed to watch it.
The second season premiere of Eleventh Hour on CTV was also very heavily promoted -- and highly rated. Lots of people tuned in to give it another chance.
What they saw was an incredibly downbeat story about sex prostitution where one of the main characters gets shot at the end, and the woman gets dragged off, presumably to her death. No resolution, just....bleahhh. I couldn't believe it. It actually made me ANGRY that I'd watched it.
The next week, their audience dropped by 50 percent.
We will not get better if we do not speak truth about why things happened. The official history, and spin being put out there does not help anyone. Or the industry.
I'm glad you noted that DaVinci's Inquest isn't a good example of something that found no ratings here but is adored in the States... it did last longer than most Canadian TV shows, based on the fact that for a while there, lots of us were watching.
DaVinci's City Hall, however, is a great example of bizarre CBC non-promotion. The best ads for the show were on about 10 seconds before the show started airing (so... we were already waiting for it...). And I love how CBC played the finale of the season --and, it turns out, SERIES-- on a different night than the show was normally scheduled, with very little warning. What the?
In other news, "Would Be Kings" is actually about corruption in a family of cops, is it not? Which should make it easier for everyone to understand the support behind it. It's procedural.
Just on the subject of the CBC having no money for publicity - its true, I'm not disputing it... but they do have a TV channel. And a cable channel. And two coast-to-coast radio networks. And one of the highest-traffic websites in the country. And still the biggest complaint about their programs is often that we have no idea when they're on, or even that they exist.
Obviously, I don't know all of the mechanics - I have no idea how things work at CBC, clearly it must be far more complicated than it seems. All I'm saying is it seems like there is unrealized potential to promote their programs using their own platforms.
"Would Be Kings" is actually about corruption in a family of cops"
Now that is cool. I was thinking of a similar idea (as I'm sure many who read the papers were), but I have not taken it far. I'm very glad the story of police corruption will be told. (and in Toronto it really is a family affair)
Decoderring, they do use their own venues to promote their shows, and that's the only place I did see Rumours info pre-premiere. But then you have to be watching or listening to CBC to know about a CBC program, and it's hard to build an audience for a new show by playing a promo on an existing show with an audience of five people - and not the right people (meow).
Promotion isn’t the only problem – Intelligence got comparatively lots before it premiered, and it still did lukewarm ratings (probably cold now that it's against House, which I think was #1 last week in Canada).
There are lots of issues to be overcome for a Canadian show, so focusing on one seems naïve, especially when it's one that conveniently absolves anyone involved with the shows of all blame. In any case, the public doesn't care. Don't tell me why I didn't watch your show, tell me why I should. But then that might come down to money too – if common sense doesn’t come naturally, some media coaching for stars and producers might come in handy.
I think Diane is right, promotion isn't always the problem. We have to grow up. If a show is on for three years, gets no ratings, and is cancelled, we have to suck it up and move on and not pretend that the network just cancelled the Sopranos.
We talk a lot about promotion but the truth is, most shows really don't get promoted. The financial reality for the networks is that, unless you are a top 10 or 20 show, you aren't getting any of their already-stretched marketing and PR resources.
We need to stop blaming lack of promotion as the root of all evil. I also think producers need to be a little more viral and a little more resourceful in how they promote their own programming.
I know a lot of tv writers who have a soft spot for the underdog and if you show isn't a total turd, they will give you some ink just because they really do want to give a little guy a shot and let the audience decide. They are less charitable when that call is coming from the publicist at CTV or Global.
I gave Rumors another shot and I still don't like it. I've tried. Truly I have. It is just a bad show. Maybe the French version is better, I don't know. But the English one bites. And I think the viewing public will support an engaging show. They will forgive faults, but they want something and it isn't enough to ask them to watch it and support it just because it's Canadian.
I feel like I have a split personality. I argue with members of the public that publicity is a problem, and argue with industry people that publicity isn't the problem. But it's not really contradictory. Yes it is. No it isn't.
Diane Kristine, me thinks you and I are a lot alike (if I am right, you should be afraid)
If you're right, my condolences, Caroline.
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