ACTRA and CFTPA have stopped their duelling pressers for now, but that doesn't mean either side's closer to the truth.
Everybody's got a take on Jim Shaw and the CTF, but having a good point doesn't mean stamping your feet and taking your ball and going home is right.
Then there's Konrad Yakabuski, who earned his asshat by writing this howler of a story in the Globe and Mail's Report on Business section yesterday. The breathtaking thing is that he "gets inside the mind of what everybody was REALLY doing and thinking" over the flap at the Heritage Commitee, then bumbles just about every fact he quotes to make his point.
Viewers, meanwhile, are not watching any more Canadian dramatic programming than they were a decade ago.Trailer Park Boys airs on Showcase. Konrad here is basically comparing ratings for 2nd tier cable with terrestrial, which considering the difference in their reach, is laughable. It's like comparing FOX ratings to ratings for F/X, Fox's cable station. The Sopranos, which is a monster show for HBO, would be canceled or on the bubble with the ratings it gets, were it on ABC.
Enter Jim Shaw. The outspoken Alberta cable king dared to say publicly what his industry cohorts have long been complaining about before the CTF's 19-member board. We'll let the TV critics determine whether Mr. Shaw's depiction of Trailer Park Boys as "guys running around half-naked, swearing and smoking weed" is fair game. But let's end the myth that the show is a ratings success.
Trailer Park Boys has drawn an average audience of less than 80,000 viewers this season, compared to more than three million for any one of the CSI franchises. The Canadian series, which got $2.8-million from the CTF this year, has been sold to a few foreign cable networks, but in the thousand-channel universe, fees for such sales are negligible. Maybe a few hundred Australians get a kick out of the beer-swilling trailer trash from Canada. But should Canadian taxpayers have to pay for it?
On Showcase, a top American import like Rescue Me, might do a few hundred thousand viewers. And that's a massive number. The 80 000 figure he's quoting for TPB is likely to be, inevitably, the average viewership for the season which is now in its 2nd or third cycle through on the channel. It is not a premiere showing.
But see, it's not enough to actually talk about what's really wrong in Canadian TV. There's such a streak of stupid perversity running through Canadian media, that you have to do this bullshit dance of trying to tear down the stuff that actually does work. "Trailer Park Boys isn't a hit!" Yup. The guys sell out Vancouver's Commodore Ballroom for a personal appearance, host the East Coast Music Awards, get mobbed at signings. The movie flopped. I'm sure the Amazon.ca sales this week don't mean anything, either. Konrad knows the score. He goes on:
It took CNN to pump up Little Mosque on the Prairie, which got $2.5-million from the CTF, for Canadians to tune in to the show's debut on CBC last month. The public broadcaster subsequently took out full-page newspaper ads to boast the show's success with 2.1 million viewers. It hasn't, however, advertised the fact that once was enough for most Canadians. The most recent Mosque episodes have drawn fewer than 300,000 viewers.In their 2nd window repeats. Yes. The reality? Let's turn to how Bill Harris wrote it in the Toronto Sun:
NOT-SO-LITTLE MOSQUEHere on this blog there was a bit of back and forth of what "stabilized ratings" means. Well, we now have a metric that's based on five airings. The huge number (2.2 million) of the first airing did go away, but the 1.2 million average of the last few weeks is stable. And the repeats get 300 000 to 600 000 viewers, which means when you add them together, Little Mosque is always in striking distance of 2 million viewers a week. In a country of 30 million. (By the way, this kind of mismanagement of ratings data is exactly why a lot of Canadian networks play those numbers close to the vest. Can't trust a reporter to do math, after all. Not when they, too, think of 'hits' and 'misses' in U.S. style numbers. Even that 80 000 number has a selling commercial value in Canada for cable. I mean, at SPACE, when they got 300 000 viewers, for anything, people would be clicking their heels and lighting cigars with fifty dollar bills. But I digress.)
No one can deny any more that CBC's Little Mosque On The Prairie is a hit. A new episode on Wednesday attracted another 1.2 million viewers. The numbers for all five first-run episodes thus far have not dipped below a million.
Online, if you look at that article, you'll see that it's been corrected. But it wasn't corrected in the original article. Konrad's fuzzy math is out there. A lie gets halfway round the world before the truth gets its boots on. In an industry beset by problems on all sides, what chance is there for resolution when the public is ill informed, the lies fly fast and furious, and lazy writing gets to muddy the debate like this?
By the way, by point of contrast, let's look at an outsider view. Maureen Ryan in the Chicago Trib, writing about Slings & Arrows:
What’s with these Canadians taking American jobs?
Aren’t we Yanks supposed to be crafting delightful backstage dramas about the catfights, crankiness and passion that go into the creation of a work of artistic genius?
Well, I guess if the behind-the-scenes chronicle “Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip” was any good, we wouldn’t have to worry about incursions from north of the border (though the terrific backstage comedy “30 Rock” is doing us proud).
As it is, let’s just allow the Canadians to show us how it’s done with the rollicking and ultimately moving third season of the import “Slings and Arrows,” which debuts 7 p.m. Sunday on Sundance Channel.
Maureen also is working in one of the markets where Davinci is a syndie hit on U.S. tv. Suddenly it all makes sense.
If we want to get support for the beset Canadian TV industry, all we have to do is...
...turn to Americans.
Pathetic. Absolutely Pathetic.
10 comments:
What a twit...
It's sad enough comparing Showcase to CTV/TPB's to CSI, but to make it sound bad that TPB's received 2.8 million Cdn. for an ENTIRE SEASON of Trailer Park Boys when CSI receives more than that for a SINGLE EPISODE? How can you you compare? Truly pathetic...
Yes, Mr. Doyle...we creatives are scared, and we're tired... because as loud as some of us might clamour - this is the mentality of a messed up system we're ultimately up against.
yeah that was the one I mentioned in another thread. It was astounding.
The Mosque thing annoyed me so much that I forgot about the Trailer Park Boys dissing that went on in the same article.
I love how these guys (that idiot reporter, that idiot cable co. owner) always pick on the trailer park boys. Yeah that revenue generating show; that's what's wrong with the canadian industry.
I don't think Mosque has gotten a number as low as 300,000 even on repeats. I'll have to look again but the repeats have been hovering around 650,000 which would be pretty good even for a first run of a CBC show.
John Doyle vs. Konrad Yakabuski. In the ring. It's got to happen, and soon. G&M could be selling tickets right now!
But Will, and DMc ... if you guys are tired of fighting, and too busy packing for the US to make a stink to the people who can drive decisions, what's the point? Why bother trying to promote Canadian TV, or save the CTF, or come up with a better funding system, or work on fixing the industry, if there's no one left with the energy to fight for their own jobs?
Give a girl some hope.
DMc, you had a great comment a while back about the role of the artist in society, similar to what Alex just posted ... that's the kind of thing Doyle's looking for. Why's that buried as a comment and not a post? Why's that not a letter to the editor?
Forget Doyle vs. Yakabuski - I want you creative people against the world. That's not much to ask, is it?
The inaccuracy about Little Mosque’s ratings in the quoted article is appalling, even if you assume it was an "honest" mistake (that he was looking at the Monday night numbers).
At the same time the comments about The Trailer Park Boys ratings was interesting, as I’d been wondering for a while about that -- how it could be on a cable specialty channel, and yet people act as if it’s the biggest hit on TV. And saying that, as a cable program, you can’t expect big numbers, doesn’t change the fact that they aren’t big numbers.
Don’t get me wrong -- I’m happy to see a Canadian show develop a fervent following; I was ecstatic when its movie opened number one. But, me, personally, I don’t much care for the series. And there tends to be this thuggish mentality in Canadian culture where if you don’t like things that some cultural Star Chamber has decreed are “Canada” -- you are somehow supposed to hand in your citizenship. Ironically, with Little Mosque, people -- grudgingly -- now concede it’s a hit, yet everywhere you go (including on this blog) people are explaining what’s wrong with it, how it needs to be “fixed” -- yet Trailer Park Boys apparently brings in less than a tenth of that audience, and editorial after editorial says how it speaks to “all” Canadians and is the soul of Canadian identity. A mature, confident culture has to accept that different people have different tastes.
With that being said, Shaw’s criticism of Trailer Park Boys is also inappropriate if he just doesn’t like it -- the fund wasn’t set up to reflect the tastes of any one individual.
But another, contentious point I’ve been brooding about for a while is the whole question of foreign sales -- and how we use that to legitimize our TV shows. Surely there are only two criteria by which to judge the success of a “Canadian” program -- Canadians like it, or it makes a profit and pays back its investors in which case it’s financially independent. DaVinci was supposedly cancelled due to dwindling Canadian ratings, yet people now pillory the CBC because, they claim, it’s a big success in the U.S.
But so what? If Canadians weren’t watching, that’s surely the main factor in deciding to cancel a series. Particularly if, as the article implies, the foreign sales aren’t actually enough to off-set the production costs.
There's a lot of facty stuff mixed up int he soup of your comment there, DK, so let's unpack a bit.
saying that, as a cable program, you can’t expect big numbers, doesn’t change the fact that they aren’t big numbers.
But they DO get big numbers. Because everything is relative.
Battlestar Galactica never got more than 4 million viewers in the USA. It just got renewed for season 4 though those numbers in the US are now rarely above 2. That's not a big number for the USA, even for cable. But the show gets renewed, and is important. Why? Because it helps immeasurably building the Scifi brand -- which an outsider looking at the no. won't be able to quantify.
They show Simpsons reruns on CBC at 5pm everyday. They get around 50000 people coast to coast. (or they did last time I checked.) That's not a huge number. Are we to conclude that the Simpsons aren' popular? No. Because you look at the slot, and the fact that it's a repeat, and how much they paid for it, etc, etc.
TPB is a very cheap show to produce (doesn't it look it?) because of its concept. It is the show that brings the "edgy" rep to Showcase -- it helps the brand. And truth is, when they do start each season, the first time through those shows do in the 250 000 to 300 000 range. Which whether you get the math or not, IS a huge number for Showcase. In fact, because of the way Showcase repeats (like A&E, on a wheel, with multiple showings on the night) new eps of TPB sometimes pull in closer to a million.
So lets leave the ratings argument behind for a moment. Because people are conditioned to USA numbers, the numbers always seem small.
Canadians have contrary souls, and that extends to the media. You're coming into this with an impression of the tail wagging the dog. If there is a "thuggish Star Chamber" cultural elite mentality at work in Canada (and I'm not sure you're wrong) it doesnt FAVOR TPB. You're just coming into the discussion on the backswing. TPB has been around for about seven years now. There was lots of clucking and up and arms stuff about it when it first came out from the elites. It was very much ignored, and denied. Articles that talked about Canadian successes didn't mention it. They were embarrassed by it.
But a funny thing happened. The boys started getting mobbed. The people actually started trumping the elite and making them look bad -- how do you take a stand and decry the lack of a Canadian star system, etc, then deny when you see something connecting with people.
But if there has been an embrace of TPB (beyond people like Doyle in the Globe who always liked it) it's recent -- and the fact that you see articles like Konrads and comments by Shaw show you it's by no means universal. The fight is ongoing. It's just not stacked the way you think it is.
As for "fixing" Mosque, I'm a pragmatist. I will not deny that audience number. And I will not say things that other people are saying to try and run it down (it's novelty, etc.) That said, I think there's a way to make the show better that wouldn't hurt anyone watching now, and might get some of that 1 million that disappeared to come back. There's a grand tradition in TV of things succeeding despite themselves.
As for your foreign sales comment, there's a couple of points packed up in that, too. People who point to Davinci's US success as example that it shouldnt have been canceled miss the point. There are 7 seasons of the show. That's around 90 eps. The show had a run. It's got more than enough eps to sell. They tried to port it to another show, it didn't do as well, and so theyve decided to convert it to an occasional movie franchise. there is nothing wrong with that.
I agree that looking to foreign validation is cracked, but it's cracked in the way that the Canadian psyche is cracked. I didn't create that problem, that perversity in Canadians. I just have to work with it. As does anyone making Canadian TV.
And trying to do US style shows with US style prod values (which Canadians expect and demand) for a market less than a 10th of the USA pop, with no foreign component -- well there's just no way to make that math work, I'm afraid.
Again, if Canadians were different, things would be different. But they're not. Now what?
I wondered when we'd start seeing this issue characterized as the television producers assault on the taxpayer.
"...it has simply become a scheme for a small group of private producers to get wealthy at the expense of Canadian taxpayers and cable subscribers.
The subscriber subscribes. Whatever portion of that fee is paid out to the CTF is the cost of doing business on the part of Shaw. If Shaw chooses to increase your cable fee and you continue to pay it then what's the big deal? Somehow cable subscriptions are now considered taxes? No he didn't say that but the inference is clear in a battle where language is the weapon.
Appalling.
Also, as a point of clarification, As far as I know producers in this country are capped, like all of us it seems, to a limit of 10% producer fees and 10% corporate overhead. That seems like 20% to your average "taxpayer/cable subscriber", but what this guy fails to mention is that the calculations are based on certain elements of the budget. Not the whole budget. When you do the final math on it (charge backs not included. things like edit suite rentals and so on.)the total figure lands in the 12-13% of the budget range.
I guess that's not as impressive a number to support his argument.
Spin pisses me off.
Some of us viewers are still hoping to use this Da Vinci movie as leverage to get DVCH back to full-ongoing series status. Gotta start somewhere, right?
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