DIANE KRISTINE has an interesting piece over at her digs about the recent news that America's Televison Critics are disappearing.
I think we're further down that road in Canada than the Americans are. We have national TV columnists at the Globe and Mail, the National Post, and Macleans magazine, and unique voices at the Toronto Star, with Vinay Menon, Jim Bawden, and Rob Salem covering the TV beat, and at the Vancouver Province with Dana Gee, whose online columns are, unfortunately, generally behind a subscription firewall.
But CanWest News Services, Sun Media and the Canadian Press supply the majority of television coverage here, which means I can pick up the Vancouver Sun and get the same coverage as I'd get in the Calgary Herald or the Edmonton Journal. Alex Strachan is a fine writer, but he's one man with one opinion on any given topic. I didn't even realize he was based in Vancouver until I looked up that hyperlink.
Besides that, most of what I can find in my local papers -- Gee usually excepted -- I can find online, along with much, much more of the same, of varying qualities and varying opinions but all filling the same role, because it's all meant for a mass audience.
Even our niche papers, the alternative arts and entertainment weeklies like the Georgia Straight, don't cover TV with anywhere near the same frequency or devotion as they cover film, music, theatre, visual arts, dance, food, books, fashion, politics, good grief, even crafts and sex shops get more coverage. I might as well call them the "arts and entertainment except television" papers.
John Doyle, essentially Canada's premiere TV critic, writing for the Globe and Mail, recently left his Toronto confines and wrote a series of columns from Vancouver, where he interviewed the people behind shows such as Intelligence, Robson Arms, Sanctuary, and the upcoming JPod and About a Girl. I loved those articles. Loved them. Partly, it was because I'd met some of the people he talked to. Mostly, it was because this was insight into television from my hometown perspective: what's filming here, who the players are, and how the city makes it onscreen in subtle and obvious ways.
One thing the internet has made extremely easy is finding out info about a television program. But how deep does that info go? When I worked at SPACE, the Canadian Sci-Fi channel, it used to drive me crazy that they'd bring around the "press clippings" and be impressed by the one Canadian Press story that got picked up in 85 papers. But wide exposure does not mean deep.
What is new is this idea that it's all the same, you might as well rip and read from the wire.
By coincidence, I was out with a good friend last night who until recently was fairly high up at one of this country's largest papers. He expressed a lot of frustration about the state of entertainment writing in general.
Apparently it's a hard sell in this newspaper-challenged age, despite the fact that after local news, entertainment writing is the only part of the paper that draws both male and female eyeballs reliably.
It tests well, younger readers are interested, it's a way to differentiate yourself in the market, and people want as much as you can give them. So why isn't there more of it?
You got me. I think that the "flyover attitude" (ie: New Yorkers and Angelinos think that anything between those points is "the flyover") and the Canadian equivalent, best expressed as "let's all hate Toronto because they think they're the centre of the universe," pretty much demands that you have a local touch when it comes to watching TV and writing about it, doesn't it?
I happen to think that critics like Maureen Ryan, who writes for the Chicago Tribune, or Sepinwall in the Star-Ledger, bring a real strength to that paper -- a clear editorial voice in an area that everybody cares about. Snobs may pooh pooh it -- but everyone watches Television. But I don't think they watch it the same way across the country.
I was way more interested to hear Sepinwall on Sopranos because his paper was in New Jersey -- and he was writing for NJ readers. I think a Vancouver-based story on CBC's Intelligence is going to play differently. You have room for more color, and have to explain less. I mean, it's bad enough that every show seems to be set in New York or L.A. already...don't you want to hear some more reactions by people out there? Isn't that, in fact, the point?
You can't tell me that Seinfeld plays the same way in Billings as in Brooklyn. And, yup, I fully believe that Corner Gas, when it starts on WGN in the fall, will do really well outside of the cities.
I give it pretty hard to Two and a Half Men -- but as a commenter put it further down:
Now, with my smarty pants east coast snobby sensibility, what if I'm a TV writer getting out there on the wire and going to a whole bunch of papers where they love shows like Two and a Half Men and hate shows like Mad Men? Why should I get to be a tastemaker? Or worse...do I chuck my compass altogether and just start writing what I think, "those people" would like to see or read about? Ugh. Shoot me now.
I've watched every episode of Two and a Half Men. It's just the Odd Couple in different (dumbed down) clothes. The humor comes from the clashing lifestyles of Charlie, the bachelor, and Alan, the divorced chiropractor with a kid.
The kid also factors into it. When it's just the kid and Alan, it's still the Odd Couple. When it's the kid and Charlie, it's still the Odd Couple. The kid opposes each of them, and then both of them. Etc.
I encourage everyone who makes fun of the show to watch 5-6 episodes and then see if you still think it's stupid. Most people can't get past disliking Charlie Sheen, but he really does have good comic timing. Jon Cryer, Holland Taylor, Conchata Ferrell and the kid are all excellent comedic actors. But the best of all is when Jane Lynch does her recurring role as the family's psychiatrist.
Wasn't music, in fact, more interesting when radio DJ's had a little power to break a song and it wasn't just all Clear Channel polling data and Independent Promoters pushing Payola? Hasn't the internet made music more interesting just by breaking that Marconi lock?
Even laying aside the role that culture writers should be playing in issues like media concentration in this country, or the very different reality Canadians get by watching American shows instead of their own -- doesn't "serving your community" mean that maybe, just maybe, you should write about the thing that most people spend 21 hours a week or more doing?
In a business that's dying even faster than the TV biz, it just seems an odd, self-defeating choice.
6 comments:
Thanks for the linkage. I totally agree with you. Well, I guess I would - I wrote it first ;-)
It's interesting to see the "Toronto is the centre of the universe" attitude at work though - I don't think that's the attitude that should or does push local coverage. Because, you know, Toronto isn't actually that important to the rest of us. But besides insight into locally made shows, why not have a Vancouver columnist who can look at something like The Wire and make it relevant to a city with a Downtown Eastside that has some of the same issues? Why not a Calgary critic who can look at something like Deadwood from the tradition of the west that city embraces? Whatever. That's the stuff you can't easily or consistently find online. Even if it's not done through such obvious - and probably cheesy - examples, like you (and I) said, it informs the writing anyway.
And a local viewpoint is the missing niche, and it's what local newspapers should do best. But for whatever reason, they don't see it as a selling feature of papers that desperately need selling features when you can get similar coverage everywhere else on the Internet.
Great post Denis/Diane...it's a trend that has been going a while at the papers and may be too late to turn back.
In my neck of the woods, there is the occasional entertainment write-up of something local or of interest to the community, but absolutely no writing about entertainment and specifically TV as 'interpreted' by a local sensibilty. They used to have a guy doing that, but he was dumped ages ago.
I've actually been told some local people read me for some of that info and opinion. And I read you and Diane and Doyle and Weinman and a handful of US critics. Which makes no sense...this is not our 'job'.
Oh, and does Christina get $5.00?
Thanks Dix.
Christina, if you want to email me your address privately, I will send you a shiny $5 CDN bill.
As of today, that's worth a whopping $4.80 American.
If you hang onto it a month or so -- I'm guessing you'll be making a cool 10, 20 cents over Yankee greenback. It's a win to you!
Oh, cool! I was just about to ask if I explained it well enough. You'll be getting an email. I plan to frame the bill.
Thanks for the perspective from Canada. I'm glad Alex won the bake-off but I think even he would say it'd be better if Canwest had kept its local crix.
My friend Ellen Gray likes to say that we're the person "in" television that you can actually reach. Can't reach the network. Usually can't reach the station. But not only can you reach us, you can engage us. And every now and then, get results.
I would disagree slightly with your reasoning for keeping a local TV critic. For me, it's not necessarily the local perspective, because journalists move around and even if they're natives, they may be contrarian and so have their head more in, say, NYC than SLC. (I actually am from Billings, but I also spent a big chunk of my life in Chicago before moving to KC. So who knows if Corner Gas is for me.)
To me, it's more the fact that local media have a real challenge on their hands maintaining a relationship with their readers. So why wouldn't you want a local TV critic? It gives the publication a local personality who writes about something a large number of readers are highly interested in.
That said, from my perspective on the board of the TV Critics Ass'n, most editors out there get that. Take a look at the US papers that recently said goodbye to their TV crix, and you'll see many of them are saying hello to new ones. In Minneapolis the old features editor briefly dropped the TV beat. The new one came in and brought it right back, same critic.
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