Can You Stand One More about Jim Shaw?

I KNOW THE answer is probably, "no." To be honest, I'm sick of it myself. But the WGC sent out a sample letter yesterday to send to the people Jim Shaw wanted to reach in his tantrum ad.

I thought the letter was a little too nice. The problem is, this is a guy who is a bully. And call it the Catholic in me, but I believe in the power of positive shaming. So here's the letter I wrote to all those addresses. Please take a moment to write yours.


My name is Denis McGrath. I’m a professional television writer and a member of the Writers Guild of Canada. In the last three years, I’ve written just about every form of commercial television made in Canada. I’ve written cartoons for YTV. I’ve written sci-fi for the Space channel, documentaries on the CBC and lifestyle shows for Canada’s specialty channels. A show I co-created, Across The River To Motor City, will be premiering on Citytv in November. The show I’m working on right now, The Border, comes to CBC in January 2008. And the show I wrote earlier this year, Blood Ties, is currently airing around the world.

I’m writing to you today regarding Jim Shaw. As you know, earlier this year, Shaw escalated a feud with the Canadian Television Fund by withholding payments he was legally obligated to make. Shaw Communications and other Canadian Cable companies agreed over ten years ago to make annual contributions to the CTF on behalf of their subscribers. When they agreed to this arrangement, they were given significant regulatory relief by the CRTC. Jim Shaw has done very well by Canada’s broadcast system, but now he seems to think that he’s making some sort of donation. He isn’t. It’s not his money, it’s money collected from Canadians by him, to help fund television for Canadians.

In his latest move, he’s taken his crusade against the CTF into the realm of propaganda, taking out expensive ads in many newspapers in Western Canada. The ads promote a tissue of lies and half- truths about the CTF, and the Canadian TV system. The CTF has a board of directors. It is responsible to the Heritage Minister. It does not decide what shows it funds: broadcasters do, through their performance envelopes.

In his ad, he alludes to shows that don’t reach Canadians. There are certainly some of these, just as every fall dozens of shows in the U.S. fail to find an audience. The problem is that one of the shows that Shaw targets – a show he’s mentioned by name in interviews as an example of the worst of the CTF excesses – is the Showcase program Trailer Park Boys.

The problem with that thesis is that Trailer Park Boys is the opposite of what he says it is. It’s not an example of the worst of the CTF’s failures. It is, in fact, a popular success. I know this because I’ve seen the ratings over the last few years. I know because I see that the DVD sets are among the top sellers on Amazon.ca. I know because I saw with my own eyes, as one thousand people sold out a cinema in Toronto in the middle of a cold January for a chance to meet the actors. I know because I saw the same thing happen at the Commodore Ballroom in Vancouver earlier this year. I know because I watched as these actors hosted the East Coast Music Awards, and drew raucous laughter from the audience, at home and in the auditorium. I know because I’ve stood outside Muchmusic and watched as the Boys were greeted like they were members of U2. And I know because, like many Canadians, last summer I plunked down my own money to sit in a theatre and watch the movie version of this little TV show that could.

How could Jim Shaw get it so wrong?

Well, I’m afraid the answer to that is really quite simple. Jim Shaw doesn’t like the show.

And here we come to the root of the problem. Shaw thinks he should be able to decide what kinds of shows get funded, and which ones don’t. He wants control.

His sense of entitlement is unwarranted. His taste is not the taste of a nation. Ivan Reitman, (Ghostbusters) whose movies have grossed over a billion dollars, produced the Trailer Park Boys movie. But Jim Shaw thinks he knows better. He has acted shamefully, and the response of the CRTC and Government has been equally shameful. By not forcing him to fulfill his obligations, they have sent the signal that a well-connected millionaire monopolist with the ear of powerful people, can bend the will of an entire creative industry to his own. It’s an old story. But optically, and culturally, it’s not good for Canada. It’s not good for Canadians. And considering the huge strides made in popular production in the last few difficult years, it’s not good for Canadian Television viewers.

In listing my credentials up top, I left one thing out. I’m an immigrant to this country. I have American citizenship. If I wanted to, I could fly to the United States tomorrow and start working. It might take me a while to make it -- I don’t have any broadcast contacts down there. But I believe I’d make it. I’m that good.

The reason I don’t go, is because I believe passionately in trying to make the TV I want to make in Canada, for Canadians. I want to make, I try to make – stories that entertain and touch and speak to quirks and eddies in the Canadian character, truths observed by me in over thirty years of living in this fantastic country. I have done my part to try and help other people train themselves, and learn the ins and out of storytelling, too, by teaching screenwriting at Ryerson University for over a decade.

Please forgive me, but I think I know the hell of a lot more about crafting stories than Jim Shaw ever will. Yet in a million years, I would never think of making the kind of bullying, arrogant, boorish moves Shaw has. The Canadian Television Fund is not broken. We don’t need Jim Shaw to fix it. And it would probably be working a lot better if its staff and board didn’t have to contend with this man’s self-absorbed quest to impose his will on Canadians.

There are always reforms that can be tried, and things that can be improved. When he’s not ranting, before he summarily declared that the Canadian Television Fund can’t be fixed, Shaw even came up with a few himself: tying successful shows to repaying into the fund, rewarding ratings success. All of this could be accomplished within the current framework. But Jim Shaw won’t come to the table, because he knows better. And the CRTC and the Canadian Government won’t make him fulfill his responsibilities because…

…well…that’s the part I don’t know. Because he’s rich, his opinion matters more than the two million who watch Corner Gas, Little Mosque; the kids who flood Degrassi’s site, the hordes who brave the cold to meet the Trailer Park Boys, and even the professional TV critics who praise superior entertainments like Durham County or Slings & Arrows?

I ask you to act on behalf of Canadians. Tell Jim Shaw to stop with the silliness and fulfill his obligations. Tell him to stop lying about the Canadian Television Fund.

Send the message that millionaires can’t get their way because they can afford full page ads in the newspapers.

And let people like me get back to writing TV, not letters.

Sincerely,
Denis McGrath
Screenwriter