POST CANWEST takeover of Alliance Atlantis, most of the AA drama development side was let go yesterday. So Canadian creatives officially have one place less to pitch.
Canwest still has to prove itself with its new comittment to Canadian material -- and Showcase, especially, was generous and occasionally groundbreaking in the material it did fund and support.
Varying degrees of quality, sure, but from Showcase over the last few years we've gotten:
Rent-A-Goalie, Trailer Park Boys, Slings & Arrows, Billable Hours, Show Me Yours, Naked Josh, Kink, Bliss, Kenny vs. Spenny, Moccasin Flats and probably a few I'm missing. That's more new stuff than most of the Canadian nets.
Until proven otherwise, there's just no way to see this as anything other than a loss.
6 comments:
Um, link?
I don't have a link, Alex. Occasionally people call me on the telamaphone and tell me things.
People still use those?
Did you see this?
"So much for "pilot" season at NBC. Jeff Zucker announced yesterday the network would no longer order up pilots as a matter of course each year leading into the upfront season, thereby saving the network tens of millions of dollars, reports The NY Times. Typically each year, NBC and the other broadcast networks order up a series of pilots for shows in development, choose a handful of them as potential primetime series in the upcoming season, and show the pilots to advertisers during the upfront season. No more, says Zucker. Rather, the network would order perhaps one or two pilots each season. Zucker says the reason for this decision is pure economics in light of the current WGA strike and due to the current US economy."
What does that mean? Is NBC gonna just renew more shows or are they gonna automatically pick up their pilots as new shows or what?
Jeff Zucker is a bold visionary who has literally failed up ever since he took over The Today Show -- which was his last triumph.
Seriously -- if you read Desperate Networks, you gain an amazing picture of a guy who somehow has remained completely unaccountable for every single failure that happened on his watch.
He took NBC from number one to number 4, and has continued to be rewarded for that. If you want proof that the fine minds driving Broadcast TV are the authors of their own misfortune -- the cause of what's currrently wrong with the TV industry, Jeff Zucker is exhibit fucking a.
If Zucker was a writer, he couldn't spell.
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