Doyle Saws Off The Branch Behind HIm

WHAT A TERRIBLE muddle it must be to have to write a column every single day. (I excuse myself from this, because I think we've come to see that I do a lot of handwaving when I'm really busy, and also because most of what I post here are sloppy and overlong first drafts. "I didn't have the time to write it short." Is the order of the day.)

Doyle flogs the dessicated bones of the horse that popped out when he defended Flashpoint's Anne Marie La Traverse in a column that pilloried Canadian TV writers for being snobs.

Just so we get the context straight -- What La Traverse said was this:

“There’s a snobbery about commercial shows here, among writers particularly,” Ms. La Traverse said. “Everyone dreams of doing a dark HBO series. There’s a resistance.”

“It took us a while to find writers who embraced this shape,” she added, “and wanted to be accessible, relatable, heroic, emotional, all the choices we really wanted to make.”

Doyle agreed with the statement. His column was titled "Canadian TV writers take themselves too seriously"; with the subhead "The door to the U.S. market is open - time to lose the snobbery."

Now we all know why fine print is used. In ads, it's your out clause. It's so you can promise something juicy and impossible and then claw it back. So it was in Doyle's column. A few well-placed words suggesting that he was only talking about a "few" writers. But LaTraverse wasn't talking about "a few" writers. The clear implication of her quote was that there were so many snobby, HBO-show wanting writers working in Canada, that it was incredibly difficult to find writers who would "fit" on Flashpoint.

This is hogwash. And Doyle rushing to defend the statement simply demonstrates that he doesn't really understand the labour and creative issues involved. Which is fine. He's a columnist, not a reporter. But when you've got the bully pulpit, you have to think about these things.

Flashpoint has some fine writers working on it. Two of the finest have been at it almost the shortest amount of time: the show's creators, Mark Ellis and Stephanie Morgenstern, who have surely had the thrown into the fire, experience building ride of a lifetime over the last couple of years.

But when it comes to the other writers, the issue was never about being able to find writers with talent -- whatever La Traverse says. The issue was finding writers who wouldn't be a threat, or a problem, or a challenge to the non-writing Executive Producers of Flashpoint.

As the most successful program in the country, Flashpoint asked for -- and got -- meetings with any A-list Canadian TV writer they wanted. This was not -- was never -- a resource/scarcity issue -- and to suggest otherwise clicks into a bad chain of history that Canadian TV writers have spent a long, long time working against.

For context on this chain of events, check out Jim Henshaw's excellent posting Mexicans in Sweaters. A brief excerpt:

Our writers gained confidence and experience, realizing they were just as good as (and maybe sometimes even a little better than) the writers who had dominated their trade in the past. And that confidence grew all through the 1980’s and 1990’s. Right up until 1999, when some political bagman blessed with a plumb post on the CRTC decided Canadian drama wasn’t that essential after all.

Many of our good writers left. Others stayed, believing their credits and experience could help recover what had been lost.

And those that stayed and those who graduated into the craft from all the new film schools all struggled against a growing tide that valued the ability to fill out government forms over the ability to conceive and create drama.

Many worked really hard at creating shows that were different and good and definitively Canadian. Shows like “Intelligence” and “Corner Gas” and “Trailer Park Boys” and “Flashpoint”. Television series any writer in this country would be proud to call their own or have had a hand in writing.

But along the way, they saw their efforts compromised and countered by others who felt they knew what was better for Canadian broadcasting. No matter how many times the Writers’ representatives would appear before broadcasting commissions and no matter how many times their predictions on the negative outcomes of changing regulations would come true, they were marginalized and ignored and berated.

And like a lot of peoples who feel marginalized and abused, those writers began to become the “Uppity Ice Niggers”; the ones who weren’t going to just shut up and do what they were told when they instinctively knew there were ways to make something better.

It’s as if the same myths perpetrated to keep waves of immigrant communities from becoming empowered are now being used against writers...Nobody calls Canadian writers “Mexicans in Sweaters” anymore. Now we’re “complainers” or we’re “difficult” or we’re “snobs”. Like the creeds and nationalities and races before us, it’s easier for some to snigger that somebody thinks they’re Hemingway or Shakespeare or Frank McCourt than to figure out if they, perhaps, just might be.

It’s always easier to be arrogantly dismissive than to engage those who don’t share your world view as possible equals.

I’ve run shows and hired writers in a half dozen countries over the last 25 years. Hundreds of writers. And unlike some of our current successes, many of the shows I ran were pure, unadulterated crap. ‘Cleavage and Dinosaurs’ as I’m wont to describe the formula.

But even if the shows I was working on demanded vivid decapitations, misogyny or ridiculous leaps of logic, I’ve never had a single writer turn me down because they thought they were better than the show.

By the way. I'm not trying to take anything away from the tremendous achievement of the Executive Producers of Flashpoint. They got the show on CBS. They got the show on 35 MM, and they continue to guide the show. It's an enviable position and a remarkable achievement.

So then, to today's Doyle. A bit of a ramble, really. He starts out talking about Bloomsday, and next, does the dodge/feint where he says he was only joking, and it's amazing how riled up we all got. To prove this, he quotes the WGC President's Letter to the Editor. That, the two comments the original column got, and a few random Tweets appears to me to be the sum total of the "outrage" Doyle says he generated and was responding to. I think my own response was in the spirit of what he said he was doing -- joking -- but you know, I guess you have to define your enemy to sell papers.

It's in the end that Doyle takes a hard right turn by suggesting that the real problem is that Canadian writers don't want the shows we make to sell to the USA. This is based on the evidence of...uh....well, as near as I can figure it, it's twisted out from the WGC's letter to the editor, where La Doyle suggests that said letter said something it really didn't.

Doyle concludes by reminding Canadian TV writers of something that most of us know only too well: Canadians don't care about our problems.

Well. No Shit, sherlock.

Nor should they. Everyone has bigger fish to fry.

Unless it involves big stars and their movings, the arcana of the behind-the-scenes in showbiz rarely leaps from the trades to the regular papers in L.A. So it is here, to an even greater extent. 99.9 percent of what you ever read on this blog or in Playback should be of no consequence to anybody not in the business. I started writing this because I felt that Canadian writers of TV could be more of a community, not to draw attention to our plight in the rest of the country. Lord knows, people got troubles enough.

Is it churlish at this point to point out that, um, I'm not the one who cleared the leap from insider blog to mention in Toronto's National Newspaper? Mmm.

Well, fine then. I don't think most of you are snobs. And unlike Uncle Will, I'm not particularly interested in hearing the names of those who are. I'm OK, you're OK, Doyle's OK.

I guess we all just bump along merrily until the next time Doyle manages to cadge a column out of something I write here. Til then, go about your business, citizens!