Yes and No.

YES. THERE'S AN explanation.
And No. I'll never tell.

H/T to L'il Larkin.

Elegy for the Magic

WHEN I WAS in my last year of University, I shared a house with two friends. One of them was finishing up an undergrad degree in Astrophysics, and I can honestly say without equivocation that it was James who introduced me to the Internet.

He'd come home some nights with pages and pages of all this stuff -- interesting stuff; canonical lists of jokes and references in Monty Python, and episode guides and arguments about the physics of Star Wars. He explained that they were from Newsgroups on the Internet -- which at that point was really still the province of University Students and government researchers. The .com domain was hissed through clenched teeth. When asked what the Internet was, James would reply "it's a computer network designed to let scientists argue about Star Trek."

He didn't tell me about the porn til later.

I nodded my head and went back to writing my Psych essay on my Typewriter. Or if he wasn't busy, on his Coleco Adam computer. Sweet.

Flash ahead to a couple of years later, and my first experience with BBS'es. Bulletin Board Systems were these little walled communities full of people with like interests. It seemed to me like those printouts I'd seen James bring home, but with people who were more or less closer by. Realer.

The two "boards" I got most into were both run on a software platform called FirstClass, which was great because it was actually Mac based. Nothing in those days was -- and I was now the proud owner of a Mac that I still miss -- a beautiful little MacSE. Sigh.

The best board was called MAGIC. It was a Macintosh User Group, and on there I "met" a whole bunch of interesting, literate, fascinating folk -- musicians, computer nerds, media types, ad guys and various and sundry other users. It was in the offices of MAGIC, a few years after I joined, that I finally got to see this World Wide Web thing that I'd seen Tim Berners Lee and other guys talk about in my new job... we gathered around the 14.4 modem and watched as a picture drew, page by page, on our screens. It was like our little BBS, but not -- because anybody could access it, from anywhere. The walls were down. We looked at that crude drawing scanning painfully slowly into place, line by line, and we saw the future-- with a hint of sadness and trepidation. But also excitement.

The other FirstClass BBS I was part of was one at my then place-of-work, TVOntario. It was a grass roots project by a group of three editors, who thought it would be an interesting way to foster community within the spread out organization. TVO (Ontario's PBS) had a famously dysfunctional corporate culture. The TV people and the Education people were always at each other's throats; the offices were spread out over several floors over two buildings at Yonge and Eglinton in Toronto, and the whole place had a kind of 'tail wagging the dog' feel to it.

The board that was TVOnline was the first time the Internet got me in trouble, and the first time I heard the phrase, "You should watch what you say." It seems incredibly ironic to me now, twenty years into a career in the media and communications, that variations on that phrase is the single most oft-repeated thing I've come across in my travels, but there you go. That's Canada for you.

What got me in trouble was speaking up on the board. I'd comment on subjects and point out what I thought was right and wrong. I was a junior story editor at this time, only about two years out of University. I had a wonderful, incredibly encouraging mentor in my boss, an Executive Producer who, in his own words, "had hired or fired, or been hired or fired by just about everybody working in the Canadian media." In story meetings, he was the first guy that introduced me to the idea that "best idea wins." I carried over that attitude onto the board.

Such is the strangeness of the TVO corporate culture (at least at that time) that it was only through that board that I started to get to know the other people who were making TV just down the hall from me -- producers like Mark Askwith and Stan Lipsey, and Daniel Richler -- who were making interesting and low budget TV like Imprint and Prisoners of Gravity. My section was Public Affairs, and one of the other things I remember is the grumpy then-host of a documentary show who'd come in to shoot his links every couple months. Some Harvard egghead named Michael Ignatieff. Whatever happened to that dude?

Anyway. The other feature that TVOnline had was an "Anonymous Forum." This was a forum where you could log in as anonymous, and only in this one forum, post a message about anything. It was the virtual version of the bulletin board that everyone could see, where you could sneak up a broadside.

And people did. Oh my God, they did. This was my intro to both the dynamics of an unhappy corporate environment, and the peculiarity of the last moments of the pre-internet mindshift. Also the value and the limits of Anonymous commenting on the Internet -- where people were always a little too free to let their freak flag fly, if you get my meaning.

It soon became clear that the manager of the network -- a tin pot, dour grey suit best forgotten -- was livid at the free expression on this board -- and especially the Anonymous forum. I started to hear whispers attached to fingers that were pointing -- at me. Quoi?

See, I guess the logic went because I was vocal on the board, I was probably also the person who was doing all the most anonymous complaining. People said that the "anonymous" posts "sounded" like me. Around the same time, there were oodles and oodles of links to FRANK from TVO. FRANK was a satirical, Private Eye like magazine that flourished for a while in the late 80's and early 90's, before falling to the gossip sink that the internet became.

Even all these years later, I get tense at the thought of it. That there were people thinking that I was some kind of mole. The weird thing is, nobody ever stopped to ask themselves why the guy who seemed to be saying all this honest stuff, attributed, would also need to use the veiled cloak of anonymity to...what? Complain more? And then leak to the papers? Odd. I just wanted to make good tv.

Anyway, suffice to say that I didn't really see the need to complain anonymously, and I never once fed information to FRANK. But that didn't matter. At one point my contract was not renewed and that was that.

I had a choice at that time. Knuckle under, or keep holding to that stubborn ideal that the best idea wins. After six months unemployment, I picked up another contract in a different department at TVO, but I was never really loyal to the place again. When I got an offer to go work for CityTV on a cutting edge show they were doing about new media, I leapt and never looked back. It was the middle of the summer -- and I actually gave my notice by voicemail, and slipped my resignation letter under the door of my boss. Everyone was on vacation. Nobody said goodbye. No tears were shed - least of all by me.

Thus I started my eight years at the end of the glory days of the CityTV empire. CityTV proved what I'd learned about corporate culture at TVO -- that it was the unhappy units you had to watch out for. There were tons of leaks from Citytv to FRANK, but luckily, they were from the Newsroom, which was an awful sinkhole of a place. Totally toxic environment.

I saw, and heard so much crazy shit over the next few years that never made it into the pages of a satirical weekly because the witnesses were all happy in their jobs. And so was I.

But it was around this time too, that the first romance of the BBS was fading. See, MAGIC, and TVOnline (where everyone was very nice to me now that I'd gotten a better job and gotten out. Typical.) had started experimenting with "Gateways" to the internet. And in the old tradition of "how do you keep'em down on the farm once they've seen Paris?" the general-interest BBS world was starting to become a ghost town.

The commercial service CompuServe went down. AOL was mighty, then not so much. People wanted the internet -- all of the internet. And the 'Net began its exponential monthly growth. It was the Wild West.

In the Internet-based early discussion boards that followed, it quickly became apparent that there was no way to replicate those early days of smart people talking about Star Trek. The cartoon of the time, that I had beside my desk at Citytv for three years, was a hound in front of a keyboard saying to another pooch, "On the internet, nobody knows you're a dog." Discussion was impossible because you had no way of knowing whether you were talking to a 12 year old in Topeka or a novelist in Nantucket. The Noise to Signal ratio flipped off the charts.

These were the days where the biggest challenge was getting a handle on everything. Nobody had the right way to search the internet; it was impossible to find anything. There was no Google yet. And Infoseek, Hotbot, Yahoo, Lycos, Altavista were all poor substitutes.

So naturally the next iteration was web-based message boards that clustered around a basic interest. The lugwrench board. Parents' groups. Alumni groups. People self-segregated again, only this time not so much like a community. It was more like an endless series of shareholder meetings.

In this climate, I moved from one job inside Citytv to help start up the Canadian Sci-fi Channel, Space. It was a fun time. I was working with people I liked from Muchmusic and City and various other corners of the building -- and I'd even managed to get thrown together with one of the guys I'd met virtually, on that TVO board years before -- Mark Askwith.

One of the first duties I had while we were getting the channel on the air was to be the "official presence" on the "Space board." This was going to be a web-based message board in anticipation of the launch of the channel.

The three or four months leading up to the channel's October 1997 launch were probably the best days of that board, never to be repeated. A great cross section of posters and personalities rapidly made themselves known. Some had inspiring and freaky levels of knowledge in areas that I knew nothing about -- like Manga or Anime. There were a few scientists, too -- flashback to my days reading those printouts from James.

From the beginning, I adopted a persona that was avuncular when met that way, and sarcastic when you came in hot, fronting that you knew better. Because the thing about Sci-Fi fans is, they always think they know better. In those lead up months, there were plenty of interesting questions about how you run a station and set it up that I tried my best to answer. There was also lots of arguing and advice that I said I'd pass on. I tried trying to explain how buying broadcast rights for a series wasn't like going to Blockbuster and renting a video tape (as they then were.) Some people listened. Some didn't. It was fun.

And then the station launched.

Over the next few years, the boards gradually...there's no way really to put this...slid. The persona I'd adopted became unwieldy because you had new people coming in who didn't get the context that had been around since the start. I was locked into the role of being a fierce defender of the station, lest the rabble get out of hand and start marching with torches. I still tried my best to engage with readers and posters who had legit questions or wanted to know how things worked. But those were being edged out by the hostiles.

There comes a time in the life of every message board where the internet lion syndrome takes over. That's where people who are milquetoast and unassuming in real life decide they can be raging assholes or know it all's online, because they can be. (I always took pride in the fact that my personality on and offline was pretty much the same. Maybe I was more charming in person. Okay, probably. But that's because emoticons are bullshit.) When you see messages and opinions laid out side by side, no differentiation, it's hard to tell at first glance someone who has a lick of sense from somebody who doesn't. "Best idea wins" becomes impossible because people become instantly enraged if you suggest that, in fact, that theory they're spouting is somewhat devoid of logic and sense. "How dare you challenge me and my opinion?" takes over. Subjects descend into flamewars. And people say things that they would never, ever, ever say in person, face to face.

And at a certain level, especially on a network level, an uncomfortably high percentage of the posts become people just there to bitch and moan about how you suck, and do everything wrong, and how much better a chimp could do if they were in that position, blah. blah. blah. Level of entitlement = staggering.

So...Neighborhood blight sets in.

And the worst part about it is that just like with neightbourhood blight, the good neighbours are the first to leave...people who could save it, the thoughtful, interesting, witty, well-informed posters look around and say, "Eff this."

So you're left with just the rabble and the yahoos. The membership rolls may say you have 3 or 4000 members, but there's only 20 or 30 who post. And they're all hardened into basic types. There's the Professor, who corrects everyone's grammar, doesn't really contribute much -- but points out every possible inconsistency no matter how small -- and posts links to more thoughtful articles but never really has much to say about them. There's the quipper, who makes lame one line jokes about everything that aren't half as funny as they think they are. There's Roid Rage, who decides that their mission in life is to slam and complain and sturm and drang and point out what an asshole you are -- proving what an asshole they are. And a few other misfit toys here and there.

In the case of the Space board, it went through several different software lives, shed moderators here and there, gained some interesting personalities but could never, ever keep them. After I left, Mark Askwith took over as the "official voice" and tried to take the complete opposite tack -- killing everyone with kindness. The dead enders loved him best, but it did nothing to tamp down the general idiocy, negativity, or sheer disinformation fluffing across the transom. Mark and I would meet solemnly in the pub now and again, the Evil master of Evil and Mr. Polite, and laugh and whoop it up about the same idiot posts we'd read. Rarely did we actually, well...disagree.

So this whole long history now comes because in the wake of the CTV sale of CHUM assets, I heard they're finally shuttering the Space board for good. It's probably overdue. It just doesn't make sense to support a platform where 99 percent of the conversation is either critical of you or irrelevant to your business.

But the funny thing is that the time for that kind of board has also passed; supplanted by threads on news stories (which still generate 90 percent idiot opinions) or the more elegant solution -- personal management tools -- things like Twitter or Digg or Ilike, where you can start to build, from the vastness of the net, a smaller community of your own interests. Finally the Net has gotten to a place again where it can be tamed. The time of big open forums like OpenSalon or The Well is probably gone for good. But now you can manage your own conversations in real time, and create a board with the people you like or trust or find to be interesting thinkers.

So it's all come full circle.

I wouldn't trade my experience with boards like that for anything. It's taught me a lot about how creators should and shouldn't interact with fans (leave 'em alone to talk amongst themselves, control the interaction and don't go in one-on-one, because then it becomes about "showing you up and taking you down.") and it's also taught me about how communities evolve and change, and how technology can help shape them.

It's one of the reasons why through all the uncertainty about how TV will go in the future, I'm not worried. I have no idea how it will work itself out yet. But I know it will work itself out.

And I know that occasionally, as I have over the years, I'll run into one of those early net posters and BBS people, or more likely, they might come up to me and introduce themselves. And we'll nod and smile and remember the early days when it was all just....Magic.

Cavalcade of Writer Randomness

I WISH I could, with a button, cause it to snow. Just because seeing flurries swirl violently out there, obscuring Lake Ontario and the Gardiner expressway, just makes me want to not go anywhere and hunker down and work. Yes, I know that this would terribly inconvenience and add to the daily misery of my fellow Torontonians, but do you hear me it means I could get more work done.

So after the mid-afternoon pause for Obamawa, I've got to psych it up for another session that I hope will take me through to 30 Rock. But in the meantime, a few random little bits for the day:

1. I'm not entirely sure why, but one of my favorite parts of the day is when fellow screenscribe Matt Neffer, Boy Spotwelder calls me and we talk and it always ends the same way -- with me feeling a whole lot better and him telling me that he's hanging up because I've ruined his day, sapped his will, and driven him into a deep depression. I think this says a whole lot about both of us, and is also proof of why our bromance will never die.
   
   
2. I watched Being Erica last night out of a sense of slacker duty, but kind of wound up enjoying it. Interestingly enough, it's also another ep where they mixed up and riffed on the original theme. Erica goes back not to a day that sucked but a day that she remembers as perfect. And of course, it wasn't, til it was. Good emotional stakes, nice acting, fun and diverting and a good payoff that still left room for ambiguity.
   
   
3. On the same topic, tonight is the show's premiere on ABC Soapnet down south in the USA, which means we now have some U.S. reviews. Here are the three bits that most caught my eye: from Variety:
   
   

   "Being Erica" is also refreshing in the sense that it's one of the few shows filmed in a Canada that isn't pretending to be the U.S. -- though the show's heritage is notable only in casual drug references, and a slightly cheekier and more risque treatment of life's more awkward moments.

   Karpluk, as Erica, is like a Canadian version of Jennifer Aniston -- a plucky girl-next-door type who can morph easily between sexy and silly.

   Even in her cosmic do-overs, Erica makes mistakes, begging the question whether or not she needs to go back and change some of these moments in the first place. With that in mind, writer and creator Jana Sinyor seems to be suggesting that Erica's wasting her life on regrets when she should just be moving forward.

   If the premise is that easy to figure out in the first episode, it doesn't leave much wiggle room for the future of the character, or the show.

   Which is a criticism you've heard here on this blog, and elsewhere too, I think -- and also why the show this week and the Bat Mitzvah ep (where another actress plays Erica as a 13 year old) were the ones I liked best -- because they stretch the world of the show just a bit. It needs it.
   
   Look what the Boston Herald had to say:
   

   Here’s the thing about shows not emanating from the United States: The characters look more real. Maybe it’s less Botox and plastic surgery. Maybe it’s less time in makeup and hair. Maybe it’s because they aren’t a size 0. The characters on “Being Erica” look like people you could know.

   There it is again...the very thing that Americans respond to in Canadian shows are the things that self-hating Canadians point to and hate. (Or executives try to avoid, like, um, calling Toronto Toronto.) Oy vey. In this new world order of Canadian-shows-trying-to-sell-to-Americans, which audience do you please? Maybe we should forgo a CTF injection or two and buy our fellow Canadians some Zoloft, make 'em feel better about themselves. Seriously, we could slip it into the water supply. Who would know?
   
   I'm not even going to link to the U.S. blogger who talks about the "prestigious" CBC. Seriously.
   
   You can follow other U.S. takes on Erica by visiting TV-eh. They're all there.
   
   
4. Tv-Eh? also has the deets on the worst-kept secret in the Canadian TV biz for the last month -- CBS has picked up its second cop show from CTV, The Bridge. This one's from Alan Di Fiore and I believe several friends of the Dead Things are on the staff, fine Writer Mafia types all...so congrats!
   
   
5. From great news to the old-usual, Canwest just sent out a press release bragging about ratings for M*A*S*H reruns. No. I'm not kidding:
   

   TORONTO, Feb. 19 /CNW/ - History Television delivered all-time record
   ratings for the channel with an all-day marathon of popular M*A*S*H* episodes,
   making it the third-ranked English channel in Canadian television on Monday,
   February 16, 2009. This triumphant victory also sets the record for the
   highest single-day audience (2+) in Canadian specialty viewing.* The day's
   audience averaged 234,000 viewers (2+), and pulled in 130,000 viewers in the
   coveted A25-54 category.

   Um. Yeah. Wow, History. Congrats. You should be very, very proud. Way. To. Go.
   
   
6. Jamie Weinman has a good little piece that raises a point I've thought for some time -- that the once-invaluable cast panels presented at the Paley Festival (which I've been visiting since it was the Museum of TV and Radio in NYC) have just become a photocopy of the Upfronts. Which sucks.
   
   
7. John Doyle has posted his semi-annual "Why TV is better than film" rant, which I always love to read, and sincerely hope is enough to drive Canada's own Diablo Cody, Karen Walton, back into the loving and embraceful arms of the bitch goddess that is Canadian TV. Help us, oh Inky one, you're our only hope.
   
   
8. When I get around to it, on further thinking and (someone else's) crunching, there's stuff to say on why that 1:1 foreign to domestic spend the CRTC proposed isn't what you think. Not saying it's bad...it's just not the bombshell change you think it is...and it might require a lot more due diligence on the part of people who don't think quasi-on genre, 25 year old reruns are the ultimate cause for celebration.
   
   
9. My current read: "How We Decide." It's utterly fascinating.
   
   
10. Yogurt is quite delicious.
    
    

Oui, Nous Pouvons

IF ONE OF the questions is "How do you like Canada?"

I'm going to poop.

Just sayin'.

The CRTC and a Tale of Two "Daily Show" Sites

SO CRTC NEW MEDIA hearings continued Wednesday with presentations on music. As usual, there were mangled definitions a-plenty, and some dumb things said and suggested. If you Twitter, it's not hard to find one hysterical tweet after another complaining about the CRTC trying to "censor" the net, or "taxing" people to support CanCon. There are still people angry about how the hearings aren't about Net Neutrality -- even though they weren't supposed to be about that. That comes later...


So in all that, let's stop. Let's have a little mint. The reason why cultural industry workers such as myself are saying, "maybe it's a good idea to get some money flowing for people to create content for this arena" is because, contrary to what some would have you believe, there isn't much here currently that's very good, or very well thought out or designed in the realm of supporting TV-like ventures on the net. I had a good steam of a rant about this awhile back.

Today let's look at the issue in micro. Let's take one property.

We'll even take the emotion out of it, and have it not be a "CanCon" thing.

Instead, let's talk about a little program called The Daily Show.

Now, if you're an average habitue of the series of tubes, you've probably come across some news site or other where they talk about a bit Stewart did on this subject or that subject -- Bristol Palin, the latest dumb thing Bill O'Reilly or Rush Limbaugh said, the histrionics around the stimulus...whatever. On blogs or on Facebook or Twitter or on any news site, Comedy Central -- the originating cablecaster of Stewart's show, cleverly manages to insert itself into the discussion of these real life breaking news events while building buzz for the show.

It does this by cataloguing topical clips from the previous night's broadcast on the Comedy Central site. Clips are up-to-date and embedable, so you can share them on your website or blog. You can stream full episodes too, but Comedy Central "gets it" in the sense that they know that the way this content is used on the net is in a YouTube, mash-y kind of way. People want a short hit that they can pass around, comment upon, repurpose and add their own spin to. It's flexible, in other words.

Now, if you're reading any of those blog posts or news articles with an embedded Daily Show clip from Canada, you're probably familiar with what I'm going to say next. When you click on that embed link, it doesn't play. But it's not that it doesn't play with the dreaded geoblock boilerplate "this video is not available from your location."

It doesn't play because the message reads, "In Canada, Comedy Central Videos are Available on The Comedy Network."

And they are.

Sort of.

But in another way, sort of not. Because when you go to the Canadian Comedy Network site and try to find Daily Show clips, they're not arranged by subject, embeddable, ready to plop into your Facebook or drop into your blog post.

You can watch a full episode. On their proprietary player. Or maybe you can search by a bit. Or, um. A correspondent. But. Um. Er. That's it.

In other words, it's shoveled onto the web like you're going to watch it just like you watch it on TV, but only in crappier quality in a tiny window.

The Comedy Network relaunched their site awhile back and actually ran on air promos and a contest saying, "our website doesn't suck anymore," if you can believe it. And it sure is a lot better. But what it isn't is current. And that's purely because of money, and a lack of attention to the product and the different medium.

I don't know what their license terms are for embedding clips, but I do know that cataloguing the clips would have to mean you were paying someone to do that. And the whole point of Canadian broadcasting is to pay as little as possible for everything. Er. Except U.S. programming, which you can buy and put on the shelf to let your competitors not get it.

It's not just with CanCon. The Private nets would be nowhere if they couldn't rely on the advertising and promo spillover from American magazines and promotional efforts.

Let's keep in mind the various comparative ideas about how to meet the challenge of reducing revenue in the challenging broadcasting environment. In the USA, FOX and NBC, not exactly best friends, team up to launch Hulu -- a relatively forward looking streaming site with a kickass, puckish sense of why the Net is cool and friendly to video:



In Canada, Global and CTV band together for what big idea? Carriage fees -- just like the cable channels that...um...they already own. In the former case, viewers at home get a great site with a deep playlist of favorites you can watch, including classic and current shows and embeddable clips. In the latter...um...well, you don't get anything really. Sorry. But they get to stay in business. For a while.

I mean, at least the ISP levy we're proposing goes to creatives, and at the end of it you'll have something new to watch, if you want to. And you will, because I hear we're going to promise Elisha Cuthbert in her scanties. But keep that under your hat. I'm not sure the deal's signed yet.

Now. Let's take a look at what the Comedy Network is doing to maximize its exclusive right to Daily Show online content in Canada.

If you go through the "Latest News" section of the Daily Show minisite on the Comedy Network website, their idea of "latest" is the clip Stewart did on the proroguing of parliament.

That was what, 10 weeks ago?

Don't worry though -- the 3rd item down on the "Latest News" portion of the Daily Show microsite is a scorcher! It's Bill Clinton's appearance on the Daily Show -- on September 23, 2008! Oh man! Can't wait to blog about THAT!

So The Daily Show doesn't get to be a vibrant part of the internet discourse in Canada, because it's not thought through and serviced right for the medium.

And that's the whole point. Money. It costs money to do that.

If you're making a program today, you have to have a logical and coherent web and mobile strategy. But the Canadian nets don't pay for it. They have trouble keeping episode descriptions up to date. And Lord help you if you try to navigate and find that show you want to stream easily. It's clunky. It's badly executed. It's ill thought out.

And increasingly, it's going to be the key to connecting with your audience.

It is absolutely essential that that money flow so that when you're making content, you have the room and the spirit to be able to back up the good ideas that you have. It's not enough to have a brilliant idea for how to tie in with your property if the site's not going to be updated in a timely way.

So part of what's being talked about this week from a creative side is, here's something new that needs to be done now. It's definitely an extra cost if you want to do it at all well. How do you pay for it? You can't pay out of your program budget. Those budgets are already screamingly tight.

In the end, the least complex scheme is to say that the ISP providing the pipe, and making the big bucks partly by pulling you in with promises of access to great online content, has some place in paying for it.

"But it's a dumb pipe," the big ISP's like Rogers and Bell and Shaw will say. "We're not broadcasters." Yup. It's just a dumb pipe. Except when it's not. Say one thing when it suits you, one thing when it doesn't.

"Well okay," the next argument comes, "you assess us a levy, and we're just going to pass it on to the consumer and they'll hate you because it's an extra tax." To which we say, you are given protected access to your market under the Telecom act. The government protects you from competition. Competition that might result in lower rates for you and me. And in the spirit of that, the tradeoff -- just as it was for Cable TV, and Broadcasters -- is that you have responsibilities to support the indigenous cultural industries. It is, in fact, part of your cost of doing business.

Yes, the technology and the function the service the ISP's provide is different. But in this case, their responsibilities are the same.

And in the end, maybe it's not just about CanCon shows or Webshows getting funding. Maybe you'll finally get those Daily Show clips served up in the way it makes sense to do for the net.

Ah yes, but wait...there is one more, extreme position... "why am I restricted at all? Why can't I view Comedy Central. Why can't I just visit the U.S. site. Why do I have to bother with Canadian stuff at all! The CRTC is useless."

To which I say: Tough. Fucking. Shit. You DO NOT LIVE IN THE UNITED STATES. If you want to live in the United States, start the process of immigration and good luck. If you are, in fact, Canadian, then man up, grow a pair, and accept that this is the way it is because it's good for your economy and for jobs in one of your largest cultural sectors, full of taxpayers who pay taxes just like you do.

The worst outcome in all this is to be successfully snowed to the point where you shout down the claims and the grabbiness of all the greedy, awful artists, who demand pennies here and there, but give a big fat old pass to the big ISPs and Broadcasters and their much larger shares of corporate Canadian welfare.

I watched FRONTLINE this afternoon. PVR'd it last night. Inside the Meltdown was all about the steps of the Bailout from Bear Stearns to Lehman Brothers to the Bailout.

GREAT website support, BTW. See? There's money for that. Oh, what a 300 Million population will give you! And it's not even geoblocked!

Anyway, It's absolutely sickening to me to look at a situation where trillions of dollars is being hoovered away by people with NO sense of responsibility, who still get bonuses and not a one of them with an ounce of remorse or a prayer of doing jail time...

...but what we really have to get mad at is the Artists. Cause they're going to break the economy. Yup, THEY'RE the ones who have to "face the market."

The MARKET didn't even face the market! Really, what are you people talking about?

Man, sometimes things are so ridiculous I just have to turn to Jon Stewart to make sense of it all.

And I bet I could find the right clip, too. If only...If only...If only...

Frickin Geniuses and the Ghost of Jack Valenti

WELL, YESTERDAY the CRTC opened hearings into the possibility of regulating the internet in some way -- and it was not an auspicious first day.

The people trying to articulate the case for some sort of levy-fund-y system to support the creation of Canadian internet projects didn't do a particularly great job of stating their case, and so got relentlessly hammered. I expect most of the coverage today will reflect this.

Why that shouldn't be the whole story:

The Writers Guild of Canada has a more nuanced and progressive view of these issues, which I'm sure you'll see for yourselves when they present next week. Is it a perfect proposal? No, of course not. It attempts to grapple with a landscape that hasn't fully taken shape yet.

In a way, this is exactly why the CRTC declined to get involved, the last time they took a look at grappling with the Net as part of the broadcast system, ten years ago.

Since that time, though, a lot has taken shape, including the rise and consolidation of ISP's so that now, about eight out of ten Canadians get their broadband pipe through one of the big telcos or cable companies. People are already making money on the net. It's just the people selling the pipe.

And how are they selling that pipe? And getting you to shell out for speeds you don't really get because the minute you do start downloading at high speed they throttle your traffic? Riggght. They're selling it on the backs of all the content you get to watch.

The last time we had a rough analogue to this, the Cable co's claimed that they shouldn't have to give anything to the production of Canadian Content because they were just a pipeline, not part of the broadcast system. (Does any of that sound familiar?)

The CRTC disagreed and the Canadian Television Fund was the result. That, too, is an imperfect mechanism, but those who argue against it inevitably invoke this or that selective definition of how "market forces" should replace it. Market forces. In a protected market where Canadian nets get a mulligan every time they run a U.S. show at the same time as the U.S. channel. We've also seen how perfect "market forces" have served the world economy just so excellent well in the last year. The dirty truth of the "market forces" approach, of course is that there is no such thing in a capitalist economy. Somehow, somebody always accrues advantage, and learns to game the system. Such is the way of the world.

Back to the net, though -- the problem this time is that these hearings take place in the shadow of what I call the Internet Frickin' Genius Syndrome.

This is the tendency for people to get exercised about everything to do with the internet, while exhibiting one of the great and persistent flaws of internet-borne information: a serious lack of big picture context.

Yes, the issues around Net Neutrality are serious. Yes. They're actually way more serious than Cancon on the net. But they're still one set of issues in an enormously complicated stew that needs to balance the rights and needs of consumers, ISP's and providers, and content creators such as myself. And this hearing is only supposed to be about the net as it relates to broadcasting. As the Chairman put it:

these hearings are to examine strictly broadcasting in new media and nothing else. The commission also seeks to examine the question of how to measure content and consumption of new media in order to implement any eventual regulatory measures.

Now, nine times out of ten, when you read something about these hearings, and what's at stake, it's not going to be somebody like Michael Geist jawing on. It's more likely to be somebody like, oh, I don't know.... this guy.

Internet Frickin' Genius Syndrome (IFGS) complicates the discussion because of the myopic tendency of people who are really, really, really into the internet to assume that everyone else but them is a total fucking idiot. [See also: Limbaugh, O'Reilly, Olbermann, et al AND Politics]

Now. A lot of the time that's true. But most of the time, over the next ten days or so, if you manage to lift your head from the desk to brave the slumber-inducing spectre of coverage on these new media hearings -- keep in mind that most of the people appearing do actually have some experience of the internet.

I've been grappling with a lot of these internet creative issues in one form or another for over fifteen years. I've visited the M.I.T. Media Lab and talked to Nicholas Negroponte, Bill Gibson, Bruce Sterling, and people at Wired when that mag mattered. I've interviewed Peter Gabriel and Todd Rundgren and Jaron Lanier; Michael Wolff and John Perry Barlow and the heads of the Web or New Media division of all the Canadian nets and many of the U.S. ones. I've walked halls and battered booths at NATPE and NAB and CES and E3, and held back the ponytails of Record Execs who vomited their fear into their soon-to-be repo'd solid gold commodes. I've talked with the Librarian of Congress about this stuff. I've shot the shit with web marketing gurus and AD directors, Game Designers and Nintendo executives; Disney imagineers and XBox'ers, Microserfs and Apple-nauts, French telecom dudes and Japanese VR venture capitalists. I've twiddled my thumbs in keynotes by Richard Florida and Donald Tapscott and Cory Doctorow and Steve Jobs and Bill Gates. I've been stranded waiting for cabs in Silicon Alley, all over the I-35 tech corridor in Austin, Multimedia Gulch, Menlo Park, Palo Alto, etc, etc. etc.

I visited the offices of The Well, for Chrissakes. I've french kissed YouTube stars. And Sonic the Hedgehog once gave me a reacharound, ok? I'm not proud of it, but it happened. Mario, too. I did Luigi old school and watched Ms. Pac Man do rails off Solid Snake's ass.We clear now, G?

And... since the turn of this century, I've been trying to find my way through as a content creator. An ISP levy is an imperfect mechanism to try and encourage a place for projects in this industry that come from Canada.

Levies on blank media, and the photocopying levy have worked. And a levy system is behind a European approach to copyright that might just be superior to the flawed, crappy U.S. bills we've gotten so far.

So the first Frickin' Genius who sends me a "You don't understannnnnd the net, mannnnn...." email gets a virtual pop in the jaw.

Here's what we're not talking about over the next few weeks:

Geoblocking. That's really a broadcaster issue. Don't blame us that you can't see eps on Hulu. We just want to get our stuff on Hulu.

User Generated Content. Canadian writers do not want to do anything to stop you and your YouTube. Pinky swears.

Forcing you to watch something, or surf something. Please. Like we can do that now on TV. And you think we expect to be able to do it on the net? Man, you are a Frickin' Genius.

Censoring Sites Wholesale, like China or Iran. Oh for God's sake, take another hit off that bong, will you, Anakin3483netfreewarezforevr?

Take the drama (as opposed to Drama) out of this equation, and the bottom line is this: what we're trying to do is prevent a repeat of the sorry state of Canadian film distribution.

Canadian film distribution is to Canadian TV as a greasy piece of street meat is to Dinner at that hot NY Bistro that just got written up but is so cool that it doesn't even have a name.

That's because years ago, thanks mainly to tireless U.S. lobbyist Jack Valenti, our screens were chucked wholesale into the miasma of the American machine. Now, Canadian box office is counted as part of the U.S. Domestic box.

That's the stake. Yes, I know, I know, you don't care. But if you read your Richard Florida, you should be a little bit scared -- because the cavalier way in which the creative class is booted south in this country is breathtakingly short sighted.

So there will be proposals for how to fix that. And big telcos and cable co's that are fighting a class action lawsuit right now to try to hold on to that $7.95 a month system access fee that nobody can figure out are going to gee-shucks about how they can't absorb a 50 cent hit per subscriber. And that's fine. It's just fine.

Woooooooo -- oooooo --- ooooooh!

That's Jack for you. Listen to the wind from Gatineau, and maybe you can hear him rattling his chains.


*Please note, some of what I wrote above is tongue-in-cheek. But not IFGS. That shit is painful, like IBS, or commenters on your average news site.

ZZzzzzzt

BILL BRIOUX has an interesting take on the Analog signal turnoff in the USA which starts today. Get used to some classic Canadian whining about the loss of our we-assume-it-must-be-Constitutional or at least God-given right to U.S. network signals.

Your Handy Monday Haiku Reviews

IT'S A HOLIDAY in the Province of Ontario today -- the ominously monikered, "Family Day." Yet I'm still plugging on a 3rd draft of one outline, and if I get that done, there's always the script I have to read and the other outline I have to write. So, in deference to that, today I only have a few Haiku reviews:

DOLLHOUSE

Joss Whedon is God
But Gods stumble and our Faith
Is just an Echo.

SKINS, Season 3

Juvenalia ruled
Then a savior said, "hello,
My name is Tomas."

TRUST ME

Oh does Will miss Grace
And Ed need Carol to save
Us from Miss Potter?

DAMAGES, Season 2

Puffy William Hurt
Cannot close the deal with Glenn
Never mind hawt Rose

WILD ROSES

I tried, yes I did
All the oil in Alberta
Cannot make this good.

30 Rock McMarketing Meets a McFlurry of Controversy

WELL, HERE'S THE tale of a weird little story.

If you watched 30Rock's Valentine's Day themed episode this week, you were treated to a subplot where Salma Hayek and Alec Baldwin waxed poetic on the virtues of the McDonald's McFlurry.
The placement was so obvious that it skeeved me out a little. I mean, this wasn't an in-joke like the Snapple or Verizon placements of 30 Rock's past -- this was a message shoehorned into the ep so hamfistedly that it just felt...ugly.

And when I watched my PVR'd copy, I immediately Twittered my feeling:

Latest: Did anyone else find 30 Rock's McFlurry-shilling this week offputting? I know they've done product placement before, but this one? Feh.

From the power of the internet department, not a minute later I got the first of several tweets back telling me that the placement, in fact, wasn't.

For what it's worth, here's what Tina Fey had to say:

“It gives me great pleasure to inform you that the references to McDonald's in last night's episode of 30 Rock were in no way product placement. (Nor were they an attempt at product placement that fell through.) We received no money from the McDonald's Corporation. We were actually a little worried they might sue us. That's just the kind of revenue-generating masterminds we are.

Also, the upcoming story line where Liz Lemon starts dating Grimace is just based on a recurring dream I have.

Seriously, though, it's not product placement.

Also, whoever is writing my Twitter account is pretty funny, but it's not me.”

But here's where the rubber hits the road with this stuff. It felt so off, and the show's past history with placements before, have made it impossible to tell what's content and what's paid. I said on Q last week that I thought that placements in programs were OK -- or at least a necessary evil, but now, I'm back to being on the fence. The McFlurry thing bothered me a whole lot more than Pepsi's MacGruber SNL bit. When something takes you that out of the action, and when the star has to issue a denial -- where are we? McDonald's clearly wins in this scenario....but I'm not sure that 30 Rock or Tina Fey come out as cleanly.

A lot of these issues were dealt with in a New York magazine article by Emily Nussbaum from October 2008.

Meanwhile the best encapsulation of the current brouhaha came in Nussbaum's response to "ha ha told you so" 30 Rock Defenders on NYMag's Vulture blog:

It made perfect sense to assume that the McFlurry bit was paid placement, since aside from the fact that product integration permeates NBC shows, 30 Rock itself has specifically, repeatedly used paid placements in the past. (Read my article linked to in the original piece for details.)

When I was researching that article, I tried to get Tina Fey to comment on the placements, but she wouldn't. She did, however, give a quote to EW in which she claimed that every time the show does paid placement, it will be specifically called out, so viewers will know it. But that wasn't actually true: the Soy Joy placement was "concealed." It's impossible for me to tell at this point what's "paid" and what's "organic," and THAT'S the problem.

This creates a bizarre conundrum for viewers: either we go "la la la I won't think about it!" -- or we are presumptively cynical. I'm a fan of Tina Fey and I adore 30 Rock as a sitcom, but when it comes to this subject, I'm frustrated and suspicious, especially after the research for that piece. I'm certainly willing to believe the McFlurry reference wasn't a paid placement, but it's absurd for the writers to act as though we should have known that, since they're the ones that created this confusion.

All I know is, "Pop!" I snapped out of the action. And every ounce of TV writer spidey-sense tells me that THAT is a very, very, very, very bad thing to be playing with. We're trained to try and make sure the audience doesn't "bump" for any reason. Letting the bump happen for the sake of shekels strikes me as a bad precedent for future comedy -- and the art form of TV storytelling in general.