In early June, while attending the Banff World Television Festival, actor Paul Gross sat down with a reporter to give his opinion on the current rush of Canadian TV producers, distributors and broadcasters vying to team up with American networks. Never one to hold his tongue, Gross – whose show Due South was the first Canadian-made show to win a prime-time slot on a major U.S. network – said things that very few in the gung-ho-to-sell crowd wanted to hear.
First, he warned that the Canadian industry should not rely too heavily on the U.S.-Canada co-production model, saying there is a danger of becoming “an assembly branch plant” for the American networks. “You might be putting in the lion's share of the money, but you do not control the fate of the production,” Gross said. “Sure, it's extraordinarily attractive. You get big exposure in a way you can't generate out of Canada alone. And it certainly helps with foreign sales to have ABC, NBC, CBS, Fox behind it. But it does bring some handcuffs that aren't all that attractive, creatively and for broadcasters.”
Jump ahead one month, and Gross's words seem oddly prescient. A little over a week ago, broadcasting giant NBC, which had teamed up with CTV to simulcast this summer's The Listener , announced it had decided to pull the plug on the Canadian-made drama halfway through its inaugural season.
“Canadians just need to be wary of certain pitfalls,” he adds. “While it's nice to have a U.S. partner, they can take a disproportionate amount of creative control over the show,” and without the U.S. licence fee, the production quality could decline. “On Due South , CBS had a huge amount of input,” Gross says, of the Mountie drama that ran on CBS – simulcast by CTV – for two seasons before the American network cancelled it. (Produced by Alliance Communications, Due South survived for four seasons in all thanks to CTV, the BBC and France's TF1.)
“It's an interesting thing,” adds Gross. “We'd all like [this model] to work seamlessly. But what people forget is that the American failure rate is unbelievably high: 85 to 90 per cent of new shows don't succeed. The Canadian market is slightly more forgiving.”
Another Toronto producer, who asked not to be identified, worries that Canadian broadcasters will begin to rely too heavily on the bilateral model – and only order series based on Canadian-made pilots if there is an American broadcaster attached. “Some writers are reacting strongly against the unfairness of American networks putting in a minute amount of money and having so much creative control over casting and scripts,” he says. “And they worry that Canadian stories could suffer because the thinking seems to be: Unless you sell into the States, your show isn't worthy. That's the risk of playing in these leagues.”
Slaughter's clumsiness and Homer Simpson-like fallibility had also always appealed to the Serbian sense of humour, which is self-deprecating – a trait Stewart believes Serbs share with Canadians. Stewart and Vespi heard time and again that Serbians loved the TV character because he would always come back after being beaten down in a fight. “The most powerful alliance in the world was bombing them, and they had a dictator, but they just kept getting up every morning and trying to get through it,” explains Stewart. “They responded to the goofiness of the character rather than anything heroic.”
