Comedy Wank Fridays!

JAIME WEINMAN'S minutae-chewing dissection of the type of "comedy writer" jokes he hates on the Simpsons is just too good not to call attention to here.

BTW, a good friend of mine -- and you know who you are -- is both a comedy writer, and a shameless whore for these kinds of jokes. And when he says them, mostly I laugh. Because I have weak sauce.

Getting CanTeeVee Cheesy

SIMON HOUPT is a sharp writer for the Globe & Mail, and it looks like he's starting a new gig that sounds a lot like the beat I used to cover lo those many moons ago on media television: he's the Globe's new Marketing and Advertising reporter.

In his first dispatch, he runs down a bit of the particular challenges of making Product Integration work on Canadian shows. I have to admit, I'm a lot less worked up over this than I used to be. Call it attrition fatigue -- but of all the things that are stacked against us here, product integration is pretty far down the list.

Today, viewers who objected to the ham-fisted wedging of these ads into their favourite shows just a few years ago largely shrug off the commercial placements, not only on reality shows like Survivor, Top Chef, and American Idol but also on Emmy-winning fare like The Office and 30 Rock.

When Ben Silverman, the co-chairman of NBC Entertainment, left the network last month, he did so to join up with Barry Diller's IAC/InterActiveCorp for a new venture that will create branded entertainment: television shows seamlessly blending advertising into the content.

Canadian advertisers say that's a game they can't hope to play. Marketers here note that deals securing placement of a major brand on a U.S. network are struck between multinationals who have no time to worry about the concerns of a branch office in Toronto, which may believe a different creative approach is required to appeal to Canadian consumers.

The article touches on several of the unique problems of growing this revenue stream in Canada. For my money, you can toss a coin to see which is more of a challenge -- the general conservative nature of Canadian advertisers, or the very real fact that placements for 20K are often more trouble than they're worth. If a placement buys you an extra day's shooting, great. But if you're going to keep three people running around for weeks for something that's not even going to buy you a day - ehh. not so much.

Interesting fact that jumped out at me, that I didn't know -- the network takes up to 60% of any revenue deal. Man! Sixty damn percent! There is just no end to the vise-like problem of raising a budget here.

Brrr.

Whenever I feel sorry for Canadian Producers, it's like an angel walks over my grave... :)

...and for the record. I'd be happy to write in Advil. Sweet, sweet Advil. Advil Blue, I love you.

Critical Regulatory Tipping Catastrophe

ONE OF THE big arguments of history is what drives human history more -- great events or great people. It's a fascinating argument. But an equally interesting little eddy is how critical mass is achieved for an idea. When Malcolm Gladwell wrote The Tipping Point, he sort of put into words something that most of us sensed, or knew from our own lives. We're taught that things change slowly. But they don't. Not really. Things kind of tend to stay the same, and then something happens and suddenly there's a critical mass and whooosh, change happens faster than you could possibly imagine.

The Soviet Union and communism had been on the ropes for awhile, but when that Wall fell, it was game over. We heard about subprime mortgages in crisis for a long time -- but Bear Sterns went down, and suddenly the whole financial system quickly imploded and we plunged into recession. The British Colonists had been grumbling and complaining for years, but when Great Britain passed the Intolerable Acts, the tea went into Boston Harbour and British North America began to unravel.

Canadians are a largely complacent people. A little smug, and not prone to rash displays. There might be some people who get a little bent out of shape about subjects like media concentration and taxation levels, but very few people are actually moved enough to do something about it.

So we have the situation we have today. Cell phone service in this country is some of the most expensive and least robust of anywhere in the industrialized world. On Text messages, the industry markup is 4900 percent. Cable and satellite services for most people have gone up something like 30% since the sector was largely deregulated a few years ago. The big three or four companies control most of the pipe money -- delivering tv and internet to the majority of the country. They've made record profits over the last few years, $2 billion last year -- off you and me, while enjoying robust regulatory protection.

On the broadcast side, well, if you've read this blog before, you know the drift of that. They've done more to spend money on U.S. programming, while consolidating, and cutting local TV coverage to the bone. My part of the industry has suffered a lot. And the broadcasters spent huge amounts of money gobbling each other up, and made, again, hand over fist profits, until they latest downturn where they decided the sky was falling -- and brazenly turned around and said that the active strategy of consolidation that they'd been pursuing for years, wasn't the reason that local TV had become so anemic. Nope, apparently everything was fine until Bear Stearns went into the tank, and GM pulled the plug on advertising.

We've been treated (okay, I concede, it wasn't much of a treat, and you probably weren't paying attention anyway) to an ugly squabble for the last couple of years between the cablers and the broadcasters. It's over money, as everything is. The broadcasters want to get paid for their valuable signals that duplicate what you already get on the U.S. networks, and the Cablers say they shouldn't have to do anything to support the system, and if they're made to pay into a fund that saves local tv or promotes Canadian creative drama, or buys pony rides for sick kids, well, that's a tax and they're just going to pass it on to you and me -- like they've passed on those massive increases over the last few years, for substandard service.

Oh there's other neato stuff around the rims, too....like the fact that they want to be able to shape internet traffic -- so they'll sell you on blazing hot speeds and then cut off the faucet when you try to get what you paid for. They also want to set rates that favour their businesses -- specifically, usage-based rates for internet pipe that makes it very difficult for the 20% of the market that isn't one of those big five Telecommunications behemoths to try and offer better service to Canadians.

In any case, with all those regs in place that mean you can't seek out a real competitor, (I mean, wow, I can choose between Rogers and Bell? Lucky me. Now, for my next choice, I get to choose between death by hanging or drowning, right?) aren't we all lucky that we have somebody watching out for us?

Who am I talking about? The CRTC, of course.

Except, of course, they don't. They never have. The CRTC doesn't work for you and me. They're a bureaucratic organization that's basically bought and paid for by the industries they regulate.

Little brushfires over things like net neutrality might have started the ball rolling, but a few recent, very tin-eared decisions and processes have stripped the veneer away from the game. First, there was that wonderful case in the last broadcaster hearings where they went behind closed doors and then erased the redacted transcripts of what was said. Then there was the screw up of the Do Not Call list, and the fact that now the CRTC is going behind closed doors AGAIN, in order to PROTECT the companies that have violated that list.

That's what they do. They protect companies. Not you. And not me.

In classic netgeek fashion, it's the internet decision last week that started an ugly ball rolling. A very slick, quite professional campaign to Dissolve The CRTC. When the light is shone upon the dark recesses of the commission, it's pretty hard to argue against the point that the commissioners are clearly too close to the industries they regulate.

But yesterday, the other crying baby, the broadcasters -- were served up a slice of failure pie that takes that grassroots campaign and elevates it to something else.

In the midst of a horrific local storm, with Tornadoes touching down all over the city, local TV failed in the most profound way possible to inform its citizens. If you ask "what am I paying for?" then based on yesterday, the clear answer is nothing. Nothing at all. As Jim Henshaw put it:

Since the lightning was now crackling the radio so much it was unlistenable and local television was in news hour mode, I went back to the TV to find out what was happening.

I learned that the Lockerbie bomber had been released, the Prime Minister was enjoying his trip through the Arctic and Hurricane Bill was threatening Bermuda.

Nothing about what was happening right outside my window and less than 30 clicks from where these broadcasts were originating.

To be sure, there had been a mention of Durham, where the first Tornado had hit an hour earlier and that there were “suspected” touch downs of funnel clouds in Vaughn and my hometown of Newmarket. But no details. No raw video from a courageous videographer. No field reporters ducking flying cows.

In the centralized model of Canadian local TV I’d predictedmonths ago but never thought might ever personally affect me, the two million people who live just beyond the Greater Toronto Area had no television service addressing the imminent threat they all faced.

Instead, I was treated to the same pre-packaged news segments, the same smiling meat puppets and the same banal “Sparky, what the heck’s happened to my Blue Jays?” banter.

People who grow up in Toronto are used to the frequent storm crawls and radar

messages that run on the Buffalo stations whenever there's a storm. Our local stations here couldn't even muster that much yesterday -- except in one case, long after the storms had already crested.

Interestingly enough, I have to say that I was out on the road yesterday, listening to my Ipod, and had no idea how really bad the storm was, until I got an email alert on my phone -- from CBC.CA. That's right. The poor, maligned, complained about CBC dropped an alert in my inbox that said Tornadoes in Toronto and spelled out the severity of the storm in dire enough terms that I immediately found a parking garage and waited out the deluge.

Go read Jim Henshaw's justifiably livid accounting of the utter failure of local TV during the storm. Better yet, print it out, mail it to your MP with a big red "WTF?" written across the top. Remember, this is local TV in Toronto, a city of TWO MILLION people -- not Regina or Red Deer or Saint John. Ask yourself if you think Michel Arpin and the merry band of CRTC commissioners are sweating yet?

A big bowl of #fail with sadness sauce. And maybe, if we're very lucky, and people keep the heat on-- a tipping point.

I Can't Stand Up For Falling Down

OH CANADIAN SCRIBE, I see you out there, reading this bathed in the cathode ray glow. You've kept silent, so silent, saying nothing as the sands shift around the sinkhole of our little industry. "Better to stay under the radar," you think. "Besides, I'm probably just going to go to the States anyway."

Really?

Well, read a couple of recent articles from Variety first:

Recession shrinks writers' room. An excerpt:

One unfortunate casualty of the recession that may not receive as much attention as the slow sales of homes is the shrinkage of the writers' room.

Those containers of creativity haven't physically gotten smaller across the television production landscape, but they're slightly emptier these days. Rough financial seas have produced tighter ships.

"I definitely feel as if there are (fewer) jobs out there," says Damon Lindelof, exec producer of ABC's "Lost."

"Whereas new shows from pilots that got picked up used to have 10 to 12 writers -- that was the size of our staff in 2004 -- we're just eight now. In late winter and early spring of this year, when the recession was rearing its ugly head, everybody was hearing rumors about the ramifications, that nobody was immune and that we had to make compromises."

"For a show like ours," says Lindelof, "or 'Dexter,' that only does 15-17 episodes but is very serialized and complex and hard to do, it's almost impossible to generate those shows with writing staffs of less than six to eight."

For the immediate future at least, some shows might have to find out the hard way if that's true.

"I don't think anybody really knows, because we're only now finding out what the new shape of the room can do," Rotko says. "We'll have to see if the story is working, if the procedurals are working. This may be the framework: a smaller, slightly condensed room.

And:

TV credits constrict with job market

Experienced showrunners and senior writer-producers who would have easily landed full-time staff slots just a few seasons ago are now taking on consulting producer gigs, thanks to the much-diminished number of scripted series ordered by the major nets for the 2009-10 season.

The rise of consulting producers is definitely a function of market conditions, but that doesn't mean that it's automatically a horrible situation for writers. Seasoned scribes who have reached the exec producer or co-exec producer level say they'd much rather work as consulting producers than take another title that would indicate they've taken a step backward -- and make it harder for them to command exec producer stripes in the future.

"It is a manageable, win-win situation for everyone involved if (a consulting gig) is properly put into place and constructed," says Thania St. John, a drama vet who is a consulting producer on Lifetime's "Drop Dead Diva."

"Nowadays you have a large group of very talented (writers) who have reached a certain level in their career. At some point there's just not going to be that (top) job available, but you still want to work. It makes sense to be a consulting producer."

The consulting producer role has become commonplace on comedy and drama series during the past decade. It typically involves an experienced hyphenate working one to three days a week on a series -- helping to break stories and outline arcs, offering rewrite and punch-up services and general troubleshooting advice.

(Posted using ShareThis)

You've got no Green Card. Things are tough all over. And the Promised Land has lots of experienced scribes with a 323 or 213 area code who've got nothing going on.

So, uh ... maybe, oh, I don't know -- maybe now's the time to actually get off your ass and try to make things better for you and your fellow creatives here, hmm?

I mean, it's better than just stressing out, right? That stuff's good for nobody!

Respect the audience, and the process -- and be prepared. There's a lot of tearing down coming. You want to pick up a hammer and maybe plant a flower or two? Or are you gonna keep being the passive character in your own life story?

Point of No Return

NICE ARTICLE in The Walrus this month that sets the table on the current problems in Canadian drama. Anderson does a good job giving the history of the medium in this country, and how it comes to find itself in its current parlous state.

With Quotes from Janet MacLean (co-creator/Executive Producer, The Border,) Chris Haddock, (Creator/Exec Producer DaVinci's Inquest, Intelligence) Bob Martin (co-creator, Slings & Arrows) and Mark Ellis & Stephanie Morgenstern (creators of Flashpoint.)

I'm working up a series of State of the Nation posts for a couple of weeks from now. Let's see if Haddock is right, and it's my turn to get pushed off the cliff. For now, read what Anderson has to say:

Walrus Magazine » Point of No Return » By Jason Anderson

(Posted using ShareThis)

Reprint: Thanks, Mr. K.

CAUSE IT'S MY BLOGAVERSARY, I'm posting a couple of pieces from the first month. This is where I finally revealed what the title of the Blog was about.

originally published 9/12/2005

Okay: so here it is. A thousand years ago, when I was still a journalist, I was interviewing an author. Doesn't matter who, but this was a writer I admired greatly. While the tape was changing, I peppered him with questions for my own interests' sake: "how did you make the leap to professional writer?" and things like that.

He smiled for a bit and nailed me with a glance. He saw what I was asking without me even asking it. He laughed and said,

"getting sick of the treadmill?"

And I smiled, too. He caught me out. This was certainly the first time any of my interview subjects had showed the slightest interest in the guy asking the questions. He paused for a second, like he was weighing saying something, and then he said,

"You'll get there. If you really, really want to write, you'll find a way to do it, and you'll find a way to make money doing it."

"Okay, I've got speed."

That's the cameraman telling me that he's ready to keep going; to resume the interview. So the last part of what the author said was the first thing I saw when I screened the tape back to cut my story together.

His face changed for a second there. Just a wisp of darkness crossed, and then was gone, as he settled back into interview mode. And before I got off my next question, he said,

"Just don't expect it to solve all your problems. At a certain point, you're still in the corner at the party, staring out at people; bewildered, munching dead things on sticks."

So. Now you know.

Reprint: His Master's Voice

IT'S MY FOUR YEAR BLOGAVERSARY, so I'm reposting a few nice pieces from that first month of blogging.

Originally published 8/20/2005

A few years ago, in a previous life, I was a television producer at a hip TeeVee station. I would do the kinds of stories where you talked to authors, people plugging their new book, videogame, pyramid scheme -- things like that. I didn't do many musicians - there were other people for that. I did lots of people who were big in advertising and marketing. Though I was tangentally related to that field, mostly the act of interviewing those people made it utterly clear to me that, boy, was I ever glad that I had not sought out a career in advertising and marketing.

Being an interviewer and producer was a strange gig, especially at this place where there was such high turnover; that kind of low level info tv is a factory -- you churn out one story after another, each one as disposable as the last. I was always an "off-camera interviewer." It meant that you tried to keep your questions short, and leading. You were constantly trying to get people to expound - not to have a conversation with you, but to talk for posterity, like they were communicating directly with that audience of one, watching at home. If you do it long enough, you start to feel like a ghost. You become about process, ever aware of the camera and the clip. It got so I could hear when we were coming near the end of the tape, because of the change in the whirring of the camera motor. I would always get my camerapeople to turn out the red light, and tell them to start rolling early, and just ease into the conversation. People got less nervous when you did that. While they were talking, you became the master of not interrupting, of feeding back signals of response that weren't verbal. A whole lot of smiles, and nods, and hand motions - everything short of speaking so that your voice wouldn't be heard on the tape. You learn to listen in clip. As you followed the conversation, there would be a dispassionate part of you that said, "bing. there's my opener. bing. that's a closing clip. bing. there's the clip I need to bridge the piece." You were simultaneously of the moment, deep in the conversation, and utterly apart from it.

Rarely in this life do people get to talk, really talk, as long as they want to. Conversation demands that you follow along, that you engage the other person; that you cede ground and give and take. An interview isn't like that at all. You could always tell the media-trained people, who spoke in soundbites and never veered off the mark. But with other people, civilians, the same pattern would always emerge. People can talk on one subject for about twenty seconds. Sometimes as much as thirty, but usually not much more. After that amount of time, they either go off on a tangent, run out of steam, or start repeating what they've already said. Try it sometime. It's uncanny.

Over the course of a few years, I probably interviewed close to five hundred people. Just the ghost in the chair listening to clip as the camera motor whirred. A couple of times in my social life, people would grow cross with me as they caught me "interviewing" them. They would call me on it, and ask me to stop. One woman put it best, when she said to me, "I'm not sure I like you when you do that. You go so far away."

Looking back on it, I realize that job for was perfect preparation for what I do now, though my life couldn't be more different. Then, I'd meet fourteen new people each week. Now, I spend most of my time alone, and the people I try to make speak, are entirely fictional constructs. Though some of those advertising types would give them a run for their money on that score.

What's remained is that separateness, that apartness. Part of actually being a writer, a working writer, is having an ability to disengage from the world, and from the people around you. To take that step back; to listen for the clip, the line, and notice the inflection and the rolling cadence of how people talk. Sure, it's artificial. But when you saw my interviews on the TeeVee, they were naturalistic, and you believed them. And that's just what I'm striving for when I write a script. It takes an awful lot of craft, and stepping back, to make things seem natural. To create a believeable world, one must sometimes take yourself out of this one.

For a long time I thought those years spent talking to people as an off-camera interviewer were wasted years; an unfortunate eddy that I'd followed for a while. For a long time, I saw that time of my life as a man who knew what he wanted to do, but lacked the courage to do it.

Now I'm not so sure. Though those interviews became tedious near the end -- I knew I had to get out when I found myself with a pasted-on smile listening to some guy talk about his new Molson ad thinking, "I could reach across right now and poke out your eyes, and you'd probably keep on talking about the breakthrough creative of your cheesy beer ad," -- I gravitated toward that job for the same reason as I settled into this one: because it suited something in my personality. I never wanted to be the centre of attention: not at work, anyway. But I did want to pull the strings.

I can hear the camera motor. I'm almost out of tape. And to think, I started out this entry wanting to explain what "Dead Things On Sticks" meant. Ah well. I'll get to that.

Driving Casting Mad

HIDDEN AMONG Bruce Handy's enjoyable Vanity Fair feature on Mad Men's new season is a little tidbit that actually serves as great crafty advice:

Another role came up, a twentysomething adman described as “blond, doughy, British.” Carrie Audino, one of the show’s two casting directors, raised an objection: “That really limits us. We can do 20s and British or doughy and blond, but all four is tough.” Weiner thought for a moment, then offered a poetically succinct summation of the character: “I want him to be one of those guys whose only attraction is his accent.” Now they had something they could work with. (The original character description had been “too limiting,” Audino told me later. “A doughy British guy who’s blond, in his 20s? There are two of them—maybe—in L.A.”)

The thing to remember when you're writing a TV script is that -- as I talked about in the series last week -- everything's happening fast. Including casting. You never know who's available at any time. You may think that you have the perfect picture in your head of what someone should look like, or be like. But how many stories have you heard of an actor who came in, and ultimately was iconic in a role, but who wasn't at all who the writer pictured going in?

All writers write specific types in sometimes, and you never know what the casting director is going to come back and say is difficult or limiting. On The Border, we would often get into trouble when we tried to find actors within specific ethnic groups that maybe for cultural reasons don't have a deep pool of actors. (First generation immigrants, for instance, tend not to have too many sons and daughters saying, "Mom, Dad, I want to be an ACTOR!" and finding unqualified support.)

It's also that combo of traits -- accent, look, etc, that dices and slices your choices. Casting Directors will try to go off the beam a little, to show you contrasts. They may ask if a part can be cast color blind, for instance. (I don't mean the actor is color blind, I mean that any ethnicity will do.) But they generally do try to hew to what you've written.

But Weiner's solution in the excerpt above is quite elegant, because rather than frame the part in terms of externals and their own mind's eye (physicality, appearance, cadence of voice, accent) it frames the part in terms of what the impression the audience should be left with.

It's a little mind shift, but when you're squeezing in those two description lines to bring a character to life, it's worth considering what the effect of the character is meant to be -- and rather than describing externals, conjure a feeling. Write what the first impression should be for the viewer.

Because if you do that, the casting director can come back to you and say, "Yeah, but what do you see in terms of height, weight, accent, hair color or age?"

Sigh.

It's a funny business.

Mad at 40 000 Feet

I KNOW THAT one of the things that makes humans prickly and maddening is the tendency to elevate anecdotal experiences to the level of something greater, more sweeping, and more important than the cold hard evidence might suggest.

So, uh...I hope you'll forgive me now for doing that very thing.

Last night I flew back from Calgary, where I spent the weekend visiting friends. These friends, very sweetly, had inquired on my behalf to see about getting AMC so I could watch Mad Men. No dice, of course. It's not offered on Bell Expressvu.

AMC in fact, is not available in a whole lot of the country. And no Canadian network saw fit to purchase the rights to Season 3 of Mad Men. CTV ran the first two seasons in a rather desultory fashion, but since the numbers weren't boffo out of the gate, passed on the 3rd season.

We've talked about some of the weird realities of TV in the midst of the great implosion before. But Mad Men is a particularly maddening fulcrum. It's an old-fashioned kind of show, paced and even shot in a style that's out of step with today's world. It's a show that bucks the prevailing trends in so many ways -- even down to the makeup of its writing staff.

It's a show that has a massive, much bigger impact on the culture than its numbers would normally suggest. It managed to establish -- instantly -- a strong brand identity for AMC that brought that channel firmly into the 21st century as a quality series destination. To watch the show on AMC is to understand, finally, the endgame of demographic targeting. The ads are all high end -- Lexuses, big brands -- Tiffany kind of stuff. Once upon a time these brands would spend freely and had enough clout to either advertise very selectively, or to scattershot everywhere. Nobody can afford that anymore. But advertising on a low-rated show is still cost effective if that small audience makes over 100K a year -- and that, my friends, is the Mad Men audience on AMC.

And just as the 3rd season starts, there are signs that the perennial low-rated tag -- the last slam against the show -- might be fading, too. Ratings for the premiere were up -- dramatically up. Close to 3 million may not seem like a lot, but there are shows that the American Networks are putting on now that are pulling close to that. For a cable channel to get that is ... well, still pretty astounding.

Here in Canada, of course, there is none of that, since nobody picked up the show. So what happens when unavailabilty meets a highly desirable audience?

Well, in a word -- weirdness. ITunes Canada announced earlier this week that it would be selling Mad Men immediately after its AMC broadcast. I checked at about 2AM ET Monday morning, and it wasn't yet up. But when I got up -- there it was. I dutifully slapped down my $2.49 (on my credit card,) downloaded it, and transferred it to my Ipod Touch.

American readers might be scratching their heads right now -- because none of this seems very unusual. Mad Men has always been available the next day on Itunes.

The point is that in Canada, it's a break in the dam of an artificially skewed and restricted market. Until recently, it wasn't uncommon for one of our broadcasters to buy a series just to keep on the shelf so that another broadcaster couldn't get it. Protected by regulation that allows them to selectively block U.S. signals when they're running the same show, Canadian channels have evolved to a place where they cherry pick the best of American network creati

vity, and slap it up on the air. It was literally a license to print money.

But now here comes Mad Men. A show that's of the moment, and might be catching fire. It's a brand establisher and a brand enhancer. Could this be the show that paves the way for paid downloading? That makes it palatable for the higher end of the audience segment? Because the people who buy Lexuses aren't, I believe, the people who'll spend a lot of time futzing with torrents and conversion programs, and what have you. Oh, and they're also the ones who'll probably be buying all those web-enabled TV's first -- so the whole "watching it on your computer" stigma's going to disappear, too.

You might laugh, but one of the odd things about the implosion of the music industry was the increase in the amount of quality music for the thirty to fortysomething market. It makes sense, when you think about it. We're the only ones still buying CD's.

Anyway, it's certainly too soon to tell. But there may just come a time where CTV or Global wishes they'd ponied up for that 3rd season, to delay the opening of Pandora's box.

Anyway, flash back to last night. I'm on Westjet Flight 158 to Toronto. I forego the seatback TV, take out my Ipod Touch, plug in the headphones, and settle in to watch the Mad Men season 3 premiere. I was glad to have spent the money, to have it to watch. I thoroughly enjoyed it -- propping up the 3 inch screen on top of the seat in front of me. After it ended, put the Ipod touch away, took out a book -- and switched the headphones to my other Ipod. (I know, I know -- shutup.)

A couple minutes later I felt a tap on my shoulder. A guy one row back had seen what I was watching. And he saw that I wasn't using the Ipod anymore.

"Uh," he said, feeling a little awkward, I guess, "Listen, is there anyway I could borrow it? I really, really want to see that premiere."

I smiled, said sure, and passed it over. The guy was so excited, he bought me a drink when the cart came around. Factor in the course of that inflight drink, and I have now, essentially, made a profit on my Itunes purchase of Mad Men.

I can safely say I've been flying with that Ipod for about two years now -- and nothing like that has ever even vaguely happened before. It made me feel like there is definitely something going on.

Flash to today, and the implications of this story (found via Jaime Weinman.)

Oscar winner Holly Hunter ("The Piano") has earned an Emmy nod for each of the first two seasons of "Saving Grace." But today, TNT announced that the crime drama will solve its last case next summer. The cable network will push back the previously announced winter run of the remaining six shows in Season 3 of "Saving Grace" and Fox will film just three more episodes to tie up loose ends. While TNT wanted to continue with "Saving Grace," Fox decided to end production on the show after disappointing overseas and DVD sales

The tail has begun to wag the dog.

All those American nets have their production companies, and the calculus of what makes a show a hit is completely off now. Friday Night Lights? Family Guy? What makes you continue a show? What makes you stop it?

It's fluid, and it's fast moving, and the Canadian networks are in no way prepared for any of it. Of course, neither are the producers, or anybody else.

DVD sets with features of Canadian shows are often poorly distributed afterthoughts. (Corner Gas and Trailer Park Boys are probably the best exceptions.) Most of the time, distribution -- both in DVD and film -- is a joke in this country. Itunes and VOD offer a possible way out of a historically Mickey Mouse approach. Does anyone have the guts to take the chance and step up?

It's generally acknowledged that the reason that 24 became a hit for FOX was because they brought out the first season in the summer before Season 2 started. People rented or bought, caught up, and by the time Season 2 premiered, the show came back a hit.

Contrast that with a worthy Canadian show like Intelligence. There's a show that could have really benefited by having a DVD in the pipeline before the second season. But it was not to be. They blew the release window, for whatever reason. Well, actually, wait a minute. Chris Haddock actually spelled out the reason in an interview with me:

We’ve been trying to get theAmerican distributor – we ‘ve got an American company that’s been putting the DaVinci show out on DVD and they look at Canada as a small market but we’ve been trying and just pushing, pushing to try and get them to make the investment in the first season. We won’t have it out when we hoped we’d have it out – this summer, because in their mind Canada’s just too small a market to put a rush on it. It’s a struggle. If we had the ability as CTV did to put a lot of coin behind it like Corner Gas, boom there they were with the set…it really does help. It’s a good support system. Unfortunately we don’t have the resources at the CBC to do that.

Haddock's as savvy a writer/producer as this country has. And the guy knows how to push. He knew the importance of timing the DVD set, but still couldn't get it done.

Now it's a couple years later -- the evidence is clear that you have got to have this stuff thought about upfront, and it's still not part of the calculus -- not really. The Canadian way of just doing everything to get the show made, and making the DVD an afterthought -- has to end. As the Saving Grace example proves -- it's not ancillary anymore. Everything's up for grabs.

Sure, there's still the catch 22 of you can't get anyone to buy something they haven't heard of, and they won't hear of it 'til it gets written about.

But it's not too much of a stretch to see a time when some enterprising American studio looks at a prestige product and does math and figures out that they can ride the hype and promo in the U.S.A. -- and maybe selling it to a foreign broadcaster isn't the most profitable route.

And then the networks here are screwed, because they have no Plan B.

Well, I suppose they could get serious about trying to make their own stuff -- and have their own quality shows to market. But that requires a culture where talent matters, and where you can recognize and develop quality material because you recognize what goes into it.

And we're pretty thin on the ground on that.

Anyway, again, I have no idea where any of this ends. And in the Canadian tradition, I'm sure there are a hundred people out there who could tell you how that would never work in Canada, and why they can't do it, and why nobody should ever even try. That is, after all, the Canadian way.

But the guy or girl who figures out a way to make it happen? The person who decides for one final moment, to be leading and not trailing edge -- who puts together a plan that combines all the things that are going on in the various rumbling, crumbling corners of the TV business -- That's the person who gets rich. Maybe a new media risk taker might save some old media dinosaur. Maybe not.

All I know is, looking down from 40 000 feet, and with all the bullshit that creatives have to face in this country, I have to say that I was so very relieved on one front: I'm glad I'm on my side of the line, and not theirs.

Cause there's turbulence ahead. Don't say nobody saw it coming.