Slate and The West Wing's Crystal Ball

SLATE TODAY HAS up a video piece that finally deconstructs something I've been pondering for a while: how the sixth and seventh seasons of The West Wing eerily predicted the 2008 Presidential Race.

By this time, the show was far past its once-vaunted viewer peak, but if you go back and watch those two, final Sorkin-less seasons now, you'll find them arguably far more trenchant than when they first aired.

TV writers are always playing a game with currency. As the most responsive of mediums, TV is great at being able to deal with things that people are talking about right now.

A movie, by contrast, has a long shooting schedule, then a big marketing run up that can mean that they have to try and guess what's going to be in the zeitgeist. When they hit, they hit. When they don't, you get a whole bunch of Iraq-themed movies that fail because everybody's sick to death of talking about Iraq, and are about to get blitzed on the economy and the sub-prime mortgage scandal.

A book, too, requires a year or more to get on the publishing schedule, unless it's a quickie cash in book that finds itself fast-tracked -- and those are usually the kind of lite-lit that follow trends, instead of leading them.

But a TV series that's in production is a bit of an assembly line -- and I mean that in the best way. Whatever the merits of the episode, The West Wing had a 9/11 response episode on the air within about a month of 9/11. You can do that when you're crewed up and going from script to finished ep in 6 weeks.

We've gotten lucky on the Canadian series, The Border, in anticipating a couple of things. I had a story about child soliders and Darfur that seemed pretty current when it aired. The week before we had a story about illegal kidney harvesting, just days after news of an Indian ring doing just that broke -- it even had a Canadian connection.

But for sheer, "oooh, how did they guess that?" the sixth and seventh seasons of The West Wing take the cake.

Briefly, a young and not so experienced minority congressman, Matt Santos, runs for the democratic nomination.

He has to overcome an insider candidacy by the sitting Vice President, who's much better financed, and seems to have it locked up.

The primary season leads to no clear winner, and leads to a brokered convention.

The opponent in the general is a Republican Senator, Arthur Vinick, who has a lot of experience, but who faces doubts from the conservative wing of the party -- who don't trust him because he doesn't share their views.

Now, to a certain extent, goosing the limits of what was possible under the U.S. political system was always one of the wonky joys of West Wing. The 25th Amendment, Posse Comitatus, and the line of succession all provided memorable fodder for shows.

But as the Slate video story reveals, Eli Attie has all but admitted that Matt Santos did share some unexpected DNA with a certain Senator from Illinois.

Another Notch in the Kwa-La-Tee Post

HOPEFULLY LATER TODAY when the numbers leak for Robson Arms' "sneak preview" premiere after American Idol, the story will be about how much of their audience was retained from the karaoke behemoth. (one minute of which I accidentally caught last night. Man, brr. I get it on an intellectual level. But...brr.)

CTV is smart in following recent broadcasting trends -- if you were tuned into IDOL, you got the goodnights,short, short title card, a "CTV Original Programming" slate and BOOM, right into Robson Arms.

American networks learned a couple years back that they had to eliminate the between-shows break or face mass flight of the audience. If 30% of your audience fled in that last break, that still got counted in your average and pulled your numbers down. A real no-no. As much as that's made it difficult for writers to adjust to the extra act break in their shows (those ads have to go somewhere) when you see minute-by-minute data you have to admit it's the right decision. (CBC, are you listening?)

Anyway, onto Robson. Robson's never been a show that I've seen every episode of. I saw roughly half-t0-three quarters of the show last year, owing to not having a VCR when it was on -- and I saw fewer shows in first season.

In the beginning, I sometimes found myself caught off guard by the drama to comedy mix in the show. I'd tune in one show and it seemed really dramatic, and another and it seemed really funny. Last year, I saw a bunch of shows where both co-existed in the same show a lot better.

Well, I don't know what's changed. Maybe it's me. Or maybe it's the fact that thanks to providence or largesse or whatever, CTV has given them a third magic season, which means there's been three years to live with these characters and watch them change -- but I thought last night's show was simply teriffic. It was really enjoyable -- a mad mix of pathos and funny. Not a lot of guffaw-guffaw funny, but the kind of solid good natured, good humour you used to find on Northern Exposure. There was a brio and confidence in the shooting and the directing that served the material extremely well.

Three years with characters allow them to grow a bit, change a bit and wear those changes. John Cassini is still fabulous as Yuri, but now he's sympathetic -- which is ... odd. (He also looks a lot like he does in Intelligence. Methinks, um, maybe there was an overlap in shooting scheds this time?) Gabrielle Miller as Bobbi is all the more lovely for her change in circumstance (and her character in the show was one that I didn't warm to initially.)

Dave Foley's on board as the new American owner, and he's got some of that great dissipated dangerousness he brings to all those Poker shows.

As the Globe and Mail's John Doyle put it in his review:

It's a delight to see the residents of Robson Arms again. The series is a smartly made social comedy, aimed at grownups and the better for it. What's really interesting about tonight's new episode is the presentation of the new American owners. They're kooky, and at first you think all that "howdy" stuff means that the show is being a tad heavy on the cutes. But you soon get the idea that there's something vaguely menacing about all that forced geniality. These are selfish, self-absorbed people.

Actually, the thing that I like most about the character Foley plays is that he's not the stereotypical Canadian "bad guy" American. He and his wife are kind of hippie kooks -- they sleep in rejuvenation tanks and wife swap and follow vision quests. A bit of loony-leftie Californian lampooning is just enough of a fresh take on the "Our American Cousin" interloper that it keeps it fresh.

Robson Arms' 3rd season continues again tonight, at 9;30 pm, after American Idol. It's fun, it's engaging, and in a kinder, less colonized broadcast landscape, it'd be a huge, smacking hit.

I think I might go try to find earlier seasons on DVD.

Now if only clicking the "Season 3 Trailer" on the CTV Broadband site actually worked.

Suppose you can't have everything...

And Maybe We'll Meet in the Middle

I FOUND THIS courtesy of Jaime Weinman.

From Zap2It:

CBS' cult-favorite vampire drama "Moonlight" is expected to shoot its last four episodes of the season without a showrunner.

According to The Hollywood Reporter, Chip Johannessen has exited the first-year bloodsucking soap for unspecified reasons. Rather than finding a new showrunner/exec producer to take his place, the trade paper says that Joel Silver and the show's writing staff will collectively work to bring in the last four episodes.

Remember that one of the biggest surprises in the recent WGA strike (for the studios, anyway) was that the Showrunners walked out on their own shows -- standing firm with their writers.

If recent Hollywood history is anything to go by, this is all part of the post fin-syn trend, where networks now own their shows. This led to a devaluation in the power of the production companies, and a rise in the power (and the notes) coming from networks.

Did it also result in a greater hit-to-miss ratio? Erm. No.

The reminder that Showrunners at their core, first and foremost, are writers had to have sent a bit of a ripple through the network firmament. Writers are weird and in a perfect world, networks would much rather not have to deal with them. If they could, they'd deal with non-writing producers all the time.

What does this mean for Moonlight? Well, sorry fans, but I have to make a completely bold prediction here, go out on a limb and say, the show's gonna suck.

You take away the vision of a showrunner and a show implodes. You start with two strikes against you.

Interestingly, of course, in Canada it's much more common for the non-writing producers to run things. In fact, of the three shows that recently sold to U.S. nets, only one has a traditional Showrunner as the person at the top, answerable for the vision and creative content. The other two employ a 'head writer' structure.

Interesting to see what happens. While we struggle here with trying to make our shows better, forces push the U.S. toward a creeping Canadian model.

Stay tuned.

(But not to Moonlight. Dude, that show's gonna suck.)

Don't Kid Yourself Who The Sharks Are In This Scenario

THE WGA STRIKE IS fast becoming an ugly memory. But endorsements of the writers' cause continue to stream in. I'm sure you'll all be relieved to know that the dolphins are with us.

TeeVee Tonight

FOR CANADIANS, it's the season premiere of ROBSON ARMS at 9:30 am on CTV after that show where all the people caterwaul.

Then at 10, navelgazing never felt so good as in Quarterlife, the thirtysomething guys net-import. I'll probably watch just because I want to see what an actress named "Bitsie" actually looks like.

Everybody's A Critic

PRETTY SELF-EXPLANATORY, really. Language is NSFW.

From Dan Deacon and Liam Lynch, "Drinking Out of Cups." Sublime.

Reminds me of a few people, really.



H/T to Mattypants.

On The Bed. On The Floor.

I REALIZE THAT there is something truly juvenile about me that I find this as funny as I do. But right til the last frame, this had me in stitches.

Who knew Kimmel had that kind of juice?

Good News/Bad News for Robson Arms

THE GOOD NEWS, courtesy Dave Moses, is that the third season of CTVs Robson Arms goes to air this week in what CTV is calling a "sneak preview," after the Tuesday and Wednesday editions of American Idol. If past indications are anything to go by, they won't hold onto all that enormous, giant killing CTV audience -- but they'll do well. Which is nice.

The bad news is that the programming of these episodes really does very little to build the brand of the show. A hasty press release went out last week. I haven't seen any promos on the air. There's very little press.

Even if you were a fan of Robson Arms, you're not really building a way for people to come back. This is another simple case of a Canadian show being used to plug a hole that results from the Canadian networks need to chase Simulcasts. Fox is going 90 minutes two nights this week, CTV has to respond. What's on the shelf? Easy peasy.

The saving grace would be if during these "previews" CTV ran lots and lots of promos saying, "Be sure to catch Robson Arms in its regular slot, on X day at X time." But my guess is they won't do that. (Boy I would love to be wrong about that.) Too bad. It's a pretty good show.

If you can ever find it.

Also, this is sort of on the same topic, during the Oscars last night, which, you know, people watch, how many promos for its homegrown shows did CTV run. Come on. Three and a half hours of airtime, guess how many Corner Gas, Robson Arms, Degrassi Promos ran. Guess.

Did you guess zero?

Righto.

Blood Ties Bumps The Border

TANYA HUFF is the author of many fine fantasy novels. She also came up with Vicki Nelson and the world of BLOOD TIES, which in a kinder universe is halfway through shooting its second season right now, sigh.

(Before you ask: No. No I don't.)

Anyway, she has some very kind words for The Border on her LiveJournal.

And whaddya know -- a whole bunch of viewer comments.

Which I guess proves the point that The Guard learned with Steve Bacic: You want to find audience reaction? Build a bridge to the genre fans, baby.

Tonight's Ep of The Border involves a scary plot on the Toronto subway and has a kickass promo which I would love to link to, except for the fact that the CBC in its wisdom posts everything in a non-embeddable proprietary video format, and the early clockwork re-posting of the previews to YouTube has gone the way of the DoDo. Sigh.

Whose View?

THE NEW YORK TIMES today has an interesting article on the new documentary on the Chicago 10, made by the Director of The Kid Stays In the Picture, Brett Morgen.

It starts out as basically another article on a historical documentary about the trial of the activists that grew out of the chaos of the 1968 Democratic Convention. And then, intriguingly, it starts to be about something else:

“Chicago 10” has met with mixed reactions from the dwindling number of people who saw the trial firsthand, and its reception at the Sundance Film Festival last year was lukewarm. (“The pic opened the fest,” Variety reported, “but by the next day its buzz was all but dead.”) Enthusiasm from younger leftists eager for inspiration, on the other hand, seems high.

In addition to the trial sequences, the film presents raw archival footage of the Chicago police department’s savage response to the protests. Brett Morgen, the film’s writer and director, married that footage with throbbing music from Rage Against the Machine, Black Sabbath and the Beastie Boys, forgoing the usual ’60s soundtrack.

Mr. Morgen, who co-directed “The Kid Stays in the Picture,” about the film producer Robert Evans, was born two months after the convention. In an interview in his office in Rockaway, Queens, a block from the beach and above a store that sells sneakers, he said he had aimed to avoid treating a turning point in the history of the counterculture as sacred ground.

“The world simply did not need another movie about the ’60s made by someone from the ’60s,” said Mr. Morgen, who is scruffy and longhaired but not especially mellow. “We weren’t making a movie about 1968 per se. I don’t want to smell patchouli. I don’t want to see bell-bottoms.”

Who gets to tell history is always a fun little topic, but having read a bit up on the Chicago 10 trial, I have to say that I'd probably have given the film a pass if not for the intriguing nature of Morgen's approach.

By untethering the trial and its legacy from what's become pretty moldy baby-boomer mythmaking, Morgen is actually fomenting a fascinating social dance right in front of our eyes.

All history is reinterpreted. There's a natural process that happens as first hand accounts fade, and people pass from the scene, and it's left to others with more distance to decide what it all meant, really.

Usually this process starts well before "those who were there" move on. And it's subject to interesting historical eddies and reversals -- especially when politics is involved.

Right after Richard Nixon's death, and in the years leading up to it, there was a pretty full-throated reaction by conservative quarters to try to rehabilitate him. That seems not to have taken or gained too much traction in the years since, as Nixon fades further and further from the public view. The overreaching of Bush and Co. have sort of underlined the feeling that, you know, maybe we got it right the first time.

We're probably only about two or three years away from the first people who'll try to "Reconsider" G.W. Bush. It'll be interesting to see how that sells.

But the reason why that article piqued my interest so much is because of the clear generational divide that seems to underly it. There's a palpable unease by many of the Baby Boomers quoted in the audience that now, a Baby Boomer story is being recontextualizeed.

It was the baby boomers, of course, who shaped the "Generation X" narrative: the slacker, how reframed through their own experiences, and now they're getting a taste of where they sit in the demographic firmament: finally outnumbered by generations younger and older than them who just don't necessarily see the sixties in the same hagiographic light. It's gonna be an interesting ride.

The reinterpretation of history in artistic or fictionalized terms is a particularly thorny brew in Canada, because the libel laws and their reverse onus positions make for a perilous landscape for anyone who cares to put a non-tradional interpretation spin on past events. (In practical terms: you wanna make a movie about something that happened that might paint the people in it in an unflattering light? Better wait til they're dead. Of course, that means by the time you're making it, it's probably not something that's too current, that could really educate or reframe debates. But there you go.)

Examples of what happens when you step outside the historically conservative box? Veterans, reacting en masse to The Valour and the Horror, which challenged the traditional "heroic" cant of Allied Bombing in WWII, mounted a big campaign to get that program pulled.

A couple of years ago, Prairie Giant, the CBC telepic of the Sask. Premier who introduced Universal Health Care, was similarly withdrawn because a relative of one of Douglas' rivals raised a minor quibble about a small, sidebar element of the portrayal of their ancestor. (In right wing noise machine terms, it was an "outrage!" But really, it was pretty small beer.)

This moves through right to the present day -- it's tough in Canada to do things that are "ripped from the headlines" because you can't afford to ever, ever get sued. Combine that with a natural play-it-safe, risk-averse, don't-offend-anybody approach to Canadian history and it's no wonder that historical movies and programs don't do too well here.

I guess that's one reason why the History Channel runs JAG.

Anyway, all that B.G. is why I'm fascinated, and pleased, and surprised when anything like Mayerthorpe actually gets made.

History is meant to be diced and rethought. One generation's orthodoxies fade with radical new thoughts and ideals, and the march of interpretation and history goes on.

The relatives of those long-dead English kings or Italian nobles probably would have been some pissed at old William Shakes. And Boomers should get used to movies like The Chicago 10. Cause more are coming, baby.

At least south of the 49th parallel...

Foley? Really?

ONE OF THE semi-infamous moments in the life of this blog was what I've come to call Foley? Really? comment thread .

Click the link and you can read it for yourself, but the basic thrust of it was this -- in talking about Rent-A-Goalie, a comment was made that one of the things that might have made the poster hate it was a lack of Foley.

Foley, for the three or four civilians who might still read this blog, is the act of recreating sound effects in TV shows. When you sweeten the mix with the sound of shuffling papers, or tapping a pen on the table, or having a pin drop or hearing footsteps echoing down the street, most of the time that's not location-recorded sound. It was recreated in a studio.

Now, the point of the Foley, Really? Thread (which also contains a really interesting back-and-forth about girl shows vs. boy shows that I had completely forgotten about) is that it sparked a bit of a bonding with Mark Farrell, who knows a thing or two about the sentiment behind it. He recognized something in the comment, and in my response. And that was the first time I thought, "maybe this thing I've noticed isn't just me?"

What "foley, really?" stands for, for me, is the propensity of a portion of the Canadian viewing audience (and a much larger portion of the production community) to judge our homemade stuff by a nitpicky yardstick that suggests we look to hate and find fault, rather than actually judge something on its true strength and merits, and its true weaknesses. It's like putting a magnet nearby and watching it warp -- you can't really trust the reaction because it seems...churlish.

The internet enabled this on a much lower level for all works. It's always been fun to look for gaffes or goofs, but as the nitpicker community grew with the net, it almost requires you to find fresh fault, and thereby validate your taste over the thing being picked apart.

But this isn't that. This is a particularly Canadian thing. Or at least I think it is. More on that later.

Foley, Really? is what drives the portion of the Canadian viewing audience that defaults to, "Canadian TV sucks," usually without seeing it. It makes people say, "that looks Canadian, I hate it," without really being able to articulate why.

This is a slippery road, I know, because the other, reactive side of this is that some creatives in Canada overpraise or too-lightly-damn things that are quantifiably off: things like a story's pacing, or confusing plotting, bad acting, or a bad set. (One person in the same thread observed that they didn't like how the Rent-A-Goalie set looked cheap. It did, and if you notice, it was pulled apart and vastly redesigned for the 2nd season.)

There's a second level of critique: cliche, camera work, whether something is funny or not, etc, that really is subjective and a raging argument always (any hand held show will always receive complaints from members of the audience who just do not like the style; this is largely, though not completely, a generational thing.) And Foley, Really? doesn't cover that, either.

I don't know where that "Foley, Really?" thing comes from. I don't know why it's such a persistent thread in reaction to Canadian shows. I don't know if it speaks to something ineffably self-critical in the Canadian character. I just know that it holds us back because it tends to overstate problems. If you're judging something by a yardstick where you're looking for it to fail, you will always find that thing.

I glanced off a bit of this in my last interview on CBC Radio's Q. With The Border, one of the incredibly interesting things we ran into was a real, honest to God resistance to portray Canadians as the action heroes of a series. It's a role we rarely see ourselves in, and initially, it seems, some portion of the viewership didn't want to hear about it.

(In a way, I think it's part and parcel of the same kind of willful myopia that makes a lot of Canadians want to hold on to the notion of our troops as Peacekeepers, even when we've been in a combat role in Afghanistan that's killed almost a hundred of our soldiers.)

Besides the action movie thing, there was a couple of amusing complaints that we had "too many Canadian flags" (the ICS building has a Canadian flag outside) and "Tim Horton's coffee cups everywhere." (I've seen the pilot three or four times, and I still haven't seen them, though I'm assured they're there. I guess I was following the story.)

Recently, we even got emails from someone complaining that an Alarm company sticker in a scene "was such an obvious bad product placement" that it "totally destroys one's suspension of disbelief."

(It wasn't a product placement. It was something that was on the door of the location.)

Contrast this looking-to-hate-it thing with, for instance, the way Monty Python lovingly satirized the way British shows used to go from video to film:



I honestly don't know what to do about Foley, Really? Am I right when I ask, "is this a Canadian thing?" Are there Brits, for instance, who reflexively hate British crime shows or other shows because they're not American? Does Australia have a problem like this? Do Italians criticize their dramas for being too...I don't know....Rome-y?

Can you imagine someone writing a letter to NBC saying that they couldn't watch Law & Order because they weren't drinking out of faux-greek coffee cups?

In Canada, we'll get complaints for being Toronto-centric. People will be livid that the scene that was supposed to be set in Petawawa or Vancouver was shot in Ontario! (uh, because U.S. shows never try to make L.A. look like...uh...everywhere else.)

It could just be a fun head-shaker. But like the Capulets vs. Montagues problem, my fear is that this dynamic allows those who'd lie about the success of homegrown programs (cough...Jim Shaw..cough) to get away with their distortions, and exacerbates the problem of trying to get people to sample shows that they'd probably enjoy if they just stopped worrying about the coffee cups and the fucking foley!

But you know, maybe it's just me.

(It's not.)

But it could be.

(It's not.)

Welcome Ken Girotti: Denis Does the Snoopy Dance

I'VE FELT THIS forever, but here it goes, and here it grows: Canadians have gotten a raw and shoddy deal from journos, who are supposed to be guardians of the culture. Yes, even a debased, devalued, and distorted culture such as we have in English Canada.

The only way around this is for there to be more first person efforts that people who were truly interested could tune into.

Let your newspapers recyle cheap wire copy from the AP or Reuters. You can read the people trying to preserve a voice in your culture for something other than the U.S. rerun directly.

Writers started the trend, but for a while I've been hoping to see more Canadian Directors' Blogs. After all, hyphenate Will Dixon can't do it alone.

Well, I'm pleased as punch to say that accomplished Director Ken Girotti has joined the Fray with a new Blog, "Boot in the Pants."

From his description:

My DGA local is New York but my home and family are in Toronto. I've done episodes of Rescue Me, Law & Order: Criminal Intent, 24, New Amsterdam, Love Monkey and my secret personal favorite, Xena: Warrior Princess. Here at home I loved working Regenesis, The Border and a pilot nobody saw called Sabbatical. There's also Mayerthorpe, a TV movie I'm proud of.

Ken is Canadian. I was lucky enough to work with him briefly on The Border. Boy, I hope to get to work with him again. For those of you fully in thrall to the colonized culture, let me remind you, he has U.S. Credits. Drink in the cred.

Head on over to Ken's blog and kick the tires. We're not all full of shit, guys. Give us a bit of love, or don't be so quick to claim us as Canadian when we fuckoff to places that care.

One Pagers Suck, Beavis.

KEE-RYE-SSST. One pagers are the scourge of any TV writer. They're barnacles of development. They're the network-mandated equivalent of a dip in the lake of fire. They're like a trip down Memory Lane with a hoe in your hippocampus. They're like burning, bleeding fingers on guitar strings made of broken glass. They're like a pretty girl who flirts with you all night and then tells you she feels so comfortable with you because you remind her of her brother. They're an actress waking up to discover that she's on the wrong side of 40 in a sexist business where women readily mutilate themselves past the point where they look human for just six more months in the spotlight that never comes. They're like a Coldplay marathon. One pagers are like eight foot snowbanks between you and the parking metre. They're like Paris Hilton winning a Grammy. They're like a debate between political candidates over who loves Jesus more.

They. Fucking. Suck.

Why?

Well, let me put it this way. How about having to send the government your tax return before you figure out your taxes? Or, maybe you'd like to furnish your house before you build it. Oh, wait! Wait! Here's a good one -- ask that girl to marry you when you pick her up for the first date. Yeah! Yeah! See how far you get then!

A one-pager is having to figure out the story before you've broken the story. And they always have to be done fast. And they always suck. It's like an unending prostate exam. They are the Carson Daly of screenwriting.

Gaaaahaahahhhh!

Anyway, in other news, Happy Birthday to the Beavis of the Canadian TV bloggers.

Director. Writer. Educator. Sometime Network Suit. Championship Rope Dancer. Pre-Industrial Hapsburg Military Tactician, and Three time County Wide Fire Swallowing Champion, Ladies and Gentlemen, I give you Mr. Will Dixon.

I want you to look at his picture.

Look at it. Look at that commanding, fierce, yet lost look.

I want you to look at it, and in the comments below I would like you to caption it appropriately.

Me, I've gotta keep scaling the @$#%ing snowbank.

Q-Cast

THE PODCAST from my appearance on Today's CBC Radio Q is up now here. (I'm up about 3/4 of the way through, but I'd advise listening to the whole thing. Jesse Wente on social gaming and author Dan Kennedy especially is a hoot.)

I wish I'd had time to turn it around on Jian a bit and ask him about the conference in Montreal he took part in last week, because the whole thing sounded really interesting. But such are the tyrannies of the clock.

Those of you who are interested in process and how I can possibly spend time writing blog entries while keeping pace with my career might note that this here entry seriously helped to focus a lot of what I talked about with Jian today.

There is one thing I left out of my little anecdote about Eli Stone: it was actually the dialogue from the Stop-Lossed Mom that blew me away: "I appealed to my sergeant and he didn't care. I appealed to my commanding officer, and my President. They didn't care."

Now THAT is not a sentiment that you would have heard on US TV a year ago. That's the thing about TV, it's not just the most influential of our mass reach media -- it's also got it's pulse on the zeitgeist in a way no other media does. And yes, I include the internet in that. It's coming -- but as a wag back in the day used to say, "The future is here, it just isn't fully distributed yet."

Culture Q

OH YEAH, I'll be on Q today in the last half-hour of the show (which I know is not available in all markets...maybe it'll be up tonight on the repeat, or on the podcast.)

Awareness and What Comes Next...

AN INTERESTING ARTICLE went out on the CP wire yesterday. It reports the details of a CP/Decima poll about the new CBC shows.

As of Jan. 28th, one in three people polled had heard about four of the CBC's heavily promoted winter shows: "The Border," "JPod," "Sophie" and "MVP." All of the shows launched in early January.

That hasn't yet translated into large numbers of Canadians tuning into the shows, however - only 10 per cent of those polled had actually seen "The Border," about an elite team of Canadian border-security officers. That's more viewers than the other shows had managed to attract among those surveyed.

But Bruce Anderson, president of Harris-Decima, said the results were promising.

"Prime time is a very tough market, and these shows were only on the air a few weeks before we ran the survey, so I tend to see the numbers as pretty reasonable," he said Sunday. "It's an encouraging start."

Of those polled who watched the new shows, 75 per cent liked them, with "The Border" getting the highest marks and "JPod," a dark comedy about a group of Vancouver video game creators that features a marijuana grow-op subplot, prompting a more polarized response - while it had the largest number of respondents saying they really liked the show, it also had the most reporting that they disliked it.

Now, the results of that poll are clearly glass half something, no matter how you spin it. But when you read between the lines, you can actually glean some interesting lessons in how Canadians respond to homegrown TV culture -- and support for the view that the recent vogue of closely tracking the week to week numbers maybe isn't the way to go.

Word of mouth is a funny thing -- and word of mouth has always been among TV's greatest strengths. Seinfeld, Cheers, The Office (UK) and any number of other eventual hit shows were slow builds -- they didn't catch on right away and needed that extra amount of time to build and have the audience find them.

Buried at the bottom of that survey is what I think is probably the most interesting data: the correlation that those who watched the new CBC shows were significantly more likely to view the CBC as going in the right direction. If you see the shows, you react favorably. And -- and here's the good part -- this is especially true for younger viewers.

This runs directly counter to the grumbling (much of it anonymous) you're going to find on CBC blogs, where the cant is universally, "shows are shit, no one cares, they're obsessed with young viewers, they can't do anything right..."

Well, apparently that's not the real story. So if word of mouth is positive, that means there's a possibility of building audiences down the road. From younger viewers, not just CBC's traditional Mom'nPop over 50 set.

The constant focus on the numbers and the arguments over what's a good number for a Canadian show and what isn't doesn't take into account so many things that are endemic and exclusive to the Canadian industry:

1) When private networks like CTV and Global simulcast U.S. shows, they count the ratings of everyone tuned in to their channel, and everyone tuned in to the U.S. channel (which has its signal substituted for the Canadian channel, thanks to Simultaneous Substitution regs.) This, in essence, gives the net a shot at two channels, not one. You might think that's dodgy logic, but ask yourself how often you've been flipping around and land on a station that catches your eye, and stop.

Two shots = two shots. Pure and simple. If you wanted an honest test, it would be interesting (and more honest) if the Cable co's simply had to "black out" U.S. channels when they were running the same show as Canadian channels.

See, effectively it would be doing the same thing -- protecting the Canadian channel's territorial purchase rights. But go suggest it. See how far you get. Then ask why.

2) One third knowing about the shows resulting in only ten percent sampling shows you just how hard it really is to attract the fickle viewer nowadays. CBC got a lot of notice for how hard they worked to promote THE BORDER this year (and MOSQUE last year,) but what those results show is that that level of promo is the bare minimum you need to get you in the game. Most Canadian shows never even reach that threshold, and so sink beneath the waves with zero awareness, and no chance to build viewership.

Still, with all the money CBC spent (and they did spend a lot -- for CBC) it's a drop in the bucket compared to the vertically integrated, omnipresent saturation of advertising promo and advertorial soft features built around your average U.S. shows.

None of that makes hits. It's just the price of admission. No amount of hype could make Bionic Woman a hit. All you can do is buy the awareness that leads to word of mouth, and that initial sample. To bring it back to the Canadian example, now you have that 10 percent who checked out THE BORDER who have a more positive view of CBC programming. You go through a few more program cycles, and grow that number, and suddenly you're somewhere.

In the shadow of the U.S. giant, the game is simply way more complicated than "how did The Border do against that HOUSE rerun?"

There's no question that it's a hard slog. But the reactionary yahoos with their "CBCgrr waste of tax money/Canadian showz suck/no one wants to watch" -- well, besides being a little pathetic in the self-hating Canadian department -- it simply isn't true.

But what is true is that dumping the shows on the air and expecting people to find them is cynical and foolhardy -- and broadcasters who do that should be called on it.

And also, um, if the shows themselves aren't entertaining, well, you're not gonna get that positive bounce from the sample who do check you out.

There's the side that needs to be taken care of by my people. We need to be better and craft better and better shows. That means training people and letting them have their third and fourth jobs as they build their skillset, rather than expecting some hipster soaking wet out of the CFC or NSI to come up with The Sopranos.

Then there's the promo side. And on that promo side, I think I want to give a shout out to Maureen O'Donnell.

Maureen handles promo for The Border. Maureen worked hard through shooting to make sure we had good art. She worked with the cast to make sure we crafted the message and the narrative of the show to reach people.

Traditionally, that would have meant articles and coverage leading up to the premiere, and then everything falling off a cliff. What makes Maureen's approach a model for what to come is this: she didn't stop there.

No, she's been assiduous in working to make sure that The Border remains in editorial consciousness. That means things like getting this article about Episode seven. (It ran in the print version with a GREAT PHOTO. Also important.) It means getting actors booked on Sports talk shows -- not in week one, in week six. It means trying to get features in Magazines that street in February, not just January. It means going for offbeat promo avenues like the Home section.

In short, it means working that word of mouth.

Bringing the A-Game is hard. But it's the only way -- the ONLY way, to make sure the brief Canadian TV breakthrough of January 2008 is the start of something, and not just a blip.

"Family Values" Streaming Now on CBC.ca

Family Values, Episode 107 of THE BORDER (which they annoyingly refer to by a previous title, "Family Affairs,") is now up for streaming viewing at the CBC site.

It should be available later this week at the Itunes store. Sorry, Canada only.

"Family Affairs?" Brrr. I don't want to imagine what happens when Gray Jackson gets Mr. French in the interrogation chair.

Don't Move, You're Surrounded By Armed Bastards (Wearing Lots of Hair Gel)

SO, DCI GENE HUNT is back. And this time he's taking guff from a bird.

Ashes to Ashes, the sequel series to Life on Mars, debuted last week in the U.K. to seven million viewers.

Ratings dropped in the second week by a million, as more than a few viewers decided the eighties weren't quite as fun as the seventies. Tell me about it, brother.

1973 is out. So's Manchester and Sam Tyler. Our hero now is DI Alex Drake. Taken hostage in 2008, she sees the bullet that will kill her. Now, in her estimation she's a moment from life or a moment from death.

The conceit of Ashes to Ashes (starring the delectable Keeley Hawes from MI:5/Spooks) is that, unlike Sam Tyler -- Alex knows precisely what's going on in her jaunt to the past. We find out that she studied Tyler after his coma. (We see a brief notation on his file: suicide.) During the course of becoming acquainted with Hunt, (who along with Ray and Chris, have relocated to London and the Metropolitan Police) she finds out that Sam Tyler lived and worked with them for seven years. It's only been a year since he drove his car into the water during an operation, never to be found.

This shocks Drake and re-frames her experience: seems that the seven years Sam experienced here were only a moment in the "real" world. She wants to get home, back to her daughter, Molly.

But there's that Gene Hunt...

Ashes to Ashes suffers somewhat by not having the shock of the new about it. Philip Glenister is still aces as Hunt. We don't get much of a sense of eighties Ray, but Detective Chris Skelton gets a nice grace note. He's not the nervous or hapless guy he was with Tyler -- as he says, he's just "cautious."

And maybe that's why the pilot of Ashes To Ashes left me a little flat. Cautious does seem to be the word for it. Hawes doesn't seem as immediately sympathetic as John Simm did, and I guess I have to admit a certain bias. Having been there the first time, the glance at some of those eighties fashions was...disturbing. Especially the women's fashions. The first time we see Drake in a Flashdance-style off the shoulder tshirt number, I kind of entered a sensory fugue state and no amount of Depeche Mode could pull me out.

There's a hint at where they're going in the pilot -- we're going to see the softer side of Gene Hunt. He certainly seems much more open to Alex's psychological-based insights into policing than he ever was with Sam's 21st century techniques. He even allows a moment of doubt: "the time for coppers like me is coming to an end."

There's a hint that things could turn romantic between the two leads, which certainly would take it into less Mars-like territory. But by offering a concrete explanation up front for Alex's experience, and not letting it be vague and open-ended, it feels maybe like a little something's been lost.

Future eps take on the wedding of Charles and Diana, and hopefully the scourge of shoulder pads.

Ashes to Ashes is fun enough. It's good to see Hunt back in the saddle (of an Audi Quattro, this time) but it's not as fun as Life on Mars.

Time will tell if Hawes signed up to be in the bestselling show, or if she's just beating up the wrong guy.

Border Bits: Making "Family Values."

IT WAS AN August morning, hot and sunny, when I found myself in a chair in a dingy little casting office somewhere in the shadow of the Weston bread plant just off Eastern Avenue in Toronto.

We were there to see Suliman's and Ali's. These were two of the key guest roles in "Family Values," my second episode of "The Border," which airs tonight at 9 across Canada on CBC.

Suliman was meant to be a vulnerable, lost and tragic man who shows up in Toronto claiming to be the real father of a teenager that's been adopted by an international movie star. Ali is his son - or is he? See, this being an action-adventure hour, nothing and no one is what it seems.

Including this episode. I've written before about the giddy high of seeing money spent on your work like drunken sailors hitting port with pay in tow, but this was something altogether different. This episode of THE BORDER, the 7th in the order, is meant to be a show where we pay for some of the excesses of the early shows. All shows do this to an extent -- none more brilliantly in my opinion than Battlestar Galactica, which blows the house on huge SFX-laden eps, and then tries to get back on budget with some smaller stories.

This ep will be shot over a seven-day schedule, instead of our usual 8 (and sometimes 9, when the ep is really big.) That means I have very few arrows in my quiver. I have to be in ICS a lot; I don't have room for big action. The only thing I can do is buckle down and try to deliver a big emotional story. If you can't wow'em with the bang-bang, you gotta nail them with the big emotional stakes.

So what I've written is a fairly contained story with some outsized personalities. We'll also see more of our main man Kessler's relationship with his daughter, and a grace note -- hopefully funny -- end to a storyline we've been doing on Slade's dating and heartbreak at the hands of budding computer whiz Sally Doctor.

For the part of the movie star, we've cast Aunjanue Ellis. Aunjanue's a great actor with a wonderful look. I'd seen her in Ray! and was thrilled to have her play our celebrity Mum, Amira. (That name took forever, by the way. I wanted a one word name like Madonna, or Cher -- and there was about two days of randomly yelling out single word names before we landed on one that would clear. If you're planning to be a single-named superstar, you may want to think about your trademark now -- the field's getting crowded.)

But now I'm in this small casting office waiting to see the kid and the Dad. Beside me is Phil Earnshaw, the episode's director. He's a deligthful man who I've really enjoyed working with the last week or so o the script. I know he's also Directed lots of Degrassi and Instant Star, so I'm fairly confident that if we see the right kid, he'll be able to pull a good audition out of him.

It doesn't go well.

We're on about the third or fourth audition where I start to get panicky. One's too young. Another's too fly. We're seeing a bit of the "processed" kid actor, who's mannered and done a lot of commercials -- exactly the wrong kind of polished feel for a part that requires some real depth.

I'm stewing and cursing myself in my seat. How could I do this? How could I write a part that so completely depends on having not just a good kid actor, but a fantastic kid actor. What is wrong with me?

This is not an isolated case of self-loathing. Part of the many problems of casting in this country is that you never know what you're going to get. There's so much good talent, but there's also that lure of L.A., so at any time you may find the really top people off chasing the down south dream. In certain hard-to-find categories, you're really taking your livelihood into your hands when you jump into a casting session.

I'm glumly mulling all this over when Isaiah Grant walks in.

He's tall. Serious. He looks anywhere from 14 to 17 -- so that works for the part. A lot of the kids they sent us were younger -- and just not up to it.

Isaiah starts to read and I sit up. There's something here. Not quite right, but certainly better than everybody else we've seen.

Reading over, Phil quietly talks to Isaiah and suggests an adjustment. Isaiah nods -- he understands what Phil's asking for. He asks for a second...he's really feeling this one, very focused -- not like a child actor at all.

The reader starts. And there, before my eyes, is Ali. I don't feel like I want to give away the store here, so I stab myself in the leg with my pen. I'm so relieved. This is it. This is Ali.

Bayo Akinfemi reads the same day. I like him a lot. He reads a little big on the sympathetic, and truly fearsome in the scenes where he's supposed to be scary. I like his look, too. He looks African, as opposed to some of the other people who gave good reads but who had a more American look. When we decide to go with Bayo a few days later, I'm thrilled. I've got a great guest cast.

I had no idea at the time, of course, how interesting Bayo's story was. He fled Nigeria over a decade ago, after suffering attacks in student protests. Bayo's also a writer and director -- he's presently looking for a distributor for his first completed feature film Eye of the Needle.

How lucky were we to get this guy?

The story of Family Values was heavily influenced by a few books I was reading last summer, including A Long Way Gone, and some echoes of the movie Blood Diamond. The climax required an open-air streetscape, and more out of pique than anything else, I wrote in "Dundas Square."

Dundas Square is the City of Toronto's attempt to engineer a kind of Times-Square meeting place. Largely derided when they first began work on it, it's actually come to be a quite successful gathering place for tourists and art performances. But it's a teeming, busy place -- on one of the busiest retail corners in Toronto, Yonge and Dundas. Never in a million years do I think we're ever really going to shoot there.

I should have remembered the lesson of the plane.

Sitting out in Dundas Square all day, watching them shoot the climax of the ep, I stood in the shadow of Ryerson University, where I went for Radio & TV. Where I first toyed with the idea of being a writer. It feels right to be there.

From the moment I see the cut of the episode I'm really pleased and kind of blown away. All the actors brought it. Jonas Chernick's Slade stuff is particularly hilarious, though its cut down a bit from the business he had in the script -- and which he landed perfectly. Jonas is a man who knows how to work a script.

But McGowan gets to show different colors in the father role -- which will play in the end of the season, but which we haven't seen since the pilot. The Guests step up. The Editor, Chris Donaldson, does some great intercutting in two key sequences near the end -- neither of which was scripted, both which paper over any of my purple excesses in scripting with a degree of panache that makes me extraordinarily grateful.

Oh and Layla! Layla -- this is the epidode where all the stuff that we've been seeding with Layla since Ep 3 finally comes to a head. And Nazneen Contractor does a great job with it.

There is one scene in the show that I had nothing to do with, past the outline. It's the scene with Layla at the psychiatrist's office. I tried a couple of times to nail it but people weren't happy. Having never been in therapy myself, I have very little to argue back with. I mean, I wrote it the best way I knew how. It's at times like this that you have to sublimate your own ego and step aside. Showrunner Janet MacLean contributes a scene that takes Layla to the edge. (Months later I'll watch episodes of "In Treatment" and go ohhhhhh... but for now it's just good to have an able assist from someone who knows what they want.)

In the end, I'm very happy with the script. We don't go crazy with the revisions on this one, if I remember correctly. What gets shot is pretty close to what I envisioned. Phil and I continue to work well together. I actually enjoy being on set.

And then there's my favorite exchange, not between any of the principals in the ep - but a nice little aside between Moose and Maggie as they wait on a stakeout, talking about Ali:

MOOSE
So Ali just walked through airport security.
MAGGIE
Yup.
MOOSE
And he got from one end of the city to the other on his own?
MAGGIE
He's survived a civil war, a Sudanese refugee camp, and six months in London with Amira. I think you overestimate the grand challenge Toronto presents.

Anytime you can sneak a dig in at Toronto, that's a good thing.

The Border airs tonight at 9pm on CBC.

"Family Values," Border-style

TODAY'S TORONTO STAR has an article featuring the thoughts of two of the guest actors on tonight's episode of "The Border," which I wrote, and saw ably Directed by Phil Earnshaw. I'll post my thoughts on the Ep and these fine actors a little later today. But for now, check out the link.

(Mild spoiler warning - the article does kind of reveal a twist at the core of the ep - but it's not that much of a twist, really, and it goes only a little further than this trailer:)