Guest blog: By My Pal Satan, Dennis Heaton

I CAN THINK of no better or worthy guest blogger than my nomengrumpenfuhrer, DENNIS HEATON. In the Canadian TV business, he is the heat. I am merely the sauce. [That pitch is copyrighted so don't even try.] The rarely photographed, extremely paranoid, xenophobic polyatheist Heaton emerged from his germ-free, high security compound, where he's currently finishing his latest project, the worthily evil webseries, My Pal Satan, to file this report exclusively for y'all.

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[At right: this incredibly rare dagerotype shows Canadian Producer, horror enthusiast, Screenwriter (Fido, Blood Ties, jPOD) and pork products marketer Dennis Heaton, moments before his assasination at the hands of noted unfunny comic anarchist Leno Czolgsoz, at the Banff TV Festival in 1872. The MY PAL SATAN creator's last words, reportedly, were, "Oh, there is no way I'm going to pay for the drycleaning with this shit." Photo courtesy Archives of the Ziggurat/Hellmouth society of Travisville, B.C.]

I am not Denis McGrath.

This happens to me a lot when I'm at some kind of film event (either a WGC party or somewhere else I've managed to sneak into). I'll either be introduced or introduce myself to someone... "hi, I'm Dennis Heaton."

And they'll look at me and, with a sniff of disdain, say "oh, yes -- the one with the blog."

They always manage to spit out the word "blog," as if it's a red tide oyster they've had the misfortune of consuming. More like blorrrrrg. or blaaahhhhhggggg.

To which, I always smile politely and say "no... you're thinking of the other Denis. Denis McGrath." And then I go into great lengths to explain how I am not Denis McGrath. How I live in Vancouver and he lives in Toronto. How we've worked on a show together (Blood Ties), so maybe that's where their confusion is coming from, and then I usually drink my beverage as quickly as possible, feign the need to go to the bar or bathroom and then leave.

Oh, I can understand the confusion. Sometimes, I can even empathize with it. I mean, we're both named Den(n)is, we're both writers, and we both consume vast quantities of bourbon. Sometimes in the same room.

But still, it's annoying. On several levels. And those are:

1) I am not Denis McGrath.

Don't get me wrong. I love the guy. Think he's fabulous. Have impure thoughts from time to time, but -- once more for the cheap seats -- I am not him. If I could be any other Den(n)is instead of the one that I am, I'd be him.

Okay that's a lie -- my first choice would be Dennis Quaid or maybe Hopper -- or Rodman if I'm feeling particularly zesty -- but McGrath is in the top ten.

2) What the is your problem with his blog anyway?

Whenever this mistaken identity thing happens, it is without fail that the person making this mistake obviously has some kind of issue with Denis' writing. It's got to do with the way they say "oh yes, the one with the blaaaahhhhhhhhhhgggggggggggggg" like they're trying to remove a hairball.

It's a blog, folks. It's one man's opinion. It's less than a "manifesto," but more than a "grocery list." Granted, most of the time I happen to agree with that opinion, but if I don't -- and more importantly, if you don't -- post a comment. Because...

3) I don't care what you think about his blog.

This is the other thing that happens. I tell the person that I'm not the Den(n)is they're thinking of, and they then go "oh..." and nine times out of ten continue to tell me what their problem is with Denis, his blog, and free speech in general.

This is when I swill back my drink, lie about my tiny Irish bladder and bolt.

Because -- and I can't stress this enough, either -- I don't care what you think. I'm not his assistant. I'm not going to pass your opinion onto him for you. We don't have a strange psychic link that allows him to hear whatever people say to me about him. We're not part of some secret order of Den(n)i who gather in underground caverns and plot the takeover of the world. You got a problem with what Denis is writing? Take it up with him (see comment 2 for suggestions how).

Actually, I kind of lied again. I will pass on your opinion about Denis' blog to him, but I'll also make fun of you -- especially if you're wearing a hat.

So, in conclusion...

Denis McGrath writes this blog.

I am not Denis McGrath.

I am Dennis Heaton (note the second N).

Thank you.

PS -- if you've confused me for Denis but love his blog, please note that I do take credit for it. (Sorry, McG... I gotta get those free drinks whenever I can).

PPS -- I'm not Dennis Foon either.

Next week: Why I am not the "other" Dennis.

Nice Doggie & Cactus D.

RIGHT NOW, the mental picture of myself I carry forth with me is that of a Black Lab swimming along, swimming, head barely above water. Not happy about it, not sad, just pushing forward with a certain, well, doggedness.

I don't know where I've conjured that image from. Might have been a stray news report, or a film, or a story I heard -- just some random image burned on the back of the retina; photographic detritus from an oversaturated age.

I'm back in Toronto for the weekend for the wedding of a good friend, after a weird week of work on The Rock. I spiked a 103 degree fever last weekend, burned through and churned out a 2 day draft of the new show that I was pretty happy with. Then the b'y's took a "Newfoundland Pass" and I was even more happy with it. We have a voice. As the others details stutter and start and move forward and back, we have a voice, and that's tremendously exciting to me.

Coming up is an even busier week, and a shift toward the practicals of how do you actually make these scripts? We have eight days an episode, and as one of our other Writers, the inimitable BadLady, says, "I have never had eight days in my life." Yet shoving scenes and characters and locations into a box -- well, it's a challenge, y'know. It certainly is.

But I'm up for it.

I'm up for a lot, it seems, these days. Nothing like the feeling of positive work to lift spirits. I've got a big crush on everybody I'm working with now, shaggy and still-kickin-the-tires as we all are.

Even though the storm clouds for the Canadian industry have rarely been darker, there are the people who continue to inspire. And hard work seems to pay off, eventually. I think.

Paul Gross is playing the Devil on U.S. TV this fall. Come on. How can you not enjoy the thought of that?

And I've gotten an email from a sometime correspondent about making that hardest of hard choices: choosing to leap and hope the writing work will appear rather than take the safe job where the learning curve is flat. That may not stack up on the courage meter with fighting cancer or patrolling Afghanistan, but it's gutsy nonetheless.

I've read Canadian pilots in the last month or so that are as good as any U.S. ones I've seen in the last few years. I've started to see a change in reporting, where the ghetto of not talking about the Canadian shows in the same article as the U.S. shows has started to break down. I've seen good worthy shows and news like the fact that Murdoch Mysteries has been sold to PBS in the USA -- which is a perfect place for it.

And I came home to my empty, still condo last night to find Norman has grown marvellous much.

Norman is my cactus. I got him for my office at the beginning of the 2nd season of the Ex-show. I dream of having a dog, but I live alone and keep weird hours (in many different cities) so for now, that's impractical. Norman the cactus is, in fact, the only living thing that depends on me. Okay, sure, you can leave him for four weeks without water, but look, look how he thrives. I mean, pretty soon I'm going to have to get him a bigger mug to sit in.

Okay, scratch all the positivity above. I'm waxing rhapsodic about a cactus. My life is fucking sad.

Psych.

Sorry haters. Norman is my other metaphor of the moment. Improbable -- a desert plant thrives in an empty condo in Toronto as the keeper of all that condo's stuff toils in Canada's most easterly point to make TeeVee that some people will run down no matter how good it winds up being. And yet I say, fuck'em. The dog keeps swimming, snout just above the waterline. Throw rocks if you want. He's not stopping. Norman lives, he thrives. And yes he's just a cactus and you should be able to commit to more than that to have a well-rounded life, but the cactus is a start. Like me, it has sharpness that'll prick you if you're not careful. But look at the top, that delicate little curve. There it is. You know what that is? It's the simplest thing in the world, the very objective correlative of optimism. Look at Norman; he's reaching for the sun.

And Fuckya if you can't get on board for that.

Guest Post @KDubb: A Letter To the TV Peeps from the big S side of the Screenwriting Ledger

Greetings TV peeps.

I too have answered the call to lighten the load for the chronically industrious & utterly irreplaceable Mr. McGrath. As is often the case whenever I show up outside of some a clearly labeled fiction, I'll be reprising my role as Grateful Guest. Which brings me to today's entertainment: me, revisiting television writing.

Now, I have been on many amazing occasions a grateful guest in television writing. But I'm trained and make my living as a screenwriter, meaning I mostly write feature films. Filmmakers still call TV writers um, TV writers. Emphasis on the TV, and you are never just 'writers'. Writers refer, in film, to literary authors. Anyway, the delineations are historic, practical though no longer prejudicial. It began with the birth of the television form, which film writing pre-dates by about half a century. Screenwriting was invented largely to act as creative comptrollers for studios' production expenses in the face of a then new brand of rebel storytellers we now call, film directors. Thus film writers see themselves as easily distinguishable from TV writers. The screenwriters' job was and is to make certain insanely expensive/expansive one-off visions dramatically cogent and affordable to execute, ideally franchise-able and, these days, ultimately irresistible to several generations more comfortable on their own sofas, watching whatever's on TV.

In that way, I compete with TV writers. Who, understandably, don't think much about competing with me. Which is interesting only when you think of the decades of hallmark television series that came courtesy of frustrated screenwriters like James L. Brookes, David Chase, Shonda Rhimes, David Lynch, Alan Ball et et et al.

TV writers think film writers are fools, but I suspect most TV writers only ever meet under-employed screenwriters. Despite the paltry minimum rates in Canada, a very small percentage of screenwriters get paid rather handsomely, and since production is a distant dream, we also set our own hours and schedules - which lets us control our time-money-bullshit ratios. Some even do better than most successful show runners (here), largely by also working in the States and overseas' markets. Well, better until you amortize the fees over the years in development it takes never to - in the end, in most cases, for a million reasons - never make the bloody films.

In film, development is big business: production is the nice-if-you-can-get-it part. That's the tax for your day to day freedom, and to be drinking in glam international locales with your red carpet crowd while the poor TV writers slave away in some bunker, trying not to strangle one another for months on end. You get to pick which horse you wanna never see a finish line with, but not why. And while no one else works on any film profitably until the screenwriter has executed her work to a case-by-case standard of excellence, there are no guarantees anywhere - at any level and in any market - that an excellent script will be made into a film of any kind. It usually just gets you the next job. We screenwriters are rarely accorded the privileges or even illusions of authorship. The first buck is won on our work & reputations. But the next buck stops no where near us.

And I'm cool with that. It's kinda like being a staff writer of one. You run your own room, all the strangling is self-induced, the product of your labor is all subject to a kind of happenstance similar in its reliability, I imagine, to accurately predicting the weather… with binoculars… from the moon.

Which may be what tends to make me…. miss television. For all its predisposition to communal hysteria via the rumor mill, its poorly-lit communal work spaces and its pandering to marketer-set morays, its infuriating habit of favoring expositional dialogue over true dramatic action, its slavish devotion to cheesy convention, its perpetual, temporal (yes they are) industrial-sized crises, its self-serving apathy regarding modern-day audience models, its shameful befuddlement by new tech and its fear of interactivity, its sad co-dependence on selling diapers and stain removers to stay alive…

When the TV writers sit down to get after it, it means something is getting done on a reasonable schedule closely related to an understandable goal. Most times it gets done very, very well. It gets produced and distributed via some not-so-dumb pipe or another to guest in millions of privately-owned devices all over the place. Good, bad, or ugly - there is no writing for its own sake. There is no squinting down from orbit watching the fog of complications du jour blot out your distant memory of your last contact with the fellow Earthlings, so far away. No! Instead we open on a sketchy-looking warehouse in some god-forsaken subdivision. Taped on the only marked door is a rarest of all rarities - a jewel in the rough, a holy grail, -- for we screenwriters --: it reads, Production Office. And somewhere above that, the title of the show you just wrote. And somewhere beyond that, the gift of executing a vision, soon to be shared - is already up and racing to air.

Fools are no where in that picture. My writing cousins are quite right.

Slash? Not so fast...

IF YOU'RE NOT reading Lee Goldberg's blog, you should be. Goldberg's got a great perspective on both the international and American business.

Today he passes along an interesting follow up to the news that's breaking now about the international response to the L.A. screenings.

International broadcasters are "slashing" buys, with the U.K. taking the biggest dip.

Yet amidst the fooferal up here about spending on U.S. shows, and with the networks saying the Sky is falling, reports now say their spending was off by only 5% over last year.

I'm with Will. Gee. Is there something that we're missing here?

Maybe it's behind the CRTC's big black marker.

Fulford on the Life and Death of a TV Series

I SOMETIMES READ Robert Fulford and think he's a little past it, but this column on the life (and death) of a TV series has a lot of wisdom (and laugh out loud funny) from a keen observer of the medium. Also, he gets full on Canadian points for using trenchant Canadian examples right alongside the U.S. examples. (Read the full article for those.) That deserves an extra 'huzzah.'

Most episodic shows tell two stories simultaneously. One deals with fictional characters. The other is the narrative's slow evolution under the pressure of desperate producers and harried writers.

The second story demonstrates that the history of a TV series, like the history of a nation or an art movement, falls into four periods - primitive, classic, baroque and decadent.

In the primitive stage the audience is unconvinced that the show will matter and the people producing it aren't so sure, either. When Flashpoint went on the air last summer, it spent far too much time explaining itself... It's now well into the classic period, confident about what it's doing and how to do it.

To see the baroque sensibility on TV, consider the extensive ornamentation built into House, the most popular U.S. scripted series last season. The parallels with Sherlock Holmes are a clear example...

The decadent era begins when writers lose interest in their themes and try to maintain audiences by concocting steadily more outlandish storylines. One of the attorneys in the law firm of McKenzie, Brackman on the program L.A. Law (1986-1994) was a divorce specialist famous for seducing his clients and all other available females. A scriptwriter had him fall through a ceiling in the office while shagging his secretary. Amusing, but it turned comedy into farce and drained reality from the character - as Happy Days did in 1977 when Fonzie rode water skis over a Seaworld shark, making "jump the shark" a term for a program reduced to terminal silliness. (In 1997 a website, jumptheshark.com, began chronicling self-destructive TV shows.

As a program's fourth or fifth season ends, alert viewers often notice that a frantic quality invades the scripts. Writers are running short on ideas just when they're trying to squeeze another season out of a somewhat worn concept. They reach for increasingly dubious themes and put the main characters in deeper and deeper jeopardy.

As a slightly-outsider, viewer perspective, of course, Fulford misses the full on sturm and drang terror that results from most series that never get out of that primitive phase, and the fact that as a series goes on, it's often one person either way that can forestall or speed up the descent into baroque and decadent.

And it's wonderful to talk in terms of years. But there are series (ones that he might have even mentioned) that are still primitive places fighting for every inch of beach when all looks fine-o on the screen-o. Such is the faerie business we toil in. It's nice to think of the writers either sparking or indulging themselves, but the collaborative nature of TV means that the whole village has a hand in it.

Oh, and not to tell tales out of school, but we all can recall, I believe, one or two series that started straight at the baroque phase and never, ever, ever looked back...

Tomorrow: A guest post! Aren't you lucky!!!

Alexi's Glee

NOW I'M GOING to guess that most of you who read hear also haunt Alex's Complications Ensue site, for his bites o'crafty goodness. But just in case you're perverse or something, or, like, Canadian TV is really your thing and your only thing (to which I say, see your doctor and get that drained, boy.) Alex has got a great, rollicking discussion going on the GLEE pilot and why he felt it was "off." I went with it, but after reading Alex's post (and some of the equally right on comments) I have a different view.

But aint noone taking away my dream of Lea Michele. I saw her in Spring Awakening, yo. Our love is pure.


PS: And while you're there -- one of Alex's endearing traits is a "show me'ism" that makes it hard for him to accept something as true unless he's seen it himself. (Honestly, these closet scientist types.) One of the old arguments he and I have had is about the "high school caste system" which he thinks only exists in TV and movies because he didn't really experience it himself in high school. So if you do weigh in, you might want to offer gentle observation on that front, as well. All for the greater good, peeps. All for the greater good.

Localized Pain, Nobody's Gain

WELL, THE LOCAL forecast here over the weekend was a 103 fever, lots of the shakes, an inability to swallow, night sweats, the poundies and the stumblies. I love you, St. John's, but I suspect you may be trying to kill me.

Luckily, this gave way today to a glorious torrent of work. On Saturday morning when I first thought, "I think I need to lie down" I had 12 pages. Now, I'm halfway through the script and seem to be able to hold down something other than saltines.

Now, it would give me great pleasure to be able to say that my condition was exacerbated by the great SaveLocal tv sham-o-rama this weekend, but I wisely kept that off my TV -- my attention and energy being delirious enough.

But since today seems to be the Local TV day at my blogging brethren, (*ps: Will Dixon is a girl) I thought I would nip in and share a few of my thoughts about the phenomena in the here and now.

I've spent most of my life, and chose to spend most of my life, in large, large metropolitan centres. I used to say that anything less than a million people was a village. I have the ones I love, (New York, Toronto) the ones that I don't understand (Vancouver, Calgary, Seattle) and the ones that I think maybe I could love if I knew them a little better (Boston, Montreal, San Francisco.)

Part of being in a large city is not necessarily understanding what "local market" meant. Even going back to the 1970's when we had those wired converters that looked like Kleenex boxes, with the manual buttons you had to push for a channel -- state of the art at the time -- local just meant the same programs, sometimes at slightly different times.

Until I thought about it. I remember realizing that not everyone knew about Commander Tom and Rocketship 7, or people who'd get the jokes about Irv Weinstein. I remember hearing about Ghoulardi when I got a little older. I took the pomo step of seeing the three or four people who fed into Count Floyd on SCTV. And yeah, there was also the fishing shows I didn't watch, and Tiny Talent Time, a show that I think a neighbour of ours went on one time. And there was Party Game! and the Hilarious House of Frightenstein, the greatest local program ever produced anywhere and if you suggest otherwise I will come to your house and cut you.

As consolidation in the media industry happened, these reference points all slowly slid away. Some moved to the burgeoning world of cable. Yeah, it's cool that I remember Mike Myers on Citylimits, and Chuck the Security Guard and the all night movies (and the Saturday night Italian movie on Channel 47....boys, you know what I'm talking about.) But those times past, as technology and viewing habits changed. And then came Muchmusic, and HBO and TMN and TSN....

Except in an important way they never did change. I think of that line, and paraphrase, that we didn't leave local TV. Local TV left us.

McLuhan and Znaimer, the two guys I spent a lot of time in my 20's studying, both theorized that the future of programming was local. That the best TV was going to be the station that told you what happened to you, today.

I was lucky enough to work at one of those stations in the last years before they worked to dismantle it: Toronto's Citytv. Others have written better and longer essays about what made City unique and different, but I have to say that rather than being any one thing, it was everything. The fact that the promos were cut by promo guys in house, who wrote funny voiceovers for Mark Dailey to read. The fact that you could sneak funny and slightly off stuff onto the air at 3am. Many have reminisced about the great post midnight voiceover for Atlantic City, where Mark Dailey enthused to the night owls watching, "Don't go anywhere! Coming up next you get to see my boss get shot in the chest!" And indeed you did. Moses had a small part in that Louis Malle feature.

If you were in a hotel in Toronto and you flipped on the TV and saw City Tv, it made you want to get out and explore that city. My time exploring other cities, especially when I started working in TV and had cause to visit other affiliates, I found the local affiliates were parked in strip malls or far out industrial bunkers divorced from the city proper never made me feel that way.

But there were some notable cases where I stepped a little outside my personal zone and discovered just what "local media" meant to communities smaller than those cities I hailed from.

When I was at a somebody's cottage, and realized that the station that you got on the dock was the same station the kids parents had listened to when they were kids;

When I realized what a complete Oasis the university station was for my friends who lived in Austin, who had to deal every day with the fact that they were in a liberal bubble surrounded by harsh, hard R Republican Fundamentalism.

It's always the small groups that are threatened by the bigger groups for whom "local" is truly important. The bigger the picture you paint, the less likely it seems that it needs to include those little quirks or elements that define a small place, that make it what it is. Maybe you can leave the Red Apple off the list of landmarks where you're dealing with a footprint of 500 miles square. From there, maybe it doesn't seem like much of a stretch to have one entertainment report done from the studio in Toronto and farmed out to other communities. And maybe it's not that big a deal if "your" weatherman is standing in front of a green screen talking about how cold it is on St. Denis street right now, when really he's up in Don Mills, ON. Maybe there truly IS no party like a Scranton party! I mean, how would you know?

But yet here I am, in a place that's vibrant and different, and way, way, way below my usual comfort zone for number of people. St. John's may be the oldest City in North America. (it is, look it up.) But it's still only 112, 000 people or so.

Yet those people, and their ways of thinking, are just so different in so many very important ways. Like a lot of islanders, I think, they just go their own way. What a treat it would be to see that reflected on screen.

Except, um. You really can't. Not really.

There's a local station here called N.TV. Such are the times we live in that it bills itself as "Canada's Superstation" -- see, because the taste is for that, not for local. I was surprised, one of the nights when I was first here, to watch an entertainment report on that station from my hotel room. The whole report was about four to five minutes long -- filler length -- and it consisted entirely of a woman giving the weekend's US box office receipts for the top five grossing films. Then they'd cut to about a minute of each of the trailers. That's it. That's the entertainment report.

Such is the problem with local TV. It was simultaneously ignored, by stations getting gobbled up by huge conglomerates like CTV Global and CHUM and CRAIG that then gobbled up some more of each other til now we have the two of them, and one on the teeter. We were told that getting bigger was the better way to go. That it promoted synergy. That it was the future of broadcasting. That it was the great big shiny future.

It wasn't. It was a lie.

Meanwhile, those little stations that were trying to make a go of it were so cut and so decimated by cuts to their operating budgets that they couldn't train people anymore. They couldn't report. They couldn't cover their communities well. Maybe they'd struggle through their one newscast with pride, and maybe you'd even see a few people on that newscast who were proud local talents (I certainly see that here in St. John's.)

But the trend is also evident: this is dying. Last one out of local broadcasting, flip the switch. Oh, the HD switch? Now now. Don't even start about that. Seriously. Don't. (Canada's just not going to do that. Hey CRTC, Fuck you!)

Meanwhile, let's take the case of the CBC. I was out at a bar for happy hour a couple weeks back, and an arts report came on the CBC affiliate from one cultural opening or another, and of course everyone sat around and spoke up and clapped and pointed every time they recognized somebody. And I realized that this was really important to them. They liked seeing this because this was rare. This is not ETalk going to some crap book launch which happens every day in Toronto. This was here. It was them. It was the kind of thing that only the CBC could afford to cover. And it was way better than the number of times I wanted to find something coming from Newfoundland only to find the only station I could get was from Halifax. And suddenly I understood far better, the cries from those who were desperately trying to tell the CBC don't cut the regions....


...because the regions are the only thing CBC has left that make it different.

The real irony about Save Local TV is that the patient's already dead. We all let it happen. The viewers by not being active enough in protesting it. The city dwellers in being arrogant enough to assume our covered asses meant everyone's were covered. The media companies who did everything they could to centralize and swallow, and now, the CRTC, who let the whole thing happen by rubberstamping instead of acting in the best interest of Canadians.

So what we're seeing now is not so much the attempts to save the patient. Nope. What we're seeing now is a little juice being punched through the corpse to get it to dance, one last time, so that maybe they can ring one more morsel of gelt out of it. Unseemly.

It's a sad thing. And there are no good guys in any of it. And whatever happens, my friends, trust me on this one: nobody's getting saved.

A Pox On Both Your Houses

BECAUSE THEY HAVE made worms' meat of us...

Seal up the mouth of outrage for a while,
Till we can clear these ambiguities,
And know their spring, their head, their
true descent;
And then will I be general of your woes,
And lead you even to death: meantime forbear,
And let mischance be slave to patience.
Bring forth the parties of suspicion.

-WM. Shakespeare, Romeo & Juliet, V, iii

Capulets. 

Montagues.

And I for winking at your discords too
Have lost a brace of kinsmen: all are punish'd.

Romeo & Juliet, V, iii

By I, I mean anybody working in Canadian TV.  And by all are punish'd I mean, stay tuned, bub. Stay tuned.

In Cameras and LaLas: Variety's Take on Canada's Branch Plant TV Industry

NORMALLY IT'S MY policy now on this blog not to link to Variety, since their shilling for the AMPTP during the last WGA Strike proved how biased they were. (And Nikki Finke gets the good stuff first anyway,) but a new story is pretty instructive in cutting through the whole domestic TV debate -- since it cuts through the redacted thrill of the CRTC and shows you what an outside perspective has to say.

Here's Variety's take on Canadians coming to the L.A. screenings.

A few key passages:

The Canadians are traditionally the biggest international spenders during the L.A. Screenings, but there is a good chance they’ll be shelling out less this year.

That point -- that Canada spends WAY more than any other country at the L.A. screenings, never came up at the "in camera" network sessions at the CRTC, so far as I saw. Though the spin from the networks seems to be that Canada's creative unions don't understand how their purchase of U.S. shows subsidizes homegrown Canadian production, that's just not true.  How the networks work here might have been news to Konrad, but isn't news to any of us. Nor is it the point.

The reason WHY Canada spends more than anybody else at the U.S. screenings is because they are the only country whose business model is based on running every show they possibly can at the same time as the U.S. nets, to take care of simultaneous substitution.

Other countries can't make any money running a three-ep flop that gets quickly canceled by the parent U.S. network, which is why they wait and buy CSI when they know it's a hit. Yes, when they make that deal, they often have to buy another show or package of shows to close the deal, but it's nowhere near as ginned as the Canadian buy. 

When I was in my twenties, I worked in production inside a media company that's since been swallowed in rounds of Canadian corporate media consolidation.  Though I had nothing to do with buying or selling the product offered each year at the L.A. screenings, I was friendly enough with the people who did to know in rough terms how the bidding and buying worked.   

But based on what we read in the redacted in-camera comments Jim Henshaw wrote about the other day, we're supposed to believe that the Chairman of the CRTC was completely taken aback and surprised by the way Canadian networks buy shows. So in other words, this guy, who's in charge of all our fates, didn't know as much as I did just hanging around a TV station for a few years?  After months of lobbying by the networks?  I tend not to buy it, because the Chairman seems to me to be an intelligent guy.  If it's true, whoa, we're in more trouble than I thought.

By not acknowledging the huge, skewing effect SimSub has on the business of buying and making TV in this country,  you're in effect discussing the effects of melanoma and how to control it and leaving out the fact that the patient also has Stage IV Lung and Pancreatic Cancer.

Understand -- I'm not counselling an end to SimSub. (Well, not really.  To do so I feel would be as cynical as the Broadcasters current "Save Local TV" campaign, as if that, and not their poor decisions and over-reliance on one faded idea wasn't the problem.)  I'm just saying that it's the gravitational change that distorts things so much, that compensatory attention to protecting homegrown production is necessary. If you are supporting one side of the business, it's only fair to support the other.  

The difference, of course, is that the creative unions only get to make that point for 15 minutes, once every hearing, while the networks get private lobbying sessions and in camera sessions to make their point known. Good to know that we live in a democracy, aint it?

Konrad, if the jobs of Canwest and CTV Executives and Salespeople and Buyers are deemed more valuable than those of Canada's Grips, Writers, Actors, Set Builders, Production Designers, Directors and Editors, etc, just say so.  And while we're at it, you might want to have a word with the hundreds of people that these companies have shed over the last few years -- starting when they were flush and bragging about their record profit margins.  (You know, the long ago days of, like, 2007.)   And if that's the case, Konrad, there are several hundred thousand people who'd like to have a word with you. In Camera, if you like.  Maybe we can also have that discussion about what Michel's watching on TV -- since it won't be "on the record," you know.

The edifice supported by SimSub is crumbling anyway.  Borders and exclusive broadcast rights (my problems seeing the Blue Jays game in St. John's notwithstanding) are looking like a pretty tarnished prom queen in a ripped dress right about now.

And here's something nobody ever points out: even the SimSub thing used to be a better deal for Canadian viewers. Once upon a time, when they bought shows from the U.S. nets, Canadian channels, if they couldn't run it at the same time and block out the U.S. net's signal, would often pre-release the show. They'd negotiate it so that, say, CTV or Global would run that show a day earlier. Sometimes two.  So for a long time, into the 80's and early 1990's, Canadians would sometimes get to see U.S. network shows first.  In the days before PVR's it was pretty convenient. You had a couple of chances to catch a show.  That's stopped now, of course. Since the moment a show airs, it's torrented, U.S. nets don't allow Canadians to go first anymore.  Yup. That edifice shure is healthy -- and great for viewers! What choice! Do I watch Law & Order on CTV or NBC? Gawrsh!

Anyway, I'm sure all of this will come up when the CRTC has their in-camera private meetings with the WGC.   Cause I'm sure that's coming, right? 

Right?

Bueller?

To continue with the Variety article:

One studio source familiar with past Canadian negotiations said prices will be “firm and more cautious than in year’s past.” Among the new shows expected to generate some heat among overseas buyers are CBS’ remake of “Melrose Place” and Disney’s sci-fi thriller “Flash Forward.”

That can’t be good news to the studios, which count heavily on Canadian coin and the bidding wars that often take place. Canucks don’t have time to watch, go home and decide what’s worth buying. With their upfronts set for the first week in June, they need to have their lineups — with new American product — set to show off to potential advertisers.

The Canuck broadcasters are breathing a sigh of relief this week because broadcast regulator the Canadian Radio-Television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) last week backed away from a proposed plan to curtail the networks’ spending in Hollywood.

Earlier this year, the CRTC had said it was warming up to the idea of forcing the Canadian nets to bring in a one-to-one ratio between its Canadian and American programming expenditures. But the broadcasters protested, and the regulator agreed to drop the idea, at least for this year. Such a rule would have likely radically reduced the amount of Canadian spending in L.A.

It's interesting to see how the Americans view it, huh?  From that position of self-interest?

The amazing thing is that our broadcast regulator, charged with protecting the airwaves for Canadians, doesn't act the same way.  Would that they actually paid attention more to what other countries do to handle the challenge of American signal hegemony, instead of floating timid trial balloons they then quickly back down from.  (And I know they say that the one-to-one spend idea isn't dead, but come on, based on history, do you really want to hold your breath?)

In all this, again, I feel it's important to say that I feel it's important that CTV and Global be allowed to thrive. But they've been addicted to the crack pipe of easy U.S. Simsub for so long, that they know nothing else but to ask for more free money, while at the same time whining about having to make any committment to spend that money on local or indigenous programming.  That's just wrong.

And let's say it plain, too. That "spending spree" in recent years by Global and CTV? It's the same pissing contest that we see every week when they release their duelling press releases.   It was as much about corporate ego and money as business reality and every single person outside of that Gatineau meeting room knows it.  It's pathetic that nobody has the balls to say it. Well, nobody but crazy Uncle Jim.  And me, I guess.  Shit, I can't believe I'm doing this again. 

I have been trying for a little while to lay off the CRTC...but the degree of paternalism and dismissiveness displayed in those documents of the in camera sessions just leaves too bad a taste in my mouth.  That relationship is just too cozy. And Konrad, if I see you at Banff, I'll be more than happy to say that to your face.

Save Local TV? Or Save Huge Media Companies?

BY NOW YOU'VE started to see all the "Save Local TV Ads" on your screens. (Wow, what do you think would happen if just once they had promoted a Canadian homegrown show that much?) For a different perspective, I direct you to this very interesting post by an admitted representative of several small cable companies.

Consider this. CTV and Canwest are publicly traded, for-profit companies. The first question is why should they be rescued at all? Should Canadians put money into their shareholders pockets? Should we permit a massive transfer of wealth from one set of for-profit companies to another just because one group yelled long enough?

Note that the main reason that the CRTC chose not to mandate these fees is that the conventional stations would not commit to ANY improvement or increase to local programming if they got the money (about $350 million this year).

The next question is, why should cable and satellite companies bail them out of financial difficulties that cable and satellite did not cause? If fragmentation of audience is the problem, why should cable pay to fix it?

The next question is, if cable and satellite customers are to be charged an extra few dollars on the monthly bill (which is, in all probability, where the money will come from) why should ONLY cable and satellite customers pay to save an over-the-air broadcasting system designed to push signals to the remaing 8% of Canadians who do not pay for TV at all?

If the system truly needs fixing, isn't that something that ALL Canadians should decide and then pay for? Isn't that a matter for Parliamentary debate and, then, amendment to our cultural and taxation policies?

And a final note: do not think for a moment that this is a one-time payout. First, the fees would be charged monthly, forever. Second, if the conventional broadcasters succeed in getting fees authorized, the next step will be incessant requests for increases to those mandated fees. Customer pays!

So now my "blather button" is really pushed. Honestly, the more I think about this, the angrier I get, as a cable representative, as a cable customer and as a Canadian television viewer.


Part 2 – Digital Conversion

As you may know, the US broadcasting system, by legislation, must go digital on June 12. That means that all over the conventional stations in the US must build digital transmitters (studio facilities and towers) for their signals.

As you can imagine, the US broadcasters balked at the cost of doing that. However, after some struggles, most, if not all, of the US conventional stations have now spent the money, gotten the job done and are broadcasting digital signals. On June 12, the analog over-the-air signals will shut down. Basically, the US is ready and it shouldn't be a huge issue.

In Canada, the digital cut-over is scheduled for August 2011. Under existing CRTC regulation -- that is, the law -- the Canadian conventional television stations MUST have digital transmission facilities built and ready for the cut-over at that time. The main point of the regulation here is that the CRTC does not want Canadians who presently get their signals only by antenna to lose TV service altogether when the analog transmission is shut down.

However, pleading poverty, the conventional broadcasters are now saying, regardless of their regulatory obligations, that they simply ARE NOT GOING TO DO IT.

So, at this time, the digital transition in Canada is pretty much up in the air. The conventional broadcasters will not divulge whether or where they intend to build any digital transmitters. Instead, they want the cable and satellite companies to solve their problem by distributing their signals for them, both to existing customers and to those Canadians who, today, do not subscribe to cable or satellite but take signals only by antenna.

However, despite the fact that they will again save hundreds of millions of dollars by avoiding their existing regulatory obligations, the broadcasters refuse to contribute ANY funding to solving the serious problem that antenna-only viewers will face when analog transmission shuts down or, for that matter, even to commit to delivering their signals at their own cost to the cable and satellite companies for onward distribution to Canadians.

Canada is beginning to lag the US seriously with respect to digitization of its broadcasting system. The conventional broadcasters are not helping us to catch up. Meeting the CRTC's August 2011 cut-over deadline appears less and less likely.

The whole thing is really worth a read.

Me and Mister C

TODAY WE'VE GOT something different. A guest post -- a little about writing, a little about television, and a little about life, courtesy of my friend Robert Sheridan, comedy writer extraordinaire. (Corner Gas, Little Mosque on the Prairie, Red Green) Enjoy.

So Denis is busy in Newfoundland and looking for a guest post, and it just so happens that I’m in the middle of writing a script and looking for a way to procrastinate. Isn’t it nice when agendas collide?

I’ve been resisting doing this because I don’t really have any hot button issue to rant about right now. On the other hand, I do like telling stupid stories that don’t really go anywhere, especially ones that involve me and someone even marginally famous. So here’s one.

I didn’t start writing TV until I was 30. Based on my earliest credits you would think that would make me 38 by now, but you’d be wrong. I’m 32. So shut your face.

Anyway, before I started writing, I did a variety of things, one of which was working as a publicist for the now-defunct Livent out of Toronto. The one run by, you know… that guy.

I knew nothing about publicity and even less about musical theatre, but for whatever reason someone snatched me out of the mailroom one day and said “here, do this.” So I did it, for nearly four years, as my twenties quietly slipped away from me without my really noticing. Note to twentysomethings: Pay attention.

It wasn’t really a bad gig, though. I got to travel around the U.S. with the touring companies of the various shows and set up media interviews with the actors in each market. Sometimes it was a real A-list town like Boston, but usually it was places like St. Louis, Indianapolis, Hartford, Cleveland... cities you might not otherwise find yourself in, but were often more fun than you’d think. And sometimes not.

The lead actors in these shows tended to be people with some background in musical theatre, but were primarily known from television, and often sitcoms, hence the marquee value. Cloris Leachman. Betty Buckley. Pat Harrington. Yes, for a brief moment in time, I called Schneider from “One Day at a Time” a friend.

One slight variation was the time we had Dean Jones in a show. Dean was a Disney star in the early 70s and had been the original dude in “Herbie the Love Bug.” Very nice man.

One night Dean Jones and I are in the back of a limo trying to get to a television station way out in the sticks. Big snowstorm. Traffic’s just crawling. And Dean’s telling me about the height of his career, and it sounded pretty great. Lots of parties and women. Lots and lots of women. And I’m really enjoying the stories and feeling kind of envious until it all culminates in Dean having a moment of clarity in a hotel room late one night. At this point in his story he turns to me and says “Rob. Have you accepted Christ into your life?”

And so a long drive suddenly got a lot longer.

But I digress. The actual story I wanted to tell was about Tom Bosley, Mr. Cunningham from “Happy Days.” Tom was playing Cap’n Andy in one of the touring companies of and before his career in television, he too had been a musical theatre star, most notably in the tile role of “Show Boat,”“Fiorello!” back in the 50s.

When I first met him in Detroit several months earlier I had heard that he could be a little crusty at first, and I guess he was. But at some point not long thereafter I had taken the time to tell him that I had been a huge fan of “Happy Days” as a kid.

That in and of itself was unremarkable – Bosley heard this sort of thing a hundred times a day. But I also happened to mention, genuinely, that my favourite seasons of the show were the first two.

In case you’ve forgotten, during the first two seasons (the ones with the “Rock Around the Clock” opening instead of the other one) Happy Days was actually a single camera show. There was a laugh track, but no studio audience. The humour was a little smaller and more subtle, the cast didn’t have to play to the back row, and Fonzie was not yet a superhero. He was there, but more of the stories revolved around small stuff between Richie and Potsie, and Richie and his Dad. Most of these episodes are really kind of terrific, if you get a chance to check them out on DVD.

Anyway, I got the sense that Tom Bosley especially liked those shows as well because we got along like a house on fire after that. Couldn’t have been nicer.

So one day we were driving around San Francisco, visiting a bunch of local TV and radio stations for various interviews. Ron Howard also happened to be in town, shooting “Ed TV.” I had, in fact, seen Ron Howard putting mustard on his hot dog at a Giants game just the day before, but I was alone at the time and hadn’t found the courage to go up and say hi. That was already eating at me by the time Tom and I had our media day.

Then, out of nowhere, Tom turns to me over lunch and says, “Oh, you know… Ronny is shooting his movie around the corner. Do you wanna go visit the set and say hi?”

I told Tom I thought that would be a little bit of all right, and so we did.

There was the usual amount of security surrounding the perimeter of the set, but the funny thing was that we didn’t have to show or do anything to get on. Tom just smiled at one of the guards and said “I’m here to see my son” and the guy smiled wide and shook his hand and removed the barrier. It was kind of awesome.

Then, we march right up to Ron Howard, who is between set-ups, and for like, ten minutes, I just stood there talking to Richie and Mr. C. Well, mostly I just stood there slack-jawed, saying squat. But it was, as any other TV-baby like me might imagine, one of the highlights of my life.

The amazing thing is that not once, not even for a second, while I’m standing there with one of the biggest directors in the world, who is himself standing there talking to his TV-Dad, who also happens to be starring in the expensive live musical that I am in town to publicize, not once does it occur to me to tell someone to grab a fucking camera.

The point is: I was a really, really shitty publicist.

Wait. That wasn’t supposed to be the point of this story.

Oh, right, now I remember. So the Ron Howard encounter behind us, we returned to the business of the day, which was ferreting Tom around to all these TV and radio stations. And it was then that I noticed that every single person we came into contact with throughout the day had the exact same reaction as that security guard on the set. The second, and I mean the second, Tom Bosley walked into a room, there wasn’t a twenty, thirty or fortysomething person who didn’t immediately smile wide and, with almost childish enthusiasm, step forward to shake his hand.

It was like their own father had gone out for a pack of smokes 20 years ago, disappeared, and had magically returned. These people were positively giddy, I tells you.

At some point, at one of the TV stations, maybe the local NBC affiliate, the woman who booked the show comes up to me and says “You know, we’ve had a lot of big stars come through here.” And she rattles off a list of names I’ve mostly forgotten, but they were all big, A-list movie stars and rock stars. Springsteen, Cruise, Hoffman. This sort of thing. Then she says: “But I have never, ever seen the staff more excited about a guest coming in. It’s Mr. Cunningham.”

I got what she meant completely.

Now, I’m not saying this was the exact moment I decided I wanted to write for television (I’ll leave that for Chapter Two of my upcoming autobiography “Rob, We Hardly Knew Ye”) but it made a big impact on me nevertheless. I think in some way every television writer kind of quietly yearns to be writing for the movies. There’s a romance to that, and you know, it would be pretty cool.

The thing is, and I realize this has been said before by people a lot smarter than me, there really is something about the primacy and intimacy of that little box being right there, in your home, every single day, that establishes an emotional connection we’re simply never gonna have with Tom Cruise. That’s the magic of the medium. And while we’re all working on those desk drawer feature screenplays with visions of glowing marquees and opening night klieg lights dancing in our heads, I like to remind myself from time to time what a privilege it is to work in television, even if I never make 1/1000^th the impact of a cultural touchstone like Mr. C.

That was my point. I’m sorry it took me so long to get there.

Anyway, as luck would have it, San Francisco was, I think, the last time I ever worked with Tom. Livent basically imploded at the end of the year, and that was that. But I remember lying in my hotel room that night and feeling kind of privileged to have had that experience, and then doing a little math and realizing that it was entirely possible that there were periods in my childhood when I spent more time with Mr. C. than I did with my own Dad.

This says absolutely nothing about my father, by the way, who was a wonderful guy. Only that I was horribly, horribly addicted to television. It was a real problem.

Still is.

I Hope Ted is Spinning

DEAR ROGERS,

You suck.

You completely, totally, utterly suck.

It was bad enough last summer, when it took about nineteen phone calls and two visits just to get my parents' big screen HD TV set up.

But here I sit in St. John's NL. I bought your super sports pack. All I want to do is watch the Blue Jays Boston game in the BG as I write. But I can't. Because after a stupid corporate fight, you've made your stupid, childish corporate deal to get TSN2 on the air --everywhere BUT in Newfoundland. And the Super Sports Pack blocks out the game, because TSN2 has the rights. Even though they're not actually showing it.

So I can't watch it. Even with the box, even with the package. Even though you OWN THE GODDAMN TEAM.

You know, when Canadians complain about Toronto, and not being included, and people having their heads up their asses, this is the kind of thing they're talking about. Just, FYI. You have terrible, legendarily terrible customer service. Every customer interaction with you is a nightmare. Last night, technical support cut me off four times. Customer service had no answers. They never do.

Oh, and while we're at it, you completely fucked up CityTV when you bought it too. So congratulations. Enjoy your money, enjoy your subscribers and tax breaks and regional monopolies.

But know this: you completely, totally fucking suck. I hope your wires corrode and your executives all quit and go to greener pastures. I hope your every future business venture collapses and burns. I hope that somewhere, one of your top managers suffers torment for every hour I have spent on the phone with you in the last 25 years, trying to straighten some stupid thing out because your evil, stupid, boneheaded corporation sucks so very hard.

My parents, when they go to Florida, get their cable through a company called Bright House Networks. They always answer the phone. They fix things right. They don't send out subcontractors who don't know what they're doing. They don't transfer you and cut you off. They don't sell you high speed bullshit and then throttle your connection. The mobile section doesn't not know what the tv section is doing. It doesn't take four phone calls to get your bill consolidated. Your Mom who's been paying the cable bill since 1977 doesn't get told she's not authorized on the account, and "you should get your husband to phone in and change that." Your HUSBAND. In 2008.

No, it takes a special kind of fucked-up, Enron-level degree of fucktardery to so completely, utterly, and totally frustrate and alienate your customer base.

Fuck you, Rogers. You suck Donkey Balls.



Hey there Bell Canada, what the @$%* do you think you're smirking at?

Flashpoint Renewed

NEW EPISODES will air Summer 2010.

(via Twitter @EWAusielloFiles)

UPDATE: what's unclear at this point is what "renewed" means. There's some question that the "third season" they're talking about might just be CBS holding back nine episodes from the current order that's being shot right now in Toronto.

CBS previously "held back" 4 episodes from FP's original order and ran them when the show returned in Feb. So there's discrepancy between what the Production considers a "season" and what the network does.

It's not clear that they've actually ordered any ADDITIONAL eps to the ones already in the hopper. The same thing happened with the U.S. sale of Blood Ties, which they marketed as two "seasons" when really, from production's standpoint, it was one 22 episode season.

In The Thick of It

WELL, I'VE TRIED, chickens. I've tried to line up guest posts. Those writers, they shant be wrangled unless there's a paycheque attached, it seems.

And after a weekend back home in Toronto I'm back on the Rock and deep into the shit. Deep work on several fronts trying to get stories up and running -- reading, writing, noting, and breaking new stories so that the great production machine can begin to rumble to life.

So the combo of those two things means that you should expect crickets here for the next bit. Now, ahem, if any of the brave souls I specifically, pathetically, pleadingly asked for material from this week come through, maybe there will be joy. But til then, may I suggest you visit all your other favorite TV sites to find out about such brilliant topics as:

• The Wonderful, Evolving World of U.S. Network Pickups
• The Canadian shopping spree that follows
• The bloodbath in TV representation

And also, Jim Henshaw has a scorcher of a post about the [REDACTED] "in camera" license renewal hearings at the CRTC, where the broadcasters explained their business for the commissioners far from the prying, dirty eyes of the great unwashed. (That's you and me, bub.)

What becomes clear is that Canadian nets still fail to see that the way around their problems is the same strategy most European nations have used to end-run the Hollywood studio insistence on owning it all -- to produce programming they can own and sell.

But I’ve been beating that drum since I started writing this blog and it seems CTV and Global would rather swallow lye than make a couple of dollars from their own labor.

At any rate, my favorite moment in this whole sorry affair occurs on pages 144-145, wherein the Commission Chair offers the following:

Unfortunately, “…what Ms. Williams just explained to me” has been redacted. So I, my fellow artists and the Arts Guilds the Commission Chair speaks of have no way of understanding her argument.

Or perhaps – of REFUTING it…

But then, we don’t matter to this Commission any more than the public does. And that’s made crystal clear over and over during CRTC hearings.

Writers Guild of Canada Executive Director Maureen Parker can explain a half century of Broadcaster “betrayal” of her membership and MP Cheryl Gallant can detail how her constituents in Pembroke were consistently lied to by CanWest. But those submissions are not explored while this document illustrates that the Commission feels enormously educated by whatever the broadcasters have to say.

My favorite moment of the redacted CRTC stuff (which was redacted, supposedly, because they didn't want "competitive details" revealed so that competitors could see them,) was the CEO of Canwest, Peter Viner, answering a question about Canada's creatives "not getting" the message that the money spent on U.S. shows subsidizes Canadian production (a point that not a single member of the WGC I've ever talked to disputes) apparently Viner said the following:


Oh MAN! He said Whhhaaaaa? What do you think's under that black bar?

"These are very intelligent people; we wish they'd just %$#$@ go away?"

Remember how the bleeps made The Osbournes funnier? Who was the guy at the CRTC wielding the pen? Dick Cheney?

Anybody who wants to guess what salty or businessy-competitive thing that was said "in camera", let me know in the comments below.

(And to Mr. Viner, I'm pretty sure you didn't drop a few stray F-bombs there. Here at Dead Things Labs, we give all professional broadcasters the benefit of the doubt. You gotta admit though -- that looks pretty dang funny.)

See you when I see you.