PLAY A GAME WITH THE average English-language Canadian: “Name a Canadian television show”. Exclude Hockey Night in Canada and news. Watch them furrow their brow.
“Uh, Flashpoint?” says one friend, with whom I had an animated discussion about how Canadian TV can be as polished as American TV, and referenced Flashpoint.
Corner Gas will likely come up and another friend mentions Being Erica. Depending on your age, Degrassi (the original) may come to mind, too, or Street Legal. Perhaps Dragon’s Den.
Aside from these, and maybe Rookie Blue and Combat Hospital because they’ve been getting so much press, in the past decade scripted Canadian TV has been a wasteland. Just recall Train 48.
The heyday of Cancon was the ’90s, with shows like Due South, Road to Avonlea and Da Vinci’s Inquest, just before the CRTC removed Canadian TV expenditure requirements in 1999, say many people. Cancon was doing so well, the feeling from the CRTC was that broadcasters would continue to make it.
A decade later and those commissioners must be feeling sheepish. However, one of the biggest complaints emerging from the recent over-the-top submissions to the CRTC from companies like Shaw Communications are the regs that force broadcasters to make Canadian television programming. They argue that those contributions hinder their ability to compete. It could be (and has been) said that Cancon legislation is the only reason we have any original domestic product.
“English-language broadcasters spent 24 times the amount on foreign drama than Canadian drama for the second year in a row,” says Maureen Parker, the executive director of the Writers Guild of Canada. “Ten years ago the ratio was six to one. Now it’s 24 to one. We’re seeing less and less revenue spent on Canadian programming.”
Only Citytv and CTV have allotted an hour of Canadian drama during prime time on their fall TV lineup. Although broadcasters have to spend a percentage of revenue on Canadian drama, they don’t have to air it during prime time or on their conventional channels.
“We predicted that if broadcasters aren’t required to put drama on their main schedules, they won’t and that’s exactly what’s happened. At best Canadian drama is left in the wings to fill-in the mid-season holes when the U.S. series flop,” said Stephen Waddell, ACTRA’s national executive director on its website.
ACTRA wants to bolster the Cancon rules with exhibition requirements that require broadcasters to air it when and where most Canadians can see it, not only on specialty channels.
But what is Cancon? “It’s any story told by Canadians, whether created by, written and acted,” says Joanne Deer, the director of policy and communication for ACTRA, says. “It’s not the subject that’s as important as who created it.”
The “Final Jeopardy” question: Is Cancon even important?
From a financial standpoint, the Canadian television industry contributes more than 100,000 jobs and $4.9 billion to the federal economy, says Parker.
Deer provides a more esoteric view. “It’s vital to any society to see and share experiences and learn about our heroes,” she says. “That’s what tells you anything about yourself.”
That means we don’t have the law of Double Jeopardy in Canada and we can’t “plead the 5th”.
“If you ask Canadians do they want Cancon? They’ll say no because they think it’s bad. I counter with it’s those repeats that continually reinforces those bad stereotypes,” says Will Dixon, a television writer, director and instructor in the film and media department of the University of Regina.
“A couple of times my kids said ‘I knew it was Canadian because it’s lame.’ I ask ‘where did you get that?’ I don’t walk around the house saying this. It’s that self esteem we’re always fighting about holding up our own as successful.”
It’s a problem that has plagued the CBC. “If Corner Gas was on CBC, the joke around the building is that it wouldn’t have done as well,” says Kirstine Stewart, the executive vice president of English services for the CBC.
But that’s an image that’s changing, she says. “Success begets more success.” Little Mosque on the Prairie, for example, had a viewership of two million on the first day, the highest ratings of any CBC show in 15 years.
“A few years ago, we needed the crutch of American programming like Wheel of Fortune and Jeopardy to provide viewership,” Stewart says. “We don’t need them to draw viewers anymore. We’re clearing the schedule. Instead, we’re putting drama after Dragon’s Den. Two million Canadians watch the show, and we use it to launch into drama.”
Most countries subsidize their television industry, says Parker. Britain does and its population is more than double that of English-language Canada at 61 million. It also doesn’t have to share a border with a country that has almost 10 times its population, speaks the same language and is a television and culture exporting machine.
“If we were to embrace a Darwinian approach to economics, there would be no Canada because we are not a natural market,” says Bill Roberts, the CEO of Zoomer Media’s TV division (the owner of Vision TV). “The Broadcast Act in 1991 was not about ‘should Astral get more money than Quebecor?’ It was about ‘do we need these to be a country?’”
Vision TV regularly logs some of the highest number of hours of Canadian content requirements and expenditures among broadcasters. “But we don’t see that as a problem,” Roberts says. What it does require, however, is an appetite for risk. There’s no guarantee a show will do well. And to make one with the same standards as the U.S., is expensive.
American shows get a minimum $3-million per episode budget. The closest a Canadian show comes is Flashpoint and Combat Hospital’s $2 million. Long-running U.S. dramas may well cost over $10 million per episode to make.
So, it’s easier and cheaper to rerun. Look at The Littlest Hobo, originally aired in the mid-60s and more commonly remembered during its 1979 to 1985 run. It’s still filling schedules, and fulfills Cancon requirements. “Rules I’d change,” says Dixon, “is that you can’t get your Cancon points from reruns. Or, if they’re older than three years, you only get 5% of Cancon points.”
What we should be concerned about is entertaining the viewer, he continues. “Broadcasters say no one will watch. But really, it’s ‘not as many will watch it as American Idol’. You won’t get the same numbers. But what if we gave them more and don’t hide it’s Canadian? Would they abandon in droves? They’ll abandon because it’s lousy not because it’s Canadian.”
Parker argues that there should be a bigger commitment to R&D at the script development stage. “In the U.S., if you don’t deliver a hit for a few years, you won’t have a job.”
Canada has the talent. Witness the success of Bones and House. At one point, they were approaching Cancon with the makeup of their cast and staff.
But that’s perhaps the biggest problem. “We don’t really have a TV industry,” says television writer Denis McGrath. “We have a TV bureaucracy industry. Creative works are almost irrelevant. Creative people are irrelevant. The whole thing is set up around these execs at the networks and the BDUs and the funding agencies…and nobody—I mean NOBODY—ever talks about the creative, or the audience.”
If they were interested in the audience, they wouldn’t order a show’s second season before the first season airs and they can gage its success. It’s easier to keep going with a show that exists if all you want to do is fulfill a quota.
“In Canada, there’s no cold analysis because again, everyone wants to talk about tax credits and the deck chairs. So what tends to happen is that everyone uses their bias as a bludgeon to not accept responsibility, and there’s no fact checking, so all the self-serving statements float out there and cancel each other out. Group X, who don’t want to have to make more shows say, ‘oh Canadians don’t want to see Canadian shows.’ Group Y that made a show that didn’t have an engaging A story that kept people’s attention, or was confusing, says, ‘oh, we had lousy promotion.’
“Group Z calls Show M a hit even though it loses more than 60% of its lead in every week because it’s politically useful to keep it around. You don’t learn to be better, you learn to shuck blame and make excuses. And you also never get better because your talent pool gets tired and drops out or leaves. THAT would be a wonderful discussion. But we never get to have it because we’re always talking about how to arrange the deck chairs.”
Have anything you’d like to tell us about Canadian content? Let us know by dropping us a line at editorial@cartt.ca. We’ll even keep it confidential if you wish.
