Examining the Core Reasons Behind the Floundering of the Canadian TV Funding Model on the Eve of the Geminis

(Toronto) In the absence of any significant news to comment on for several days with regards to the English Canadian film industry, I had thought of commenting on the Gemini awards. However mainstream media, both right and left biased ones, are doing a pretty comprehensive job on putting it in perspective. A very negative perspective, it appears. However, to be fair, and going beyond the first glance, it’s hard to gather a real diversity of opinions because, like so much entertainment news, most of the stories are just cut and paste from one or two sources of information, rather than having an actual entertainment reporter or editor based at the paper write up their coverage. Perhaps there is a more diverse group of opinions to be heard and read regarding the state of English Canadian Television and where it stands and where it is going, or appears to be going?

While I have a keen interest to keep on top of most of what’s going on in Canadian Film, I’m probably not the right person to comment on Canadian Television, based on my hours committed to the box. Personally I spend very little time watching TV because the onslaught of the empty Celebrity Culture Machine from the mega-multi-media corps that has developed in the post-Entertainment Tonight era is so overwhelming and irritatingly omnipresent -- even on what are supposed to be Canadian TV stations.

That said, I have made it a point to watch some Canadian TV. And, unfortunately, when I have tuned in to most new Canadian shows in the past two years or so, they were hopeless disasters like What It’s Like Being Alone or some of the terrible Showcase series -- basically anything but Trailer Park Boys on Showcase has proven to be terrible. Which is odd, because one would think they’d learn from their one success and allow the creators of other new series do their own thing without interference like the people behind Trailer Park Boys were able to do (at least that’s what you read in all the interviews), but Showcase doesn’t seem to have caught on to that and their other products all seem as insincere and as unconvincing as TPB is genuine. Perhaps they’re just empowering the wrong people? I caught a few episodes of Corner Gas. It wasn’t for me, but at least I could see how some people might like it. I could be wrong, but it seems to demonstrate the same aura of sincerity as does TPB. Reading interviews with the creator(s) behind that, it seems to reflect a not dissimilar situation as far as creator control.

If that’s the case with those two shows, this represents a difficult lesson to learn from, or rather something which is difficult to implement for future successes. Looking at the limited commonality of the two shows, and comparing them to the many failed Canadian series that surround them, here’s a model for a successful English Canadian TV series: It has a large populous base for subject matter and setting; it has a genre, but is not a rip-off of an existing identifiable American director or filmmaker or TV series; it doesn’t shove an artificial multi-cultural agenda down peoples throats, but rather it may use a diverse cast/creators mix organically; and the main creators of the show call the shots with minimal input by the broadcaster’s development team to keep it from becoming too safely predictable and manufactured in fabric, thereby preserving a distinctive voice.

The difficulty in implementation emerges because not only does such a model negate much of the input and usefulness of the bureaucracy of both a public broadcaster such as CBC (and Telefilm itself), but it also swings the other way and negates the development team and executives at a broadcaster like CTV, who uses an American-style bureaucracy for its dramatic TV development, which is even compromised further, because they base big decisions in this area on Telefilm’s decisions. Because broadcasters like CTV and Alliance and Global have been enabled by the government to rely so heavily on American programming for their bulk content, because they are also enabled by the government to spend as little as possible out of their big profits on Canadian dramatic television and rely on Telefilm and other tax-payer funded sources instead of themselves and corporate investment, and because they have been enabled not to depend on ratings for those shows for further government hand-outs for new shows developed the same way, the status quo of ineffectively providing Canadian television content is largely preserved.

So how did we get success stories like Trailer Park Boys and Corner Gas in the first place? Seemingly sustainable series that appear to run on their own power of public popularity? Why did they give those creators the chance? Unfortunately, while I think we can pretty effectively draw up a basic model for Canadian TV series success if we’re honest about things, the enabling of effective TV series creators is not so cut and dry and there are many paths to that and examples to reject it as a model, truth be told. For example, Ken Finkelman has had tonnes of chances on CBC, with real empowerment as a creator but his shows, which were okay, had little public acceptance.

Looking at TPB, and seeing how Alliance/Showcase operates, and reading all the articles/interviews that have come my way on it, the filmmakers got the power largely because of two reasons: a) The cast and crew were all there in place and acting as a pretty much uniform force, being mostly long-time friends, and having done a forgettable short film together that got into the Atlantic Film Festival and set up the whole concept before hand. b) The show is made in Nova Scotia and was cheap to make. Therefore, Alliance/Showcase didn’t have to dig very deep into their own pockets at all and could rely on a strongly supportive provincial funding agency and Telefilm to flip the bill for most of it.

Unfortunately therein lies the major, unsavoury truth of the English Canadian Television equation, and points to why things are as they are, overall. These shows only appear to run on their power of public popularity. The truth of why they were made initially and continue on in production, is not so wholesome.

I don’t know exact figures, but I would guess that Alliance/Showcase are still paying only a small fraction for the production of the TPB series, though it is a “success“ that has lasted some five seasons now. And I’d bet anything that if Telefilm and Nova Scotia had decided at, say, the third season to stop funding Trailer Park Boys, then a “success”, Alliance/Showcase would have stopped making it. If Telefilm and Nova Scotia were to withdraw funding for the show right now (perhaps arguing progressively that it is time to look at new potential success stories to fund to join TPB in the Showcase line-up), and point out that Alliance is going to have to operate like any other successful business and fund their own successful product, TPB would be dropped. Count on it. From what anybody can see from their track record, they aren’t any more willing to back Canadian dramatic series than, say, CHUM has been. Though the dramatic development team at CHUM, from the top down, must be the most inept in the world, based on their track record.

And that’s the glass heel that can be broken out from under even the most lauded Canadian TV show success stories: You cut the public funding to produce Corner Gas and Trailer Park Boys and require commercial Canadian Broadcasters to pay to continue to produce their own successful series from their profits, and watch them get cancelled. They don’t have to pay much for success or failure from the ridiculously minimal level of original Canadian dramatic content they must produce because it’s mostly all subsidized, while they enjoy big profits from American TV with zero Canadian culture content. Meanwhile at CBC, they appear to act largely with impunity it seems, and are able to put out show after show with miniscule ratings, answering to themselves. Or so it appears. At least in their favour, until the recent embarrassing talent show thing, they can make some claim towards attempting Canadian culture. However, it appears the pressure is on there these days.

So here’s the English Canadian Television welfare quandary: Culture is only truly created when the culture it’s created for embraces it and accepts it as its own, and continues to be created when the creators embrace it themselves. But when the creators of culture do not truly embrace it, are not required to significantly risk financially for what they create, and rely on the public taxation funding mechanism of the culture in order for it to be created (without which, they willingly let it perish), then there is no naturally sustainable authentic culture being produced.