I started to be conscious of the fact that all these Canadian shows were appearing without a blip on my radar and wondered why. Was I just not paying attention? Or was the industry not paying attention to me?
That writer, Denis McGrath, ended up using me as a case study of how the industry is not reaching viewers (TV Mandarins Meet the Viewer: Part One and Part Two), and his questions probed the ways the industry has failed to connect to me in the present. On top of the discussions at Banff, I'm starting to feel the industry isn't particularly interested in connecting to me in the future, either.
Listening to executives fretting about international markets felt a little insulting. What about me? Wouldn't they like to make a TV show I might want to watch and then let me know about it so I can watch it? I heard "let's protect Canadian content in the scary new world of the unregulated Internet, but let's not make it too Canadian or we can't sell it."
I heard it suggested that successful shows like Corner Gas and Trailer Park Boys might be too Canadian for international markets, despite the fact that the former had just signed a US distributor, and the latter is broadcast on BBC America. Not to mention the apparently unimportant fact that Canadians like to watch them, too.
I had to wonder if, in their hunger for the secondary markets of the future, they'd forgotten their primary audience of the future, an audience that in the past made shows like Degrassi, Slings & Arrows, and DaVinci's Inquest successful within our borders before they were embraced outside them.
The future of Canadian television also seems to overlook the primary product in the zeal to create secondary products. The suits talked about how to entice viewers through means other than television – that is, how to use new technologies and media to drive people to programming and vice versa. They talked about audiovisual content on the web, cell phone videos, and the need to train and support more Canadian artists to produce this new multi-platform content.
Article comments
1 - AlbertaLife
We have not done enough in terms of Canadian content, and a lot of the CanCon we have simply sucks (e.g., Jeff Ltd., which is a textbook example of what happens when untalented actors and writers get together).
I have been lamenting the lack of CanCon, and I have been calling for the adoption of European law, which states that you have to show 60% domestic content.
2 - Diane Kristine
I hate to say it, but I don't know that more Canadian content is the answer right now, when we can't produce and promote what is on the air now properly. I think we should focus on doing it right first, then doing more of it.
3 - Brent
Dianne, I'm not entirely convinced that both you and AlbertaLife aren't right and wrong at the same time. I think that there are loopholes in the regulations that need to be plugged, like the ones which allow networks to show a lot of their Cancon during the summer, and which define "peak viewing hours" (aka "prime time") in such a way that the evening and late night local newscasts count towards a station's peak viewing hour quota. Make the stations make the quota on a quarterly basis rather than an annual one is just one way to go. At the same time we need to find some way to encourage quality programming in shows that aren't co-productions with some foreign network or did we all forget the farce that was Canwest's "Adventures of Sinbad", shot in South Africa and money from All-American TV and with only a couple of Canadian Actors and government money to make it "Canadian".