“If you think about it, English Canada is roughly the same size as or a little bigger than Australia. But Australia doesn’t have all the American services on a little island beaming signals into every household. And boy, does that make a difference — and the US isn’t just an hour or two away, luring all the talent.”
Grant sees Flashpoint’s success not as the product of a bold new strategy, but as a lightning strike. He warns, “You can’t count on that to build an industry.”
CBC broadcast its first television show in 1952. In the years since, there’s never been much agreement about what kinds of shows Canadians should make, or how to get other Canadians to watch them. One strategy, of course, is to do what the new school of Canadian dramas is doing: make shows that look American. With their emphasis on heated confrontations and ticking-clock scenarios, Flashpoint and The Border are imitative of the action-heavy model epitomized by 24 and NCIS.
But emulating the pace and, more important, the production values of American television is something Canadian producers have never accomplished to anyone’s satisfaction — at least not until recently. Perhaps that’s why the Canadian shows that traditionally enjoyed the greatest success on both sides of the border shared one quality: the willingness to deviate from American norms. Think of the sly, self-mocking blend of comedy, drama, and sleuthing in Seeing Things and Due South; or the frank explosion of adolescence in Linda Schuyler’s Degrassi High; or the grubby, low-key realism of Da Vinci’s Inquest; or even the often less-than-rosy nostalgia of Road to Avonlea .
According to Mary Jane Miller, professor emeritus at Brock University and the author of several books on the history of Canadian television, the best Canadian shows have exhibited several distinguishing traits: “a tolerance of moral ambivalence, open-ended narrative structures, a willingness to experiment with the medium itself, and an ironic vision of authoritarian values.” Not surprisingly, she casts a wary eye on the new US-ready genre. “Why would we do anything that looks American? They already do it, and they do it very well.”
Dramas are considered a bellwether for the Canadian television industry, because they’ve always been so difficult to make on the limited resources at the disposal of producers. During CBC’s first few decades, homegrown drama content consisted primarily of filmed versions of theatre productions and anthology series. Not until 1966, when it created Wojeck, starring John Vernon as a tough-nosed coroner, did the network produce a hit in English Canada. (It ended shortly after, when Vernon was lured away to Hollywood.) In the 1980s, the public broadcaster’s signature drama was Street Legal , a prime-time soap that managed to Canadianize an American hit (L.A. Law) with more aplomb than usual.
Meanwhile, American programming dominated private networks like CTV, which was launched in 1961. Throughout the 1970s, the CRTC expanded its subsidy and quota system to foster domestic production and programming, and as a consequence the proportion of Canadian content (including comedy) on English-language television rose, from 2 percent in 1984 to 17 percent in 2001. But it was not an easy battle. In 1979, the regulator refused to renew CTV’s licence, after the network repeatedly ignored orders to include weekly Canadian drama on its schedule. CTV appealed the decision, but in a ruling three years later the Supreme Court upheld the CRTC’s right to impose such conditions.
Peter Grant outlines the problem in his 2004 book, Blockbusters and Trade Wars: Popular Culture in a Globalized World. “Left to their own devices,” he writes, “private broadcasters will respond to a vaguely worded local-content quota that fails to distinguish between program genres by providing the least-expensive local fare possible.” That was made evident in 1999, when the CRTC’s decision to expand Canadian content regulations to include reality programming and entertainment “news” shows devastated dramatic production. (Launching the career of eTalk co-host Ben Mulroney was another unfortunate side effect.) Janet MacLean, co-creator of The Border and a veteran writer for shows such as Road to Avonlea, recalls how “Canadian series disappeared overnight. We went from having a substantial number of Canadian dramas down to two within a very short time — it was extreme.”
One of the survivors was Da Vinci’s Inquest, the CBC series starring Nicholas Campbell as a Wojeck-like city coroner. “The regime at the CBC was very progressive,” says creator Chris Haddock. “They supported me and kept their hands off.” He was less fortunate with a subsequent regime, which cancelled his series Intelligence in 2007. In the ensuing war of words, CBC brass took the position that at 350,000 the show’s viewership wasn’t strong enough to warrant further support. Haddock accused them of burying the show. “If they had worked as hard to promote it as they did to erase it, it would have been a miracle.”
As the number of dramas on the conventional networks waned, the CRTC and the Canadian Television (now Media) Fund compelled the specialty, pay, and cable networks to spend more on domestic production. This created an opportunity to make programs using the shorter-run BBC model rather than the open-ended style preferred in the US. One such show was Slings and Arrows, which aired between 2003 and 2006 on the Movie Network and Movie Central, and on Showcase in Canada. “The brass ring in American network television is to create something that can last forever, until it dies a humiliating death,” says Bob Martin, who co-wrote the show with Mark McKinney and Susan Coyne. “It’s a different way of conceiving a product. It’s more about setting and character than story, because it has to be open ended. You can have little arcs within a long run. With Slings and Arrows, because we knew it was going to be limited we really could concentrate on story.”
