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Daren in Brief - CANADIAN AMERICAN TV
by Daren Foster

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Daren in Brief
Canadian American TV

by Daren Foster

Amidst all the doom and gloom about the future of Canadian television, green shoots of optimism have sprouted up erratically throughout the barren landscape. American networks, it seems, have cottoned onto the notion long known by their Canadian counterparts that it is far cheaper to buy pre-made product than to go all in on your own to produce it yourself. This is how our country’s private broadcasters once grew fat before the world collapsed around their ears. Leave all the creative (and expensive) decisions to someone else and just shill over the chump change needed to buy the finished product.

Not since 1994 with Due South has a Canadian made television series made it onto the American primetime lineup. Now they’re nearly running rampant. First came CTV’s Flashpoint bought up CBS and garnering respectable ratings stateside with a 3rd season already ordered. CBS has also picked up another CTV series, The Bridge. NBC hopped into bed with CTV giving The Listener a whirl (while ending their involvement in the co-pro prank show, Howie Do It.. proving that sometimes taste does transcend nationalities and countries can come together in agreement on the fact that Howie Mandel is a jag-off). Global is now in on the act with their show that is just about to go into production, Copper, that ABC has purchased.

So what’s all this talk about the death of Canadian television drama? It appears that all we had to do to get the private broadcasters to live up to their license obligations was to generate interest from American networks. And all we needed to do to generate interest from American networks was for the economy to flatline and have their usual revenue stream to shrivel up. Easy-peasy.

It’s too bad, however, that based on what I’ve seen so far, what our network’s have shown a knack for is bland, forgettable procedurals. Despite a nice visual flair, Flashpoint -- taking you behind the lines of a big city tactical response squad aka a much more earnest version of the 70s show, S.W.A.T. -- quickly evolved into a hostage-a-show formula. Is it really possible that even in the most crime ridden of big cities, the swat team is called on every day or even every week? I would imagine it to be an interminably dull existence punctuated by moments of pure, nerve-racking tension. Not really a format to draw much attention from the big U.S. networks, I guess.

That said, Flashpoint has it in spades over the first couple episodes of The Listener. How’s this for a pitch? Two words. Telepathic paramedic. Huh! Huh?! He “sees” accidents before they happen but not soon enough to stop them. Where would the tension be in that? Some guy running around the big city stopping outbreaks of murder and mayhem before they occur. Who’d watch that? Instead, what you have with The Listener is a paramedic “seeing” things when he needs clues to solve the mystery and not “seeing” things when the show needs something to blow up. Things blow up a lot in the first couple episodes of The Listener.

To be fair, The Listener did not invent the telepathic subgenre of the crime procedural. It simply.. derives from it. The Ghost Whisperer. Medium. Even Tim Roth’s Lie to Me has a paranormal degree to just how absolutely accurate his character is in reading other people’s body language. The magical machines of the CSI franchise also possess otherworldly qualities that help break cases. Hell, for sheer preposterousness, check out The Mentalist. That dude hypnotizes people into effortlessly handing over clues to the police. How lazy a story department is that?!

So yeah, three cheers to our Canadian broadcasters for keeping scripted drama alive by slavishly imitating bad formulaic American television and selling it back to them. Better that than a dying homegrown TV industry. I think.