It doesn't seem 'Canadian': quality television' and Canadian-American co-productions

CineAction, Winter, 2009 by Anita Lam

Flashpoint: One Moment Changes Everything

Flashpoint, the English-Canadian (1) one-hour scripted drama about an elite police tactical unit, can be considered the manifestation of a particular moment in Canadian television history. It is a moment that has profoundly changed the television production landscape in such a way that Canadian television scholars have yet to find a way to fruitfully discuss these changes. Flashpoint was born from the dramatic drop-off in American television production during the hundred-day Writers Guild of America strike, which spanned from November 2007 to February 2008, and can be considered the most proximate cause of why Flashpoint was picked up by American network CBS for co-production and simulcasting purposes. It could be argued that Canadian television scholars were experiencing their own drop-off in the production of innovative theories and methods for how to address the changes being wrought on the production of English-Canadian television programs. They continue to analyze English-Canadian television through the themes of nation building and citizenship, (2) even though this paradigm of understanding television as a tool for disseminating and affirming Canadian identity has been considered a constraint to new forms of television scholarship. (3) It is particularly a limitation to understanding the production of the new crop of Canadian-American co-productions on private television networks (e.g. CTV and CanWest Global). Analysis of these programs is not furthered by scholarly arguments for public television service, or by determining the ways in which the CBC's mandate to "Canadianize" television has succeeded or not. Such analysis is also disabled by redundant analyses of how aggressive American culture is endangering a traditional Canadian culture, (4) precisely because a successful co-produced program must appeal to both sets of audiences in the context of their respective cultures. (5)

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This paper is informed by the particular context of producing this new crop of English-Canadian television programs for a private television network. However, it will not be a macro-analysis of the political economies that have produced such a context, even though such an analysis has long informed the study of English-Canadian television studies. (6) Instead, I will use a microanalysis of the production of a CanWest Global/Showcase pilot, tentatively titled Lawyers, Guns and Money (7), to think though the following questions: how do producers negotiate the content of the pilot to appeal to both Canadian network programmers and potential American network programmers, so that both sets of programmers would agree that it is "quality" television? Is the standard of "quality" set by American television programs? Is this appeal to "quality" what makes a pilot successful (or rephrased, how do you measure the success of a television pilot)? I have chosen Lawyers, Guns and Money as my case study because of my capacity to observe its production as an insider, which allows me to document how the production has shaped itself to be palatable to both the Canadian and (potential) American markets. Drawing from actor-network theory, I argue that this particular Canadian pilot's success is due to its ability to mobilize American-associated markers of "quality" in order to convince network executives that it itself is a "quality" production.

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Economic Flashpoint: Canada Exports "Quality"

While American networks have been making television shows in Canada for years to gain tax benefits, Flashpoint became only the second Canadian-American (CTV/CBS) co-production of a television series, following Due South in 1994. Its consistently strong prime-time ratings on both sides of the border have made Flashpoint a successful experiment, and a blueprint for a new economic model of television production. Facing a softening advertising market, a fragmented audience, reduced production on the number of television pilots, a general reduction in prime-time programming costs, and the economic downturn, (8) American network executives have become quite open to co-producing television series with Canadian independent production companies. Since Flashpoint has come to exemplify the success of Canadian content with an American audience, the following co-productions are being developed and/or shooting currently in Toronto, and will be aired between 2009 and 2010: CTV/CBS' The Bridge, CTV/NBC's The Listener, and Global/ABC's Copper. While one can emphasize the economic advantages of co-productions, Peter Sussman, former chief executive officer of Alliance Atlantis Communications Inc.'s entertainment division, suggests a different emphasis: "These shows didn't get on the air because of the business deal. They made it onto the air because they are quality productions". (9)

Here I want to investigate what might be meant by the term "quality." Although Canada is the second, only to the U.S., largest exporter of television programming worldwide, (10) Canadians themselves have long held the view that their television is not "quality" television--namely, that it is not very good because it is awkward, slow, and earnest. (11) Reiterating this sentiment, Enrico Colantoni, principal actor on Flashpoint, "wants people to know that [Flashpoint is] a Canadian show and be fooled by that ... [and] wants them to know that Canada produces quality shows and we can compete with the best of the American product". (12) Again, the term "quality" surfaces, but this time to suggest that "quality" is defined by being as good as the best American television programs. This in turn implies that the standard of "quality" is set by American television productions and any Canadian program aspiring to be "quality" must be made equivalent to this standard. The question then becomes, assuming that "quality" is not an ahistorical designation, why is "quality" programming associated with American programming?