Soothing our nation through its cathode rays since 1961, the CTV Television Network has plenty of tradition to live up to: platitudinous banter on Canada AM, lunchtime with the late Uncle Bobby, cheaptacular game shows like Definition and Headline Hunters, suppertime World Beat News with Tom Gibney and Lloyd Robertson’s national sedative before sign-off. Their local compound in Agincourt (address: 9 Channel 9 Court) has long been our equivalent to Universal Studios, only the set of The Trouble With Tracy wasn’t preserved for its own theme park.
What they made the most money at, like any good 20th century Canadian broadcaster, was brokering commercial time for American shows — simultaneous substitution on the cable dial was their best friend. Then, a few years ago, the durability of that model became endangered and new measures had to be taken.
This morning, a quartet of press conferences at the Park Hyatt Hotel provided a chance to see the stars of this new paradigm. CTV’s day of upfront presentations finds them boasting of three new shows — one more than ABC’s fall schedule has. That’s in no small part because one of the series will air this summer on CBS, another will run on NBC and the third is a franchise made familiar by Fox.
Corner Gas, the most unrepentantly Canadian of all, is actually going into its final season. While initially the beneficiary of a two-year funding envelope to cushion the Bell Globemedia takeover of the network, Brent Butt’s small-town Saskatchewan sitcom surprisingly proved it could thrive on its own, yet next spring CTV will broadcast the final episode — just over five years since the first.
That’s old news to a roomful of wags that cover Canadian television, but the full Corner Gas cast assembled here, largely to press the flesh with advertisers later in the afternoon. Butt is nonetheless put through the paces of explaining the end.
“I don’t even feel like I made the decision,” he says. “I feel like the show made the decision. I was tempted to do one more season, as a shameless cash grab, but it wouldn’t be right. Outside of a bank heist, it doesn’t make sense to do anything as a cash grab.” Bob Newhart was quoted in today’s Toronto Sun, amenable toward the suggestion that he’d be a dream cameo for one of the final Corner Gas episodes, but there are apparent complications due to past creative blunders, says Butt: “He has a bee his bonnet about doing half-hour television.”
The gang makes no effort to look anything but the employees of a petrol station in Dog River — even the women from the show who make some concession to glam up for the occasion have the posture of wage slaves. Somewhere in that honesty lies the secret to the success of Corner Gas, and talk of a movie version.
But it’s the two male and two female stars of The Listener, who appear on the dais for the next session, that look groomed for a Canadian equivalent of How I Met Your Mother — only more multicultural. What they’ve been recruited for, though, is an hour-long drama about a telepathically cursed twentysomething.
Well, at least they’re better looking than Louis Del Grande and the rest of the schlubs who comprised the cast of Seeing Things on CBC a quarter-century ago. How else would NBC be interested in the show, even one that sounds relatively unapologetic about being set in Toronto. The inner dialogue from star Craig Olejnik’s character in the opening sequence of the pilot episode sounds as trite as it comes (“When God sets you up with free cable he expects you to do a little surfing”). More unique is that he’s riding local rails on a vintage PCC streetcar.
The look of that first episode was the calculated effort of director Clement Virgo, who’s applied that scenic Toronto affection to his movies, and now aspires to do it in a context that will be seen. How those explicit allusions will be received by NBC seems to generate suspicion among the old-school teevee press corps. What doesn’t get raised, maybe as not to hurt the feelings of the youngish cast, is what happens if The Listener follows the most likely American scenario of being cancelled after a week or three. For once, thanks to CTV’s regulated side of the deal, the 13-show season is at least guaranteed to air on its home turf.
Flashpoint’s stars are next to be prodded. This made-in-Toronto cop series (inspired by the travails of this town’s Emergency Task Force) is ready to roll on CBS starting next month, on Friday nights at 10pm, all summer long — the very sort of time slot that would be derided as a dumping ground if CTV tried it alone, only this cross-border synergy hasn’t happened since Due South, 14 years ago.
Glenn Frey of The Eagles once starred in a CBS detective series, South of Sunset, which was cancelled after one episode in 1993. Flashpoint’s idea of a rock star is Hugh Dillon — the former Headstones frontman, now without hair.
The frontline cast is all-Canadian — imperative should stateside actors take their turn to strike this summer: Enrico Colantoni, formerly of Just Shoot Me and Veronica Mars, responds to the initial questions about his role as a sergeant intensely enough to suggest he’s been waiting to be taken seriously for a while.
Amy Jo Johnson — once of The Mighty Morphin’ Power Rangers and who even more famously played the dour dorm-mate Julie on Felicity — grew up around Cape Cod, but has actually resided for the past couple years in Montreal, coming off like a Generation X antihero who, instead of being a serial rock star dater a la Winona Ryder, writes songs of her own. She doesn’t say much, and isn’t the least bit loquacious about why she took this gig: “I wanted to do a show that my dad would really enjoy.”
Thankfully, the media at these press conferences aren’t being barraged with hyperbole — that’d be onstage at the Four Seasons Press Centre for the Performing Arts later in the day — although CTV’s dominance of the domestic television landscape is reflected in its two local news operations, CP24 and CFTO-TV, constantly filming and filing reports from the other side of the room. Of course, the listing magazines that were once counted on to print cheerleading fluff on behalf of the medium have basically been pronounced dead.
But should CTV leverage all of their properties — which now include 35 specialty channels and local A-Channel stations across the country — to create the perception of a hit show? A story by Bill Brioux in the Sunday Star suggested that it’s only going to backfire in the case of Canadian Idol, since inferiority can’t be masked by overkill.
For the last session, though, the assault was confined to the increasingly crowded room, as 11 people involved with the fall show So You Think You Can Dance Canada took their places to stir up anticipation for 45 shrill minutes.
Leah Miller, the MuchMusic VJ recruited as host, yields the spotlight to seven judges — a couple of whom are known from the American version of the show — two choreographers, and executive producer Sandra Faire. Whatever they’re gushing about doesn’t sound like Electric Circus; more like the shows produced by CTV when the era of musical variety shows ran their course at the end of the ‘70s, their place on the schedule taken by Circus, Stars on Ice and Thrill of a Lifetime.
For a business where everything known at the turn of the millennium is now wrong, such comparisons might seem prehistoric. Then again, the inaugural 1961-62 season on CTV did include a show called Cross Canada Barndance.
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