A deftly rendered theatre-world satire that doubled as a keen-eyed workplace comedy and a passionate celebration of Shakespeare, Slings and Arrows won the Gemini Award for best dramatic series for two of its three seasons. When it aired on the Sundance Channel in the United States, it attracted an ardent following and reams more good press — the New York Times’ Virginia Heffernan called it “charming and complex and lovely.” (It was paid an even stranger compliment by director Fernando Meirelles who remade the series for Brazil under the title Som e Fúria, or Sound and Fury.) In Martin’s view, Canadians should take pride in the fact that so many American reviewers said a show like Slings and Arrows could never have been made in America. “That’s what’s great about Canada,” he says. “Because the market is smaller, we can take chances.”
Maybe so, but it’s telling that neither Martin nor Haddock, the forces behind two of Canada’s best dramatic series, is part of the post-Flashpoint wave of production. Although Martin is in early talks with Showtime about a new series, he’s busier in the theatre world: The Drowsy Chaperone, which he developed with his friends in Toronto’s comedy scene, went on to become Canada’s most successful export to Broadway, and he’s now preparing for the New York debut of a new musical comedy called Minsky’s. As for Haddock, having burned his bridges in Canada following the ugly demise of Intelligence, he is now writing and pitching in Los Angeles in the hope of making a new US-backed series (possibly an Americanized version of Intelligence), which he wants to shoot in Vancouver.
T o call attention to the scarcity of Canadian drama on the domestic private sector networks, a contingent of actors, including Gordon Pinsent and Wendy Crewson, staged a protest outside Toronto’s Massey Hall, where Global was premiering its 2007 season for the media. “Our airwaves are now filled with American shows, 24-7,” said Crewson. “It’s time Canadians were given a choice in what they can watch in prime time.”
Meanwhile, the makers of Flashpoint and The Border were preparing to launch shows that presented, at least in their minds, a brand of television entertainment that retained Canadian values but would attract the same viewers who flocked to US shows. Ironically, the creators of both found inspiration in 24, notwithstanding its bent for right-wing paranoia, and Jack Bauer’s indefatigable confidence in the harshest of interrogation techniques. In promoting The Border, co-creator Peter Raymont took to describing it as “24, but with a conscience.” According to Mark Ellis, the original pitch for Flashpoint promised a show with “the look and style of a CSI and the pace of a 24.”
Ellis points to Flashpoint’s “core Canadian values” as a big reason for its success. “This is a show about a SWAT team,” he explains, “yet its motto is ‘Let’s keep the peace.’ That motto is bound into our identity; we Canadians think of ourselves as peacekeepers. So it’s really gratifying that it has gone out into the world and into the US market, and that people have responded to it.” The weapons on Flashpoint are ubiquitous but, as he says, fired “very selectively. We never shoot first and ask questions later — we always ask questions first.”
As for The Border, Janet MacLean thinks viewers are responding to the ways in which it presents Canadian- specific subjects — from the illegal dumping of toxic waste, to eco-terrorism in Alberta, to the smuggling of child brides for a polygamist sect — in a more compelling manner. “I really wanted to present these issues as being played out in Canada with the same urgency that they are played out anywhere else,” she says. “Canadians are used to feeling like they’re not part of the world stage, like the exciting stuff all happens somewhere else, when it’s really just how the stuff is framed.”
Although both shows peer into the private lives of their characters, they allow little room for introspection, and action inevitably trumps talk. “The problem with Flashpoint and, to some degree, The Border is that the resolution is almost always guns,” says Mary Jane Miller. “That simply isn’t a reflection of either Canadian life as it is lived, or of Canadian television drama’s history.”
Proponents of the new programs might counter that Canadian TV drama has entered a new era — although the negative response from CTV and Global to the CRTC’s recent suggestion that the private networks should spend as much on Canadian programming as they do on American imports does not instill confidence for the long term. Nor does history suggest that the private networks will remain enthusiastic about producing new Canadian shows if they fail to attract Flashpoint-like ratings.
This could once again make CBC the only game in town, albeit in an ever-more-weakened state. Heritage Minister James Moore recently decreed that the corporation would now have to compete with private broadcasters for access to the Canadian Media Fund. “It’s an eternally complex business,” says Miller. “To me, the most basic point of all is that there is no stable, multi-year funding. That’s what the CBC has requested for the past 60 or 70 years, and it’s never gotten it, and that’s unique in public broadcasting around the world.” According to a 2006 study, the BBC — which Peter Grant rightly calls “the envy of all public broadcasters around the world” — receives approximately $124 per citizen for its services; the CBC gets $33.
Grant remains skeptical about banking the industry’s future health on the emergence of more Flashpoints. “The key thing here,” he says, “is that in a scenario where you essentially have an unpredictable demand for a series, you want to have a lot of bets at the table. And honestly, you want a volume of different kinds of drama. Flashpoint represents a certain kind of drama: it’s a police procedural; there are lots of those on the air, and they seem to do very well. But there’s room for many other types of shows.”
