In last year’s TV, eh? Charity Auction in support of Kids Help Phone, one of the top prizes was a Murdoch Mysteries gift package plus a walk-on role on season six, donated by Shaftesbury. Winner Jane Borkowski recently visited the set and sent this picture of her Murdoch debut. Thank you for the generous bid and congratulations to Jane.
From Dexter Brown:
Get out your hockey sticks and baseball bats — this week Rewind looks at SportsDesk.
Taking the form of a more traditional newscast when compared to the noisy and flashy successor SportsCentre, SportsDesk (TSN, 1984-2001) was the sport network’s flagship broadcast.
SportsDesk‘s intro, opening music and graphics were more lively when compared to network newscasts from the same era and often felt remarkably true to the time when each were put into place.
However, when SportsDesk tackled stories like the loss of the Winnipeg Jets for example it could get dull, dreadfully dull. Choosing to fill a few minutes with meaningless sound bites then going to some banter between the hosts and a more traditional story of getting reaction of the news from two or so people in a crusty looking bar, it felt squarely aimed at the die-hard sports fan who could tolerate anything as long as it dealt in some way or another with sports.
TSN did try to jazz up its reports by adding some cheesy background music but that didn’t really do much to help.
As with SportsCentre and many other sports news shows, during a typical episode of SportsDesk you had to sit through some mindless jibberjabber from athletes. The sound bites that make it onto the air often have them sounding like airheads, talking about winning and team effort and what not.
By the late 90s SportsDesk released a series of humorous commercials and the light-heartedness of the successor show, SportsCentre began to take hold.
With the advent of tickers on cable news and the excessive bombardment with random boxes of information like Toronto’s cable news network CP24, TSN has since developed a complex ticker that airs at the bottom of the screen during its current flagship sports news broadcast, dubbed the Bottom Line.
As SportsDesk evolved into SportsCentre it represented quite a shift in philosophy in Canadian television that it too should mimic the glitz of American television, down to the loud music, the obnoxious and nonsensical graphics, the in your-face-TV personalities, and even further down to being rather shallow and losing focus of what it was set out to do in the first place.
Today, SportsCentre‘s signature seems to be its dash of humour thrown into virtually every episode such as playing out the suspense of revealing where SportsCentre would be broadcasting from on the road by pulling out a piece of paper revealing the location out of an envelope reading “Top Secret” written in marker or having a segment filmed in a zoo. Sometimes snark is hidden in a recap of the day’s sporting events, but with the show going by at lightning speed, it’s easy to miss.
While SportsDesk might be off the air, you could catch its successor SportsCentre daily on TSN and TSN2 and Saturday mornings on CTV.
Christina Jennings, Chairman and CEO of Shaftesbury, founded the company in 1987 and has led its emergence as one of Canada’s leading production companies (who also give great prizes to a certain website’s charity auction). Shaftesbury series include Murdoch Mysteries, The Listener and Good God. She spoke with me a couple of months ago about her company, career, the job of a creative producer, and the rescue of Murdoch Mysteries.
Shaftesbury has a very diverse lineup – how do you choose what projects to pursue?
It always comes down to passion. Life is too short. It takes an awful lot of time from a lot of people in our company to get a project realized so you really have to love it and be prepared to stick with it. It isn’t easy. It’s getting more challenging. So whether it’s a kids project or one hour series or half hour comedy or a digital property or even a factual show, it’s got to resonate with us. Do I have to love everything as the head of the company? Probably not, but I do. I know everything we acquire and why we’re acquiring it. It’s got to be passion.
The other thing we tell creators and writer is that even if we love your project, we don’t want to take it on if ultimately we don’t think we can help them get it made, again getting to “life is too short.†I can think of all sorts of examples that we just loved but when we sat down we said to ourselves we’re not going to be able to get this thing made right now in this current climate, with these broadcasters, or with the current package. So we are selective and that’s our process.
Has your business model changed given the changing TV landscape? Does something like Totally Amped signal a new area for Shaftesbury?
There’s no question and I say it every single day: I am having to train myself and we as a team are having to train ourselves into approaching content as content and being somewhat platform agnostic. Totally Amped and State of Syn are two examples. They started life as completely independent. One is going out through iTunes and now online through various broadcasters around the world. It’s a whole different way of looking at it.
Now people bring us a project and we do all our steps of: do we like the project, do we like the team who’s involved with the project, do we think we can actually get the show made. And then we say to ourselves, where’s the best place to deploy this project? Six months to a year ago, projects would come in here and we’d say which broadcaster do we sell this to? Which broadcaster in Canada, and the States, and Europe? We don’t do that anymore. We ask ourselves where could we launch this perhaps faster, where could we incubate a project where yes, it’s a smaller budget, but we get to try something out. That’s how we’re approaching things now. That’s not to say that a huge part of our business isn’t projects that we acquire for television, because that is the core of our business.
How has the co-production model helped with getting projects made? Do you see a downside?
We’ve probably been doing co-productions right back from our feature days and moved right into TV co-productions, so it’s probably 20 years we’ve been doing them. If I look at Murdoch Mysteries, while that’s not a treaty coproduction it is a broadcaster co-production. We sure couldn’t make Murdoch Mysteries without those UK partners. The plus side there is that those partners are able to help us get the show made in Canada.
If I think about shows that the British have brought us, years ago we did Diverted, about the planes on September 11 that were diverted from New York and the story of how many people ended up in Gander, Newfoundland. Well, that started out originally as a British project, if you can believe it. A British writer, Tony Marchant, heard the story on British radio and wrote a script, and in the end we got involved and it became a very Canadian production.
You look at each one differently, and I think if there’s a downside it’s that there are only so many time slots for any of our programming across whatever genre. In primetime there are only so many hour long time slots, for kids’ shows there are only so many. You have to be mindful of the fact that if a minority Canadian coproduction is sitting in one of those coveted slots, that means that that’s gone for a Canadian show to come along. The only downside is it makes a bit more competition.
Murdoch Mysteries being rescued by CBC after its Citytv cancellation was one of the good-news stories last season. How did that deal come together?
Kirstine Stewart (head of CBC TV’s English programming). I know Kirstine and she heard the news and she reached out immediately. She knew the show and she knew it worked for her audience, the CBC audience. We are so thrilled with what Citytv did after all those years, and 5 years is a really long run for anybody, but we believed, and CBC did too, that there’s’ a lot of life left in Murdoch. There are a lot more stories to be told. What’s going to be quite exciting when Murdoch does go on the air on CBC is the fact that it will be a national Canadian audience that will get to see Murdoch. Citytv was limited in terms of audience. We did terrific numbers for them, but we were limited in that they’re not a national broadcaster. So we’re pretty excited by that, that people in Canada who’ve not seen Murdoch before might actually finally get to see it.
It does seem odd that when it had good ratings it was cancelled anyway. Do you think it says something about where a Canadian show fits on a Canadian broadcaster?
No, I don’t, I really do think projects have their time and when it launched on City it was never the perfect fit. Every network has a brand, every network has a demo it’s going after, and Murdoch didn’t quite fit. But you know what, City had great numbers, it was doing quite well for them, but at a certain point you have a brand. It was a great five-year run, it was its time to leave City for all sorts of reasons, and now it moves to this different, more national platform on the public broadcaster. I look at their fall lineup and Murdoch fits very nicely. I give Kirstine that credit for reaching out.
When developing a project, what is your role as producer in the creative process? How do you work with writers to create a series, and then throughout a series?
I am a businesswoman running this company but I am also a creative producer. That’s how I started and that’s still what drives me. But I do believe that it is crucial to let the creators have their voice. A creative project is a very delicate thing. There are a lot of voices in our business. There’s the producing voices, broadcasting voice, the partners that are involved have opinions, sometimes you have foreign sales people that have opinions, and in the centre there’s this writer, the creator, holding onto the vision. I very much see our job as trying to help the writer do their best, support their vision.
How we work with an experienced showrunner might be different from how we work with a newcomer who might be looking to us creatively to provide guidance in terms of how do you construct a long running series, how do you answer to network notes. Part of that is just experience. So how we as a company deal with the creators depends on the project. We could all do a fantastic job producing and directing but at the end of the day it really is about that vision and that voice. Once you get it right you can, like Murdoch, have a series go into its 6th season because we found that voice and had that vision. It’s a delicate industry we have in terms of shaping the creative.
How did you get your start as a producer?
I grew up in a very creative family. My father was a writer – a journalist, not a television or film writer – and my brother is a journalist and all sorts of members of my family are writers, and my sister is in the music business. I grew up in a family where it was about being creative, it was not about growing up to be a lawyer. That’s what we lived and breathed. I started in different careers that weren’t necessarily creative but in one I owned a restaurant with some family members and started meeting film and television people and I go back to your first question: I fell in love with their passion. They had these dreams and they wanted to tell their story and it was so important and they were so passionate I just fell in love with that passion. I thought if I can bring my business skills and all of that to the table and work together – I got the extra benefit that it was a creative endeavour. In a way it ticked all the boxes personally.
What advice would you give for somebody who wants to be a producer?
One of the things I’ve realized about what I do is that it’s a multifaceted job. There’s the business aspect so you need to understand business, you need to know how to put the deal together and you need to understand various people’s positions in the financing of a show, so if one of your partners is looking to recoup their investment you have to figure out how to do that.
The amount of homework you have to do, it’s a tough business. You need to know if you have a project like who’s done anything like the project you’re trying to do before you, and have they succeeded or failed. Are there any projects like the one you’re talking about out there. Who’s doing what. You have to be constantly tapped in to your competitors. That’s your homework and you’ve got to do your homework.
It’s the ability to manage a disparate group of people. You’re dealing with writers, broadcasters, money people, you’ve got actors, you’ve got the international marketplace, there’s just a lot to manage. People skills are pretty high on the list of things you need in your bag of tricks.
By Dexter Brown
Today newsmagazines may be met with a yawn. They’re often drawn aside to lousy time slots and throw every predicable gimmick to try to get your attention. There was a time, however, when all that was cutting edge and brand new. This Hour Has Seven Days was one of the genre’s early forms, and this week Rewind takes a look.
As with many landmark television programs, the importance of the show isn’t immediately understood. The program may simply appear different, and may be dismissed as farfetched and implausible, but when they catch on, they catch on like wildfire. This Hour Has Seven Days (CBC, 1964-1966) is one of those programs. It has been noted as heavily influencing the creation of the television newsmagazine genre. W5, the fifth estate, and even CBS’ wildly popular 60 Minutes, all have a lot to owe to Seven Days.
Still, comparing Seven Days to a modern-day TV newsmagazine is a bit unfair. While it did tackle many of its stories in what has since become known as a newsmagazine format, it wasn’t limited to one or two core stories as most Canadian TV newsmagazines are. Seven Days played out like a fusion of the assortment of the stories that you’d typically get in a daily national newscast with the style of your modern-day weekly TV newsmagazine. With that said, Seven Days was a very well-rounded show. It covered everything from books, sports, music, politics and even the taboo subject of sex.
Early on in its run, Seven Days often let the story speak for itself. If the story was crazy, the story showed you what was crazy as opposed to a reporter simply describing it that way. A notable example was their coverage of Beatlemania, a fairly early concept of the since common place boy band phenomenon. The piece for Seven Days consisted of lengthly scenes of screaming fans drowning out a Beatles concert, other fans in tears not knowing what to do with themselves and even more fans blindly professing their love for their favourite Beatle. The maddening assortment of clips spoke for itself rather than having a stuffy newsman tell you about the insanity.
Of course letting the story speak for itself meant that if the story wasn’t anything particularly interesting, it would fall flat on its face. Seven Days‘ coverage of a CFL player who lost a game played out like a movie newsreel of yesteryear or a very dull reality program. It was a sharp contrast to much of the fast-paced, often humorous sports stories you see on the air today.
Despite at this time by treating all their reports with a near consistent feel of importance and also the lack of modern-day cable news’ sensationalism, the stories that were bold still some how stood out. Those reports appear like the gems lost among the rocks.
Their story tackling racism and segregation in the south is a prime example. It contained burning crosses, Klansmen marching around spewing the n-word and racist sentiments around repeatedly and even a body being pulled from the water. It was riveting television and felt particularly surreal when compared to a lot of what is on the air today.
Just a few minutes with Seven Days is staunch reminder that while the 60s have been romanticized with the likes of Mad Men and the less successful Pan Am and The Playboy Club, that things were just as bad back then, perhaps even worse.
As with early incarnations of television programs, however, Seven Days wasn’t perfect. Somethings from the show’s early days have changed for the better. You don’t see interviewees distractingly fidgeting in their chair as much these days. Anchors, reporters and guests no longer smoke on air today. Not as many pedestrians distractingly stop to stare into the camera when an interview is taking place on the street. Profile shots during interviews are uncommon, as is reading directly from a hard copy of a book to set up a story. The swinging sixties theme music would be laughable if it was still used today.
Seven Days grew tremendously during its run. It grew bolder and gained a grasp for creating even more remarkable television. In one episode contained a piece on Penthouse magazine, played with viewers emotions with a piece on the death of a young officer in the line of duty, delivered a much punchier sports story involving a Canadian boxer compared to earlier sports stories, captivated viewers interest with an interview with the legendary Orson Welles and contained an infamous segment where two Klansmen were interviewed with a black man. Through its run, the strange set where each anchor had their own desk each off to themselves at different angles in front of a black backdrop was dropped. This was in favour of a more traditional desk which was also in front of a black backdrop and usually a female co-host would be off to the side. An live audience also joined them through the series’ run. Graphics on the other hand, were virtually nonexistent through much of the series but what was there slowly gained a bit of prominence as the show took off.
While This Hour Has Seven Days did give birth to the TV newsmagazine format, there doesn’t feel like anything like it today. Newsmagazines today seem uninspired and overly sensationalized when compared to Seven Days. Seven Days also incorporated humour, satirical sketches and even animation all of which seem to have been lost in the television news magazines of today. CTV’s W5 is still, however, considered one of the descendants of This Hour Has Seven Days. It hit the airwaves shortly after Seven Day‘s run and has been on the air ever since.
Today, however, in investigations such as excessive force by police, W5 falls into formulaic ways of presenting stories. They throw around words such as “shocking,” and “brutal” and subsequently there doesn’t seem to be as much effort into presenting it a way that was shocking as Seven Days might have.
Both the shows shock and provoke but there’s something about the way Seven Days does it that is much more captivating. Broadcasting shocking things isn’t the problem. Seven Days did broadcast a dead body being dragged out of water, W5, on the other hand, had shown one person with a bloodied nose and someone vomiting blood after being struck by police. While Seven Days had occasionally broadcast offensive words, mild profanity also makes it on the air on W5.
The modern day W5Â feels remarkably tired, like it’s all been done before. In fairness, however, it probably has been.
These days, W5 is like a voice lost in among inane things like yet another rerun of that day’s Sportsnet Connected and random infomercials on a Saturday evening. W5 has to compete with a lot more noise in comparison to Seven Days‘ era where only a handful of TV station were on the air. Arguably that could be one of the reasons, W5 could never attain the type of popularity and success that Seven Days had during its original run.
To get your This Hour Has Seven Days fix, hit up the CBC online archives.
You may not notice given the slow summer posting anyway, but TV, eh? will be on semi-hiatus for the rest of the summer, with minimal posting and no podcasting. Look for regular activity to resume by Labour Day at the latest.
