Originally published in Reel West Magazine:

If Jean-Pierre Blais were a television writer instead of the chairman of the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC), every show he wrote would be gold. Apparently.

Earlier this year he summarized the findings of the Talk TV hearing in an “Age of Abundance” – his more charitable description of today’s “peak TV,” FX CEO John Landgraf’s epithet for what he sees as a content bubble where “this is simply too much television.”

Blais is nothing if not optimistic, though. He thinks he has found a way to make less, better. From his speech to the Canadian Club of Ottawa as released to the media:

“We want creators and distributors to choose quality over quantity. Such an approach creates a virtuous cycle where the industry invests to create better programs, which in turn bring more value into the system, which in turn generates more money to re-invest in content made by Canadians. More importantly, it creates an environment where Canadians want to watch content made by our creators – not because it is forced upon them, but because it’s good. Indeed, because it is great.”

Isn’t that cute? It’s like it’s never occurred to him that you don’t get quality without quantity. That if you look at the most successful television industry in the world, an average of about 65 percent of new shows are cancelled in their first year.

Plus, how do you measure quality? Are we talking low-rated The Wire, one of the best TV shows of all time, or are we talking high-rated NCIS that appears on few best lists?

However you define it, it seems evident that quality TV is a by-product of the mass production of TV. Since it’s not evident to Blais, for one, science can provide the evidence.

Writer Jonah Lehrer — whose interests lie in the areas of psychology, neuroscience, and the relationship between science and the humanities — pointed to a recent experiment published in Frontiers in Psychology: “Quantity yields quality when it comes to creativity.”

The psychologists and neuroscientists involved gave their subjects a graphic and told them to write down as many things as they could that the drawing suggested to them, with the answers scored for their creativity. The researchers gave each subject intelligence and personality tests and measured their cortex, and after all their sciencing, they concluded that the quantity of ideas was related to the creativity of the ideas – those who came up with the most ideas also had better ideas.

Earlier, psychologist Dean Keith Simonton had proposed the equal odds rule: “the relationship between the number of hits and the total number of works produced in a given time period is positive, linear, stochastic, and stable.”

The people with the best ideas have the most ideas … as well as some of the worst ideas. Deadwood and John From Cincinnati came from the same brain, as Lehrer points out. Pablo Picasso created more than 20,000 works of art. Hollywood’s Golden Age was also one of the most prolific periods for studios, who created a lot of dross along with the gold.

The CRTC’s Blais points to successful international dramas such as Australia’s The Code, the UK’s Downton Abbey, and Denmark’s Borgen and The Killing as proof that brilliant content could happen here. He doesn’t mention the terrible shows those countries produce because, being terrible, they haven’t made their way to Canada. He does mention, but doesn’t connect dots, that Canadian shows such as Slings and Arrows, Rookie Blue, and Murdoch Mysteries are mentioned worldwide as quality shows.

Just as the quality problem as identified by Blais misses the mark, so too do the CRTC’s Talk TV solutions. Blais proposes making more adaptations of Canadian literary hits, because you can never go wrong with a literary adaptation, apparently. Should we break it to him that for every Book of Negroes that garners huge ratings is a Best Laid Plans that doesn’t? Another Talk TV pilot project is to prioritize high-budget dramas – high enough to exceed Downton Abbey and Borgen’s budgets.

In Canada, as broadcasters merge we have a smaller quantity of broadcasters buying shows and therefore a smaller quantity of shows. As CBC cuts their season orders we have a smaller quantity of episodes of each show. Never mind that the Canadian content quotas currently in existence already allow Global to have no scripted Canadian shows for half the year. How can our regulator think quantity is even a factor in our industry?

Lehrer sums up the research on creativity like this: “high levels of creative output are often a prerequisite for creative success. Put another way, throwing shit at the wall is how you figure out what sticks. More shit, more sticks.”

There’s a strange arrogance to the Talk TV conclusions: Blais seems to think Canadian TV can beat the quality odds that plague every other creative endeavour. He’s wrong.

Is there a road, a path, dare I say it, an information highway to discoverability?  With a multitude of channels and platforms, how can producers and broadcasters make sure that audiences can find their program and that audience members can find the programs they want?  The CRTC is trying to figure this out with their Discoverability Summit to be held next May in Toronto.  The first of two lead up events happened yesterday in Vancouver (the second, in French in Montreal, happens December 3, 2015).  “En Route to the Discoverability Summit:  Content in the Age of Abundance” was live streamed for those who couldn’t get out to Vancouver or hadn’t known about it.  I livestreamed it and I’m going to share my overall thoughts with you.

Tony Chapman, marketing expert and frequent speaker, gave the keynote.  As you would expect from a marketing guy, the talk was all about the power of brands and a shift from brands going through broadcasters to the consumers, to going directly.  Gary Maavara of Corus asked Chapman for specific advice for broadcasters.  He said Corus should delete one of their U.S. programs, take the money and commission three programs from teams of Canadian producers and brands.  The brands would then distribute the programs globally.  To me, that sounds like the brands are the owners and the producers are service producers.  That would not be good for the independent production sector.  I don’t see the upside for broadcasters in doing that either, unless they had a share in the global revenues.  And I’m not sure what that would mean for the content, if it became a glorified product sales tool.  There are good examples of branded content (i.e. “Carmilla” and Kotex) but being limited to product promotion does tend to stifle creativity.

That conversation set the theme for the session as the roundtable (Sara Diamond of OCAD, Tessa Sproule of Vubble, Ling Lin from YouTube Canada, Nathan Wiszniak of Spotify, Ashkan Karbasfrooshan of WatchMojo and Moyra Rodger of Magnify Digital) also spent a lot of time talking about the disintermediation of the content supply chain (to use marketing-speak). The new paradigm is apparently the content producer (either funded by brands or a self-funded YouTube creator) reaching the consumer directly.

However, there were no answers to the question of the day, which is how will consumers find the content that they want in this new universe?  It was clear that everyone is struggling with this problem but there were no new solutions presented (sorry but ‘transmedia’ and ‘gamification’ are not new ideas, particularly when the terms are misused).  I’ve been saying to anyone who will listen that I want a site or an app that will tell me where to find the programs that I want, whether they are on broadcast or iTunes or Shomi or CraveTV or Netflix.  I am tired of bingeing a show on one platform only to find myself a season behind and not know where to find the next season.  Apparently there’s a word for what I’m looking for – universal search.  We have all agreed that it is needed but no one has yet figured out how to do it.

I found it very odd that the CRTC would host a session that said that the future of content was going to bypass the broadcasters.  Based on the responses from Bell Media in the Q and A I think they were too.  They see themselves and their brand as a necessary filter or guide in the very crowded content universe and until I get my universal search app I think that’s going to be true.

We should hear details on the next stage in this process, the Discoverability Summit, in the coming weeks.  We’ve been promised a unique and international event.  Stay tuned.