Lately I’ve been thrilled to see senior executives at the major Canadian broadcasters publicly declaring their desire to support Canadian content. I’d be slightly more thrilled if they gave some basic support to their Canadian content.

Barbara Williams, Senior Vice President of Content at Shaw Media, is co-chair of the working group that so piqued my interest with their ideas about celebrating the success stories in Canadian on-screen content. A recent example is that Shaw successfully cancelled Bomb Girls for low ratings that dropped after Global pulled it off the air and changed timeslots mid-season to make way for an American import.

Kevin Crull, President of Bell Media, says he wants to duplicate the star system of Quebec in English Canada, and acquiring Astral apparently will help him do that. The Montreal Gazette explains: “Crull didn’t give any details of Bell’s plans, though he did tell members of the academy that Bell’s strategy of putting Canadian TV shows in popular prime-time spots, keeping them there and heavily promoting them are keys to their success.”

Ah yes, regular timeslots and promotion — two of the most basic ways to build an audience. Which include, for instance, not programming Motive, your only Canadian scripted series on CTV, on Sunday nights so that you have to move it when ratings sag amid the killer competition.

To give Bell credit, they wisely launched Orphan Black after Doctor Who on Saturdays, where there was a well-primed audience free from most other TV-related distractions. If I were feeling magnanimous I wouldn’t point out that BBC America chose that timeslot and Space followed suit.

Crull’s colleague Scott Henderson, Vice-President of Communications at Bell Media, was a panellist at this week’s Academy of Canadian Cinema and Television’s event Getting Canadians To Watch Canadians. “How do you get Canadians to watch Canadian television?” the blurb reads, promising that executives from the major networks would “share what they are doing to capture and increase this audience.”

Let me share what they’re doing. The same week that Henderson spoke about this topic, his two homegrown scripted shows — Motive and Orphan Black — had nothing on their homepages to indicate that a new episode would air that week. No promo, no episode description, no information even that the episode would be new. The episode descriptions in the usual programming highlight media releases were AWOL too.

The CTV media releases — generally sent out bimonthly with descriptions of new episodes — were missing the May 2 Motive airing. One release listed shows until April 30 while the next began with May 3.

In the coming apocalypse, Space is clearly betting on zombies over clones. Their programming highlights media release has been condensed, eliminating Orphan Black episode descriptions, but if you want to know the details of Abraham Lincoln vs Zombies, or their zombie mini-series import In The Flesh, you’re in luck.

The episode descriptions are now only located on the walled media site, but that change was not communicated and relies on the media actively seeking the information. If their shows were in witness protection Bell couldn’t do a much better job of protecting them from prying eyes.

Both Motive and Orphan Black launched well, the former garnering over a million viewers and the latter breaking original series premiere ratings for Space. I have genuine respect for Bell for their initial promotion and for giving Motive the post-Super Bowl premiere.

But both shows have declined from their premiere ratings. Orphan Black has already been renewed and I’m confident it will continue to go strong. While it loses its Doctor Who lead-in soon, besides the engaged fans there’s at least the BBC America promotion seeping over the border.

Motive shows more troubling signs of softness that can be strengthened with consistency and promotion. It had recovered from the natural viewer erosion after the (wise) timeslot shift, but its ratings still fluctuate down to Bomb Girls levels now after reruns.

I don’t expect Bell to pull a Shaw and cancel Motive, but they have no other original series to promote right now. They should be aggressively promoting what they have.

Or at the very least, broadcasters should stop telling us about their successes and their valiant efforts to get reluctant Canadians to watch Canadian TV until they demonstrate a true desire to succeed with their Canadian shows.

In ancient Twitter times, maybe a year ago, a discussion popped up: where’s Canada’s Mad Men? Why can’t we produce something so excellent, so embraced by critics and audience?

My answer: we have. We had it before Mad Men. But we have to scale down our thinking from Hollywood levels.

Slings & Arrows was an intelligent, fun, carefully crafted series, and a critical favourite. I posit there is no show better, Canadian or American or Mexican. Girls is no cleverer or funnier or well-loved than Michael: Tuesdays & Thursdays. Durham County, Intelligence, Call Me Fitz, Less Than Kind – we have shows that in another country, with a larger population base, and not as overshadowed by the Hollywood machine — in a country with a healthy TV industry and more diverse media — these shows might have received the same kind of attention as a Homeland in the US or a Luther in the UK.

A crucial element to sustain these critical darlings, however, is buzz. Mad Men, Breaking Bad, Girls, all have tiny audiences compared to a network hit — even an NBC hit — yet command a much greater percentage of critical and social media attention than an NCIS.

The problem: Canada’s population base is 10 times less than the US. Canada’s TV critic community is even tinier per capita. Canadians consume American media, including television criticism, while our critics are time-sharing their attention with American shows. Homegrown TV is crowded out of every thought-space.

It’s easy to say Canadian media should write more about Canadian shows, but it starts to become a no-profit endeavor very quickly, and the Canadian media are struggling with that well enough now. They check in with the hits, and their favourites, but there’s little checking in beyond once a season, never mind the kind of obsessive episodic analysis that’s become a staple for American critics.

My direct comparative experience is out of date now, but when you get over a thousand people clicking on an article about House and over a dozen clicking on an article about Intelligence, you have to have a certain will – one not driven by chasing ads – to persist in writing about a low-rated but thoughtful Canadian series.

Audiences aren’t talking much either, because a cult audience in Canada is a microcult spread over 10,000,000 km². There are pockets of chatter on social media, and if a particular show is in your bubble you’re bound to see talk of it, but there’s little spreading to the greater water cooler out in the wild.

We notice loudly when the Canadian TV industry produces more mediocrity. Let’s listen for the excellence falling among us too. Because in Canada, we have to listen very carefully to hear it.