Remedy is coming March 23. Rookie Blue should be airing in the summer.
It’s not that Global has no original scripted series, it’s that you can’t tell by looking at the conventional television season. We went through two rounds – fall and midseason– of Global trumpeting their upcoming primetime seasons of only US programming.
Yesterday’s release was the “P.S. We’re airing a Canadian series now that Sleepy Hollow is out of the way.” It’s not fall, midseason or summer — it’s what’s known in the US as a midseason replacement, or in Canada the year-round “slide-Canadian-programs-in-when-we-don’t-have-an-American-show-to-fill-the-timeslot” season.
Remedy will likely do very well there, just as Rookie Blue does well in the summer. But when you have one original scripted series air date announced so far since last summer, your Canadian programming starts looking a little … thin.
It’s true that fall is a difficult season for Canadian productions. Overwhelmed by marketing from the US networks, a homegrown show can find it hard to be seen amid the commotion.
But January is usually a good bet. It’s still the thick of the TV season but with less competition for eyeballs. CBC, for example, just launched Schitt’s Creek and The Book of Negroes to stellar ratings. Global had great success with Bomb Girls a few Januaries ago. This January? Global’s got nothing.
Besides defining the brand of a network apart from “a mishmash of ABC, FOX, NBC, CBS and The CW†– besides being a requirement of a broadcast license — original content is becoming even more crucial for networks who are trying to, say, convince people that their streaming service is better than the other streaming services.
In the meantime, convincing an audience that your original content is bold and exciting becomes more difficult if you’re too timid to put it on the air when most people are watching.
