English Canada needs French Canada’s low-budget drama approach: report

Canada shouldn’t try to compete head-on with big-budget Hollywood shows, but should instead try low-budget dramas to solve its current production woes, author Guy Fournier suggests. During a panel discussion on the future of Canadian television drama at the Banff Television Festival last week, Fournier repeated comments contained in his recent report, What About Tomorrow? A Report on Canadian French-language drama, that French-language dramas on average cost a quarter of what they do in English Canada while reaching five times more people (CCR Update, May 28/03). "I think English Canada could learn a lot from Quebec on low-cost and medium-cost production," Fournier tells Canadian Communications Reports. "Because that’s the only way you can have more Canadian drama, unless you try to get more and more money from the government every year, but you know you won’t be able to do that. If you want Canadian drama to get exposure, you can’t go only with high-cost budgets." "On the English side, for example, people think that more expensive dramas would have more success with audiences. Yet it already costs $3.71 to reach one Anglophone viewer with an original drama, compared with only 79 cents per Francophone viewer," he writes in his report. "It certainly seems significant that the two most successful shows on French-language television over the decade - La p’tite vie and Un gars, une fille - are relatively low-budget dramas that could have been produced without government assistance!" It is untrue to say that the French language, as distinct from the more universal English language, is the only factor that has contributed to the success of Quebec television dramas, Fournier states. He notes that one of the advantages of the "highly economical production methods" used to produce drama in Quebec is that it enables broadcasters to produce long runs, which in turn help build loyal audiences. He blames the way that the Canadian Television Fund and Telefilm Canada operate for reducing the number of episodes of a series getting produced. "Because assistance funds are not unlimited, and costs have a nasty tendency to keep rising, most of the projects being proposed to the CTF (and to Telefilm) are for 13 episodes, and often fewer," he writes in his report. "As a perverse effect of government assistance to the television industry, this economical production culture is now disappearing, and the new culture supplanting it is far more expensive. Costs run from $450,000 to $1 million per hour of programming, which makes long-running series economically impossible." At least one English-language private broadcaster is trying the low-budget approach. Global Television Network has just begun airing Train 48, a drama that centres on 10 train commuters as they travel to and from work. It is filmed entirely in Global Toronto’s studio, and the dialogue is ad-libbed based on a general scenario, helping keep costs low. The 65-episode series is being aired Monday to Friday at 7 p.m. in Ontario, Quebec and Alberta, and slightly later in other parts of the country. The first five episodes of the series, which began airing on June 2, drew 2.9 million people (total reach, 2+), according to Bureau of Broadcast Measurement (BBM) people meters. "I think people have to start to do productions without using the fund, because it cannot support everybody’s applications," said panelist Loren Mawhinney, VP of Canadian production at Global, during the Banff session. "You need two kinds of projects. You need the project that you’re competing with the big-budget American (production) and that we don’t do on a series level that well. On a MOW (movie of the week), we’ve had terrific success. …I think you have to have both things. One example is we launched a very small, little experimental drama that we do every day in our studios this summer called Train 48. We finance it ourselves; there’s no money from the CTF." She added that in French Canada, television stars grew out of those lower-budget dramas. Sandra Levy, director of television at the Australian Broadcasting Corp. and the sole non-Canadian representative on the panel, stated that quotas have helped boost homegrown dramas Down Under and that low-budget shows are playing an integral part. While Australian domestic drama also has competition from many American shows, she pointed out that broadcasters there must report annually to the regulator and prove that they have aired so many points of homegrown production throughout that year in order to keep their licences. As a result, she noted that domestic dramas have cracked the top 10 in ratings, and that the most popular indigenous shows were low budget. Panelist Trina McQueen, who authored a report on English-language Canadian drama for the CRTC, tells CCR that she agrees that low-budget drama has a place in the system. "In my report, there is a recommendation that we should encourage soap operas and more entrepreneurial edgy kind of drama. I think the thing about drama is that the more you do it, the better you get at it. Anything that gets drama onto the air is just great," she says. "But once you’ve done that though, you have to narrow your focus to find out what goes well with the audience. I’m not sure low-budget, low-audience drama is the solution to many of the problems. But low-budget, decent-audience drama could be a very interesting way to go." Glenn O’Farrell, president and CEO of the Canadian Association of Broadcasters, tells CCR that a wide range of drama options is necessary. "We have to have regulations that support flexible programming strategies that include all forms imaginable that are deemed to be desirable products that consumers are going to watch." He notes that French-Canadian drama programming has tended to be less expensive to produce because of Quebec’s tele-roman tradition. "They have been very successful in terms of Canadian programming for years and years. And they do have lower production costs because of consistency of sets and cast, and you can shoot many episodes in confined periods of time." Even the unions are on board in giving low-budget drama a try. Brian Topp, national director of Alliance of Canadian Cinema, Television and Radio Artists (ACTRA) Toronto Performers, tells CCR, "It is true that if you look at British television, other European television or Australian television, if you invest in great writers and use great local talent, you don’t have to spend tons of money. I think you can command great audiences without having West Wing production values, if you invest in the creative people. You look at the typical low-budget British or Australian show and it’s beautifully written and people love the characters."

English Canada needs French Canada’s low-budget drama approach: report

Broadcast | June 20, 2003

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