CBC seems to have decided to celebrate the New Year with a garage sale of sorts.
Last week the mothership proudly announced that the BBC has optioned the format for the CBC series Canada’s Next Great Prime Minister for production in the U.K. Deals were also inked with the Netherlands and South Africa. We can only surmise it’s a matter of time before every Commonwealth nation forks out the dough to CBC for the premise.
Is this good news or bad?
Well, it’s good news for CBC and Canadian broadcasters alike who are tired of borrowing someone else’s shoes to dance in. And it’s always nice to export rather than import.
And let’s face it, this format will never make it to the big time (i.e., the U.S. of A.), because this is more or less how the American presidency is decided already. Candidates face off on TV, appealing to the public to not vote them off the island, so to speak. Their efforts are then lauded or laughed at by a panel of judges, but instead of Joe Clark and Kim Campbell, they’ve got Jon Stewart and Bill O’Reilly. (Personally, I’d rather see the candidates go on Moment of Truth so we can find out if they’ve ever been involved in a hit-and-run or slept with underage prostitutes.)
The bad news is that within a year, I guarantee that you’ll see a U.S. version of The Week the Women Went, which premiered on Monday night on CBC. The show is like Wife Swap, but instead the wives all swapped their families for a spa holiday. I’m surprised the whole show didn’t revolve around Dad ordering pizza for dinner and bribing the kids to do the cleaning up. (For anyone who missed it, the show is available online at www.cbc.ca/thewomenwent/video.html.)
I like this show, and not just because I’m a reality TV junkie. But maybe that’s because I’m a woman who does housework. It’s got some actual reality to it, which is refreshing, and it’s a peek into small-town life in Alberta. Look for that to end with the U.S. version.
Also on Monday, the CBC board got the green light to sell its entire international library of television programming to London-based ContentFilm. So now the Brits don’t just need ideas—they need full-scale plugs in their TV dikes, lest the audience leak out.
But in case anyone thinks the CBC is throwing out the baby with the bathwater, that’s not their intention. The network is not against producing Canadian programming. It just can’t afford to put it on eBay. “We know that we lack the scale, resources, investment capital, and risk tolerance required to be competitive in a market dominated by large, specialized companies,” CBC executive vice-president Richard Stursberg told Variety this week.
Um, if the CBC doesn’t think of itself as a large, specialized company, then that might be a reason they’re having problems. I understand that it doesn’t want to get wrapped up in international sales, but it doesn’t seem all that bogged down by producing good programming right now either. But that could be a good long-term strategy as well. Instead of actually making good TV, why not just come up with the ideas for it and sell them overseas to unsuspecting schmucks in Bahrain. I can already see MVP: The Secret Lives of Hockey Wives re-set in Sweden (lots of sauna action).
On the plus side, Toronto-based Peace Arch Entertainment is negotiating to buy ContentFilms, so maybe all those master copies of The Beachcombers will be coming home after all.
In the meantime, CBC is on the right path for making our television culture a Relic of the past.
