TV’S WINNERS AND LOSERS OF 2017
Sex harassment scandals ate up our time, but there was much to enjoy on television this year.
First, a confession.
I’ve been glued to CNN when I should be watching every one of those 500-plus new TV shows that dropped this year. But can you blame me when some dotard has his fingers on the nuclear button?
Cable news has been vastly more entertaining and alarming than just about any scripted series. The WWE pay-per-view box office for Kim Jong Un (Rocket Man) vs. Donald Trump (Mad Dog) would be off the charts.
CNN and other news outlets have seen a massive rise in ratings and profit because of the Trump presidency. But the news makers, including a revamped The Na
tional in Canada, weren’t the only ones making headlines in our winners and losers list this year. Peak TV means Toronto and Vancouver have morphed into giant television studios; there is the rise and rise of Canadian literary stars such as Margaret Atwood and, of course, plenty of sex scandals. The Star takes a look at a tumultuous, but fascinating year in TV.
Loser: Serial harassers What is it with high-profile guys masturbating in public?
The sexual harassment scandal that engulfed Hollywood and beyond has arguably hit the television landscape harder than most in what has become a quantum shift in how seriously we take discrimination and harassment.
The ball got rolling in TV land with long-time allegations against comedian Bill Cosby as he was mounting a sitcom comeback. It caught fire this year over Miramax producer Harvey Weinstein’s alleged assaults.
Most visibly for a TV production, Kevin Spacey was fired from Season 6 of House of Cards by Netflix. Then there was Louis C.K., of the critically acclaimed Louie on FX, followed by Jeffrey Tambor on Amazon’s Transparent.
You could argue that the last season of House of Cards was already irrelevant or even reductive in the Trump era. But it’s a significant show in the annals of TV as the first big, Emmynominated prestige show from an online broadcaster.
It’s a show that historians will look at a century from now as a true watershed moment in the medium. The series continues with Robin Wright in the lead.
The critically acclaimed Transparent, meanwhile, was the show that signalled to the industry that Amazon really did sell everything, including Emmy Award-winning television.
And of course, there is the news business: Fox News, the jewel of the Murdoch empire, has been hobbled by first the resignation of CEO Roger Ailes after women accused him of sexual harassment, to allegations against Bill O’Reilly, who paid a reported $32 million to one accuser in a settlement.
Fox wasn’t the only casualty: see PBS’s Charlie Rose, NBC’s Matt Lauer and, closer to home, Sportsnet Blue Jays analyst Gregg Zaun.
It was a year that not even House of Cardswriters could match in depravity. Winner: Hollywood North Hollywood is north again.
The new Star Trek: Discovery series filming in Toronto’s Port Lands is an apt metaphor for the state of the film and TV industry in Canada.
For the first time, Toronto broke the $2-billion mark for filming in the city, up from under $500 million during the doldrums of the 2008 recession and the third record-setting year in a row. With so much TV being produced by new online purveyors, such as Hulu’s Handmaid’s Tale, studios are turning away business.
The city has also turned into one big TV studio, where TV series now account for three times the budget of moviemaking.
It seems this will only accelerate as Netflix has pledged to spend at least $500 million in productions in Canada under an agreement with the federal government. Overtime anyone? Loser: The National Peter Mansbridge, all is forgiven.
Give Canada’s public broadcaster credit for taking a risk: it took four exceptional journalists and refashioned its flagship news show with multiple hosts. But the new National, which launched in November, is too disjointed, too distractingly chatty.
Much of the newscast is spent with the anchors interviewing each other and then interviewing other reporters. It doesn’t feel urgent, more like an extended remix of an “At Issue” panel.
When the conversation stops and you see the anchors in the field like the exceptional Adrienne Arsenault, it feels like a completely different show, as if you mistakenly tuned into a PBS documentary.
Producers, to their credit, have tinkered with the format to make it less overwhelming. The writing and visuals remain top notch. And the program does an exceptional job of breaking down difficult concepts for the average viewer in an elegant way.
But the four-anchor concept remains a hokey Justice League teamup where Batman, Superman, Wonder Woman and the Flash all get to contribute one gratuitous punch, which often makes for one mediocre show. Winner: Margaret Atwood Toronto’s Atwood was all over the airwaves this year, culminating in a spectacular win at the Emmy Awards where The Handmaid’s Tale took home the prestigious Best Drama award.
The Handmaid’s Tale is speculative fiction, looking at the abuse women endure under a fictional patriarchy, but the thesis is not dissimilar to CBC’s Alias Grace, based on Atwood’s Booker Prize shortlisted novel that examines historical sexism in the 19th century. The two shows bookend a year in which attitudes about sexual harassment have undergone a cultural shift.
Atwood received some glowing shout-outs during this year’s Emmy telecast and some of the biggest applause of the night when she joined the Handmaid’s cast, including Elisabeth Moss, onstage.
Twitter lit up when she also brought her purse up there (you can never be too careful!), reminding us that Hollywood glitz aside, she is em- inently, sensibly Canadian. Loser: Multicultural Television Canada’s newest television network, OMNI Regional, debuted in September with a promise of carrying the news in a variety of languages including Cantonese, Mandarin, Italian and Punjabi.
But in a controversial move that attracted the ire of community groups and the union for its workers, it contracted out its Chinese language newscast. Critics say this has reduced the diversity of voices in the community and, more worryingly, could start a trend for other multilingual programs. Unifor, the union representing OMNI’s workers, says Rogers has violated its lucrative mandatory carriage licence agreement — which allowed OMNI to be part of basic digital TV packages so it could restore multilingual newscasts cancelled in 2015 — and has filed a complaint. Rogers says it retains editorial control over the programs.
In this case, Rogers has contracted out to competitor Fairchild TV, which is known for much more right-wing commentary and considered the “Fox News” of Chinese television. The old OMNI newscasts were more centrist and likened to CNN.
Having conservative-leaning Chi- nese news isn’t a bad thing. But not having a balance is. Winner: Feel Good Shows If only Nicholas Sparks had a TV channel. Oh, I forgot, it’s called the Hallmark Channel and ratings have never been better.
Too much scheming in House of Cards? Too much sexual assault in Game of Thrones? Too much crazy when you’re watching CNN or Fox News?
For years the buzzwords for broadcasters looking for critical success and some Emmy Awards were dark, edgy drama. But it seems that, along with a bleak and unrelenting news cycle, may have prompted something of a backlash.
The top hit of the fall season is The Good Doctor, a schmaltzy hospital melodrama.
Created by Canadian David Shore, it is based on a South Korean hit of the same name. It centres on young Dr. Shaun Murphy (Freddie Highmore of Bates Motel fame), a new surgeon who happens to be autistic. Unlike Shore’s other famous doctor character, arrogant and dismissive Gregory House (Hugh Laurie), Murphy is curious, well-intentioned and kind.
The show has been such a hit that it has edged out that other feel-good, prime-time tear-jerker This Is Us in ratings, proving that audiences are hankering for more uplifting escapism in the era of Trump. Loser: Superhero Shows Did the bubble just burst in the superhero business?
The appetite of viewers at one point seemed endless for shows like Arrow, The Flash, Supergirl and Legends of Tomorrow as well as Gotham and Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.
But new entries this season to the increasingly overcrowded genre seem to be failing.
NBC’s superhero sitcom Powerless starring Vanessa Hudgens was one of the first casualties. Marvel’s Inhumans and The Gifted debuted to less than stellar viewership.
So are these shows the canary in the mine shaft for audiences suffering from Spandex fatigue? Possibly. But the greater explanation is that these shows were just poor, uninspired TV that suffered from me-too syndrome.
Meanwhile, the intensely dark Gotham, a prequel to Batman, consistently astonishes with a nihilistic vision and savage violence that I’m not sure how a noncable broadcaster manages to finesse. Surpassing Tim Burton’s darkly comic movie vision, it remains the best superhero show on the tube. Winner: The Vietnam War It’s impossible to watch The Vietnam War and not be astounded by the casual, sometimes accidental reasons — seasoned by ego and pride — that presidents and generals send good people to war.
It takes 18 hours for Ken Burns and Lynn Novick to tell the tale of Vietnam, but it is the finest series on television this year.
Corus has put The Real Housewives of Toronto on “hiatus,” so there will be no second season pickup
Burns, known for his good but flawed series The Civil War, had become something of a cliché among documentarians. This is his masterpiece. Loser: Real Housewives Perhaps this is one loser we should feel thankful about. Corus has put The Real Housewives of Toronto on “hiatus,” so no second season pickup.
When it debuted, it gave homegrown fans of the American franchise their own show to cheer about, bringing together Botox-laden housewives weaponized with Hermès bags, sending them to endless, pointless parties.
The fights were not the smashing of glasses or turning of tables that viewers were accustomed to in the American franchises.
Befitting a Canadian show, there was lots of passive-aggressive pos- turing and the biggest scandal was when Joan Kelley Walker, wife of Magna CEO Donald Walker, took her knickers off at a cottage party to go skinny dipping and left them in the grass.
And yes, that’s another hour of your life you can never get back. Winner: Canadian Drama Canadian broadcasters have long been criticized for taking the easy route of remaking American franchises and not investing in challenging and uniquely Canadian stories.
2017 will go down as a watershed year as broadcasters have stepped up to the plate by producing noteworthy serialized drama that includes: CBC’s Pure, which looks at drug trafficking in a Mennonite community; City’s Bad Blood, which followed the Montreal Mafia wars; CTV’s Cardinal, based on the Northern Ontario mysteries of Giles Blunt; and Global’s Mary Kills People, a dark dramedy about a doctor who practises euthanasia.
Not everything was a home run, but it is the start of what will hopefully be a trend toward producing critically acclaimed drama that celebrates Canadian stories and our own mythology.