How Trump has hurt our TV ratings

The Globe and Mail

Canadians are bored with Canadian television, said John Doyle. The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation had its premiere week recently, and the ratings for homegrown series such as Alias Grace and Mr. D were “shockingly bad.” But it’s probably not the fault of the shows themselves; it’s because of our “increasing, intense fascination with the drama that is the United States.” Canadian viewership of U.S. series has shot up in the months since Donald Trump was elected president and began pitting American against American. “Canadians watch, often gobsmacked,” as sitcoms like the new Will & Grace joke openly about how Trump is

upending friendships and forcing characters to take a moral stance against the White House. The divisiveness “reaches even into late-night, with a ferocity that is entirely new.” Host Jimmy Kimmel, for example, has morphed “from jokester to national spokesman for the angry,” first helping to tank the Republican effort to repeal Obamacare and then calling for gun control in the wake of the mass shooting in Las Vegas. As for news, how can we pay attention to local politics when the man in the Oval Office could start a nuclear war at any minute? The U.S. is drama incarnate. “We are watching, transfixed, as a country tears itself apart.”