Small screen BIG IMPACT
Tatiana Maslany, Toronto, nostalgia and Asian Canadians among TV winners this year
Television in 2016 was the most compelling watch yet.
The best drama on TV wasn’t about robots in a western theme park or hackers trying to overthrow an evil corporation. Anyone arguing over whether TV has any real cultural or political import can think again, since it was the boob tube that birthed the commander-in-chief of the United States.
The bizarreness of the TV universe would have been complete if Donald Trump had only appointed Kim Kardashian as secretary of state. But maybe that was wishful thinking.
Trump wasn’t the only one to make the history books. Some observations from a year of bingewatching TV, including moments that had an impact on Canadians.
The commander-in-chief
As a former business reporter for the Star, I’ve interviewed president-elect Donald Trump several times. In full promotion mode for his hotel in Toronto, he displayed none of the nastiness that would come to characterize his run for the presidency.
He was ever the showman, of course. At our first meeting at the National Club in Toronto, he was full of hyperbole and exaggeration. His building (back then slated to be a Ritz-Carlton) would be the biggest and the best. Those qualities would serve him well in disseminating his brand to voters.
And thanks to The Apprentice and The Celebrity Apprentice, few figures on television looked more presidential than Trump. As in, “Hey Boeing, you’re fired!”
Reports say Trump will retain an executive producer credit on the show, which now features Arnold Schwarzenegger as host. (Although he disputes how much time he’s going to spend on it.)
But while half of Americans are in dismay over their new leader, the media, whom Trump constantly disparages, is perhaps the big winner.
According to reports, CNN alone will see a billion-dollar payday in gross profit for 2016 for the first time in its 36-year history thanks to stellar ratings.
After all, when was the last time you sat riveted to the TV watching an entire presidential debate? Toronto becomes La La TV Land From the current Star Trek: Discovery series filming in the Toronto docklands to one of the season’s breakout hits, Designated Survivor, where the White House is recreated in all its splendour in Downsview, Toronto has become TV land.
On-location filming in Toronto exceeded the $1.5-billion mark for the first time last year and that figure is expected to be surpassed at the end of 2016.
And it seems there are an awful lot of fans of Canadian-made television. That would include Prince Harry, who it can probably be said with some certainty is a fan of Torontoshot legal drama Suits and star Meghan Markle.
While Toronto has long held the moniker of Hollywood North, it is TV production that keeps the bulk of people employed with 85 per cent of all production being television and the remaining 15 per cent film.
In total, there were 81TV series and 124 TV specials filmed in the city in 2015, representing $881 million of production. That compares to 45 movies at an investment of $181 million, including the blockbuster Suicide Squad.
With an end to Peak TV nowhere in sight, and a Canadian dollar that is forecast to dip to as low as 70 cents (U.S.), the trend looks to continue upward into 2017.
Tatiana Maslany wins an Emmy The Emmy Awards finally recognized what most fans of Torontoshot Orphan Black already knew: playing a dozen or more characters brilliantly on a TV series is bravura work.
For the first two seasons, Maslany’s name was absent from the Outstanding Lead Actress Emmy nominee list, leading to outrage from fans and consternation from critics. But eventually, her talent in carving out multiple characters in the clone drama would not be denied, making her the first Canadian in a Canadian show to win the award. The Emmys have not been kind to genre shows in the fantasy and science fiction realm. But Maslany showed that having acting chops works in any category.
And she also had to do it against some ridiculously stiff competition including Viola Davis ( How to Get Away With Murder), Keri Russell ( The Americans), Taraji P. Henson ( Empire), Robin Wright ( House of Cards) and Claire Danes ( Homeland).
The CRTC changes Canadian content rules The Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) decided to change regulations for what makes a show Canadian for funding purposes, prompting an outcry by the creative community.
The rules created major controversy with some Canadian showrunners saying there will be fewer distinct voices in Canadian TV in the future.
The CRTC said reducing the points needed to make a production Canadian would “facilitate the hiring by production companies of non-Canadian actors or creators, who may increase a project’s attractiveness and visibility in international markets.”
Critics say it opens to the door to American showrunners such as Vince Gilligan ( Breaking Bad) or Shonda Rhimes ( Scandal) creating Canadian shows. It may make the shows more marketable.
But would that be Canadian? Big screen to small screen TV executives can be a cautious, unimaginative lot. So this year, the trend of making TV series out of film franchises continued unabated. Most of them were dreck.
That includes the anemic Rush Hour (which originally starred Jackie Chan) and the failed Minority Report from Steven Spielberg’s Amblin Television, proving that not even the master of film is fallible when it comes to the TV world
There were some minor hits, including Lethal Weapon, which mirrors the over-the-top violence of the original Mel Gibson-helmed movie and features real chemistry between co-leads Damon Wayans and Clayne Crawford.
But no translation has been more successful than HBO’s Westworld. The series about a robotic future eclipsed the scope of the original 1973 movie that featured Yul Brynner as the original Terminator cowboy. Westworld isn’t the Game of Thrones replacement that HBO may have envisioned. But sci-fi musing on the nature of humanity, told on a grand and thoughtful scale complete with major stars such as Anthony Hopkins, proved that HBO wasn’t going to cede ground to the upstarts at Netflix and Amazon.
Not that you asked, but still to come: TV shows based on Shooter, Rambo and Training Day.
Nostalgia makes a comeback Gilmore Girls. Fuller House. The Odd Couple.
The remakes of former beloved sitcoms keep on coming. That would include One Day at a Time, the Norman Lear classic reimagined. This time it’s a Cuban-American family living in apartment 402 with a tropical “This Is It” theme song sung by Gloria Estefan. It drops Jan. 6.
Netflix seems dead set on dredging up the past, but some things are best left in the memory vault. That includes the schlockey Full House remake (Season 2 dropped in December), which only reminds us of the absence of the Olsen twins who are way too busy hanging out with Tom Ford to tarnish their brand.
Gilmore Girls: A Year in the Life, meanwhile, reminds us of how much we want Rory and Lorelai to succeed in life and get the hell out of Stars Hollow. Creator Amy Sherman-Palladino’s exhausting verbiage is still exhausting.
So some things haven’t changed.
The Asians are coming! It always seemed strange to me that a country as diverse as Canada couldn’t come up with an All-American Girl or Fresh Off the Boat before the American networks.
But finally, we have not one, but two sitcoms: CBC’s Kim’s Convenience, about a Korean-Canadian family running a corner store in Toronto, and City’s Second Jen, about two young Asian women, one Chinese, the other Filipino, trying to make it on their own. The two shows join OMNI’s Blood and Water, the first drama by the broadcaster in Cantonese, Mandarin and English. Because, yes, it’s 2016.
The standout of the bunch is Kim’s Convenience, based on the play by Ins Choi. The writing is sharp and slightly subversive. It makes you remember that good TV starts with fine writing and not necessarily a bigger budget. It slays ABC’s Fresh Off the Boat and Doctor Ken, both shows that feature bigger profile stars and a larger network. Kim’s Convenience hits the target because it doesn’t try to play for broad laughs, but looks at the inanity in one culture that resonates in all cultures.
Vancouver is the superhero capital of the world Vancouver residents are now blasé about folks in shiny Spandex running around downtown. And some aren’t so happy to see that all that filming has helped make traffic congestion the worst in the country for 2016, according to technology firm TomTom.
It started with Arrow. Then The Flash. Add Legends of Tomorrow. And now even Supergirl packed up and moved from Los Angeles to Vancouver for Season 2 in 2016.
For that you can thank executive producer Greg Berlanti ( Dawson’s Creek) for combining the DC and CW universes into an unparalleled superhero factory in the north. The Blue Jays aren’t the only ones to root for The breakout Canadian talent this year is Kylie Bunbury, the star of Fox’s Pitch.
The 27-year-old, Hamilton, Ont.born Bunbury plays the first female Major League Baseball pitcher with such verve, poise and conviction that you’d almost think the character existed.
Sadly, there is no female MLB pitcher just yet, although rooting for Bunbury is a good start. While she never played baseball before, she comes from an athletic family, including her dad, retired Guyanese-Canadian soccer player Alex Bunbury, whom you’ll find in the Canadian Soccer Hall of Fame.
Before Pitch, Bunbury had minor roles in shows including Days of Our Lives and Under the Dome. The sports clichés abound in Pitch. The tough coach. The ambitious agent. The sycophant brother.
But Bunbury transcends the attimes banal plot lines by stepping up to the plate.
Canada’s first Bachelorette was the best yet ABC’s Bachelorette reality dating series has had some pretty good Canadian presence with Jillian Harris and Kaitlyn Bristowe starring in their own seasons south of the border. So when Canada’s W Network bought the rights for a Canadian version, the expectation was that a northern franchise would probably be just a low-rent version of the real thing. But it turns out that Vancouver’s Jasmine Lorimer was the most emotionally smart bachelorette yet.
Yes, there were a few dirtbags in the lineup of guys (hello, Drew!), mostly from Toronto. But many of the scenes seemed to reflect genuine, unscripted emotion as Lorimer tried to thoughtfully narrow her choices.
Lorimer represented Canadian values well, or at least what we think are Canuck values, less petulance and anger and more something resembling an actual grown-up conversation. Her final choice ended up being debatable for many.
But it was a stellar franchise debut that showed that an aging, at times cheese-ball series could still debate questions of the heart.