It Doesn't Seem 'Canadian': Quality Television' and Canadian-American Co-Productions

Flashpoint: One Moment Changes Everything Flashpoint, the English-Canadian (1) one-hour scripted drama about an elite police tactical unit, can be considered the manifestation of a particular moment in Canadian television history. It is a moment that has profoundly changed the television production landscape in such a way that Canadian television scholars have yet to find a way to fruitfully discuss these changes. Flashpoint was born from the dramatic drop-off in American television production during the hundred-day Writers Guild of America strike, which spanned from November 2007 to February 2008, and can be considered the most proximate cause of why Flashpoint was picked up by American network CBS for co-production and simulcasting purposes. It could be argued that Canadian television scholars were experiencing their own drop-off in the production of innovative theories and methods for how to address the changes being wrought on the production of English-Canadian television programs. They continue to analyze English-Canadian television through the themes of nation building and citizenship, (2) even though this paradigm of understanding television as a tool for disseminating and affirming Canadian identity has been considered a constraint to new forms of television scholarship. (3) It is particularly a limitation to understanding the production of the new crop of Canadian-American co-productions on private television networks (e.g. CTV and CanWest Global). Analysis of these programs is not furthered by scholarly arguments for public television service, or by determining the ways in which the CBC's mandate to Canadianize television has succeeded or not. Such analysis is also disabled by redundant analyses of how aggressive American culture is endangering a traditional Canadian culture, (4) precisely because a successful co-produced program must appeal to both sets of audiences in the context of their respective cultures. (5) [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] This paper is informed by the particular context of producing this new crop of English-Canadian television programs for a private television network. However, it will not be a macro-analysis of the political economies that have produced such a context, even though such an analysis has long informed the study of English-Canadian television studies. (6) Instead, I will use a microanalysis of the production of a CanWest Global/Showcase pilot, tentatively titled Lawyers, Guns and Money (7), to think though the following questions: how do producers negotiate the content of the pilot to appeal to both Canadian network programmers and potential American network programmers, so that both sets of programmers would agree that it is quality television? Is the standard of quality set by American television programs? Is this appeal to quality what makes a pilot successful (or rephrased, how do you measure the success of a television pilot)? I have chosen Lawyers, Guns and Money as my case study because of my capacity to observe its production as an insider, which allows me to document how the production has shaped itself to be palatable to both the Canadian and (potential) American markets. Drawing from actor-network theory, I argue that this particular Canadian pilot's success is due to its ability to mobilize American-associated markers of quality in order to convince network executives that it itself is a quality production. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Economic Flashpoint: Canada Exports Quality While American networks have been making television shows in Canada for years to gain tax benefits, Flashpoint became only the second Canadian-American (CTV/CBS) co-production of a television series, following Due South in 1994. Its consistently strong prime-time ratings on both sides of the border have made Flashpoint a successful experiment, and a blueprint for a new economic model of television production. Facing a softening advertising market, a fragmented audience, reduced production on the number of television pilots, a general reduction in prime-time programming costs, and the economic downturn, (8) American network executives have become quite open to co-producing television series with Canadian independent production companies. …

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