Television is important to Canadians, and particularly when it’s cold outside, we nurture a certain amount of devotion to the glowing box. In the winter months, studies show we’ll spend more than 25 hours of quality time with our TVs every week. Most of this time is spent watching programs imported from our neighbours to the south, but not all the time. When we’re looking for sports or news, we’re after something homegrown, with a Canadian perspective. But ask a Canuck couch potato to name her favourite Canadian television show, and she’s apt to give you a blank look.
The singular exception to American television’s dominance in Canadians’ viewing habits is CTV’s hit series Corner Gas, which can sometimes land ratings in the Top 20, with around 1.5 million viewers per week. It’s a surprisingly charming sitcom set in small-town Saskatchewan, a sort of Seinfeld-meets-W. O. Mitchell. It’s witty and refreshing, miraculously free of profanity; in short, it’s a blessed relief from Canada’s erstwhile favourite homegrown sitcom, the unnecessarily crass Trailer Park Boys. Yet, other than that minor blip, Canadian-made programming doesn’t seem to register.
The truth is that American drama is our favourite kind of television. Primetime U.S. series are the beginning and the end of our most engaged hours in front of the TV. Of those many hours that we’re in front of the tube each week, most of us spend them watching Desperate Housewives, CSI, or Lost. This has created a dilemma that Canadian television networks have been struggling with for decades-Canadian dramas are entirely drowned out by a cacophony of loud, slick American shows. Nevertheless, Canadian television offers up some exceptional programming for anybody who can tear themselves away from Wisteria Lane.
Swap sexy starlets and brutally handsome leading men for a culturally diverse and aesthetically underwhelming cast, overwrought story arcs for something a bit more local and certainly more realistic, and you’ve got yourself something like the average Canadian drama. And while the strongest Canadian dramas regularly fail to register ratings that would give them commercial appeal, that hasn’t stopped them from garnering critical acclaim and even a cult following of CanCon junkies.
Chris Haddock is something of an oddity in the Canadian television industry. Having worked in television on both sides of the border, he returned to Canada committed to make “serious” TV for the Canadian market. In 1998, he created Da Vinci’s Inquest, a gritty crime drama set on the mean streets of Vancouver that follows the city’s head coroner, Dominic Da Vinci (played by veteran actor Nicholas Campbell).
“I’ve had success in the U.S.,” Haddock says. “And I found that getting an individual voice to air is certainly [easier] here.”
His dedication to capturing Vancouver’s underbelly in all its seamy glory paid off. Da Vinci’s Inquest received kudos from critics and took home shelves of Gemini Awards over its 7-year run, and continues to air regularly in syndication. For anyone that followed the show, even sporadically, it’s easy to see why. Da Vinci’s Inquest pulsed with authenticity, exhibiting none of the smug superiority of its powerhouse American counterpart, CSI.
“In the U.S., their demands are quite a bit different,” Haddock explains. “You have to have an immediate breakout hit, or you’re gone.”
Without the pressure to grab eyeballs that dogs American dramas, Da Vinci’s Inquest was free to develop powerful stories that set it apart.
“I think we’ve been successful because we’re specifically Canadian and we don’t pretend to be from some neverland floating over North America,” Haddock said. “We are specifically from Vancouver in our storylines and issues, and it has been universally true that people like to see things from their own community.”
Concluding after seven strong seasons, Da Vinci Inquest inspired a franchise, spinning off last year into the follow-up series Da Vinci’s City Hall, which charts Da Vinci’s move into municipal politics. In the end, it was a kind of television stickhandling that couldn’t happen anywhere but here.
Location is perhaps Canadian television’s most compelling feature. Over the years, American film and television producers have conspired to make Canadian cities disappear into a mist of bland, generic North American-ness. How often has Toronto stood in for American cities, robbing our distinctive street corners of their identity? In a movie like Cinderella Man, the Hudson’s Bay Company building that takes up an entire Toronto city block is magically transformed into Madison Square Gardens. Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle was filmed in the Caledon Hills, an hour north of Toronto. Brokeback Mountain actually took place just outside of Calgary. After years of our willing suspension of disbelief, it has become natural for us to see Canadian cities camouflaged and masked, playing anything but themselves.
Luckily, strong Canadian dramas have surreptitiously found a home at the CBC. With Da Vinci’s City Hall unabashedly portraying warts-and-all Vancouver, it was only a matter of time before Toronto begat its own local drama. Entering its third season, legal drama This is Wonderland draws an audience (half a million strong) into Old City Hall (which sits in the heart of the city at the corner of Bay and Queen Streets), which houses the chaotic world of Toronto’s lower courts.
“When we went into the building, we were just faced with this onslaught of stories,” says Dani Romain, the show’s co-creator and executive producer. “We were amazed by the volume of cases, by the different people that were there-different colours, different nationalities. There are something like 166 different translators working in that building.”
Romain and her co-creator, famed local playwright George F. Walker, clearly share a passion for these stories, but This is Wonderland is more than an auteur’s project. It’s a fascinating experiment in storytelling, featuring Torontonians of all shapes, colours, and sizes. With 25 regular characters, each episode swings wildly through four or five storylines, a parade of the comic and the tragic.
Romain and Walker spent 18 months watching and listening in on court cases.
“We spent a lot of time in the mental health court, because the stories there were so powerful,” Romain says. “You feel so helpless, because these people don’t belong in jail.”
No other legal drama even attempts to portray the heart-rending cases that move through a court like that, but it gets equal prominence here, along with the more typically portrayed bail and plea courts.
“[Bail court] is really the most important step in the judicial process, because it’s not about innocence or guilt, it’s just about whether they have enough to detain you,” Romain notes. “[You] actually you have to prove that you should be released on bail. And if you’re poor and your mother can’t afford to put up money to get you out of jail, you kind of have to stay there.”
While Romain claims that This is Wonderland isn’t on a mission to change prevailing notions about the Canadian legal system, one can’t help but feel that the show espouses a distinct social consciousness. On American shows like Law & Order, the philosophy is very much “put the bastards away,” whereas Wonderland’s focus is less black and white, more humane.
“[We’re] not dealing with murderers or big fancy ‘ripped from the headlines’ stuff,” Romain said. “We deal with real people’s problems… Like, ‘I hate my mother-in-law, so I hit her and she called the police.’ Things like that.”
The human drama that Wonderland dishes is as true to life as television gets. The stories it tells may not be ripped from the headlines, but they certainly are plucked from the street.
For many Canadians, television is a faithful companion, keeping us company as we hibernate during the bleaker months. Mostly, we’re consuming a steady diet of American content, but in the cold of winter, that can be a weak broth that leaves us feeling a bit anemic. Luckily, for those of us bold enough to actually flip the channel, Canadian drama serves up a hearty stew of homegrown themes, locally produced talent, and much-needed reality.
