The Tea Makers

There’s no doubt there’s some kind of shakeup happening at English CBC-TV these days. To be frank, it needs it.

The question is, what kind of shakeup is it?

Lise Lareau said last week that the current president is obsessed with revenue generation, and she wishes he was “half as obsessed with programming.” I thought that was last thing we needed. I imagined the president introducing an impish, goggle-eyed cousin into DaVinci’s City Hall.

But thinking of it some more, Ms. Lareau was right.

All of the major decisions over the last few years have been about making money, rather than making TV. Perhaps if the TV was better, the money would be easier to find?

Going back a bit, there is the obsession with gleaning money from real estate. There was the outsourcing of the promotions department, ostensibly to save money, which has proven to be a failure, and will probably not save any money at all. Then the lockout, which was about saving money in the future, with interim programming so bad it was literally criminal. Then the head of English TV programming quit, whose job, inexplicably, was left vacant over the fall launch and into the next year. Then this week, 3 dark, complex, adult – and good – shows were cancelled for bad ratings.

Now the new head of programming, Kirstine Layfield, seems like a nice lady and is supposedly a savvy scheduler. She used to run Alliance Atlantis’ “lifestyle” channels, and before that she worked for Hallmark Entertainment. She knows how to deliver cheap, comfortable, profitable pap with the programming.

But Rabinovitch says he wants audacity, so who knows? Maybe they will deliver unto us the Canadian Sopranos. Or the Canadian Jackass. Or the Canadian Jackass Sopranos?

But given the actions of the current management over the last few years, and looking at their obsessions, you don’t have to be a master codebreaker to see where this is all heading.

Or a goggle-eyed cousin, for that matter.