Canadian TV Drama by Catherine Murray, Roger De La Garde and Claude Martin1
Total Page：16
File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb
By Catherine Murray, Roger de la Garde and Claude Martin 1 Star Wars: Canadian TV Drama By Catherine Murray, Roger de la Garde and Claude Martin1 The Audio-Visual Landscape Canadian broadcasting folklore has it that French language broadcasting is a success, English language broadcasting a failure. The blame for that failure is laid on the geographic and cultural proximity to the United States that leads to hyper-commercial star wars with the tv entertainment machine south of the border. Conclusions about situational victories or routs are drawn from overall viewing trends, which show that francophones spend the majority (some 76%) of their viewing time with indigenous programs and the majority (some 72%) of English viewers’ time is spent with American entertainment. This report argues that the “cultural proximity” principle cannot explain the relative health of Quebec dramatic broadcasting or the relative fragility of English language Canadian tv, which has been much studied by European scholars as a canary in the mine of globalization. Pictures of “success” underplay both the rate of incursion of US programming and the role of social formations, managerial judgement and creative leadership in Quebec in sustaining a viable alternative to US stars despite a small population. The larger size or economies of scale of the English market are not sufficient to win the battle of supply and viewing to big-budget US drama, in part due to structural characteristics. But there has been some repatriation of audiences (albeit to new genres of programming which may be better translated into broadband delivery), triumph of cultural proximity in news, sports and, increasingly, comedy, and some isolated successes in drama, as the data will show. Canada’s tv landscape has two distinct official linguistic markets, anglophone (23 million) and francophone (7 million), with radically different contours to their media worlds. The natural linguistic barrier insulating Quebec’s audio-visual landscape cannot alone explain intra-market variations. The larger anglophone market base sustains more conventional networks (6 to 4); more regional production centres (Toronto, Vancouver and Halifax versus one in Montreal); more specialty channels (37 to 23) and proportionately more service- or export-oriented production. As a consequence, the competitive position of the public broadcaster is sharply different (with a larger market share in Quebec). In terms of cultural practice, overall viewing patterns indicate different levels of viewing in Quebec (more tv orientation), different substitution levels (less Direct Broadcast Satellite reception and Internet usage2) and less fragmentation of viewing. The two media markets operate in virtual isolation, with little crossover in supply of production or viewing. The assumption by Tracey and Redahl that the English Canadian tv market is the only one in the world where domestic entertainment is not preferred over imports – whether through historical accident, marketing or shared North American value systems – deserves careful analysis. Certainly, it is easy to 1 Catherine Murray is professor at the School of Communication, Simon Fraser University, British Columbia; Roger de la Garde is professor at the Département d’information et communication, Université Laval, Québec; Claude Martin is professor at the Département de communication, Université de Montréal. The authors wish to thank their assistants for their valuable contributions: Amel Aloui, Synda Ben Affana, Marie-Anne Laramée, Marylaine Chaussé, Maria Eugenia Dominguez in Quebec; and Sean Ebare, Jean Fong, Cassandra Gilliam and Cathy Matysiak in BC. They are indebted for financial support to the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, the Department of Canadian Heritage, the Licence Fee Program of the Canadian Television Fund, Alliance-Atlantis and Craig Broadcasting. This study would not have been possible without the assistance of the Market Analysis Division of the Canadian Radio-Television and Telecommunications Commission, the Culture Statistics Program at Statistics Canada, the cbc Audience Research Division and the Bureau of Broadcast Measurement. See www.sfu.ca/communication/ecf for further information about this study. 2 According to Statistics Canada’s Household Internet Use Survey in 1999, Quebec had the lowest Internet penetration by province (33%) compared to a national average of 45%. A Canadian Consumer Technology Study 2000, conducted by PriceWaterhouseCoopers’ National Survey Centre in Ottawa ,however, found that “Quebec has the fastest growing market for Internet access this year (1999) in Canada”. 2 consider these viewing patterns structurally caused. Private television stations in English and French Canada have since their inception had to compete with American overspill. US producers enjoy a competitive advantage because they can recover production costs in a market 10 times the size of Canada’s and have established vertically integrated conglomerates (AOL/Time Warner, etc.) to produce, promote and distribute exports worldwide. Canadian private broadcasters in the English language market built profitable businesses by importing relatively inexpensive American entertainment programs. By contrast, French television’s prime time schedule is built mainly around the “téléroman”, a unique dramatic response to the specifics of the Quebec market with enormous critical and popular successes like 4 et demi (50% market share) or Un Gars, UneFille (53%) but also, to a lesser extent, around public affairs programs such as La facture (35%) and Zone Libre (22%), musical quizzes such as La Fureur (45%) and a show which combines intellectual and athletic abilities named Fort Boyard (36%). Canadian tv ownership patterns reflect the global trend to consolidation, mergers and acquisitions, and the increased efficiencies may translate into increased investment in dramatic programming. In less than 10 years, the English market went from one private widely-held company in competition with the cbc to two majority-owned national entities, ctv and CanWest Global. These conglomerates also control the two major national newspapers (The Globe and Mail and the National Post, respectively). ctv itself has been taken over by Bell Canada Enterprises, Canada’s largest telephone company. Three regional conventional broadcasters exist: wic/ontv, in its last year of operation awaiting the disposition of a sale to CanWest; chum/city, available mostly in Eastern Canada; and Craig Broadcasting, a midwestern channel. In Quebec, tva, a private network owned by the cable operator Vidéotron, and Société Radio-Canada, or src, the French part of cbc, reigned as a duopoly for many years. Radio-Québec, now Télé-Québec owned by the Quebec government, was a minor player. Then the crtc opened the gates to a second private network, Télévision Quatre-Saisons, tqs, now owned by Quebecor. It is also on sale as Quebecor lately took control over Vidéotron and tva, the dominant network. Quebecor gets more than 50% of advertising spending in Quebec, also being one of two major players in daily newspapers and one of the major providers of weeklies and magazines. Cable now penetrates 75% of Canadian households, down from 78% in 1997, while in Quebec the penetration stabilized at around 72%. Direct-to-home satellites are found in an additional 6% of homes. Canadian cable companies remain powerful gatekeepers, controlling access to the viewer and vying with increasing competition from telephone and direct broadcast satellite carriers to attract customers to new packages of Internet and tv services. Such competition has led to demand for more content. In response, the crtc has aggressively supported specialisation of supply (with a seven-fold increase in special-interest genre or demographically targeted channels) in one of the most highly cabled countries in the world. Five English language specialty channels existed at the start of the decade, 37 at the time of writing, compared to two rising to 23 in Quebec. This shift in supply coincides with a marked rise in overall share of tv viewing in both language markets for the new broadcast entities. In 1992, the audience share of Canadian and American specialized channels plus pay television and vcr was 11% in Quebec and 17% in the rest of Canada: in 2001, the shares are 21% and 42%. To stop such losses due to audience fragmentation, existing English language broadcast ownership groups have diversified into new subscription revenues, assimilating two-thirds of the 37 specialty channels. Diversification has been slower in French markets, where there are 23 such channels, with Astral Media as the main operator and both tva and src also present. Such new system demands for programming have allowed market power to concentrate over the last decade in the publicly-held independent production sector, whose revenues now match those of tv broadcasting. Two-thirds (67%) of revenues accrue to the top 10 production companies, four of them located in Montreal. The largest independent, Alliance- Atlantis, reported a slight (2.3%) decline in revenues in 1999, but still commanded 14% overall. The next largest, Fireworks Entertainment (affiliated with CanWest), had 8%. The third tier in size featured companies such as Motion International (associated with tva), Lions Gate and Cinar, each with 6% of revenues. 3 Overall Viewing Patterns Watching television is Canadians’ principal leisure pastime, but they continue to spend less time this way. The average 21.6