Much-touted CBC daytime show goes on hiatus
The Toronto Star says the new Gill Deacon show is on hiatus to fix some elements of the show’s content and set. Says Antonia Zerbisais:
Last fall, Gill Deacon’s face was smiling down from every other billboard in town. CBC-TV spent a small fortune promoting her new daytime show, at the expense of other programs – except for The Hour with George Stroumboulopoulos.But Deacon, who is a terrific and intelligent host, was woefully miscast as a lifestyle twinkie and I just hated her chirpy “We’ll have tons of fun!” promos every morning during CBC Radio One’s The Current. It all was so wrong for CBC, a public network, which should be tackling riskier fare.
Well, seems the audience hated it, too. The show, telecast three times a day, averaged some 32,000 viewers per outing. It is on hiatus until March 12.
Said Julie Bristow, head of fact-based programming, “We are making some changes to the content, the animation and the set to better reflect the mandate of the show.”
More money spent when CBC can ill afford to spend it.
A CBC spokesperson told me this pause was always in the cards, and this is just a scheduled break.
Did you ever catch it? Did you like it? What would you like to see different on it?
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Interesting that Bristow did not tell me that this pause was not always in the cards, doncha think?
After wondering for ages what the billboards everywhere in Vancouver were about, I checked it out once (I should say, just once). I didn’t like what I saw one bit… I think it was a segment about dressing up your table for the holidays or whatever, with some table fashion consultant. Or maybe I’m misremembering. But I remember clearly thinking: No thanks. Just my taste, though.
There is a major problem if it was always in the cards to shut down and retool the show.
Leave it to Antonia to be the only alert media reporter in the country.
Josh doesn’t say why he didn’t like it.
I saw it in person and thought that after years of enduring hell with Gaboringreau and Dini The Crude Petty it was a nice change to have an intelligent and useful program.
Apparently everything is wrong here is except the host.
I still think Jan Arden has a career waiting for her in TV.
Shooting it at the Eaton Center would have helped to give the show some immediacy and life. It really had the cold, odd feel of a time warp to it (the disco set didn’t help) and most segments could have been recorded anywhere in the last 5 yrs.
Perhaps what women want during daytime is to see another woman who is more successful than them yet not all that bright.
Not my type of show really, but I don’t think either that it’s not not the type of show the pubcaster should be trying for either. General daytime lifestyle programming seems to be a niche the CBC hasn’t been fulfilling. Hopefully with the overhaul they get it right. I liked Gill enough, but indeed something about the show seemed “icy” and 1991′ish.
As a new mom (and CBC employee) at home I watched Gill’s show regularly until my daughter started showing a bit too much interest in the pretty moving pictures on the box and I stopped having the TV on during the day. Can’t say I really miss it; I enjoyed some of the segments on home improvement, enviro topics and the more newsy items, but Cranium for Cash was utterly stupid and the fluffier stuff (fitness, cooking, fashion) seemed a waste of Gill’s talent.
That said, daytime programming can’t be easy for CBC, and finding a good fit for the slot will be tough. There’s not much that will bring me back, because I don’t plan to raise a TV zombie, but more substantial content that makes me think might induce me to tune in occasionally.
Oh yeah, the Chatelaine mag tie-ins didn’t do much for me, nor did the “song of the day” or Gill’s tidy wrap-up at the end.
Yeah, great.
We could have had a couple more years of Brave New Waves for what this dog of a show cost.
We all like and admire Gill; there’s no question of that.
But she was not able to connect with the audience.
What does The View and Regis have?
For one thing, the show made references to the day’s news and as a viewer I felt I was watching something that was NOW, instead of from “whenever”.
The daily song has been mentioned above. What did they expect from the audience? That less than ten seconds of something was going to prompt someone to go and buy the tune?
Kind of shortsighted and presumptuous.
Better they had it available as free download each day.
It’s surely one of the great mysteries of life that a fifty year old broadcasting company finds it impossible to come up with either a daytime or late night program that satisfies viewers in it’s own country.
Then again, they didn’t call me.
Maybe I’m off base here, but hasn’t the CBC had previous success with a daytime program – “Midday”?
I’ve no idea what Midday’s ratings were like close to it’s demise, but I know at one point it was quite popular for a Canadian daytime program.
Maybe bringing back something like that – a light newsmagazine – would appeal more to Canadians?
I think the problem with trying to duplicate American-style talk shows is that Canadian’s bias towards homegrown programming kicks in, and regardless of the accuracy of the statement… they think “Why should I watch this when it’s just a Canadian knockoff of Oprah?”
Canadians are no longer interested in putting up with glorified cable Toronto shows with purely regional Toronto hosts being passed off as national shows. Move the show out of Toronto. Get a non-Toronto based host, preferably someone with a bit of a national profile, i.e. no one like Gill Deacon, and then the show may have a chance. As is it never even had a chance to succeed, and that should have been obvious. I never bothered to watch the show because I knew just from the fact that it was to be hosted out of Toronto by someone essentially unknown outside of Toronto that this would not be a show that I’d be interested in.
Then your (insert name of city here) bias has caused you to miss a really good show, David.
Allan:
I think a better interpretation would be that I accurately assessed the signs. The show was not popular and credible reports say that it was not very good. Knowing CBC’s recent track record, when I see them put out yet another show that looks on the surface like a cable Toronto show being passed off as a national show, then recent history suggest that that is probably exactly what it is. Next up will be Jian Ghomeshi’s Sounds Like Queen Street West, or whatever they decide to call it. And whatever they decide to call it, you know that it will be Sounds like Queen Street West. That’s all any of his shows have been because that’s all he knows. Ghomeshi is not even close to being qualified to host a national pop culture show. This isn’t rocket science and the bias is not the bias of the listeners. It’s the bias of the CBC.
Dear God……is there any reason why we have to suffer through this painfully faux chirpy boring show twice a day in the Maritimes. It’s bad enough that we have to surf for an hour in the morning to find some other program to watch while the hour passes, but we have to do it again in the afternoon.
Surely CBC, there must be something else to replace this (may I suggest also of eliminating the reruns of “Whats for dinner”, and “The Incredible Food Show” Incredible is not the word I would use but………….
What was wrong with Emmerdale………………..a little too pricey?
I saw the Deacon show in person and thought it was excellent.
Ghomeshi is vapid, but what can anyone do about it?
Is this a symptom of his generation, or of the CBC?
All that’s really needed is a program with … spunk.
Like The Hour, but with producers who are “old” enough to vote.
Maybe, and I might be going out on a limb here… maybe Canadians aren’t going to accept a light news magazine non-celebrity talkshow format thing anyway? It hasn’t worked in recent memory, for all kinds of reasons, but maybe most significantly it’s because we are leery of anything that is so unoriginal and Toronto-esque. I don’t watch it because I don’t know who Gill Deacon is or why I should watch her. There’s also nothing on with her that I can’t see done better elsewhere.
Who knows… we’re so picky when it comes to Canadian TV anyway, I’m just glad they keep trying.
The problem with the Gill Deacon show is that it is going up against canada’s answer to Oprah that being Cityline and the host Marilyn Denis.
CBC is trying to get cityline viewers who would normaly watch Marilyn who looks comfortable on camera and connects with the viewer at home. Why would I watch the deacon show when it is copying the same formatt of cityline.
CBC needs to know what type of viewer they are after and come up with an original formatt, why not get four different hosts ( The View) from various parts of canada and get their views on life etc, and get high profile celebs who promote their movies and such on to the show and maybe their viewership will go up.