The final episode of CBC’s reality show How Do You Solve a Problem Like Maria? airs tonight. Turns out, Maria is solving a few problems of her own.
Faced with capped funding and more competition for ad dollars, CBC Television has lately been shifting programming to shows which which people watch (ratings = ad dollars), or, depending on your outlook, drowning in a tidal wave of American cultural. Choose your own moniker.
Say what you like about reality television (and, okay, even Eyewitness News openers), the ratings seem to like it. With “One” notable exception, our ratings have quite strong for Maria, No Opportunity Wasted, The Week the Women Went, Dragon’s Den, and others.
CBC has received criticism that we’re simply importing rather than inventing Canadian content, but Kirstine Layfield says being able to adopt the just-add-content model is helping the CBC. Layfield, head of CBC Television’s network programming, told InsideTheCBC.com today that Maria is a good example of how public broadcasters can share shows. (In the case of Maria, the CBC imported the highly popular BBC format, adding homegrown Canadian content and contestants.) “After all, the BBC is a public broadcaster too,” Layfield said, “And we’re a public broadcaster. We’re really just sharing good ideas.”)
And it’s not just one-way. The CBC is exporting our own home-grown productions.
- BBC Worldwide is picking up The Session, a time-drama commissioned by the CBC (produced by the same company that makes Maria.) The show airs this Fall.
- Later today, CBC Television will announce that ABC is co-piloting romantic comedy 18 To Life.
As for tonight’s show, Elicia MacKenzie and Janna Polzin are the last remaining contestants, hoping to headline an upcoming production of The Sound of Music. Yesterday, Jayme Armstrong of Richmond, B.C., was eliminated at by none other than musical impresario Andrew Lloyd Webber.
I guess if you’ve got to go down, that’s a pretty nice way to do it.
BONUS FACTOID: People erroneously credit Survivor as being the first reality-TV show. In fact it started airing in 1999 as Expedition: Robinson, a Swedish program. As noted in the comments, I had this wrong. Turns out MTV’S Real World preceded even Expedition.
Expedition’s very concept was actually born earlier in England. Britain’s Pop Idol became American Idol, then “(Insert Your Country Here) Idol“. And the reality train was unstoppable.
1 CBC would prefer you call it Factual Entertainment. Then again, the CBC also wants you to calling them “Castro Caps”.
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Canada’s Next Great Prime Minister is also a Canadian grown show, now exported to several countries, also from Factual Entertainment.
How do you solve a problem like promotion masquerading as journalism?
The main entertainment page of CBC.ca, as of 6:20 p.m. Monday, is dominated by a Maria package breathlessly headlined “Maria: Problem solved tonight!”
It includes a large photo of the two remaining contestants and several links, including ones to the official Maria contest site, “More Marias” and a CBC news story about the show approaching its finale.
This is exactly the same kind of “infotainment” ratings-boosting hype used by CTV on its website and newscasts to push Canadian Idol. Promotion is fine if readers know that’s what it is, but putting it in a spot normally reserved for independent journalism, and making it appear as such, is wrong.
CBC likes to talk the talk about having higher ethical standards than the privates. On this one, I’m still waiting for the walk.
Hmm… I think you forgot about MTV’s The Real World, which started in 1992. Good entry though, I will have to write a response piece on my far less read blog
I watched about 5 minutes of A Problem Like Maria to see what all the fuss was about. The show’s problem? It just isn’t very good. It’s not even trashy enough to reach guilty pleasure status so it just stagnates in a pool of mediocrity.
Problem solved.
Next problem.
@macocite: Ah, good catch, thanks.
@Gueinevere: True, though that wasn’t wasn’t a CBC production to begin with.
CBC would prefer it to be called “Factual Entertainment” but the 8 o’clock CBC Radio news reader distinctly referred to it as “CBC’s reality show”. Thank goodness the corporate doublespeak (”factual” vs. “reality”, “regions” vs. “centres”, “benefits” vs. “Total Rewards ™”) hasn’t yet afflicted the news department…
Dave — I agree with you.
See this: http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/SelfPromotionDisguisedAsNews
not only was it on cbc.ca as ‘news’ — the bloody national also reported on it like it was something going on in the world. appalling. embarrassing.
I thought the first reality show was “Who wants to marry a millionaire?” But he turned out to be a smarmy con artist or something shady like that. Meh.
Japan had “reality” shows at least a decade before anyone else.
You can watch clips on YouTube of current Japanese offerings, and see just how bizarre TV will look in another 10 years…