In an article leading this morning’s Globe and Mail Review section, reporter Gayle MacDonald described CBC TV’s Fall 2007 season as “sexier”.
After years of so-called high-impact miniseries that largely left viewers cold, CBC Television has unveiled a slate of fall shows that it says reflects a new belief that audiences like to be given time to really get to know TV characters.
Kirstine Layfield, executive director of network programming, promised a “new direction at the CBC” and acknowledged that “the audience had changed.
“People like to meet characters. They like to fall in love with them, and stay with them for a while. Our goal is to increase the number of people coming to the CBC,” Layfield said, adding that in 2006 the network enjoyed its best prime-time season in five years with shows.
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Layfield called 2006 a “year of building” at the CBC. She and her boss Richard Stursberg, executive vice-president, English Television, said they’re gunning for 2007 to be the network’s best for ratings in 10 years.
Also in the Globe this morning is an article about the CBC’s new metric for measuring the “public value” of its programming — PARC.
I’m guessing my own formula below is now out of date?
Show Budget (C) - Angry Complaints (X) + Number of
Gin and Tonics required by producers (GT) / Lockouts (L)
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Sexier eh? Why should CBC-TV try to do one better than midnight CTV? First they have DQ’s whipping cream come-on ad for chocolate waffle fusion, next-Grape Vine and Night Line personals for disturbed and lonely people, and then Viagra’s secret language of conjugal connectiveness. Punch that in with Jon Stewart and the Colbert Report and your jocular night is complete. The ‘Glib’ and ‘Male’ formula for television continues to edge on needle and spoon visual escapism- a la Americano. Gayle MacDonald’s formula is thrown together to alert the few lonely people able enough to work their channel changers. The Channel Universe of Television has become a waste land obsessing on its own waste products. How long can this go on? Kirstine Layfield shouldn’t let people like Red Green and Rick Mercer slip off the radar for the sake of a print journalist’s need for excitement and candor.
My question is why? CBC Television needs a makeover yes, but please base it on BBC1, not CTV or the UK’s Channel 4.
ACADEMIC IDOL…
There should be an ‘Academic Idol’ show to have graduate Senior Years students mindmapping their Post Secondary ambitions to a panel of graduate year university students on television. Prizes could be a complete post-secondary education pre-paid… right up to a Doctorate Program. If you want to see young people on Television- this show could out drag on ‘Dragons Den’ and out opportune ‘No Opportunity Wasted’. As an aside you could have them offer up their media and fashion idols- along with how their personal choices have evolved throughout their Senior Years in High S-Cool! Thirty Year old immature talk show hosts like Curious George S. will never bring these kids in from the halls into the studio. It would give our thinking youth a media platform they could build on.