I feel for CBC management--not all the time, but every now and then.
The game we're in right now is very high stakes. The cost of a pilot is enormous. We've set the benchmark; we're trying to compete with House and CSI. If a show is a clunker, they have to come before the committee and explain why they made a bad show. If they cancel curling, we're going to hear about it in the House of Commons. Altar Boys, oh my God, we're going to have editorials. I don't think anybody even got to see this show. If CBC gave me a bootleg copy, at least I'd appreciate it.
We're in a strange situation where you really have to either be absolutely safe or absolutely guaranteed. So we're not going to do a lot of interesting television because of that.
Yet the question I'd put to you is.... If we think of the best Canadian television we've had, it's been fairly cheap. If you look at The Second City, we've created a generation of not just stars, we've created a generation of superstars from a program that was done very much on the fly, and it allowed people to develop their skills. John Candy would not have been a superstar if he hadn't had endless hours on television developing his craft and building an audience.
Is the argument to be made that it's worth it in the long run to put some money into regional programming where the CODCOs come out of and the Rick Mercer Reports are born, rather than having to put everything on the one roll of the dice in Toronto, where if you don't make it, that's going to cost a lot of money, it's going to be egg all over our faces, and we're going to have to debate it in Parliament? Is there a better argument to say there's got to be a funding envelope to allow the bubbling up of new ideas we never would have expected, and if it fails, what the heck, it didn't cost us all that much money anyway?