Is the CBC on Target to Develop Great Dramatic Programming?

How the new shift to pilots will affect screenwriters

By Vern Smith

Canada’s public broadcaster is talking about focus-group testing, focus-group testing, and more focus-group testing.

During a conference of independent film producers in Ottawa earlier this year, CBC’s executive vice-president of English television, Richard Stursberg, said the network was shifting its development process to pilots. At the time, he was unclear about how the pilots would be financed, saying if the CBC intended to broadcast any given pilot, it would produce it with tax credits, Canadian Television Fund money, “and other sources.”

However, despite having ramifications over how the industry will be affected, the pilot matter has barely been spoken of since February. More recently, after a half-dozen calls to his office, Stursberg’s aides referred questions to Kirstine Layfield, CBC’s new executive director of
network programming. So the main question is put to her: Won’t more pilots mean less development?

“That’s probably not the right equation,” says Layfield, just over from Alliance Atlantis, where she was senior vice president, programming, lifestyle channels. “We’re putting fewer things into development in terms of trying to streamline a process. I don’t think we know at this point that that will create savings. By making sure that those things that go into development have a better chance of showing up on screen, we’ll actually be investing more in that particular development. So, where developing before may have been ‘send us a script or a bible or something,’ we’re going to do much more work on the development process, which (means) fewer projects, certainly, but we’ll probably be spending as much money on development as a whole.

“I think it might turn into less work in terms of spec scripts and stuff like that. But when we do this, we have an opportunity to make sure things that are going through will have more of a chance to come to fruition.”

A hazy vision

Writers, however, largely see a hazy vision at this point, and are waiting to see how this will trickle down. David Barlow, for instance, has written pilots ranging from half-hour episodes to Nothing Too Good for a Cowboy, which debuted as a two-hour made-for-television movie. So as he studies CBC’s pilot plans, he admits that there is value in casting a project, shooting, and then taking a step back to adjust before going to series.

At the same time, he says problems could be many for Canadian screenwriters. In particular, the chief concern is that dollars originally earmarked for development will go towards financing costly pilots.

“With Nothing Too Good for a Cowboy, we did a backdoor pilot, a TV movie,” says Barlow, who has also written for Blue Murder, North of 60, and Street Legal. “That aired, and again, we made changes and learned, so it can be valuable. The challenge is we are trying to replicate an industry that generates something like a billion dollars in profits.

“Seinfeld was the worst tested half-hour in the history of marketing. Before that, focus groups rejected The Mary Tyler Moore Show. The pilots tested terribly. Then someone decided to ignore the test results and give them a shot anyway. It’s not an infallible system.

“The Americans test them up the yin-yang, and they still fail. The percentages of success are terrible.”

Indeed, instead of searching for a niche, the very pilot process that is designed to please everybody, statistically, pleases next to no one, more often than not. As a rule of thumb, only one out of ten U.S. pilots goes to series.

“You can be prepared to be stretched and pulled and buffeted about by this,” says Barlow. “And it doesn’t
necessarily guarantee success because we haven’t found a viable way of test-marketing this material. At least the Americans haven’t and they’ve been at it a long time.”

Further, these pilots will only take up a few hours of broadcast time, since the CBC has suggested that certain pilots won’t be aired at all. That makes it unclear how the network will fill up the rest of its Can con requirements–fuelling fears that dramas and sitcoms will be left in even more of a lurch.

“There’s just so much scarcity right now in this industry that pilots are universally acknowledged as wasteful,” says Michael MacLennan, who’s written for Godiva’s, Queer as Folk, and Wind at My Back. “You’re spending a great deal of money, you might develop 40 scripts, you might take 12 to pilot, and you might program four. The cost of getting to those four is enormous. Private broadcasters are prepared to do that because it’s their money, but for a public
broadcaster, what it means is fewer actual series.”

Even when a pilot does take off, MacLennan wants to know how the CBC will be able to guarantee that writers and actors will be available six months after the pilot to continue working on the series. Partially answering that earlier this year, Stursberg promised faster turnaround times. But how would the CBC accomplish that?

“I think you’re referring back to an old method that was used by people before me where they would actually air the pilot and see how it went first,” Layfield says. “That’s not what we’re trying to do going forward. A pilot is something you do to test how it looks in-house. We’re not going to be putting, in the future, test pilots on the air and see which one does best and make that one go forward. That, like you said, causes all kinds of problems in terms of availability, that’s not my plan.”

Whatever the plan is, exactly, the broadcaster isn’t quite saying. When asked to estimate the budget-range for pilots of half-hour sitcoms and one-hour dramas, for instance, Layfield says, “We wouldn’t even be able to come up with a range right now.”

The cost of pilots

Although the U.S. is in another financial world, in May the Entertainment Industry Development Corporation reported that 131 pilots were made during last year’s U.S. production season. Costing an average of $2-million for every half-hour of comedy or genre and $4-million for every hour of drama, it totaled a whopping $364-million in production.

So, in Canada at least, financing competitive pilots for the CBC and beyond will be a challenge, especially if cast-offs start piling up, as they do in the states.

Even highly promoted pilots like Love Monkey and Elmore Leonard’s Karen Sisco resulted in the briefest of miniseries despite acclaim and star support. So why should the odds be any better here?

“They pilot a lot of things that never make it to air,” Layfield says. “We’re going to have a lot better ratio of shows that actually make it, because we’re hoping that if we’re putting more money, time and effort into the development process, by the time you get to pilot, that pilot has much more than a one-in-ten chance.

“Now, not everything can be piloted. Certain kinds of shows won’t have pilots and there are all different ways of testing something on tape. But going to pilot is a great way to access all these elements coming together the way we want.”

It’s also a way, MacLennan fears, of turning the craft into an exercise of writing and re-writing for a dozen or so people in a goldfish bowl.

“You’re writing something that you hope tests well,” says MacLennan. “You’re basically a dog doing tricks for the test group and your executive, as opposed to somebody who is coming in with a vision. I have never done a pilot and I would never do it in Canada. I would in the states because you’re paid well and it’s worth the grief. But nobody’s going to give you three-and-a-half-million dollars here.”

With Writers Guild of Canada statistics indicating a proper hour of Canadian drama is going to cost $1.2-million, with a half-hour costing $480,000, Barlow says that “it’s very difficult to raise that in the marketplace in the funding pattern that we have.

“If A, you’re going to blow the thing off and make changes, you can’t run it as part of the series. Or B, if you’re just going to do a one-off, you’re not going to amortize any costs. You’re just going to do the hour. There is no sales value to that, no backend in terms of foreign sales. It’s a kind of disposable item unless you’re very, very lucky and you can manage to tag it on as the first episode. But you have to be very lucky. Nothing can change. Then the question is, what’s the pilot for?”

Stursberg claimed it is about “doing what any other broadcaster, magazine or newspaper publisher does, and that is getting a better understanding of our audiences, their interests, habits and tastes. Simply put, we need to know who is watching what on television, and why they’re drawn to one particular program or programming genre. We need to know for whom we are making our programs.”

But again, with Layfield unable to peg a budget range for pilots, Barlow says, “the money for those pilots has to come from somewhere. Unless there’s new money in the system–and it could very well be, I don’t know–but if there’s not new money, that means yeah, fewer shows.”

See the Summer 2006 issue of Canadian Screenwriter for the complete interview.