Fact: Canadian drama is leaps and bounds ahead of where it was in the ’70s and ’80s. Fact: There remains room for improvement.

Despite copious hyperbole about the quality of Canadian drama, the mass audience remains tuned into American programs in prime time, according to the ratings.

Seeking an analysis of the reasons why and thoughts on what’s required to move drama to the next level, Playback asked former Globe and Mail television critic John Haslett Cuff for a retrospective and his perspective after 10 years covering Canadian television.

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Compared to the best programs from the u.s. and Britain (and even Australia), Canadian television drama series still lag lamentably in quality and sophistication. Despite the enormous growth in domestic television production, much of what is produced here still reflects the sort of cultural schizophrenia that is both a product of economic realities and a failure of confidence and imagination.

The cbc continues to air the most identifiably indigenous drama (North of 60, Black Harbour, Wind at My Back) and the private sector still creates too much embarrassingly adolescent dreck (Psi Factor: Chronicles of the Paranormal, Cold Squad, Welcome to Paradox).

More money, more opportunities and a larger, more skilled talent pool clearly have not resulted in more high-quality, indigenous drama.

The general awareness and volume of Canadian tv have grown significantly and the major players (Alliance’s Robert Lantos, Atlantis’ Michael MacMillan, ctv’s Ivan Fecan, et al) have all become considerably richer and more influential, but the television viewer just pays more for more of the same mediocrity.

When I started watching television professionally a dozen years ago, Night Heat was the first Canadian show to crack the u.s. primetime lineup (cbs, briefly) and Anne of Green Gables was the most-watched domestic drama ever produced.

Since then, Night Heat (ctv) alumnus Clark Johnson has gone from playing a detective on a Canadian tv show to playing a detective on a u.s. tv show (Homicide Life on the Street), and Kevin Sullivan, the producer of Anne of Green Gables, is still producing popular period dramas for the cbc. Both examples are instructive in terms of trying to understand the curious condition of Canadian television drama today.

Back in 1986, the Canadian television industry was entering a boom period and everyone (including me) was optimistic. The reasons for this optimism were obvious. The Caplan-Sauvageau Report of the Task Force on Broadcasting Policy had just been published, castigating the private broadcast sector for not producing enough Canadian television drama and recommending that, as a condition of their broadcast licences, they (ctv, Global) devote a higher percentage of their revenue and primetime hours to high-quality Canadian programs

More significantly, the television universe was beginning to expand rapidly – from a handful of specialty licences then to more than two dozen now – and production companies and broadcasters were all hell-bent for growth and diversification.

Most observers and industry players concluded, reasonably, that more outlets and greater expenditures would mean more production. Even in the uncertain calculus of this accelerated cultural and industrial growth, it didn’t seem too idealistic to expect that more high-quality Canadian tv drama would be produced.

Another reason for optimism at the time was the appointment of Fecan as the head of CBC English Television programming.

A graduate of both Citytv and local cbc and a post-graduate of programming at nbc in Hollywood, Fecan was seen as the refreshingly young and hip new honcho at the staid public network who was going to jazz things up and raise the standards of Canadian entertainment programming to new heights.

As it turned out, Fecan succeeded spectacularly in some cases (Love and Hate, Conspiracy of Silence, codco, Kids in the Hall), but was ultimately foiled by a combination of severe budgetary cutbacks at the network, u.s.-style extravagance and misplaced ratings mania which have all but destroyed what little remains of the integrity of the public broadcaster.

True to expectations, over the past decade, the sheer volume of Canadian television production has increased dramatically as both ctv and Global grew more profitable and began reluctantly to respond to public criticism and regulatory demands for more homegrown product.

The cbc developed Street Legal and ctv came up with Mount Royal and then e.n.g., which were ambitious attempts to create popular primetime drama series that Canadians would want to watch week after week.

Both e.n.g. and Street Legal were arguably slicker and racier than any previous Canadian drama series, and they were demonstrably proud of being geographically and culturally specific about their Toronto settings.

While they both seemed adolescent and distressingly imitative of u.s. fare in pace and style, the shows had devoted, if not huge, audiences, and just about everyone regarded them as representing progress and growth for the industry.

Due South (a product of Alliance/ctv) was also considered a great leap forward for Canadian television, partly because it had a run on cbs primetime and mostly because audiences found its often funny send-ups of the differences in Canadian and u.s. culture charmingly spot on.

And over at the cbc, true to form, a drama series featuring mostly earnest and upright aboriginals (North of 60) found a passionately devoted audience who reveled in the depiction of life far beyond Toronto’s Yonge and Bloor or Vancouver’s Granville and Hastings streets.

Most notably, the cbc continued to make the only truly cutting-edge television, beginning with the comedy of the Kids in the Hall and codco and moving forward with Ken Finkleman’s The Newsroom and More Tears. But these were comedies, long a domestic strong suit.

And for every Due South and e.n.g., every North of 60 and Road to Avonlea, the industry continued to produce literally dozens of drama series that were industrially successful and highly exportable but not in any way distinctively and valuably Canadian.

From Adderly and Diamonds and Hot Shots, through t.n.t. (whatever happened to Mr. T?), Alfred Hitchcock Presents, The Ray Bradbury Theatre, The Outer Limits, Destiny Ridge, Forever Knight and Lonesome Dove to Once a Thief, Nikita and Gene Roddenberry’s Earth: Final Conflict there is an unbroken string of Canadian produced, made-for-u.s.- cable schlock whose chief characteristics are far-fetched scenarios and u.s. (sometimes Canadian) actors whose careers had stalled south of the border but whose names were at least recognizable to u.s. cable tv programmers.

Proof that the domestic industry has grown up to some degree lies in the production of two drama series. Traders, a product of Atlantis Films and Global, is perhaps the classiest, flashiest and most technically sophisticated of any Canadian drama series ever produced, but it suffered from poor scheduling, being pitted against the strongest u.s. primetime lineup of the week (Thursday).

But far more interesting and more innovative was the Alliance/ Back Alley Films/cbc series Straight Up, a teen and twentysomething half-hour drama that completely dazzled most critics and held up in comparison to the best of such shows produced anywhere in the English-speaking world.

Typically, however, it was never given the funding, promotion or smart scheduling that it deserved. Any momentum Straight Up might have been able to build on was stalled by horrendous funding problems that delayed the now moribund show’s second season by two long years.

In the dozen years since Alliance (now Alliance Atlantis Communications) grew from a small, deeply-in-debt and cash-poor Toronto production and distribution company into one of the largest and most versatile entertainment conglomerates in the world, the Canadian television industry has also grown into a multibillion-dollar enterprise with a larger talent pool and more opportunities than anyone ever anticipated.

And with the ever-weakening dollar remaining attractive to investors and producers south of the border, the production-service-for-hire business will continue to grow.

Canadian drama itself will not markedly improve, however, unless there is more stable funding earmarked for projects that do not self-consciously imitate the formulaic, jolt-per-minute u.s. programming that continues to dominate the world’s television screens.

There must be a greater willingness to take risks (by producers) on drama that is more clearly and identifiably local and less reliant on the formulas that have made so much Canadian drama interchangeable with crap produced south of the border.

The key to all this is, of course, the public sector, especially the cbc, which has the mandate and the track record for consistently producing the best comedy, tv movies and miniseries.

But unless all those companies that have grown rich off the public purse (Telefilm Canada) – mostly producing undistinguished ‘hybrid’ dramas that look like u.s. cable knockoffs – are more severely restricted in their access to the limited production funds available, nothing will improve much.

It is no longer conscionable that these large, publicly traded production companies should be receiving any public largesse and the money might better be redirected to both the cbc and those independent producers with Canadian projects worthy of support.

John Haslett Cuff was The Globe and Mail television critic from 1986-1997.