NATPE in retrospect

Days after the rapture of New Orleans has been reduced to incriminating pictures, we’re of two minds on the Canadian posse at natpe.

While all expend serious energy branding content ‘Canadian’ at home, it’s the last thing many producers want down south at the circus that is the National Association of Television Program Executives convention.

On one hand, you could respect success. They’re a tough crowd, those Americans. This year, Tin Can Alley – the row of ‘booths’ manned by Columbia TriStar, Paramount Television, and Carsey-Werner et al who spend between us$2 million and us$3 million to woo buyers with food, drink and the parading of Donny and Marie, kiss, Richard Simmons and a couple of Judge Something or Others whose names escape us – had Canadian representation in the form of Alliance Atlantis Communications.

Dubbed aa in the u.s. trades (which seems bad karma and we’re not using it), aac first and foremost, more than the American producers, appears to have mastered the action-adventure series syndication market.

A blindly confusing maze of cash and barter, distribution and subdistribution, new first-run hour weeklies, off-network hour futures and several other bafflegab terms for which there is no dictionary, the syndicated action-adventure genre is apparently plagued by squeezed time slots, rising programming costs, and falls prey to preemption by sports so often that some estimate as much as 80% to 90% of first-run syndicated shows fail in year one.

First-run – those programs going into syndication from episode one – are the largest crapshoot for u.s. distributors who, given the costs of programming, are more often than not willing to let other channels test run a new show and gather Nielsens before investing. That’s why it’s rather cool that our own Alliance Atlantis is producer of the few big deals announced at the market including Peter Benchley’s Amazon, Beastmaster: The Legend Continues and Total Recall: 2070. Telescene’s Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Lost World is another.

aac and Telescene, the former with 25 mows and 14 series in process and the latter towing more than 100 hours of original programming to natpe, apparently have the confidence of the market. This is where the money is, and going forward, as per aac’s Laurie Pozmantier, senior vp of aac tv production, ‘there isn’t anything we’d consider producing you can’t sell internationally. Unless I can cover it through licence fees in Canada and u.s. sales and make a profit, we won’t do it.’

Back at home, the options for industrial Cancon are growing. Psi Factor is 10/10 on the cavco scale. Presumably some among Outer Limits, Gene Roddenberry’s Earth: Final Conflict, Nikita, Misguided Angels, Student Bodies, Peter Benchley’s Amazon, Total Recall: 2070, Beastmaster: The Legend Continues, Lexx: The Series, and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Lost World also qualify as Canadian content. Primetime network windows could close for those more clearly Canadian projects accessing the Canadian Television Fund. Someone might have to decide at some point whether this is okay.

Other thoughts on natpe: The Americans are trying a new strategy. On the Global Financing with North American Partners panel, abc/espn’s Herb Granath said learning to play local is key to the future. A twist on ‘think global, act local,’ presumably the translation is that u.s. productions can further dominate the world if they learn to address the particular quirks of the target market. Beware the first import that features a beaver and makes New York look like Toronto. If you are an igloo, be very, very afraid.