There’s a lesson to be learned from the meltdown of Mike Bullard – a reason why the respectable audience numbers he drew over the course of six years to CTV and The Comedy Network did not follow him through his short, dark winter at Global. Was it the lackluster guests? Or the lack of a strong lead-in? Were fans turned off by Bullard’s departing spat with CTV or did the stigma of his very un-hip weight-loss commercials finally catch up with him?

No one seems to know.

Exec producer David Rosen was partway through retooling The Mike Bullard Show – tightening the comedy and musical acts, and adding some variety show elements – when the network killed it in March. He says he ‘wasn’t looking at the numbers’ and, like many industry watchers, is puzzled.

‘Nobody knows what happened there,’ says Brent Haynes, director of programming at Comedy. ‘I can’t speak for Global, but it could be that the new show was too similar… when you got right down to it, it was the same show. Maybe viewers expected something new and different?’

And yet both are already working on new shows to fill their late-night gaps. Comedy has tapped comic Elvira Kurt to host Popcultured, a smart-ass talker about the world of celebrity and entertainment, and shot three pilots in late March. Global has shuffled Rosen to an untitled variety show, set to test potential hosts in early May.

Both ‘casters seem to have accepted that, in Canada, traditional late-night shows can’t compete with the U.S. giants like Letterman and Leno.

If Popcultured goes to air it will likely be at 10 p.m., says Haynes, getting a jump on the competition, and will run a half-hour with short, non-celebrity guest segments of just five minutes each, much like The Daily Show with Jon Stewart. Guests will talk about the latest celebrity gossip.

‘It borrows from several formats,’ says Haynes. ‘It has a talk show-ish feel but there are no sketches. We don’t need star guests, we need someone who can talk about what’s going on… to unspin what’s been spun.’ Kurt’s guests on the pilots included comic Scott Thompson and eTalk DAILY host Ben Mulroney.

Rosen’s show, however, will be a full hour, starting at midnight in the middle of the late-night melee and will try to build an audience by breaking from the typical couch-and-desk format.

‘We certainly want to give something different to that timeslot. It’s extremely congested,’ he notes. ‘We have to create a show that will get people to turn off Letterman or Leno and stay with us through Conan and Kilborn and hopefully not go over to The Daily Show.’

Global had intended to launch the new show immediately, but is now holding off until the fall, prompting rumors that it had, in fact, been killed. Some 48 freelance crew were recently dismissed, but Rosen insists that Global is ‘still committed’ to the project and that he plans to rehire the crew. ‘This is the team I want to work with in the fall,’ he says.

Rosen won’t get into details about the show, except that he is leaning towards a variety format, something that plays to Canada’s strengths in music and comedy while stepping back from, say, less-than-dazzling interviews with underwhelming writers and actors. The show will not be hung on a single host.

Variety is a format well suited to Canada. Done right, like Canadian Idol, it draws high ratings to all-Canadian content for virtually no money and can compete, with reduced risk, in both primetime and late-night against the major U.S. networks. The format has been little used since it fell out of fashion in the late 1970s, but, historically, some of this country’s most popular programs have been varieties. Tommy Hunter stayed on the air for 27 years showcasing country music, of all things, and civil war nearly broke out when CBC canceled Don Messer’s Jubilee back in 1969.

True, the TV landscape was very different back then, but producers are putting a new spin on the old format, and variety appears to be on its way to a comeback.

That’s been the theory at Toronto 1 since last fall, when it launched The Toronto Show, a ‘talent showcase’ of dancers, comics and musicians airing three nights a week under the low-key guidance of host Enis Esmer and produced by Breakthrough Films & Television.

True again, the show has drawn poor ratings, and rumors have swirled that it will not be brought back for a second season, but showrunner Luciano Casmiri believes it can still can work, provided the show shrinks to one hour per week and moves from the too-competitive 10 p.m. slot. He’d rather be on very late, closer to 1 a.m. or 2 a.m., to get hip urban viewers who have just come home from the bars and clubs, but notes that wide-appeal varieties, for networks, usually do well at 8 p.m. or 9 p.m.

‘That’s what killed us, being up against ER and hockey games,’ he says.

-www.thecomedynetwork.ca

-www.canada.com/globaltv

-www.toronto1.tv