Do you ever get the feeling you’re invisible?

Michelle Marion sure does. She’s the director of Canadian independent production for Astral Media. Astral owns the pay channel The Movie Network, otherwise known as TMN. Maybe you’ve heard of it?

‘When there are these big mothership statements about the fate of drama in Canada, everyone refers to conventional TV,’ she says. ”Is Drama Dead?’ and ‘Is Anyone Doing Drama?’ We want to wave our arms and say, ‘Yes! We are!”

Yes, they are. In the early ’00s, TMN and Movie Central, pay channels owned by Astral and Corus Entertainment covering Eastern and Western Canada, respectively, entered a joint partnership to produce scripted programming à la HBO to complement their bread and butter, American first-run movies, and fare from HBO.

‘It’s becoming harder and harder to own the real estate of movies, so one of the ways to make ourselves stand out is to produce original drama,’ she says. ‘From a branding perspective, we feel that this strategy is really important.’

It has taken a while for producers to catch on to what TMN was looking for, exactly.

‘When we started, pretty much all the pitches we got were retreads of rejected CBC and CTV pitches with a few swearwords and sex scenes thrown in,’ she says. ‘But that’s not what we mean. We’re talking about a completely different approach when it comes to narrative, theme and character, and now, a couple years later, we’re getting creatives that come to us first thing, saying, ‘There’s nowhere else I can do this.”

Together the two webs produce three series a year. Three. Scripted. Canadian. Series. Per year.

TMN spent $28 million in 2004 and $32 million each in 2005 and 2006 on Canadian content, most of it on Canadian movies in exchange for which they take first pay window, but also on scripted drama. Pool that with Movie Central’s kitty, and they’ve got a nice little thing going for producers.

Of the series that have resulted – among them Slings & Arrows, G-Spot, Terminal City and ReGenesis – some have been more successful than others. The critics loved Slings & Arrows, which, in its third and final season, bagged three Geminis. ReGenesis airs in (count ’em) 110 countries (and is the highest-rated series on France’s ARTE, according to Marion) and recently won an International Interactive Emmy for its online version.

Their latest offering, Durham County, premiered in early May to enthusiastic reviews. ‘Hypnotic and jarring, beautiful and repugnant,’ wrote The Toronto Star’s Vinay Menon, ‘it is actually an exceptional bit of television.’ Note that he omitted that patronizing ‘Canadian’ qualifier that you so often see.

But here’s the thing. There aren’t many people who get it – TMN or Movie Central, I mean. Astral has just over a million subscribers, but as to an individual show’s numbers? Wild horses couldn’t drag that out of them. Because they’re small. Real small.

‘I think it’s terrific that this is being done, and some of it’s pretty darn good,’ says Directors Guild of Canada president Alan Goluboff. ‘But in terms of audiences, how many people have access to that stuff? I as a viewer don’t have access to any of those stations. I think the people who have pay, it’s got to be a minority.’

ACTRA’s Steve Waddell doesn’t get pay either. And as for Durham County? Never even heard of it. He has heard of HBO, however, and Waddell says that if TMN and Movie Central want to crank out some good Canadian drama, he’s all for it. ‘If they’re producing Canadian drama, we salute them, we applaud them and we encourage it. And using the analogy of the HBO model, it’s certainly well proven and we’re happy to see it.’

But Waddell is more interested in talking about the conventionals and how all this applies to them. He points out that the pay channels produce more drama because they have to – they have higher spending quotas and stricter conditions of licence. Ergo, he says, regulation works. And now if only the conventionals can be made to work as hard at it…

For her part, Marion at Astral laments that although the pays are producing exactly the kind of fare that everyone says they crave for Canadian television, the Canadian Television Fund’s performance envelope system penalizes them for being different.

‘Here you’ve got a network that is out there doing high-quality drama, and our funding is going down and down,’ she complains, ‘and yet what we’re doing is very much in synch with their mandate in terms of quality, if not quantity.’

Unlike conventional or specialty, the pay channels’ programming strategy is not to rack up numbers on that first airing to get the ad dollars flowing, so much as it is to grab a subscriber’s attention and to run enough repeats to give them a chance to see the thing, and hopefully not so many as to turn them off (or run afoul of the CRTC.)

But the CTF does not see the difference commercial-free might make, nor does it recognize on-demand viewing at all (90% of which is on TMN, the network says, quoting BBM Nielsen.)

And so last year, under the fund’s new performance criteria, TMN and Movie Central’s envelopes were slashed 52% to $1.6 million each. By comparison, Showcase received $8 million, the Comedy Network received $9.3 million, HGTV and History each received $5 million. Even Space received $4 million. (In the conventional world, CTV got $18 million, Global $8 million.)

The unfortunate truth, however, is that it’s not until the shows hit their second window on a conventional, as ReGenesis did on Global last year, or even on the bigger specialties, as G-Spot and then Slings & Arrows did on Showcase, that these series reach any kind of water-cooler chit-chat level, no matter how much they deserve it.

Frustrations notwithstanding, Marion says all’s well. ‘We’re in a great place where we have a really clear sense of what we want and what we don’t want.’ Most recently, the former is ZOS, which stands for Zones of Separation, from Paul Gross’ Whizbang Films, which Marion describes as a rock ‘n’ roll journey through the life of a peacekeeper on assignment, and the adaptation of Vincent Lam’s Bloodletting and Other Cures, produced by Shaftesbury Films.

Too bad most of us are going to have to wait for the second window, whenever and wherever that may be, to see them…

Like I said, do you ever get the feeling you’re invisible?