After more than 40 years in the Canadian entertainment industry, Degrassi executive producer Stephen Stohn has written a memoir, dishing on everything from [the original] Riverdale to backstage Juno drama and Aubrey Graham’s [a.k.a. Drake] Degrassi audition. Playback caught up with the veteran producer to discuss his new book, Whatever It Takes.

PB: Why did you decide that now was the time to write about your life and career?

Stephen Stohn: It all started about 15 years ago when I was having dinner with director Jim Donovan. We started to talk about stories from the past and I started talking about some of the stories Christopher [Ward, musician and former Much VJ] and I had in Europe, like playing on board a U.S. destroyer, teaching backup singing in a pink palace in Ankara or playing at the Playboy Club. And he said, ‘Oh that would make a great movie.’ I thought he was joking, but he came back to it a few times and I thought, ‘Well, maybe there there is a story there that might be interesting to some people’. So it was about three years ago that I thought why don’t I just put pen to paper and then it just started unfolding from there.

PB: You open the book with the cancellation of Degrassi on its U.S. channels – after 35 years and nearly 500 episodes, you got a call from a Viacom exec saying they were “moving in a different direction.” What did you learn from that experience?

SS: Well I wouldn’t say that I learned this from that phone call, but in the book I give so many examples of me failing. So I learned that failure is an unacknowledged virtue, because it truly does seem to be the case. It’s not that one door closes and another one opens. It’s just that you learn something — even the failures are good. They provide something that is almost necessary to carry on and be successful. And so I don’t actually think of them as being failures.

The biggest story was the cancellation of [CBC’s 1997-2000 primetime soap] Riverdale. I thought it was the stupidest thing in the world and my wife [Degrassi creator and producer Linda Schuyler] almost quit the business. She was so upset by it. But if the CBC hadn’t canceled Riverdale we wouldn’t have brought to Degrassi back for another 425 episodes. And Degrassi became, in a sense, everything that we’d hoped the Riverdale soap opera would be.

When the [Viacom] call came in we thought, ‘where do we go now?’ And literally within a week we were on Netflix [with a new iteration of the franchise, Next Class].

PB: Did you have to change the show for the new platform?

SS: I’m not the first to have noted that if a few seconds, literally seconds, go by and something isn’t grabbing us, there’s an e-mail or an Instagram post or video or another service or channel just hovering there waiting for our attention. So the storytelling is different. There’s no question it is. The absence of commercials is one thing, of course, and that changes how you structure an episode because we’re used to leading up to commercial. And it’s very important to have at least a mini-cliffhanger to hold people through that three-minute or three-and-a-half-minute commercial block. Well you don’t have to do that when you’re on Netflix. You have more room to open up the storytelling.

But because so many people watch virtually an entire season all at once, there’s some storytelling that just can’t happen in the same way. It’s one thing if two characters in episode one are meeting each other, in episode two they’re falling in love or not and then they break up and they do other things and that’s spread out over 20 episodes over the course of nearly a year. Well if it’s spread out over the course of maybe two nights of people watching the show it just may be happening too rapidly. So we need to really think of how the audience is watching and we didn’t get it right right in the beginning. We’re sort of retooling now, I think responsibly so, and luckily we’re working with Netflix and just looking at how can we parse out the story. We got a lot of things right. And you know our numbers are good on Netflix but I think we’re going to make them even better as we as we learn from what we’ve done.

PB: What are the big takeaway messages for producers from this book?

SS: As I said, failure is an unacknowledged virtue. One of the nice things about failing in our business is when you fail, people don’t really know. There are so many things that I didn’t mention in the book where we failed. We tried interactive versions of Degrassi. This was way back in the day. We tried an avatar version of Degrassi where the fans wrote in and we had avatars playing the characters. Just complete disasters!

We had all these really really stupid things that we did and yet every time we did some of those things we learned something. With the interactive idea we learned that it’s not about interactivity, it’s about engagement. People don’t want to choose the story, they want to sit back and be so engaged that they’re carried along. And you don’t want to take their attention away from it by having them punch in A, B or C on the screen to find out more information. That’s great for sports but not for drama. The biggest message is just to really embrace the failures and lap them up, dive into them and just move on.

PB: You’ve been in the entertainment industry a long time. The industry is facing some profound challenges today. What do you see as the biggest issue on the horizon?

SS: I feel very strongly that the CRTC has made some very bad decisions, most recently in Let’s Talk TV, but it’s over the course of many years, in choosing really to ignore the over-the-top services. The over-the-top services are fantastic. I love Netflix, we all love Netflix. But if Netflix comes in and it’s not an even playing field, if the Canadian broadcasters have certain rules they have to follow, certain taxes that have to be paid, and that isn’t the case with the over-the-top services, to me it’s a pretty foregone conclusion that the Canadian broadcasters are going to be wiped out. And so to me the biggest challenge is with the government and the CRTC to say what is fair. It’s not an easy answer. But we really have to think about it. How do we look at the entire industry, including the over-the-top services, and make sure that every element is treated fairly and gives a chance for Canadian content to just have a place. To have a pride of place.

Whatever it Takes was released this month in paperback and e-book by Dundurn