CSA roundtable ’24: Creators discuss legacy, getting personal

Part one of the discussion with some of the top Canadian Screen Awards nominees examines authenticity in storytelling.

What does it mean to write an authentic story?

Part one of Playback‘s 2024 Canadian Screen Awards (CSA) roundtable explores that topic with some of Canada’s top creatives and producers. Part two gives a deep dive into what currently defines success in television.

Sitting on the panel were Crave/APTN lumi’s Little Bird co-creator and showrunner Jennifer Podemski, CBC’s Workin’ Moms creator, writer and star Catherine Reitman, CBC’s Sort Of co-creator, writer and director Fab Filippo, Crave’s Bria Mack Gets A Life creator and showrunner Sasha Leigh Henry, and Christina Piovesan, whose nominated productions include Brandon Cronenberg’s film Infinity Pool, Apple TV+ animated series Pinecone & Pony, Family Channel’s Home Sweet Rome!, and CBC’s Essex County.

The panelists represent 65 CSA nominations overall across 10 productions, and 16 nominations between the five of them: Podemski with five, Piovesan with four, Reitman with three and Henry and Filippo with two apiece. Little Bird earned the most TV nominations overall at 19, followed by Sort Of with 18 and Workin’ Moms at 12, both of which are celebrating their final seasons.

This interview has been edited and condensed

Playback: Christina, you have four nominated shows this year, up for a combined 29 nominations. With so many financing challenges right now, how are you able to balance such a varied production slate?

Christina Piovesan (pictured right): I feel like we’re in a really disruptive time. More than I feel like the industry, specifically the TV industry, has been in a really, really long time. The market is just trying to find its way through all these consolidations and pivots and it’s not over yet.

In terms of diversifying your slate, I think, for me, I’m really driven by creators voices. I’m really driven by [author] Kate Beaton behind Pinecone & Pony, then bringing on Stephanie Kaliner [for the series], by Jeff Lemire on Essex County. It was my privilege to work with Jeff. He’s an innovator in graphic novels and this was his story to tell.

Brandon Cronenberg and Infinity Pool – who says no to that? I can’t take credit for developing that [film]. Karen Harnish and Andrew Cividino at Film Forge really nurtured that with Brandon. I came on alongside my team at Elevation Pictures to just help them through the coproduction and help them get the financing. I think it’s just following the voices and being privileged enough to be let in and to be collaborative on the project.

Jennifer, how did you feel when you saw the nomination announcement?

Jennifer Podemski (pictured left): [Little Bird] was such a challenging project that when I heard that we were being acknowledged in that way, I just cried. I felt like I had reached the top of the mountain, finally, after however many years it’s been. Like, “They see us! We made it!”

Award season, to me, always represents the end of the chapter, so I felt relief and I felt deep gratitude and a lot of tears.

Has anyone else on the panel felt that way before?

Catherine Reitman: It’s always a wave of gratitude. It’s a cool club, right? Where you’re constantly hoping that people watch your stuff, acknowledge your stuff, feel seen by your stuff.

And, for Workin’ Moms, being its last season, it’s been this wild ride that’s been deeply personal to me. It’s all ripped from my own life, so anytime my personal stories are being acknowledged by an esteemed group of people, it’s very special.

Little Bird had such an emotional ending. What was some of the feedback you received on the conclusion?

Jennifer: There’s an audience who never even knew this reality existed, which was pretty much the consistent feedback from the moment we let people read the scripts. It was like, “is this real? Did this really happen?” So that keeps coming in.

The rest of the feedback is from the community – the Indigenous community, the Jewish community, but also the film community. It’s just been overwhelming. Like you said, Catherine, your show is very personal. This one was very personal to me, probably the most personal thing I’ve ever done. So I felt very vulnerable with every part of it.

To stick on the topic of endings – Catherine, how did you decide how to wrap up Workin’ Moms after seven seasons?

Catherine (pictured right): We got hit by a curveball. We were literally about to break to draft the final season and my father [Ivan Reitman] passed away overnight.

There was this moment where my brother [Jason Reitman] was like, “I think you should pause. I think you’ve got to take a second because I don’t know if you’re going to be able to do this thing.”

I’ve spoken so much about my father’s passing, but I don’t think I’ve ever actually shared that there was this moment of us thinking we weren’t going to do it. And I just kept picturing him being like, “Get back to work. What are you doing?”

So, about a week later, I got on with the room in Zoom and I said, “I think we’ve got to rewrite this thing.”

An ending is so difficult. We all know a series we love that ended terribly and we didn’t want that reputation on our back, especially a show that so many women come up to me and say they feel seen by. This is their story, it’s not my story. But when my father passed, it was really hard for me not to be incredibly selfish and say, “Hey, I think I have an idea about this.”

My father always spoke about finding the magic of life. And these women, who were daring enough to be unapologetically ambitious and go after something outside of the nursery, were all finding magic in each of their characters’ lives. So we rebroke the arc of the season, specifically the last three episodes and specifically Kate, my character’s episode.

The ending, in a way, was gifted this bigger, larger than life message that got us through the finish line.

Sasha Leigh Henry (pictured left): I think you stuck the landing quite beautifully. It feels like a product of one of those moments where, if you do it scared anyways, it unearths something really special in it.

What do you think will be the legacy of Workin’ Moms?

Catherine: Are we allowed to speak on that? Here’s my very privileged nepo baby angle on this – legacy is so much bigger than us and we don’t know what the footprint is going to be. It’s larger than me. I don’t know what the legacy of Workin’ Moms is. I know what it meant in my life, and how cathartic and extraordinary the experience was for me on a very selfish level.

A part of me thinks that the way the world is changing, and the way mothers are changing and the way people are deciding whether or not to have kids, I don’t know that my stories will always be relatable. But they sure are a time capsule from the last decade.

Jennifer: When you say it’s bigger than you, maybe you don’t recognize that you single handedly carved out space for a voice that wasn’t there before. That’s a legacy in itself. You made that space. And I won’t say anymore because, I don’t know why, but I’m emotional about it.

Catherine: I’m emotional about it too and I was about to say: right back at you.

Jennifer: I’m always asked about legacy and I just feel like, for me, that’s all it is. I came in and made space for something to exist that didn’t exist before. And I think you did the exact same thing.

Catherine: I always feel like whenever we’re trying to make space for something, especially because I’m acting in the damn thing, I feel incredibly indulgent and that it’s somehow about me. Then you’re constantly trying to both take the space in a way that represents accurately and authentically, but also at the same time not make it about you and make it about this larger thing. It’s a really complicated plane to fly.

We’ve all seen a show that’s just trying to appease the most amount of people it can, and not be specific and not be authentic, and it’s garbage. You hate when you don’t feel like it’s a real thing.

So you kind of have to be selfish. It’s not going to appease everybody, not everyone’s going to feel seen. And then, when you do that, the strangest thing happens, which is that everyone does feel seen because it is so authentically individual.

Sasha: It’s so funny how that happens. I think it’s Toni Morrison who says that in the specific is the universal, but no one else is going to know the bus stop at the end of the street where I grew up. And then you put it out there and people are like,” I thought I was the only one who had that kind of bus stop!”

That is an experience in making a show that I never really tire of. It never ceases to surprise me just how specific you can get and it really will still translate if it is authentic.

Sort Of holds an incredible space for members of the LGBTQ+ community, so, Fab, how do you feel about its legacy?

Fab Filippo (pictured right): I’m really feeling what has just been said about the specific being in the universal. Being able to share a lens with Bilal, even though our life experience is so different, there were so many times I would shock Bilal by my understanding of what they’ve gone through and being othered, in a very different way, obviously. And it was kind of a beautiful connection.

I see the show as the thing in between Bilal and I. It’s how we also kept from arguing or not letting them break up the band when stuff got tough, because we both were kind of like, “It’s not about you and it’s not about me, but it’s about the thing in between us.”

I also can’t speak to the legacy of it. Things are changing so quickly. I remember hearing an executive say, “even six months later, we wouldn’t have greenlit this show.”

I’d like to think that the show opened some people up and showed the universality of life experience, showed how everyone is in transition, even though all those transitions look different. I miss being in that world and being allowed to be in that world as someone with my particular lens.

How do you move on from a project like that?

Fab: There’s definitely a mourning period. I think you all know how this feels when you have a series, this thing in your life that you’re constantly putting your own life experiences into. [When] something happens to you, you’re like, “Oh, I could put that in the show.” And then the show is gone and there’s nothing there, so I think that’s partly the feeling too.

But in terms of what the next thing is, there’s some stuff [in the works] and it’s all very different, It’s nowhere in the realm[of Sort Of]. I have a couple of projects where I’m seeing other creators’ visions or two, and that’s incredibly fulfilling when it’s really right and I’m really enjoying that as well.

Last we spoke, Sasha, you were about to go into production for Bria Mack Gets A Life. What were some of your biggest lessons learned from your first series as showrunner?

Sasha: I learned a lot about making a first season in post. The blessing and burden of not having made a Black-led female comedy in so long was there wasn’t necessarily an echo that it belonged to in Canada, tone-wise.

That was really challenging, where you start questioning yourself, like “I laughed when I wrote it. Is it hitting the mark?” And especially because in the post process in the edit, it’s everyone’s job to give the notes to try and make the best thing that it can be. But my job as a showrunner is to figure out which one of those are actually going to help make it the best thing it’s going to be, and which ones aren’t.

But, at the same time, you can get in your head overthinking every single one of them because even if it might not make sense to me right off the bat, that person is pointing to something that could be something to fix.

Video editing by Taimur Sikander Mirza

A version of this story originally appeared in Playback‘s Spring 2024 issue