How do you make compelling television in a risk-averse environment?

Part two of Playback‘s 2024 Canadian Screen Awards (CSA) roundtable offers a deep dive into what constitutes success in TV right now. Part one of the conversation explored topics of authenticity and legacy in storytelling.

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.

This interview has been edited and condensed

Playback: What do you think is the secret to success in television?

Christina Piovesan: I think it’s what everybody’s been speaking to today. I think it’s authenticity, it’s being bold, it’s taking risks. Everybody on this call has done that and has been successful in doing so. Jennifer, I really have to call you out in the sense of Little Bird being so groundbreaking and so beautiful.

Fab Filippo: [Jokingly] I think what Catherine said earlier about putting together a show that doesn’t really have a voice and is a mishmash of everything you think people want to hear, that’s the key to success.

Catherine Reitman: People are so afraid right now, right? It’s a weird moment in America, it’s a weird moment in Canada. It is not a confident moment, creatively nor executively.

I’ve felt, since the U.S. strikes finished, that there was a level of anger from both sides. When receiving notes on a few different projects, there were all of a sudden so many cooks in the kitchen, so many people weighing in on every single joke, every single piece, where it starts to water it down and it gets really, really scary. I’ve had one show that worked and I’ve been desperately trying to hang on to my confidence and my voice from that thing. It’s amazing how quickly one loud voice can knock that right out of your head.

When fear is at a boiling point, as it is right now in so many networks, you have to be twice as confident in what you’re trying to say. You have to carry that hurricane of what the vision is and only allow the right tent poles to keep the hurricane in place.

Jennifer Podemski: Success is such a weird concept because it really depends on whose success it is. The divide between the corporate interest and agenda and the artistic content creation agenda feels the farthest away from each other than it ever has.

In the past there was a sense that we were working together a little bit more, but now it feels a lot more distant and divisive. And success for an agenda that’s really finance-driven and budget-driven is smaller rooms, shorter time span, just less for the creative.

I think success would be to put more agency in the creative’s hands. Stories build community, and what will we be without those very specific stories? I’m afraid of that, so I try to stay focused on the truth and authenticity and also, in the background, prepare to maybe have another job just in case. [laughs]

Catherine: And I just want to take a moment to tout the CBC here, because there were so many moments, whether it was an abortion storyline, or moments of unlikable women where they really held fast.

While I do feel – to your point, Jennifer – an incredible divide as well, I also can’t help but feel like the CBC, Sally Catto, Trish Williams and that team over there, have been an incredible support in the last decade. The entire United States passed on Workin’ Moms, nobody thought that this show had any place to be and it was greenlit to 13 freaking episodes here.

Fab: We had a similar experience with Sort Of, and I think I had pretty much the same team that you did. They really supported the vision of the show. Making a show like that was tricky for everybody, politically. I could tell sometimes they were afraid to give notes because they’re like, “Can we ask this? Can we say this?”

I really had a different view of executives when I was in the middle of it, because their job, in a weird way, is so much lack of control.

Sasha Leigh Henry: I’m glad to hear that you both had that kind of support. For real, shout out to the executives within the big machines that really do have your back and hold it down, especially with the stories that we’re all trying to tell. All of them were really groundbreaking and needed a champion [to help] say things that we hadn’t seen here before.

In the time that Bria Mack Gets A Life was being developed and then later greenlit, the racial reckoning happened, and the response really took me by surprise. There’s a scene where Bria holds up her whole office and reads them the commandments of working with a Black girl. I truly thought that was going to be the biggest hill to climb in terms of making the show. Everything is always a conversation, but it really wasn’t a fight.

Christina: I just want to add two cents on the Americans. On Pinecone & Pony, I had never done an animated series before, I’d never done kids content before. My colleague Mackenzie Lush brought it to DreamWorks Animation and they so believed in what we put together and in Kate [Beaton’s] book that they were like, “Yeah, you’re our teammate, let’s do it.”

And I do want to say, coming back to the CBC, Marie McCann ultimately developed Pinecone & Pony at CBC in the first instance. I sent Sally Catto Essex County and she said, “Let’s do it.” I had never made a series before and was coming from feature films. So, to your point, there are definitely folks inside there who will say yes, who can make decisions and we will back a bold choice.

Sasha: The thing that I keep telling myself is that there is opportunity in chaos and in that unknown and in the topsy-turvy of it all. Just write it, just do the thing, go back to why you like to tell stories.

Wherever the dust settles on the other side, you are going to be fine. It’s dicey times for sure, but I’m not giving into the despair of it. I really do think that it’s going to open up something for a lot of folks. This is my hope anyways.

Pictured (L-R): (Top) Catherine Reitman, Jennifer Podemski; (Bottom) Sasha Leigh Henry, Fab Filippo and Christina Piovesan

Video editing by Taimur Sikander Mirza

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