For many it was sad but not surprising. Global Television was, after all, entering a second season of losing and losing badly to CTV, trailing in both ad sales and in ratings. The net usually has only five or six of the top-20 shows in any given week. Global bought all of the wrong U.S. series for its ’03/04 season – Coupling, The Lyon’s Den, Skin, et al – and lost two of its biggest titles, Friends and Frasier, when their runs ended in May. The summer season produced no solid hits – does anyone even remember The Men’s Room or The Jury? – and despite the moderate success of the spin-off Joey, warhorses such as The Simpsons and Survivor, and the returning The Apprentice and Without a Trace, the net’s ’04/05 schedule is off to another slow start, leaning more heavily than ever on its aging lineup of sitcoms, short-run giggle reality, and its low-budget, homemade Train 48. Someone would have to take the blame.

Or apparently, three someones. Last month, the network fired its head of sales, Jack Tomik, and top programmers Loren Mawhinney and Doug Hoover, replacing them with one internal promotion and three new hires from the U.S.

Mawhinney and Hoover are both well-liked by producers. ‘It was shocking, although in hindsight it makes sense,’ says Jamie Brown of Winnipeg’s Frantic Films, producer of the forthcoming Global show Last Chance for Romance.

The shuffle is part of a larger overhaul that brought the print, radio and broadcast holdings of Global’s parent under the aegis of the newly formed CanWest MediaWorks and its president Rick Camilleri. The company installed Kathleen Dore, ex of New York’s Rainbow Media Holdings, as its president of radio and TV, along with Time Warner vet Joseph Mangione as head of sales and marketing and former New York Times exec Michael Williams as head of publications. Anne-Marie Varner has moved up from running Global’s daytime and specialty programs to take over Mawhinney’s post as head of Canadian production.

Despite Playback’s attempts to solicit the participation of the new executives, Global did not make anyone available for this story.

The shuffle has everyone trying to guess what Global will do next. How will it pull out of its ratings tailspin? Will it program more Canadian dramas and comedy or stick with store-bought reality shows?

Many suspect that the net, often criticized for what seems to be a halfhearted commitment to domestic programming, will add more American shows.

‘It betrays the American orientation of the company,’ says lobbyist Ian Morrison of the group Friends of Canadian Broadcasting. ‘They fired three people who understood Canadian regulations and the market. It would be a miracle if [the new execs] had the same sensitivity or knowledge.’

Morrison notes that Global is also halfway through its seven-year licence, a time when networks often pay less attention to regulatory requirements and more to their balance sheets.

‘Leonard Asper is looking at the street,’ says Morrison, referring to CanWest’s president and CEO.

Global’s only Canadian-made drama is Zoe Busiek: Wild Card, which it shares with Lifetime Television in the U.S., and which has performed well enough to merit an order for a second season. It has been suggested that Global might prefer to make more shows in the Wild Card model, or that it may take advantage of its parent company’s holdings by striking copro deals in Australia, New Zealand or Ireland.

The network also has some unfinished business. Brown isn’t entirely sure if Last Chance for Romance, which was commissioned under Global’s old guard, is still going to air as planned in January, noting that baby series often get thrown out with executive bathwater. ‘I’m worried about it,’ he admits. ‘I haven’t heard anything about the direction they’re planning to go. I’ve heard nothing.’

Global also has yet to decide if the backdoor pilot Falcon Beach – now in post and set to air in early 2005 – will become a series, and seems to have stalled its efforts to develop a new late-night talk show, shutting down the office of would-be producer David Rosen and cutting loose would-be host Jebb Fink. Rosen and Fink spent a good part of the summer experimenting with a new late-night talker, looking to fill in the crater left by the crashed-and-burned Mike Bullard.

Global is also seeking approval from the CRTC to run an all-reality TV digichannel although, again, the status of this project remains unclear.

In fact, few producers have heard anything from Global in the past month – except Steve Levitan, producer of Train 48, who recently sat down with Dore. He predicts that there will be no significant change, up or down, on the spending coming from Global towards Canuck production.

‘They’re no more or less committed to [Canadian shows] than any other broadcaster, in my perception,’ he says. ‘But their attitude is less bullshit, less holier-than-thou about the status of their shows. They’re interested in shows that are popular, but not necessarily good for you. But they take it as seriously as any broadcaster in Canada.’

-www.canada.com/globaltv