Production of one-hour Canadian dramas has declined 62% in three years, says Maureen Parker, executive director, Writers Guild of Canada.

Work on one-hour dramas for WGC screenwriters has dropped from 173 hours in ’99 to 65 hours in ’02 and half-hour drama series production is also down, although kids shows have increased, says Parker. The overall decline is 26%.

‘The one-hour genre is in trouble,’ says Parker, adding that the slump undermines ‘the resident creative community.’

And it’s not just the fault of private broadcasters.

Parker says that despite the $60 million top-up from Canadian Heritage (almost all reserved for regional news) the CBC is also moving away from drama.

The WGC, like other production sector associations, says that the decline stems from the 1999 CRTC decision to redefine priority programming, ‘de-emphasizing drama production by lumping it in with less expensive content like regional production.’

WGC hopes to meet shortly with former CTV president Trina McQueen, who was asked to explore remedies for Canadian drama by CRTC chair Charles Dalfen.

Julia Keatley, CFTPA chair and president of Vancouver’s Keatley Films, says Canadian TV movies can draw one million or more viewers, ‘but for a series, 600,000 would be a very good rating. Audiences have definitely declined across the board. I think that’s the biggest challenge for us as producers and for broadcasters. How do you attract and keep audiences, and what is a success and how do you define it? What are our benchmarks, and what are our goals?’

‘I think in the fall all the broadcasters were in a state of shock when they started getting numbers [ratings], because they were even lower [than before],’ says producer/writer Wayne Grigsby of Chester, NS-based Big Motion Pictures. ‘It’s a tougher world and everyone has to get their heads around what these numbers actually mean.’

Primetime, he says, ‘is [becoming] more and more a kind of a big-hit, blockbuster mentality. Profile is a key to big numbers.’

Grigsby says there’s been a shift – five years ago casters only wanted to talk about extended series and ‘building the schedule.’ Now that’s changed for a ‘go short’ perspective favoring miniseries and TV movies.

‘There’s more and more pressure on people producing the series and more people looking over your shoulder dotting i’s and crossing t’s. And then it gets very hard to get to where one has the creative latitude and freedom to do the kind of show that might break [Sopranos, Six Feet Under, Curb Your Enthusiasm]. Those shows come out of a singular vision, not out of group-think,’ he says.

The U.S. industry’s promotional machine is murder, says the producer.

‘We all get killed at the grocery checkout counter by the residual effects of all those magazine covers, all that gossip stuff on Entertainment Tonight. We are all trapped in a box, but there are only a limited number of ways out,’ says Grigsby.

Specialties licensing drama

To counter the decline in drama licences from conventional networks, Alliance Atlantis Broadcasting CEO Phyllis Yaffe says the CRTC should allow all broadcasters to license original drama in the program or genre categories for which they were licensed.

‘If a network wants to add drama – and commission original drama – why in this country, when we are having so much trouble getting drama commissioned, would anybody want to stop that?’ However, Yaffe makes the following qualification. ‘It is not about adding ‘drama’ to the list of eligible programs. We do not support the notion [specialties] can just add movies. What we are [talking about] is original Canadian drama commissions. There is a very big difference.’