Out of mothballs, for one entry only...
So I’ve been libelled by FRANK magazine again. For those of you who don’t know FRANK, it’s a satire magazine that was briefly-relevant in the early nineties. About a year ago, a much-diminished zombie version lurched to life once more.
The whole thing keys off a relapsing, silly donnybrook between me and a newspaper critic at a certain paper who loves, loves, loves REPUBLIC OF DOYLE. Fair enough. To each his own, right?
In March 2013, in a shot against the brand-new Canadian Screen Awards, said columnist suggested the CSA’s were “crooked” because the only nomination REPUBLIC OF DOYLE received that year was for a Guest Starring role by Gordon Pinsent. The writer felt this showed bias against Newfoundland, or the star of the show, or joy, or something.
FRANK picked up on the newspaper story, presumably operating on some inside grumbling, and named me as a person who apparently had the power to keep the show from getting nominated. The motive, according to FRANK, was bad blood because I was “fired” from Doyle.
FRANK got just about everything wrong. I’m going to set things straight. But we need a bit of background first.
Back in 2010, I was still blogging about Canadian TV. I’d gotten more careful over the years, and yet I started hearing that people were getting mad at me for “things I’d written.” Only problem was, a lot of the time, these “things I’d written,” I hadn’t written.
An example: in one story room a writer dissed me to someone they didn’t realize was my friend, claiming I’d written a bunch of terrible things about Republic of Doyle. My friend, who knew I had not written a negative word about RoD since I’d left the show, challenged her to find the blog entry. She instantly backtracked to, “Well, I didn’t read it myself, someone told me…” My friend called up the entry she referenced and read it out loud, pointing out that it didn’t say what she claimed. She changed the subject.
Then, the critic who’d once described me as “thoughtful, learned and provocative about creating Canadian TV” started taking shots at me in print. My little sideline had become a liability. It was time to quit.
Instead, I became much more involved with the Writers Guild of Canada. (I should point out what I write here is speaking for myself, and not on behalf of the WGC.)
It’s through the WGC that I became briefly involved with the Canadian Screen Awards.
In 2011, Martin Katz and Helga Stephenson took over the award shows presented by the Academy of Canadian Cinema and Television. They were in dire shape.
Under the old system, each award had a chair who would assemble that award’s jury. Since the jury’s vote counted for something like 70% of the final result, the chair could effectively stack the jury and decide the award depending on who they selected.
Helga and Marty cleaned house, brought in a new Board and created an advisory committee on the new “merged” awards. I represented the WGC on that committee.
We pared down some awards categories. We established a “Best International Series” award.
We also revised the jury system. The juries still selected the nominees, but their votes for the winner only counted for 50%, with the other half being decided by the General Membership. Finally, the juries all prepared and watched the materials on their own time, then met as a group to deliberate. For the first time, all the juries met and decided on nominees on the same weekend. If there was any kind of collusion or horse-trading before, that opportunity was now gone. It was a much fairer system.
As a show of confidence, I agreed to be a juror for the Dramatic Series Writing category for the first ever Canadian Screen Awards. (I hadn’t entered, so I wasn’t in a conflict.) I got a bunch of DVD’s to watch. There were eight people on the jury, and each submitted episode went to at least three. From there we pared down the lists of our favourites and came in to compare and select the nominees.
In my package there was one episode of Republic of Doyle. Because of my unhappy labor history with the show, I immediately contacted Louis Calabro at the Academy and told him that I had a conflict. They shuffled that episode to someone else.
Now back to the FRANK article, which claims that somehow, despite the new rules, the simultaneous jury deliberations, and the dozens of other people involved, I was able to wield immense power which allowed me to deny Republic of Doyle its rightful nominations.
Well, let’s take a look at the one jury decision I actually did have a hand in — the Best Dramatic Writing award. It’s a drag to open the kimono on this, but if the alternative is allowing a bunch of people to continue to lie, that’s not cool. So here’s what happened.
The actual jury debate was a great success and a pleasant surprise. We all had an interesting and cordial debate about what five nominees we should put forward. People advocated. Some were swayed, and some were not. I went in with a list of my top five and was convinced by the debate and the arguments of other jury members to change two of them.
What I remember of the jury: it was about a fifty-fifty gender split. I knew two people relatively well, had worked with one, had met maybe two more. The rest were strangers.
Oh, and one more thing: not one of the eight of us had Republic of Doyle on our shortlist. Not even the writer from Newfoundland.
We were one of the last juries to finish that day, having discussed the work passionately for almost two hours. Getting down to five nominees was really difficult. I think we would have liked to put forward seven or eight. It was creatively very exciting. It made me feel hopeful about the whole industry. (The show that won the category, a Flashpoint episode, I think is probably my favourite of the series.)
Looking back, one of the scripts I wish we could have nominated was a wonderful Murdoch Mysteries called “Dead End Street.” It was a tight little mystery about a murder that had taken place during a parade, and the key came down to a mute, autistic savant witness played wordlessly by Liisa Repo-Martell. It was unpredictable, ingenious, and spare. A perfect example of a series that is sadly too often underestimated. If only I actually possessed the power some think I do, it might have been nominated. But the other work was too good that year. Champagne problems.
So…at no time was Republic of Doyle talked about by anyone as being in their Top Five. Even if we had been able to nominate eight shows, Doyle wouldn’t have made the cut. It simply wasn’t in the running. I only have knowledge of the jury I served on, but the buzz among all the people gathered in the atrium after the awards suggested that our jury experience wasn’t unique. There was a lot of good work that year. Canadian TV had stepped up its game.
Once the first FRANK libel came out last November, I was surprised the Academy didn’t do more to defend the integrity of the system they’d worked so hard to fix, let alone defend me. I still don’t know why they chose not to. It was pretty disheartening to volunteer all that time and get slimed for it. So I asked to be replaced on the advisory council and as it happens, haven’t attended or had anything to do with the Awards since.
So. That’s the story. A few things I’d like you to consider:
Republic of Doyle was nominated for Best Series in 2010. Indeed, it has not won any major awards since. Gordon Pinsent won the CSA for that guest starring role. But neither the star, nor the series, nor the writing has been nominated. All that’s true. As far as I know, the show has never been nominated for a Canadian Screenwriting Award. In fact, I don’t even know if they submit. I don’t judge those awards because I usually have a script in there myself.
I did have one opportunity to wield immense power over denying recognition to Republic of Doyle, during a quarterly story meeting for the Writers Guild magazine, Canadian Screenwriter. Here’s the problem, though. Just a few months before my supposed mustachio-twirling foiling of the show’s CSA chances, I, and the rest of the board, signed off on an article on the show written by Philip Moscovitch for CS’s Summer 2012 issue. The Creator of RoD was quoted wall-to-wall. So I can spike the punch at the Canadian Screen Awards, but not in the magazine where I’m the Chair of the Editorial Board? In the story room, we call that kind of logic “a bit sweaty.”
It seems ludicrous to have to say this, but I have not, in fact, done anything to prevent the glory due to Republic of Doyle from happening. I quit the show (Oh yes, FRANK got that part wrong too) OVER FIVE YEARS AGO.
Get over it, b’ys.
This week, after six seasons, Republic of Doyle will air its last episode. They did wonderful things for the City of St. John’s. They celebrated many Newfoundland and Labrador-born actors by repatriating them for juicy guest starring roles. Their fans include a couple of the top newspaper writers in the country, and some of the online generation of journalists, too. RoD’s producers and creator made sackloads of cash, and got to buy houses. So many achievements worth celebrating. Isn’t it a little bit weird that that’s not enough?
During the three months I worked on the show, we talked a lot about TV: what worked, what didn’t, what was good, and what was bad, and I have to say this:
What I remember most strongly from the principals involved was the constant derision they expressed for most Canadian shows, and the people who made them. They seemingly had nothing good to say about anybody except Paul Gross. They roundly dissed the very show with which they would later do a crossover.
Does that have anything to do with not having huge swaths of support come awards time? I couldn’t say. But I think it’s a lot more plausible than the McGrath-is-Gandalf theory.
Anyway, thanks for reading. I’m sorry this was so long, but libel really sucks. A special thanks to all the people volunteering on CSA juries this weekend. Good to see that people will still volunteer time to celebrate their colleagues, not just themselves. If you care to, do watch the series finale of Republic of Doyle this week on CBC.
I hope the ratings are good. I really do. Because I like to see the Canadian TV glass as half full.