I’m not going to beat around the bush.  The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation has cut $171 million from its budget.  800 jobs will be lost.

I also won’t repeat the usual talking points.  Instead of doing what other people are doing and complain about how the Mothercorp is a billion-dollar waste of money and/or a crown jewel that Stephen Harper wipes his ass with, I’m going to actually pick apart some of the items that are being dumped or slashed.  The list is taken from Tod Maffin’s blog, just because it’s in neat point form.

Oh, and here’s Richard Stursberg being a gimboid.

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CBC RADIO
Cut:

* The Inside Track

Although the show was in decline its last few seasons, it’ll be sad to see this show go.  The Inside Track was CBC Radio’s only high-profile sports program, so it filled a niche.  If nothing else, The Inside Track was the only show where Nick Purdon didn’t come across as annoying.  Twenty-five years is a decent run for any CBC Radio show.

* Outfront

I won’t miss Outfront.  It’s never been one of my favourites on CBC Radio One.  The idea was sound – “ordinary people” make a documentary with the CBC’s help – but the execution was wanting.  I would have been happier with the show if it wasn’t so middle-of-the-road with its subject matter.  The Dead Dog Café was better at filling fifteen minutes of time slot.

* In the Key of Charles

The In the Key of Inanity blog, not surprisingly, welcomes this news.  Was this show any good?  I’ve rarely had any reason to listen to CBC Radio 2, before and after the format change.

* The Point

Thank God.  This show never got off square one.  CBC would have been better off not launching The Point in the first place.  Aamer Haleem will be hanging around the schedules for a while, filling in for Jian Ghomeshi on Q like CBC Radio’s other personalities.  I don’t know what will take The Point’s place on CBC Radio One, but geez, even Freestyle lasted two seasons before it was taken out back and shot.

* La Ronge SK bureau (one person)
* Thomson MB (one person)

Any reason why these one-person bureaux were being maintained until 2009?  They both served rural communities – Northern Saskatchewan and Northern Manitoba, respectively.  If either of these bureaux were producing decent content, more power to them.  It’s sad to see rural-oriented stations close, but I’m not surprised they’re gone.

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Reduced:

* Radio drama

I don’t think cutting radio drama is a good idea.  I’d rather listen to radio drama than politically-oriented current affairs shows or Rita Celli.  Monsoon House was given another season this year, which is a no-brainer since Russell Peters is omnipresent on Showtime, but what about Man, Woman and Child?  Is radio drama that expensive to mount?  Does radio drama not count unless Al Rae or Nick Purdon are involved with a show?

In a perfect world, CBC Radio would be using these shows as testing grounds to see if they’d work on television.  Then again, CBC Radio rarely has shows on the level of The Boosh or On the Town with The League of Gentlemen.  There should be more to radio drama than Afghanada.

* Radio 3 consolidated (single feed of satellite and online programming

I honestly hope Sirius Canada is included in the sale of CBC’s assets.  Sirius XM in America still exists, but it’s a sub-dollar stock.  CBC should just cut its losses with satellite radio, since even the founder of Sirius thinks the future is in Internet radio.

Sirius XM might still eke out its niche in subscriber-based Internet radio, but I’ve never understood why CBC part-owns Sirius Canada and runs Galaxie.  The best bet is to stick with Galaxie.  Let Astral Media or whomever will buy CBC’s stock in Sirius Canada play around with it once Sirius embraces the Internet model.  Hell, move CBC Radio 3 to Galaxie if possible.  Satellite radio is a bust at this point.

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* Staffing in Windsor, Thunder Bay, Sudbury, Quebec City, Moncton, Saint John, Sydney, Gander, Corner Brooks and Grand Falls will be downsized. Thunder Bay, for instance, to lose 4-6 positions out of 13.

These jobs are never coming back.  CBC will just become more focused on the major urban centres with every budget cut.  I won’t go so far as to call CBC Toronto-centric, since the CBC wall of bland sounds the same in Ottawa, Vancouver, Winnipeg or anywhere else in the country.  It’s a sad day for regional programming.

Originally this feature was going to be in two parts, one for Canadian shows and the other for “foreign” content.  I then read this article, realized how right it was, and will take the article’s advice in order to alleviate the lull between URBMN posts.  It doesn’t make for a nice segue into Rabbit Fall discussion, but I’m not a fan of segues.

I’m also not fond of the promotion Space has given Rabbit Fall.  It reran the entire twelve-episode run of the show earlier this year, not doing much to advertise that fact.  Space did promote the second season when in first run, but I thought Space would big up the first-season episodes for the newbies.  Not everyone is in love with Battlestar Galactica, so say we few.

Andrea Menard is Constable Tara Wheaton, a Métis cop transferred from Toronto to Rabbit Fall via “professional indiscretion.”  She’s a fairly decent actor in a straightforward supernatural crime drama.  Rabbit Fall is decidedly generic, which doesn’t surprise me as four networks (SCN, VisionTV, Space and APTN) have had their hands on it over two seasons.  Still, the quality of this show is better than I expected.

I don’t understand the show’s comparison to Twin Peaks* – Rabbit Fall does not have Killer BOB, log ladies or backwards-speaking gnomes.  The X-Files is a good reference point, since Rabbit Fall shares the same conspiratorial MO.

While Rabbit Fall’s second season is much better than the first production-wise – Rabbit Fall looked badly lighted its first year – the show does have its problems.  Some of the acting is atrocious, while the supernatural element can be a bit cartoonish at times.

For instance, main antagonist Simon Blackhorse turns into a crow while in a police car.  Sure, his distraction of Sergeant Stanton Martinsky leads to a crucial plot development in Rabbit Fall’s second season premiere, but it looks silly in execution.

Another thing I don’t understand is why the show’s being a half-hour drama is sold as unique.  The half-hour drama is a concept dating back to The Twilight Zone, early Gunsmoke and Dragnet, and these are just obvious examples.  Hour-long dramas are the norm for modern episodic television, so Rabbit Fall is just bucking the trend.  I can’t see how Rabbit Fall would benefit from expanding to an hour, as that would just force padding on its meat-and-potatoes story structure.

In the end, Rabbit Fall’s positives outweigh its negatives.  If nothing else, it shows that Saskatchewan can produce decent television.  I’d like to see more Saskatchewan-based television shows in the near future.  Toronto moonlighting as Generican/Genadian City can get a bit tiring after a while.

^{*As an aside, Twin Peaks wasn’t the weirdest David Lynch television show.  It’s amazing how many people have forgotten or suppressed On the Air, which the YouTube link will soon rectify.  If you watched it, you can’t unwatch it!}

The Comedy Network now receives South Park episodes two days after the show’s initial American airing.  As a longtime South Park fan, I’m happy.  I’d be happier if the major ISPs in this country didn’t automatically redirect me from Comedy Central’s webpage to The Comedy Network’s, but then I’d be walking into a morass of questions like “how will the CRTC handle new media?”  As soon as it figures out how to handle regional television and cable channels switching their mandates on a whim, let me know.

“The Ring” suffers from a bad case of déjà vu.  Mr. Hankey is South Park’s own-brand Mickey Mouse, as “Chef’s Chocolate Salty Balls” makes clear.  High School Musical had already been made fun of by South Park four months previous to “The Ring.”

Kenny’s dying of syphilis as a result of girlfriend Tammy Warner’s fatal blowjob is reminiscent of “Kenny Dies” and “Spontaneous Combustion,” as Kenny is given a proper funeral.  ”The Ring” is even similar to “Christian Rock Hard.”  Replace secular lyrics in Christian songs with the purity ring’s role in selling sex to minors, it’s the same concept.  Never mind “Simpsons Already Did It,” South Park is cannibalizing its own ideas at this point.

Despite this, “The Ring” is a fairly spot-on thirteenth season premiere.  ”Elementary School Musical” was essentially “High School Musical is gay” brought to a moderately funny extreme.  ”The Ring” goes after the selling of a semi-religious item, the purity ring, to a secular audience.

The Walt Disney Company is also given a skewering.  Mickey Mouse is revealed as a greedy corporate bastard.  Using the character in this fashion is obvious, but South Park keeps the Mouse surprisingly on-model.  Mickey punctuates his sentences with his trademark laugh, a surprisingly funny verbal tic.

The last time Mickey was this funny, it was during a Saturday TV Funhouse cartoon.  Mickey’s never funny in his own cartoons.  Then again, no one is, not even Goofy.

Other Walt Disney Company-related items are also lampooned.  After Kenny wears his potentially blowjob-nullifying purity ring, he becomes boring enough to want to watch Grey’s Anatomy.  The Jonas Brothers also sing about Netflix, a great place for Disney Channel’s more homogenized offal, as an alternative to sex.

“The Ring” works as it’s not about how The Jonas Brothers and Disney suck.  How The Jonas Brothers are portrayed in the episode versus what they’re really like is irrelevant.  What is relevant is how commercial interests can take something like The Jonas Brothers’ evangelical beliefs and use it as a selling point to shift units.  Mickey Mouse is the only character in the episode openly disdainful of Christianity (“they believe in a talking dead guy!”), but that’s because he’s actually a Norse demon.  Or something.  Ha ha.

Overall, “The Ring” makes for a strong South Park season premiere.  It’s a better debut for its season than “Tonsil Trouble” was for the twelfth.  I’ll go so far as to say it’s the best season premiere since season ten’s “The Return of Chef.”  ”The Ring” is familiar in spots, but it’s above-average for South Park.  I can’t wait to see how South Park makes fun of The Princess and the Frog.

Hell, I’d like to see if South Park acknowledges Robot Chicken’s existence and/or the Jon Stewart/Jim Cramer brouhaha.  Those topics would make for fun episodes.

By the way, Mickey as depicted in South Park would not have come from Valhalla.  He would most likely have come from Múspellsheimr, the realm of fire.  I’m reading too much into a throwaway gag near the end of “The Ring,” but it’s still lazy writing.

I’m also not fond of South Park ending the episode on an over-referenced G.I. Joe line.  Discredited tropes always make for painful television.  Now you know, and screwing the pooch is half the battle!

Lately there’s been news of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation asking for a bridge loan to cover an up to $65 million advertising shortfall for 2008-09.  Over-the-air broadcast television is failing as “old media” like television and newspapers have gone/threaten to go bankrupt.  The Conservative government didn’t approve the loan, leading to talk of whether CBC needs to exist, adapt to the new economic climate and what have you.

In many ways the back-and-forth is typical – the more liberal want CBC Television to go ad-free and above the “usual rubbish” on television, however poorly defined said rubbish is.  Also, there’s a lot of “mean old Harper” fist-shaking.  The more conservative want all CBC-related projects dead or privatized, $1 billion worth of taxpayers’ money wasted, the usual fuck-’em-they’re-socialists talking points.

Most of the talk seems to be related to CBC Television and Télévision de Radio-Canada, the divisions of the CBC most bolstered by ad revenue.  CBC.ca also accepts advertising, but it’s not likely that Internet advertising revenue amounts to much.  Since CBC Television and its need in a 500-channel universe is a popular enough topic, I thought I’d at least add my two cents on the Mothercorpse.

I don’t think CBC Television has made many good programming decisions in recent years.  CBC Television has lavished undue amounts of attention on “can’t-miss” series – The One, MVP, Being Erica, Making the Cut, Little Mosque on the Prairie, The Tudors et al.

The danger with this sort of programming strategy is that if the show fails or does worse than expected, all that promotion means diddly poop.  Overhyped shows that fail can easily kill a network’s reputation.  If the show is also derivative of existing content, American or otherwise – MVP was essentially Footballers’ Wives transposed to hockey – it doesn’t reflect too well on Canadian television.

There’s also a problem with relying on more American content to generate “more revenue.”  The real problem with importing shows like Jeopardy!, Wheel of Fortune and The Martha Stewart Show is not that the shows are American, it’s that there’s no necessity to have the shows on CBC Television.  I’m not anti-American, but it makes more sense to me to launch a modestly-budgeted game show than to make sure OMNI.1 and A Channel don’t make bank from Pat Sajak.  It’s not like A Channel’s making bank right now, as is the case with most traditional media.

Instead of Jeopardy!, CBC could have bought the Canadian rights to Mastermind.  The format is fairly simple – hard questions, a chair, a university backdrop, a host, a yearly tournament – but it’s done well for BBC.  As long as Rex Murphy or Big Daddy Tazz don’t host, Mastermind would be at least decent filler.  Just a thought.

Also, what happened to CBC Retro?  That initiative seems to have died in recent years.  Its output has been limited to Jimmy MacDonald’s Canada, Pop-Up Royals and Extreme Weather, as far as I know.  CBC Retro can still work provided someone actually bothers to do something entertaining with it.  The bar can and must be raised higher than Scott Thompson wearing a dress.

Even if CBC Television becomes ad-free, which I can’t see happening in my lifetime, its programming decisions continue to puzzle me.  Take comedy, for instance.  Back in the 1990s, CBC had some decent comedy shows – The Newsroom, Comics!, Kids in the Hall, CODCO and This Hour Has 22 Minutes when it was good.  Even some of the fair-to-middling performers (hi, Gullage’s and Ken Finkleman’s non-Newsroom series) were a step up from Mosquito Lake.

Recent CBC comedy programming tends more toward filler programs like the Just For Laughs galas, Just For Laughs Gags and The CBC Winnipeg Comedy Festival.  Shows like The Rick Mercer Report and Little Mosque on the Prairie are safe and quirky, lamely topical or both at the same time.

The CBC has tried for edgier fare – The Tournament, The Altar Boy Gang, jPod, What It’s Like Being Alone – but hardly anything sticks.  It also cancelled Kenny vs. Spenny in its first season, leaving Showcase to turn the show into a hit.  CBC Television can foster truly edgy comedy when it wants to, since that brings in a deeper talent pool to draw from.  It might also equal better advertising revenue.  I don’t know.  No one knows with television.

The big thing about CBC Television is that it’s the English lynchpin of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation.  CBC Radio has its good and bad traits, but CBC Television’s current direction and the numerous mistakes it’s made give the portrait of CBC itself as an out-of-touch, directionless entity.

Granted, it’s always had that reputation to some extent.  Dropping Don Messer’s Jubilee despite continued popularity and giving Ralph Benmergui a late-night talk show has that effect on a network.  It is still hard to ignore things like CBC losing the rights to the Hockey Night in Canada theme song, the piddling performances of Being Erica and Sophie, a reliance on ratings when ratings are at their most meaningless and hiring new executives of questionable worth.

I can see why people are opposed to CBC not receiving bridge funding.  $700 million a year should go towards more varied fare than The Week the Women Went and Arrested Development reruns.  CBC Television needs to realize it’s not the arbiter of Canadian culture it was in the 1950s and go from there.  I can’t see the network being scrapped, but CBC Television needs more than new “Canada lives here” ads with unfolding gem action and dinky jingle.

Oh, and could someone explain to me why bold needs to exist?  Sure, it airs the new Doctor Who episodes and Peter Benchley’s Amazon, but is that all it does?  The channel, formerly CBC Country Canada, has had no purpose since it stopped talking about rural culture and became a programming bran tub.  Give me a reason to care about bold.  David Tennant fighting a Sontaran isn’t going to be enough here.