It's mid-morning Thursday in the sprawling eTalk Daily newsroom at CTV in downtown Toronto. Staff gather around a monitor to watch just-arrived footage that will become the evening's lead story: Ashlee Simpson acting late-night disorderly in a downtown Toronto McDonald's.
Visiting the city to promote her new album, the singer hardly needed more airtime: The Monday before, Husein Madhavji, host of CHUM's Star!Daily, had Simpson's new CD, I Am Me, on his desk, preparing for his interview that day with the American singer. On Wednesday, Global Television's Entertainment Tonight Canada ran a Simpson interview. Combined with the eTalk coverage, Simpson and her new album reached roughly a million Canadians over the course of the week.
If you're the hot thing of the moment, now is a good time to visit Toronto. The fall launch of not one, not two, but three daily entertainment-news shows based in the city means it's crawling with celebrity-hungry producers desperate to give their show the edge for the evening. It also means that in the quest to build a Canadian star system while stealing eyeballs away from competitors, Canadian television has created not just an intriguing ratings battle but, paradoxically, some of the most homogeneous programming ever seen in this country.
The battle was joined in September when Global launched ET Canada, a spinoff of the U.S. show, in the same timeslot as eTalk. Also launched this fall was Star!Daily, now showing on the cable specialty channel Star!, as well as on the company's CITY-TV and A-Channel stations. Even Sun TV, which broadcasts primarily in the Toronto area, got into the mix with the launch of its daily show, Inside Jam. "The public's appetite for celebrity coverage," says Jaimie Hubbard, editor of TV Guide, "appears to be insatiable."
Hubbard cites the success of such TV shows as Corner Gas, Trailer Park Boys and Da Vinci's Inquest (now Da Vinci's City Hall) as part of the picture. "There is an appetite for what's happening in Canada," he says, "and not just American stars in Canada."
Others wonder how committed the talk shows really are to shining the spotlight on homegrown talent. "I think it's great to create a Canadian star system," says Rachel Giese, who writes about the arts and pop culture for CBC.ca, "but I don't think that's the goal of these shows. They are relying on American product -- they aren't filling the gap."
Consider the example of Lost star Evangeline Lilly. Canadian-born, she was all but unknown in this country until her show became a hit and she appeared on the cover of Rolling Stone. Now, the perfectly coiffed castaway is a mainstay of the Canadian entertainment shows.
Still, the producers of the shows are quick to defend their commitment to Canadian culture. "We want to make people who work in Canadian entertainment more relevant," insists Zev Shalev, executive producer for ET Canada. "When we brought this well-known, established brand to this country, we distinguished it by celebrating Canadian celebrities. That's our huge priority." Over at eTalk Daily, executive producer Jordan Schwartz points to what he calls his show's "Canadian sense of irony and Canadian sensibility."
Not that every show has the same way of achieving its Cancon goals. "On Star! we don't flag stuff as Canadian," says James Woods, director of entertainment production for CHUM Television. " 'Canada's very own.' 'From our native lands.' I think that's kind of demeaning to the artist."
ET Canada and eTalk Daily, meanwhile, trumpet every possible Canadian connection. Schwartz's eTalk says that means giving coverage to all Canadians. "It's easy to just do the Canadians in Hollywood," says Schwartz. "We make an effort to focus on the Canadians who chose to stay at home as well, and that's really important to us, whereas I don't know if our competitors would share that focus."
Over at ET Canada, says Shalev, "We cover Canadians who have made it wherever they make it. It would be kind of crazy not to talk about those stars. Wherever Canadians are successful we should be proud of that."
Perhaps, but anyone who tunes in on a nightly basis to any of the shows can't miss their distinct preference for Canadian-born talent of the international-superstar variety. Shania, Celine, Alanis, the Barenaked Ladies, and it-moment actors such as Lost's Lilly and Sandra Oh, of ABC's Grey's Anatomy, can be expected to appear with considerable frequency. (Which is not to say that homegrown celebrities are totally ignored: e Talk sent Dr. Marla Shapiro to interview Melissa Etheridge, and ET Canada did a spot on the cast of Global's new teen drama, Falcon Beach.)
But with the average length of a story at a minute-and-a-half, neither fans of Hollywood nor devotees of Cancon can expect much in-depth coverage. "They take something that is virtually nothing and make it appear like we are seeing something that nobody else has," says Robert Thompson, director of the Center for the Study of Popular Television at Syracuse University in New York State. "Just watch how they create an entire segment out of virtually no new data."
Even when there is the potential to delve into important political and social issues, the shows rarely do more than graze the surface. The release of the Desert Storm war movie Jarhead could have been an opportunity to talk about how the entertainment world is dealing with the real, live sequel to the first Persian Gulf war. But eTalk offered preshot segments featuring banal sound bites by star Jake Gyllenhaal. ET Canada took the opportunity that same night to use Jarhead as the anchor for a feature on how stars get in shape for movies -- including plenty of clips of a shirtless Gyllenhaal glistening in the desert heat.
"There are ways to cover pop that are smart and engaging and accessible," says Giese, "but they're not doing it that way."
Instead, many critics argue that the shows focus too much on making daily promises of "exclusive" interviews and "first-time" peeks. "When we use the word exclusive we mean it," eTalk's Schwartz says. "But I can't always say the same for our competitors. I can't tell you how many times I'll see a story on ET Cana da and they'll say 'Only ET has it' and we had it two days ago."
ET Canada's Shalev dismisses the idea that his show is even paying attention to the competition. ET Canada, he says, derives its claims of exclusivity from its ability to package material in a particular way. "We have a large viewership and we value them and respect them," says Shalev, "and when they come to us everyday we want to make sure they get something special."
So what does an exclusive look like? One night, eTalk presented a peek inside Canadian Idol winner Melissa O'Neil's new apartment. Another night, ET Canada took viewers behind the scenes for an first look at O'Neil recording her album.
Exclusives also often seem to be connected to each network's upcoming programming. Which is only natural, according to TV Guide's Hubbard. "You have to look at it as, where are you going to get the best access, what is going to give you the edge over your competitor? You are going to be able to get better access for stuff on your network, so you enter a loop where you are going to run more stories about the stuff on your network."
In that loop recently was a Star!Daily feature on Nickelback crisscrossing the country to do three shows in one day -- followed by the promise of an entire Nickelback special on CHUM's MuchMusic.
Canadian Idol at times seems almost synonymous with eTalk -- both shows share host Ben Mulroney. And when a reviewer was assigned to serve up a 15-second report on Camilla Gibb's Giller-nominated novel, Sweetness in the Belly, the job was thrown to Canadian Idol runner-up Casey Leblanc. (CTV, by the way, was here leading up to its broadcast of the Giller gala.)
Global's ET Canada airs regular Apprentice updates (the network runs both the Martha and Donald versions) and does so much promo for Entertainment Tonight, which runs right after the Canadian version, that it's sometimes impossible to tell which show is which.
Despite the cross-promotions, their producers characterize the entertainment dailies as giving fans what they want -- their favourite stars -- while offering a reprieve from heavier news stories of natural disasters and terrorism.
But that approach, says Giese, ensures that "you never see an interviewer say to a director or musician, 'I didn't like the work, I had problems with that.' There are lots of people who want to fawn over celebrities, but at the same time there are lots of people who love pop culture, but also feel it could stand up to some challenge."
"It's the merger of the news business and show business," says Danny Schechter, executive editor of New York-based media-criticism website MediaChannel.org. "Audience is deserting traditional media. As a consequence, people say if we dumb it down even more and give the people what we think they really want, we'll build our ratings, keep our jobs and everybody lives happier ever after."
Or do they? Audiences for conventional TV are dropping and many, including Schechter, argue that while ratings may go up temporarily as these kinds of shows come on the air, the more they proliferate, the more they cannibalize from the same group of watchers, while the rest -- disenchanted and disgusted -- stop turning on the TV altogether.
The numbers for the two flagship daily entertainment shows may yet bear this out. On its own, eTalk was reaching as many as 700,000 TV screens nationally in the 7 p.m. timeslot. With ET Canada in direct competition, the shows have been winning a viewership in the 430,000 range -- for a combined total of between 800,000 and 900,000 screens, or a net gain of a mere 100,000 viewers helping to build the Canadian star system.
Ultimately, the future may not lie simply in growing a particular show's ratings, but in finding other places on the dial to repackage what it creates. Recently, eTalk started offering local CTV news affiliates an optional minute-and-a-half entertainment package for their newscasts. Six stations from Vancouver to Halifax have taken it up on the offer. And Star!Daily's CHUM is an industry leader in repackaging bits from cable specialty channels like Fashion and Space to appear in different incarnations on their more conventional stations.
Over at TV Guide, Hubbard says that is ultimately good news for Canadian entertainers. "Canadian shows and Canadian talent are actually getting much more coverage on television in their own country than they ever had before," says Hubbard. "And you gotta figure that's a good thing."