The Watcher Has Left The Building - Nov. 1, 2008

ON SCREEN:
THE WATCHER HAS LEFT THE BUILDING

BOTTOM LINE:
THANKS FOR READING.


That's a wrap!

After 12 years at the
helm of TVtimes,
it’s time for The Watcher
to pack up and move on.
But first, a few parting words …


By Eric Kohanik

Cancellation can often come swiftly and without warning in the TV world.

And so, it’s somehow fitting that The Watcher’s exit from TVtimes not have much advance notice.

For more than a decade, I’ve had the privilege of telling countless stories and spewing all sorts of opinions about television on the pages of Canada’s largest TV publication. Of course, that has been only part of the job of being the editor of TVtimes for 12 years. The other parts of the job? Well, they’re way too unexciting to write about here.

What has been exciting, though, has been the opportunity to keep tabs on the most fascinating medium in the world – and the colourful individuals who populate it.

Television has been my professional preoccupation since the 1980s – part-time since1981 and full-time since 1986. The focus has been local, national and international.

It has often meant attending big press tours in Los Angeles – 40 of them, in fact! – to get up close with some of Hollywood’s top stars, everyone from such legends as Lucille Ball, Bob Hope and Carol Burnett to contemporary stars Jerry Seinfeld, Oprah Winfrey and George Clooney.

Those TV press tours are overseen by the Television Critics Association, an organization that represents more than 200 TV critics in the U.S. and Canada.

Several years ago, I even had the honour of being part of the TCA’s administration: two years as secretary, two years as vice-president and, to cap it off, two years as president – the first and still only time a Canadian has held that post.

As for TV stars, American or Canadian, there have been many stories to tell about them over the years. Many have been told in print; many more have simply made for party conversation or chatter around the office.

There was the time Tom Hanks confessed to me over dinner how he regularly watched CFL games, via satellite, at Martin Short’s house. And there was the time I actually got to hang with George Clooney at a party during his early days on ER.

“They give you all this free booze!” Clooney exclaimed to me that night. “And they drive you home afterward. Perfect!”

Of course, things aren’t always perfect in L.A. “This town is friggin’ hard on you,” one Canadian actress lamented to me on a Hollywood set in the mid-1990s. “If you’re not related to it, married to it or having sex with it, it’s hard to find work.”

Although that fact of TV life hasn’t changed much over the years, many others have. And, alas, some of those facts have affected the publications that cover the medium.

In recent years, an explosion of channels, declines in advertising revenue, increases in paper and printing costs and the rise of the Internet have altered how TV is covered.

And so, it’s a wrap for me at TVtimes. It’s been a fun ride. Thanks for reading.

HBO Canada - Oct. 25, 2008

ON SCREEN:
HBO CANADA
STARTING OCT. 30

BOTTOM LINE:
IT'S NOT TV. IT'S HBO.
AT LEAST, THAT'S WHAT
THEY WANT YOU TO THINK.

Channel flipping

Pay TV subscribers have always
longed to have HBO in Canada.
Now, they weill finally be able to get it.
Well, sort of.


By Eric Kohanik

There was a time when only a handful of pay/cable channels populated the TV landscape. 

Now, there are so many that, whenever another one launches, it’s usually greeted with a ho-hum shrug by those who cover television.

Except for this week. That’s because HBO is finally arriving in Canada. 

Well, sort of. 

Canadian pay TV subscribers have always longed for HBO. That longing is what has fuelled much of Canada’s pay TV industry.

Over the years, it also helped nurture an entire industry of black-market and grey-market satellite dishes across the country. 

Starting Oct. 30, though, Canadians willbe able to get HBO legally. 

Well, sort of.

See, it’s not really HBO. It’s a Canadian adaptation – a couple of existing channels masquerading as the famed American icon.

Pay TV in Canada started a quarter of a century ago, following a formula similar to HBO in the U.S. There were three national English pay TV channels in Canada then: First Choice, Superchannel and C-Channel.

The first two were competing movie channels; the third was a “culture” channel that had programs with a high-class appeal. 

C-Channel didn’t last long. And the two remaining services found their only hope for survival would be to split the Canadian TV market right along the Manitoba-Ontario border, with First Choice taking the east and Superchannel saddling up in the west. 

Still, HBO was nowhere to be seen in Canada. At least, not legally. The two Canadian pay channels eventually took on new names: First Choice became The Movie Network (or TMN), while Superchannel rebranded itself as Movie Central.

Canada’s pay-TV scene recently got a newplayer – a national network called, wait for it, Super Channel. But, hey, that’s a wholeother story we’ll save for some other time. 

Multiplex and video-on-demand technology have broadened the reach of both TMN and Movie Central over the years. Both of them even cut deals long ago for the rights to show most HBO programming in Canada. 

But Canadian TV fans continued to long for HBO itself – to the point where the CRTC had actually considered opening Canada’s protectionist doors to let the American channel in. 

In a crafty countermeasure, though, the parent companies of TMN and Movie Central took pages from Canwest Global’s deal for E! and CTV’s partnership with MTV. They teamed up to snag rights to the HBO brand and are now rechristening two of their existing multiplex channels (MMOR in the east and MC4 in the west) as HBO Canada.

So, technically, Canadian viewers will have HBO available to them this week – even though it’s really a Canadian version that will have to air homegrown programs as well.

But at least Canadian TV viewers can now finally stop longing for America’s beloved HBO.

Well, sort of.