The U.K's design and architecture show Grand Designs has 24 seasons on CBC Gem.Supplied
Imagine settling down for the evening and switching on your favourite home and lifestyle channel.
A new program, made by Canadians, takes viewers to Mulmur, Ont., where crews have just poured the foundation for a new residence; the Costa family cheers as their architect pops the Champagne cork.
Then, viewers are whizzed over to Toronto’s Parkdale neighbourhood, where the transformation of a Victorian mansion from a seedy rooming house to a modern multiplex apartment building is almost complete.
Meanwhile, in Guelph, Ont., architect Samir assures his clients that the red brick he’s chosen for their very modern house – they want fibre cement panels like the one down the street – has great pedigree.
At that point, a little history lesson about Modernist brick buildings by famous architects such as Louis Kahn, Eero Saarinen and Frank Lloyd Wright fills the screen.
Sound good? While loosely based on the U.K.’s Grand Designs – 24 smash seasons are available on CBC Gem – it’s an imaginary television show. And one you’re not likely to see in Canada, says executive producer Carolyn Meland of HeartHat Entertainment (recently nominated at the Banff World Media Festival for Bollywed).
“Process shows are a hard sell in the TV landscape as broadcasters simply don’t get excited by them,” she says. “They don’t feel they draw eyeballs; and while they may like the idea of covering the design process from beginning to end, they prefer it in small doses.”
North American shows are all sizzle and no steak; if a viewer learns anything in 47-minutes, it’s quite by accident. Here, architecture and design programs require a quick payoff vis-à-vis the before-and-after room reveal, or a race against the clock, or other game-show shenanigans to keep the audience engaged. The creative process, sadly, would just slow things down.
Yet slower-moving procedurals are good enough for cop shows. Is that audience smarter?
“I certainly wouldn’t say that people are too stupid,” says York University department of communication studies associate professor Mark Hayward, “but I do think that it would work against a set of established expectations about genre as they’ve evolved.” It’s Hayward’s opinion that, while 30 or 40 years ago lifestyle/architecture programs contained documentary-type content and unravelled at a more relaxed pace, the two genres “really do exist in different universes now.” Meaning play-it-safe broadcasters place documentaries in one silo and real estate shows in the other, and never the twain shall meet.
But they once did. When HGTV Canada launched in 1997, it featured a gentle little process show about party planning, Savoir Fair with Nik Manojlovich (where Sarah Richardson worked as a set decorator before pitching her own show), and, more than a decade before that, CityTV’s Fashion Television – which also featured architecture – was kicking sartorial butt in the ratings. Host Jeanne Beker says creator Jay Levine saw architecture “as an important field of design.” But unless you approach it in “an upbeat way” it can be “a kind of dry subject matter.
“Not long ago I was rewatching the 25th anniversary special of Fashion Television, and of course one section featured the architecture stories over the years,” continues Ms. Beker, “and all of a sudden the pace changed, and it was just not as compelling, it just wasn’t as sexy.” She was stumped. When “architects themselves are such colourful characters” who deal with multimillion budgets, this type of programming should work, she says.
It should, especially on the CBC or TVO where more cerebral BBC shows have always played well. But, says Hayward, while broadly structured like the BBC, the CBC “has never played the same dominant role as the main broadcaster with multiple channels.” So, without those same fatty resources “to be able to pull together both a research team that’s doing historical documentary with another team that can be out in the field shooting,” it’s next to impossible to get an architecture “procedural” like Grand Designs made here.
Yet, even in the much larger U.S. market, where specialty channels such as Smithsonian or History should be airing programs that inform us about how we live and why we build in certain ways, programmers play it safe and give us fighting Vikings or the Second World War ad nauseam.
I have a little experience with why this may be. In 2014-15, I hosted 20 episodes of an iChannel show, Where Cool Came From, which traced how things such as coffee, sneakers or even Modernist architecture, became cool. While somewhat high concept, the unwritten rule seemed to be this: Get money from the Canada Media Fund but make the show in such a way that it’ll sell to a big U.S. broadcaster after it airs in Canada (so they’ll hopefully foot the bill for more episodes).
This means the content must appeal to both soccer moms in Des Moines, Iowa, and elitists in New York.
“I think broadcasters and commissioners have a tough job – they are in the business of creating hits,” says Meland. “It’s not easy to take chances on different kinds of shows when you can be laid off for making mistakes … and the fallout of that is there are less champions for programs that may be great and interesting.”
Dave LeBlanc writes weekly as “The Architourist” in Globe Real Estate. Reach him at dave.leblanc@globeandmail.ca