Anchorboy

by Jay Onrait

  But Mark and Ben didn’t like the idea of doing a Canadian version of The Soup. In their minds it made more sense to call the show something completely different and make it our own right from the start. There was a method to their madness: The two of them were essentially in control of programming at MTV, MuchMore, and MuchMusic, and they reasoned that by starting the show on one of those networks and calling it something new and unique, we would have some ownership over it and hopefully it would be given a longer time to find its way and be successful. I had seen shows like Late Night with Jimmy Fallon start out slowly. Had NBC given Jimmy only a month or two, the show would likely have gone down as a miserable failure. Same with Seinfeld. Same with Beverly Hills, 90210. I reasoned that if we could make the show a hit on a network like MTV or MuchMore, then a spot would be found for us on the main network. Or not. I didn’t really care. I just wanted to do a simple little television show that I would be proud of week after week. I wasn’t really concerned about where it aired. I just wanted it on the air.

  This may be a point where a reasonable person would say, “Shouldn’t you have a manager or agent negotiate these things for you? Aren’t you a creative type who should just be worried about content?” When Mark and Ben agreed to shoot a pilot for the show, I was just happy to be doing something within the CTV family for the first time since the Olympics. My basic philosophy was: Get the show on the air and make sure it’s good, and the rest will take care of itself. I didn’t care about money. This was about doing something I loved and truly cared about.

  I was assigned a show producer named Michael MacKinnon, who had started out in the business shooting and editing The Buzz, a comedy show that started on Rogers Cable TV and eventually made its way onto the Comedy Network. The Buzz starred Daryn Jones and Mistah Mo and was almost a precursor to Punk’d, Jackass, and shows like that. I always thought Daryn was a really funny and talented guy and was surprised it took so long for him to find a home on conventional television, co-hosting MTV Live and working for Mark McInnis and then eventually moving to the CBC. Michael was also a funny and talented guy, and he was genuinely enthusiastic about the project. So we had Mike on board, and Ben and Mark were on board; it was time to shoot a pilot for the show. We wanted to stick to material we knew we had access to rather than trying to do a pilot that featured a bunch of clips we couldn’t use anyway. For the most part we stuck to Internet clips and a ton of MTV Canada and MuchMusic-based clips, knowing we had access to all of them and would probably be using a ton of that material going forward.

  After Michael and his crew assembled enough clips for a credible pilot, the two of us sat down and wrote some intros and jokes for the clips—nothing too hilarious, just funny enough to give senior CTV execs an idea of the tone. The whole thing made me feel really happy, like I was finally accomplishing something outside of TSN. We were shooting a pilot for a real TV show. In Canada! It was practically a miracle.

  Mike, Mark, and Ben came up with the name The Week That Was. I didn’t love the title. I felt it had been used on a bunch of radio and television shows before and wasn’t really unique enough. Again, though, I wasn’t about to let a little detail like that derail our progress. We shot the pilot at the famous Masonic Temple in downtown Toronto, which was being used as a studio by CTV, mostly for MTV Canada, and has since been sold, likely to condo developers. The Temple had hosted a number of legendary bands on its mainstage over the years, even Led Zeppelin. I’d seen Sloan play there back in my Ryerson days. Our studio wasn’t exactly a walk-in closet, but it was pretty close. It was about the size of a decent one-bedroom apartment. It really didn’t matter because it was all we needed.

  The pilot went as well as hoped: not mean-spirited, but rather a celebration of all the television being produced in this country. I had visions of The Week That Was being sold all over the world, with various foreign networks playing it for audiences who would laugh endlessly at Canadian TV clips. I was dreaming big. I didn’t think it was the funniest show we could do, but I thought it conveyed the spirit of the show very well. I was confident we’d get picked up. And we did!

  But it was complicated. My bosses at TSN had been very good about letting me shoot the pilot in the first place. They knew I wanted to try something new and were completely in favour of it as long as it didn’t affect what I was doing at TSN day to day. That was the plan, anyway. Spend maybe three days a week working on The Week That Was: two days of writing and prep work, possibly pretaping one item per show, a comedy sketch or an interview perhaps, then on day three shoot the actual show and look ahead to next week. Keep in mind I was already working a full-time job. I didn’t want the new show to take anything away from SportsCentre.

  It didn’t take long for the feedback on the new pilot to start coming back, and it was generally very positive. Apparently, the pilot was shown to the CTV sales team and was met with great enthusiasm, with several young salespeople, guys who had watched me for years on TSN, offering to sell the project to advertisers. Rick Brace, who was in charge of all CTV Specialty channels but had once been the president of TSN and was aware of my existence, gave the green light to the project. Rick was apparently concerned about our ability to secure clips for the new show, but Mark and Ben reassured him that there was enough content within the walls of CTV to get us started and we’d work from there. We were a go.

  We had been promised only a limited early run, and it was my fault: I had to make my annual trek with Dan across the country to do live shows for the Kraft Celebration Tour in August, so The Week That Was would have to go on hiatus about four episodes in. Should we wait and launch the show after the Kraft Tour was over? Or produce and air four episodes during the summer, get our feet wet, and then return as a well-oiled machine after a two-week break? We were all eager to get going, so we decided to launch the show as soon as possible.

  I had become acquainted with the Toronto-based Sketchersons comedy troupe through their weekly show, “Sunday Night Live” at the Comedy Bar in the Bloorcourt Village neighbourhood. I was actually honoured to have been asked to host the show, essentially a note-for-note live rendition of Saturday Night Live, complete with “Weekend Update” and a musical guest. The Sketchersons would frequently ask Toronto “celebrities” to host, like Mayor David Miller and former Kids in the Hall star Scott Thompson, as well as other local stand-up comedians and sketch comedians. I was asked to host the show in 2010 just after the Olympics, and I had a great time doing it.

  I found everyone in the cast to be supremely talented and fun, and in particular I hit it off with a baseball– and Battlestar Galactica–loving nerd like me named Brendan Halloran. When it came time to find a writer for the show, I knew Brendan would be a great fit. He understood exactly what we were going for, but going in he was already understandably frustrated by the limitations of writing on our show. There was simply no way for us to be as mean-spiritedly funny as The Soup because we wanted to encourage other shows to sign up and let us use their clips. Still, I kept reminding Brendan that we had plenty of amazing footage that would make the show a definite hit. Or, if not a hit, at least a serviceable choice on Sunday afternoons while you’re nursing a hangover.

  We also hired two local stand-up comedians, Hunter Collins and Dini Dimakos, to gather our Canadian TV clips, and two up-and-coming young producers, Dave Grunier and Kate Morawetz, to handle the day-to-day production. We finished off our crew with Marla Black, who was responsible for “clearing clips,” shorthand for “begging TV networks to let us use funny clips from their shows.” In other words, she was the lynchpin for the entire operation. If Marla was unable to convince networks like Global to eventually let us use clips from Recipe to Riches on the Food Network, then in the long run the show really would look like a half-hour advertisement for CTV programming. No time to worry about the long run, though: We had two weeks of rehearsals before our first set of four shows. All I was worried about was making sure the show was funny.

  The first week of rehears
al went well. We had some kinks to work out, but all in all I loved the content we had to work with. But four days before we were set to tape our first real show, things began to fall apart, and it was an innocent comment from Marla that made me realize how much trouble I was in, and how pitching the show had been a horrible mistake.

  CHAPTER 26

  What Do You Mean, We Can’t Make Fun of Ben?

  WE USED PLENTY OF CLIPS from CTV’s entertainment show etalk during our pilot and first week of rehearsal. We discussed at length that we would probably need to use plenty of etalk clips in the early stages of production and beyond, because CTV would likely not want to promote Entertainment Tonight Canada or other entertainment shows on other networks. It really didn’t matter to me because etalk host Ben Mulroney was a one-man comedy factory. At one point during a rehearsal show we used a clip of him dressed in drag while he interviewed someone for the Toronto stage version of Priscilla: Queen of the Desert. Ben was, quite simply, the ugliest drag queen any of us had ever seen. He was also a very gracious guy who seemed to have no problem with us poking fun at his persona on our show. Something told me Ben had developed a thick skin over the years. The only concern among us was that we might be tempted to use too many clips of Ben from etalk.

  After our second rehearsal week it was time to prepare for the real thing, and I made my way to the Masonic Temple. It was a Monday and we were supposed to tape our first show that Friday.

  The previous week the entire staff had met to go over the rehearsal show and hash out any concerns about content or presentation or, frankly, anything that needed to be corrected before we actually went on the air. We started to discuss content for our first program, and the first thing I asked about were those clips of Ben dressing in drag. They were a week or so out of date, but we weren’t concerned with little things like that at this point. We were just trying to make the show as funny as possible, so if the clips weren’t 100 percent fresh, so be it. Who cared if the show was called The Week That Was?

  “So if we’re going to use the Ben drag queen clip, should we try to write a better joke for it?” I wondered casually.

  “We don’t have the rights to use etalk clips,” said Marla matter-of-factly.

  I tried to digest what exactly this person was saying to me.

  “What do you mean, we don’t have the rights to use etalk clips? That show is on CTV, it’s a CTV show, don’t we have the rights to all CTV shows?”

  Marla’s answer was a slow, deliberate shake of the head. I was concerned. I was very, very concerned. I asked Michael MacKinnon, our day-to-day show producer, to explain to me why I was just finding out now that we didn’t have the rights to use clips from a show that I thought were a mere formality to use. Were other shows like this? Other CTV shows? Turns out the answer was yes.

  “So Marilyn Denis? We can’t use the clips to that show?” I asked.

  “Not unless their executive producer gives us the green light,” replied Michael.

  “So let me get this straight …” I was trying to remain calm in front of the entire staff, who likely would not have been surprised had I started throwing things. “You’re telling me that in addition to trying to get other networks to let us use their clips, we now have to go to each individual executive producer from each individual in-house production here at CTV and beg them to use their clips as well?”

  “Yup, that’s pretty much the case,” said Michael.

  I felt completely duped.

  In the previous regime, when Susanne Boyce and Susanne Boyce alone was making programming decisions, the use of such clips would have been a formality. When Susanne or Ivan Fecan green-lit a show, everyone at the network parted the seas to make sure it got on the air the way they wanted.

  But I didn’t have Susanne in my corner now, and little did I know that Mark and Ben were soon on their way out as well—they no longer had a place in the new Bell world. I had pitched my concept to a regime that was heading out the door, and now I was beginning to realize how truly fucked I was. After the meeting was over I pulled Michael and Brendan aside and asked them to meet with me in an empty office nearby.

  “Perhaps,” I wondered aloud, “we should consider postponing the show until we have more clips cleared and actual content to write about.”

  “We can’t do that,” reasoned Michael. “All of these people will lose their jobs. And besides, we’ve already started to promote it.”

  “No one has promoted anything,” I replied. “I alone have mentioned it on my Twitter feed. But that’s it. That’s our promotion. Forget about billboards and radio ads, there aren’t even promos for the show running on the actual network the show’s appearing on! If you were a regular viewer of MuchMore, you wouldn’t even know the show existed. We can easily pull the plug on this.”

  “But people’s jobs …” Michael trailed off.

  I was so fucked. I was being put in an impossible position. I had pitched a stupid little show that I hoped would develop a cult following over time; now I was being told that about half a dozen people’s jobs rested in my hands, and if I backed out now they’d have to find other work. Not to mention the fact that I really wanted to do the show. I was at a loss for what to do. My bosses at TSN, Mark Milliere and Ken Volden, were concerned.

  “What’s going on over there? Are you all right?” Ken asked on the phone one day.

  “Not really, I’m kind of fucked. But there’s nothing I can do about it because I don’t want anyone to be out of work here, and I think eventually we can make a great show. The question is: Will we be given the necessary time to do that, and the resources we need to acquire the content? I’m starting to wonder.”

  “Keep us posted. We’ll pull you off that show if you want.”

  My lingering Catholic guilt about putting people out of work was too great to pull the chute now. We were going ahead with taping the first show on Friday and airing it on Sunday. The good news was we had a few days to convince etalk executive producer Morley Nirenberg to allow us to use clips of Ben. Michael had a great relationship with Morley, and eventually Morley came on board with the idea. I also had a great relationship with Marilyn Denis Show executive producer Nan Row, even after I turned down a spot on her show, and I was able to convince her to let us use clips from that show as well.

  I took Tuesday off as per usual and planned to be back in the office on Wednesday to go over the script Brendan had written. I was very frustrated that it had taken until four days before the show for me to be told we didn’t have access to clips I thought were in the bag, but I needed to maintain a positive front. I wanted everyone on the staff to feel good about the show, and besides, it wasn’t as if things could get any worse.

  Things were about to get worse. Much, much worse.

  CHAPTER 27

  We Have Nothing

  I ARRIVED AT THE MASONIC TEMPLE offices of The Week That Was on Wednesday afternoon with a smile on my face. The weather was sweltering hot, and I loved working downtown instead of making the trek all the way out to Scarborough to work at TSN every night. The Masonic Temple was at Yonge and Davenport, right in the heart of downtown. I envisioned many wonderful years of working there.

  But when I walked into our offices that afternoon, it was clear that something was amiss. Michael and Ben were huddled up in an office with Mark McInnis, and they all looked to be discussing something very serious.

  I went to say Hi to Brendan and everyone else on the staff. We chatted casually about an Internet clip we had planned to use about a Filipino cook named Hot Rod Cantiveros who used to appear on The Big Breakfast with me in Winnipeg. Rod had posted a failed pilot on YouTube in which he would “ambush” people at the grocery store, follow them back to their homes with fresh produce, and cook for them and their families. It was just bizarre and unintentionally hilarious and very Canadian. In other words it was exactly the kind of clip we wanted for the show, and lo and behold, Marla had reached Rod’s son and gotten approval to actually use the cl
ip! Things were looking up for The Week That Was.

  It was about that moment when Michael called me into Mark’s office. I sat down and saw a look on the faces of those three men that I had never seen before. It was a look of exasperation and defeat. Michael informed me that an executive at another network who had previously agreed to let us use clips from a ton of Canadian reality shows had changed their mind and was now refusing to give us access. These clips made up half of our content and, more importantly, prevented the show from looking like the advertisement for CTV that I had feared it would be.

  “We don’t have any content!” I screamed, surely getting the attention of the rest of the crew in the offices nearby.

  I could not believe this was happening to me. We were scheduled to shoot the first show in two days and we had lost half the show. It would be like having only the “police” portion of Law and Order and not the “district attorney” portion to wrap up the story. We were, to paraphrase a French Revolutionary, royally fucked. But I refused to give in.

  “What if I went and personally spoke to that executive? I’m really charming in person. This is not over yet.” I sounded as if I was trying to convince myself.

  I was so desperate that I knew I just had to make this work for the sake of the show and for the sake of everyone’s jobs. We needed those clips. We were too deep in it to quit without a fight. I understood perfectly the position the executive had taken; if I were in charge of that network and someone asked permission to show clips of “funny” moments from their shows, most of which had occurred by accident, I’d have concerns as well. But once we met face-to-face and the executive realized our intention—to celebrate the comic side of Canadian television and not ridicule it—surely, they would agree to let us use those clips. Especially since so many of the clips we had intended to use were brought to my attention by the talent hosting those shows. I was so sure of my ability to convince the executive I was still not yet that discouraged. Ben agreed to accompany me to the executive’s office the following day. But first I had to complete my Worldwide Media Tour.