By Diana Hart
Believe it or not, Canada has an awards show season. Its last big trophies were handed out at the annual celebration of Canadian television at the Gemini Awards earlier this month.
It was billed as the biggest night in Canadian television. Yet barely anyone actually tuned in to watch.
The Gemini Awards moved from its traditional Toronto location to the small Vancouver suburb of Richmond in the hopes of connecting with new audiences from across Canada. But it somehow lost its viewers along the way. Not that the show ever pulled in a large audience, but the 28 per cent drop in viewers had to hurt its organizers, the Academy of Canadian Cinema and Television.
This year’s tiny pool of 203,000 viewers is appalling when compared to the huge ratings of American award shows.
Even the Emmys, which caused so much outrage this year with the new voting system that saw many fan favourites like Desperate Housewives passed over, still managed to pull in millions of viewers across the continent.
Global desperately tried to copy the elegant, glittery world of American award shows, red carpet banter and all, with Cheryl Hickey doing her best impression of Melissa Rivers.
The night even had a minor fashion scandal, after This Hour Has 22 Minutes’ Shaun Majumder stepped on the dress of Evangeline Lily of Lost. Lily then stole the limelight from nominees as reporters clamoured to ask why this star from American television would so graciously swing by her homeland’s awards show.
On the surface the Canadian award show seemed to have what the American shows have, except for star-nominees that people actually know.
At a time where headlines about Canadian television tend to have the word “save” in them, it is hard for people outside of the Canadian television microcosm to justify setting aside a night to celebrate its accomplishments.
Not that Canadian television isn’t worth watching. There are some truly fantastic shows out there: Corner Gas, Intelligence and the Rick Mercer Report to name a few. But when so few people are watching most Canadian shows, who is going to get excited about its awards, outside of those receiving them … and their families.
Maybe it’s because the shows that tend to be the big winners at the Geminis seem to be the ones that have just been cancelled or are on the verge of cancellation. It is hard to get excited about a show that you will never be able to watch.
This is especially true of one of the night’s biggest winners, Slings and Arrows. The show has a genuinely huge Canadian star, Paul Gross, and deeply Canadian subject matter, the backstage happenings at a Stratford-like theatre festival. It has won six Geminis, including one for best dramatic series.
It’s sad to learn it is in its dying days, finishing up its third and final season. After a bizarre journey seemingly typical of Canadian television – the show was meant for and then passed over by the CBC before being shunted over to the Movie Network — where it can be watched by lucky Canadians with a huge cable package.
The show’s critical success is well deserved, but it is completely unmatched by commercial success, hence the dilemma of why people do not care about the Gemini Awards, or Canadian television for that matter.
Viewers do not seem to know what Canadian shows are out there, and looking at some of the sponsors of the Gemini Awards – Global, CTV, CHUM Television, CBC – maybe the money funneled into this “members-only” awards show would be better spent in actually promoting the television shows themselves.