A Right Heartless Failure
Made in Canada: Rick Mercer’s second season will need depth, life
Mercer as Strong: Cobbled-together comedy sketches
By Stephen Cole
Angry young satirist Rick Mercer promises his January 1st departure from This Hour Has 22 Minutes will only be a 13-week sabbatical. But if he goes for good, as has been reported elsewhere, he’ll be leaving at the top of his game. His slashing editorials on This Hour still hit with the jolting force of your first morning coffee. A collection of his old tantrums, Streeters, even went number one on the bestseller list this summer, disproving the long-held Canadian publishing maxim that essay collections never sell (unless they-re written by Peter Gzowski).
But what to make of the reason for Mercer’s sabbatical? His new offering, Made In Canada, ended its much-hyped first season this past Monday with a satire of the Geminis that managed, like most of the series, to be savage and cutting, without ever being brave or even particularly funny.
First of all, a satire of the Geminis would hardly seem necessary, since the show is something of a national skeet shoot anyway. And the subjects who came under attack in Monday’s show – Karen Kain, pompous TV producers, and Barbara Ann Scott (!) – are hardly the stuffed shirts Canadians long to see set afire.
Therein lies the problem with Made In Canada, a satire that, in its first season at least, never managed to locate a target worth slapping around.
At first, the show’s premise – a take off on Richard III set in Hollywood North – seemed alive with possibility. The first minutes of its early October debut offered a bright string of well-constructed jokes. The performances had fizz. Here was a right group of creeps – caricatures all, but the show was young – for us to scheme and cackle along with.
But as the first, then second and third installments of the six-episode series aired, it became apparent that the intriguing premise was stillborn. The conniving, bed-hopping, behind-the-scenes characters of the fictional Xena clone, The Sword of Damacles, remained nothing more than clever caricatures. Worse still, after a few shows, the cleverness began to grate, as the series developed a smirking, pleased-with-itself preciousness that one associates with college theatrical revues.
The most obvious problem with Mercer’s new show is its failure to bring its title to life. Although the series is made in Halifax and set in what appears to be Toronto, MIC has neither the rollicking pub-night gleefulness that marks This Hour, nor the withering cool that informed Ken Finkleman’s recent inspection of Hogtown’s TV culture, The Newsroom. The airless studio concoction feels like it could have been made anywhere. Or nowhere.
The suggestion made by some in the press that MIC is a courageous affront to our TV industry is absurd, as parent network CBC produces nothing like Damacles or Xena. While it’s true that Salter Street Films, the series’ Halifax production house, is responsible for LEXX, a federally-funded, pay-the-rent action series similar to Damocles, that company and the same federal agencies also sponsored an arty conceit like MIC, so what’s to complain about?
No, if Mercer was really interested in snacking on the hand that feeds him, he might try taking on the CRTC, or maybe the Mother Corp. itself. (Hey, how about writing a wicked insider spoof on a highly successful Canadian variety show, starring an ungainly, but hugely popular Maritime singer? What happens if the show is yanked off the air because some Armani rat-bastards from network headquarters in Toronto are offended by its plain virtues and grassroots appeal?)
That MIC makes no significant contribution to our public discourse and lacks a sense of place would be neither here nor there if the show were funnier of more compelling. It should be. The jokes are there. And it’s endlessly clever. The problem is there’s nothing but jokes and cleverness, as star-writer Mercer seems to have succumbed to the Chevy Chase sketch-artist syndrome. Which is to say that his new show, like most of Chase’s post-Saturday Night Live efforts, exhibits little dramatic shading or character development, just the rat-a-tat-tat of stapled-together comic bits.
Such shallowness compromises even the show’s lead character, Mercer’s Richard Strong, a scheming script reader who is screwing his way to the middle of a major film studio, Pyramid Productions.
At the end of the show’s first season, we know little about Richard other than that he’s an amoral, self-absorbed thug. So is everyone else in the series. So, it could be argued, were most of the characters in The Larry Sanders Show. But whereas in that series, viewers had some emotional stake in the proceedings, one views the bickering and pillowfights in MIC with a growing sense of apathy. And really, why should we care? They’re nothing more than strangers to us.
What’s really disappointing (and surprising) about MIC is that such a risk-taking performer as Mercer would be so timid in exploring the souls of his characters.
It’s instructive to compare his performance here with Michael Riley’s expert turn as the frozen-hearted hockey agent in CTV’s Power Play. Both play silky villains. But because the latter series works hard to get inside the skin of its characters, Riley’s performance has far more resonance and depth.
Mercer will spend his upcoming sabbatical writing MIC’s second season. Hopefully, he can use his skills as a mimic to impersonate Christiaan Barnard and give his clever show much needed heart and soul transplants. Don’t bet he can’t. After all, here’s a performer who made 22 Minutes one of the best hours on Canadian television.