Mercer Really Is Made In Canada
HALIFAX, September 30, 1998
By Sid Adilman, Toronto Star
In Made In Canada, his first situation comedy series, Rick Mercer savages every executive at the country’s TV and movie production companies and the programs they make.
Made In Canada debuts – for a six-week run with more to come next season – Monday on CBC at 8:30 pm, after This Hour Has 22 Minutes, on which he is a regular until he bows out in January. Mercer plays Richard (read Shakespeare’s Richard III), a lowly script reader with overweening ambition who works for a Canadian TV and movie production company listed on the stock exchange.
He does anything to get promoted. He drugs and gets his immediate boss (his brother-in-law) fired to win his job as head of TV production; sleeps with the company president’s 18-year-old daughter, and gets an executive fired after having sex with her.
“We bite the hand that feeds us; it’s a composite of everyone we’ve had the pleasure of working with and seeing rise to power throughout the years,” says Gerald Lunz, a 22 Minutes producer who created Made In Canada with Mercer and Michael Donovan, co-chairman of Halifax’s Salter Street Films, which makes both shows. CBC executives viewed the first of six half-hour episodes and, in an unusual move for a show that hasn’t yet aired, ordered 13 more for next season.
Mercer also co-wrote the episodes over a two-month period with 22 Minutes writer Mark Farrell. Pyramid Productions, for which Mercer’s character works, is fictional. But among its shows are Sword Of Damacles, a hunk action series, Beaver Creek, a historical drama series, Vigilante Vengeance, with a buxom babe, environmental theme and computer-generated effects, and a low-budget lifestyle series similar to what many Canadian producers churn out for specialty channels.
As Mercer tells viewers in the first episode, “Television is about making one thing only – money.” The series satirizes movie and TV company executives, their shows and sometimes their crews, but no one from the creative side, says Mercer.
The company president, played by Peter Keleghan (the spacey reporter on The Newsroom), is a womanizer. Pyramid Productions, though Canadian financed and based, makes its shows for the international market – only one of them, the history drama, identifiably set in Canada – a poke at the recent output of Atlantis, Cinar, and Nelvana.
Mercer and company aim Made In Canada at general audiences, not just for Canada’s production insiders: “It’s not about Alliance or Cinar. It’s about all of them.”
He, Lunz, and Donovan began developing the series four years ago, but, says Lunz, by fortuitous timing they presented the proposal to CBC in March. “This year,” says Lunz, “natural resource stocks, the bread and butter of Canada, were seriously devalued, while at the same time stocks in film and television corporations in this country went up 100 percent.”
And while filming from July 17 to August 24, “Atlantis and Alliance merged and it was on the front page of the newspapers,” adds Mercer. “The industry is in people’s psyche.” Also fortuitous: Made In Canada premieres against a backdrop of widely reported CRTC hearings on the future policy of Canadian broadcasting and its Canadian content.
“It’s more about office politics than show business,” says Mercer, “but it’s about show business because they’re more ridiculous than people you’d find in any other kind of office. People take themselves so seriously; they think what they’re doing is so important. They should just go take a pill.”
The key characters, like real-life counterparts, wear fashionable all-black. For budget reasons and verisimilitude, Made In Canada was filmed at Salter Street Films’ high-tech studio in downtown Halifax Fridays to Sundays, from midnight to 6 am, well after its staff had left.
“In the same boardroom we use tonight, there will be real meetings tomorrow like those we make fun of,” beams Mercer. Regular cast members include Leah Pinsent as the company’s No. 2 executive; Alex Carter as the dumb Damacles; Dan Lett as the doomed head of movie production and Janet Kidder as the equally short-lived assistant head of TV production.
There are name cameos aplenty, including novelist-actor Ann-Marie MacDonald. And The Tragically Hip allowed Mercer to use one of his favorite songs, “Blow At High Dough”, as the theme.
About future episodes, Mercer will only say his character “wants to become president of the company. From there, who knows.”