At Last, A Canadian Sitcom That Just Might Be A Hit
The Toronto Star, October 5, 1998
By Antonia Zerbisias
In a country where audiences flee a series, even without watching it, just because it’s Canadian, calling a show Made In Canada is a pretty stupid – or suicidal – thing to do.
It’s like screaming: “Don’t watch me! I suck! Change the channel for another tired episode of Mad About You! Or how about those two new really lame sitcoms, Conrad Bloom or King Of Queens? Sure they blow, but at least they’re American!”
Which is ironic considering the focus of Made In Canada, starring This Hour Has 22 Minutes’ in-your-eye, on-the-establishment’s-back Rick Mercer...
Brilliant doesn’t begin to describe it. “Scary” does. Same with “cynical”. “Biting” works, too. “Backbiting” works even better.
So the only stupid or suicidal thing about Made In Canada is how it skewers its very own producers – Halifax’s Salter Street Films, in whose offices it was shot – as well as every mogul in the business.
The show centers on the rapacious Richard Strong (Mercer), a lowly script reader at Pyramid Productions, a fictional TV-movie production house known mostly for low-rent crap produced for American cable or syndication.
On the production slate is Sword Of Damacles, a Sinbad-meets-Hercules-meets exportable adventure series, all too typical of what passes for Canadian TV nowadays. Strong’s boss is Alan Roy (The Newsroom’s Peter Keleghan), a womanizing schlokmeister who has as much passion for Canadian culture as a polar seal has for a pair of Inuit-made boots.
Roy’s second is Veronica Miller (More Tears’ Leah Pinsent), who, Strong tells us in his asides to the camera, “does everything, is paid nothing.”
But even she is venal, as we learn in a later episode.
They’re surrounded by a cast of production executives and assistants – and it’s easy to tell who will make it to the top and who won’t. The winners wear black; the walking dead don’t.