December 17, 1994
Red Green's Hard-Work Way to Make TV Pay
Greg Quill, Toronto Star
Don't ask Steve Smith about the state of Canadian TV comedy. His response is either a vulgar noise from deep inside his throat or an endless diatribe that usually begins with:
"One of my most prized possessions is a letter (from the former vice-president of a Canadian network) urging me to drop the Red Green project because Canadians can't make funny TV shows."
And ends with:
"Red Green on CBC? I doubt it? I've had an entire career in the time I've been waiting for them to return my phone calls."
Smith, 47, isn't bitter, mind you. From where he's sitting now - at the helm of a hit cult comedy series seen across Canada (Saturdays at 7 p.m. on Channels 6 and 41 in Ontario) and in more than 30 major American markets, mostly on Public Broadcasting System stations - things look mighty good.
Well, not my lunch. The perfectly grilled, smothered-in-braised- onions calf's liver on my plate visibly offends him.
"Liver . . ." he shudders, prodding at his mammoth club sandwich and fries.
"Let's not even think about it."
Smith may have learned a lot in recent years about the business of television, about marketing and bartering and merchandising, about hob-nobbing with powerful TV brokers in the U.S. and elsewhere.
With The Red Green Show, he may have successfully plundered our own culture to mount a mockery of TV business and comic stereotypes that almost defies description.
He may have assembled an extremely talented cast of neglected writers and performers and attracted the attention of frequent stellar on-air visitors.
But he still has the appetite of a simple man. And that's what keeps him going.
A former school teacher whose career in music, then comedy began when an inspector told him his work in a Hamilton classroom was the best faking job he'd ever seen, Smith says he was "prepared to let Red go" when Hamilton independent CHCH-TV (where the show was developed under contract in 1992) then Baton Broadcasting's Toronto station CFTO-TV, dropped it in successive seasons.
"But the fans weren't. I was overwhelmed by their response. After CHCH cancelled us, we got thousands of letters and petitions supporting the show.
"I particularly remember one from a high school in Beamsville, Ont., with 320 signatures. It came with a note saying the petition had been hung on a wall outside the cafeteria.
"Now, I haven't been at school for a long time, but I don't think I ever bothered to sign something on a cafeteria wall." FOR THE UNINITIATED, The Red Green Show is part situation comedy, part sketch comedy, part surrealistic - though affectionate - spoof of manhood and male stupidity.
It's set in the tumbledown, ramshackle Possum Lodge, beside a swamp called Possum Lake and infused with the sounds of typical Canadian country life - buzzsaws and shotgun blasts in spring and fall, roaring leisure craft engines in summer and winter.
In the best traditions of modern TV comedy, it's not about anything at all.
The grizzle-bearded, occasionally abrasive Red - who fancies himself a self-sufficient, self-made, dominant male, though most of his energy is expended on base, tasteless, and unrewarding work - is based loosely on the former Canadian weekend TV fixture, outdoorsman Red Fisher.
"That guy fascinated me," Smith says. "It was as if he dared us not to be bored. He wore shades all the time - even his eyes were nobody's business."
Red runs the retrograde, men-only lodge, with his gormless nephew Harold (played by Pat McKenna), a sexless, misfit, video-age techno- freak, who actually seems to produce the show and, via some miracle of home-made electronics, gets it on the airwaves.
Series director Rick Green, a member of ground-breaking, long- gone Frantics comedy troupe, and, till recently, host and star of TVOntario's sci-fi/pop-culture magazine Prisoners Of Gravity , plays Bill Smith, who, in mostly black-and-white open-air sequences, falls prey to his own deadly recreational devices, a la Super Dave Osborne.
Other regulars include:
* Ranger Gord (Peter Keleghan) - who for the past 16 years has kept an extremely lonely vigil, scanning the horizon for non- existent forest fires atop a 10-storey platform near Possum Lake, and whose pathetic attempts to find company have made him something of a local pariah;
* Winston Rothschild (Jeff Lumby) - the blissfully happy operator of the local sewage disposal company. "Follow your dream," he advises viewers. "Or the smell," is Red's riposte;
* And Dougie Franklin (Ian Thomas) - a southern cracker whose astounding blend of ignorance and arrogance transcend his character's origins by a country mile.
Shot in front of a real audience in the Hamilton studio where the series originated, The Red Green Show is a television phenomenon, both culturally and as an example of innovative business practice.
It's clearly low-budget, low-tech fare that relies on improvisation as much as pressure-cooked scripts and seat-of-the- pants technical wizardry. THOUGH SMITH AND his co-producers, Toronto- based Lauron Productions' Bill Johnston and Ron Lillie, have never actually conducted anything as sophisticated or as essential to conventional TV wisdom as market surveys, advance screenings or audience research, they've learned - via their American distributor (a wing of the mighty Hearst multi-media corporation, no less) - that the show appeals largely to the perfect TV demographic group: men age 18 to 49, the big-money earners and spenders.
"Mind you, the women I've talked to who love the show say their husbands think they're laughing at Red," Smith points out. "I suspect there's more Red in every man than most men realize."
Before every taping, the studio is ringed by hundreds of fans - mostly men and boys and mostly Red Green lookalikes, wearing plaid shirts and Red's trademark red-and-green suspenders.
They come from near and far, from across Canada and from Texas, Minnesota, Illinois, Oregon, Ohio and other states in which Red and his wacky lodge-mates have engendered a cult whose passions and proportions stagger even Smith.
"We have over 20,000 fan club members in just two seasons, though we've never run a single print advertisement, and as many pieces of mail in the past year.
"Our merchandise - hats, T-shirts, suspenders, the expensive Possum Lodge crest, books of poetry - is handled by a major American marketing company.
(The Red Green Show's press kit, however, comes in a cut-down cereal box held together with duct tape).
"Red has broken all kinds of records in major U.S. cities for PBS pledge drives; one station this spring made back its licence fee (for the show) in just 24 hours after he made a pitch on air.
"TV audiences have never seen anything like him. At one TV marketing convention, Tim Allen (star of the U.S. network series Home Improvement, the highest rated show in TV history) asked me if he should be worried about Red.
"Red is my best friend. He doesn't worry about a thing.
"Though it takes time for new viewers to understand the show isn't about hunting and fishing, it is about self-determination. Hunters and fishermen don't need money or governments; they make their own shelter and fend for themselves. That's what I've done.
"That's what I've always done. When someone says no, it might close one door, but it makes me determined to find another one I can open myself." THAT'S EXACTLY what happened when Baton pulled the plug on The Red Green Show's second season.
Smith hit the road, financed by Lauron's Johnston and Lillie.
He took a hockey-bag full of homemade merchandise and thousands of supporting letters from frantic fans to independent TV programmers and cable companies and to American TV marketing conventions.
"The first trip, we got no definite signings, only a sense that we were on the right track," Smith says.
"On the second trip, after Hearst had agreed to distribute the show, we had five stations - the first was Detroit. By spring this year, we had 30, and by next fall we'll have 100."
Those sales of existing shows - the buy-out of Smith's contract with CHCH gave him ownership of all Red Green material, as well as rights to his two former series, Smith & Smith (co-starring Smith's wife, Morag) and The Comedy Mill - financed the production of a third season.
It premiered in Ontario on Global in October, where Smith buys air-time that he pays for with commercial sales.
"We have financed our own independence, and never once has a buyer complain about Canadian content," he says.
"They like it because they think it's funny. We're looking at the possibility of a Red Green feature movie and Red Green book next year.
"And I think it's funny, too. If I didn't. I couldn't do it. I look at Hollywood situation comedies like Growing Pains and I get depressed. I think I'm in the wrong business, until I get on our set again.
"Maybe I've learned more about the business than I ever wanted to know. I became performer to improve my writing, and a producer so I could work as a performer in this country.
"All my professional life, I've been told, 'No,' but negativity just creates an opportunity gap for me.
"Historically, Canada has sold its raw materials at a loss and bought them back at a premium as finished product. There has to be another way, particularly as the TV universe continues to fragment.
"Broadcasters have to stop selling audiences wholesale to advertisers in order to survive. We have to find a way to make TV work for smaller and smaller audiences.
"I might be crazy, but I think Red Green adds an option to the Canadian creative community. You don't have to leave the country physically or spiritually, you don't have to put up with some Hollywood executive telling you what will work and what won't.
"You have to work a lot harder, but if you persevere . . . .
The Ground Hog
It is Spring.
The ground hog comes out of
his hole
and sees a shadow.
It is the shadow of my right
front tire.
That means winter will last
another six weeks.
But not for him.
* This poem is from "The Collected Works Of Red Green," written by Steve Smith and Rick Green, a series published all too frequently in The Possum Lodge Newsletter.