Interview by Craig Byrne – Read Part 1
Continued from Part 1
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Did you guys envision having a show that would go beyond Emma, Spinner, Liberty and the original group, into what you have now?
No. You never do. The entertainment world — it’s sort of a secret in the entertainment world, and I’ll tell you why. The secret is nobody knows what works and what doesn’t work. There’s so much randomness. There’s so much luck. I’m not just trying to be humble, but it doesn’t matter whether you’re in recordings, or televisions, or films. You can have everything right and it just doesn’t work, or something unpredictable can work and carry on. There really is just no way to tell. So, you live from season to season, and you don’t know whether it’s going to work or not. So, when we came back with the Next Generation in 2001, Linda was really worried. First of all, she was bringing back something. So, what? She didn’t have any other ideas? So she was worried that she would be labeled as not having any fresh ideas, and she was very worried that it wouldn’t work.
So, every year – it’s been a bit more exceptional recently because the ratings have been so good – but every year you’d sit on pins and needles whether you were going to get renewed or not. So there was absolutely no thought that it would carry on. In about Season Seven, the ratings peaked, and started to slide a little bit. We were still the #1 show on what was then called The N and is now called TeenNick, and we were the #1 show by far, but we started to realize that maybe we were coming to end, and that seven years is a good time. So we worked, and then the slide sort of continued. Again, it wasn’t a huge slide; it was more of a leveling off as opposed to rising each year.
At that point, you may recall we were trying experiments like following Emma, Marco, and the others off into university or beyond, and what we discovered was that that wasn’t working as well as we’d hoped. People loved the characters, but there wasn’t the same kind of dramatic tension in university. The example that we use is that in high school, if you get drunk and throw up and are thrown out of a restaurant or miss your classes, there are consequences. The teachers know about it, the parents know about it. You’ve got to deal with it. If you do that in university, who cares? There aren’t the same kind of consequences. So, we said “Okay. We don’t have anything to lose here. Why don’t we just really refocus back into the high school, bring in a bunch of new, young characters, and just go with them.” And the ratings suddenly shot back up again, and they’re as high as they’ve ever been. And then, of course, it was last year at this time when we started to have discussions about really revamping it, and doing twice as many episodes, and doing what was just “The Boiling Point,” with daily episodes in the summertime.
What were the biggest challenges of doing The Boiling Point in comparison to the previous years?
It was extraordinarily challenging. Broadcasters pay a license fee per episode, but it doesn’t mean that we were doing twice as many episodes, so that they’d pay twice the license fee. They can’t afford to do that. So we had to produce per episode at a much lower cost. So that was an extraordinary challenge. Another challenge was that normally, we would start shooting in the spring, and we’d be on the air the first Friday in October. This time, we would start shooting a little bit earlier in the spring, and we would have 24 episodes on the air over the summertime, and then the first Friday of October, second Friday of October, we’d be showing the 25th episode. So there was an extraordinarily fast delivery schedule. Everything had to work together. So we had to shoot much faster. We had to modify the storytelling to accommodate for both the lower budget and the fast delivery schedule, and we had to do it all in a way that everyone would perceive it to be of measurably higher quality in every single department. And I think we’ve succeeded. Certainly by ratings we succeeded. We’ve doubled and tripled our ratings. It’s just stunning, what happened ratings-wise. But better than that, I think if you look at the picture – first of all, we switched cameras. We went from an analog 16mm camera to a digital video camera called the Red-One, and went with a more cinematic feel. In the United States they still only broadcast it in standard definition 4×3, but what we actually shoot it in is the 16×9, full high-definition, and we actually shoot in four times the quality of high-definition, to get that cinematic quality.
The music, we just went back and said, “How do we encourage great new indie bands? How do we do this so that we get even more music?” Use it in a different way. Use it to tie stories together. Every single department. Writers, music, art design, photography, the post team that had to work so much faster – everybody had to do more, faster, and cheaper, and they did it. They stunned me. They stunned everybody. Because you set these bars high so that people can reach it, and we just exceeded the bar. We exceeded all our ratings expectations. We exceeded all of our quality expectations.
Were there any characters or actors that really surprised you as standouts of the Boiling Point season?
It wasn’t necessarily a surprise, but I was really impressed with the new cast that came in. All of them. It’s hard when you come in to an ensemble cast. We’ve got about 31 main characters now. So you’ve got a team of people who have been working together for a number of years, and you come in and you’re the new kid on the block. But the new ones just came in and were really shining. The success of some of the characters — like Munro [Chambers] playing Eli, is one that I think people circle in on – but really, all of them stepped up to the plate in their own way, and brought it. People weren’t like, “Where are the departed characters?” People are just fanatically involved in the new characters as well, which is fantastic.
Speaking of newer characters, recently you had a “Three Tenners” storyline with some of the younger characters and their attempt to be cool. Were those moments at all inspired by the classic series, when characters like Arthur and Yick Yu tried to get into the spotlight?
Absolutely. Also, in the Next Generation, we had J.T. and Toby. They’re very dear to my heart, because when I was in high school, I was a nerd. There are nerds, and nerds and geeks, actually in some ways are cool these days. Or I hope they are, because I’m still a nerd, but there’s a contingent of them there. And they’re good kids, and it’s really, really nice to see a character like J.T., who’s sort of the class clown, and of course when he died, it caused such an outpouring of emotion, because you grew to love these characters. And I think the same thing is going to happen with the “Three Tenners.” Dave is a fun character. Connor, with his Asperger’s, is a difficult character to really engage with unless you actually know some people who have Asperger’s and you know what they struggle through to be there. And of course, the Wesley character, who ended up with two broken arms… they’re charming. And you want them to succeed in the end.
Recent changes to characters like Clare, or Riley, or even Holly J. — were those developments planned in advance, for example, deciding that someday Riley would come out of the closet or that Holly J. would be nicer, or did those things happen organically as the show went on?
When you introduce a character, there are certain traits that you want, and not every character can be sunny and light. Other characters have to have a dark side to them, or a negative side, because that’s the way people are in real life. But if there’s somebody who’s really, really sunny and light and peppy, that doesn’t mean that they’re always going to be that way, and maybe they’re hiding something inside that, as you get to know them more, they come out. As the writers get to know the actors more, and their strengths and weaknesses, and what they’re comfortable with, that helps to mold how they think the character will develop. People, particularly in adolescence, tend to not remain the same. Different sides of them come out and they explore them. We do know that probably characters will change. What we don’t necessarily know is how they’re going to change.
When the show returns for the second half of the tenth season, will we be getting new opening titles again for any characters that might have come and gone?
What we’ve done is a very slight tweak. We’re not doing a major overhaul, but we have reshot two scenes. There’s somebody who we would have liked to have had in it — I’m not going to name names, I’m going to let everybody have fun and see the new opening. There were three characters we wanted to bring in, but we were only able to bring in two of them, because it just didn’t work to get the other person when we were shooting — with the time constraints, they weren’t available. And there are a couple of characters, who we thought when we shot the sequence, would have more screen time, and it ended up not happening, so it was a little bit odd to have them there, even though we love them.
On that note of people who were in the opening credits but not seen very much, are we going to see more of Peter in the second half of the season?
You’ll have to see the opening titles, and see whether that question is answered. I think it will tell, because people will say “Oh. Such-and-such a character isn’t in there now. I guess we aren’t going to see much of them. Oh, so-and-so’s there. Maybe we are going to see more of that person.” Even that, by the way, is a bit of a guess, because the way the stories organically develop… you suddenly find a character that you didn’t think was going to play too much, is playing dramatically more; and somebody you thought was going to be playing a lot, just isn’t.
Is there any chance we’ll ever see any of the older generations again, whether it’s Spinner and Emma, or people further back like Wheels or Lucy, even?
Seriously, anything is possible. The problem that I mentioned earlier about our discovering that we really want to focus on the high school experience, that we don’t want to go exploring as much to what’s happened to people afterwards. I could certainly imagine a storyline where we see Spinner and Emma again, and maybe Sean returns or something like that. That isn’t in the works now; I’m just using that as an example. But if we did something like that, it would have to be done in a way that it truly interacted with our core cast in the school. I could foresee bringing back a character because they have a daughter or son who’s now going to Degrassi, assuming next year we bring in a new crop of Grade Nines. That would be a way that we might see somebody again, or have a chance to tell some stories about them. But we’ve got some pretty rich stories with the characters we do have in the high school, so it’s unlikely that these characters would come back for more than an appearance.