David Fortier and Ivan Schneeberg, founders of Boat Rocker Media.Josh Fee/Supplied
This week, the country’s television industry is gathering in Toronto for the Canadian Screen Awards under perhaps the biggest storm clouds in the sector’s history.
From the collapse of the traditional linear-broadcast landscape to the ever-tremulous state of the CBC to the in-limbo status of the Online Streaming Act (Bill C-11), there are enough twists in today’s television landscape to fuel countless binge-ready dramas.
Yet the founders of Boat Rocker Media see a path forward and outward. The Toronto-based entertainment company, led by co-executive chairmen David Fortier and Ivan Schneeberg, has three high-profile series currently topping the streaming charts: Palm Royale (Apple TV+), American Rust: Broken Justice (Prime Video), and Beacon 23 (Prime Video). It’s also preparing for the long-awaited premiere next month of Orphan Black: Echoes, a spinoff to its hit 2010s series that made Canadian actress Tatiana Maslany an international star.
Boat Rocker faces challenges familiar to any entertainment company operating today – its ambitious series Robyn Hood will not return for a second season after premiering on Global TV last September, and the Zoe Lister-Jones series Slip has yet to find a new home after being pulled from the Roku Channel as part of the streamer’s cost-cutting measures. But there is a sense of optimism inside the outfit’s King Street West offices that feels quite un-Canadian.
Just ahead of Canadian Screen Week, during which Boat Rocker’s productions are up for 49 Canadian Screen Awards, The Globe and Mail caught up with Fortier and Schneeberg to discuss the future of small-screen entertainment, both inside and outside Canada.
This morning is as good a time as any to meet, given you just released your Q1 results, which your chief executive John Young said showed “signs of resilience” in the market.
Ivan Schneeberg: We’re fortunate in that we’ve got some good shows that we produced that are performing well, and getting renewed, and it’s giving us consistency. But it would be incorrect to say that the industry as a whole isn’t still finding its legs.
David Fortier: We’re proud we’re able to manage costs in an effective way. We don’t have debt, so we’re coming into this period of real uncertainty and upheaval with a bunch of shows.
Before the 2023 strikes rocked the industry, how worried were you about the trajectory of the sector?
Schneeberg: The pandemic accelerated this arms race among the streamers. Everyone was sitting in their homes consuming content, and the streamers were all spending as they tried to grow their inventory and subscriber base. But there were too many platforms, too much spending. The strikes came in and then gave everyone cover to say, “Whoa whoa, what’s going on here?” It was a moment of reflection that served as a reset, which is continuing. The good news is that television is still a part of popular culture – it’s reduced but it’s not going anywhere. The challenge now is that it’s far less predictable than it once was.
So how do you navigate that?
Fortier: You go back to your roots. We’re independent TV producers, so we know how to cobble together financing from everywhere. Now we’ve got a large sales division and money to invest in content in the worldwide marketplace, not just with the big U.S. streamers. We’re going to keep working with them, of course, but also implement the age-old plan of putting together financing from lots of different sources.
The future of Boat Rocker, then, rests in making those big shows for streamers, or something else?
Schneeberg: We’ll always be making big premium dramas like Palm Royale, but factual shows are half of our lineup. Feature documentaries. We have a robust kids and family slate, too. Those big shows take a long time to develop and package with stars, so you need other shows to keep you going.
How much does Boat Rocker consider itself a Canadian company versus an international one?
Schneeberg: We’ve always seen ourselves as not a Canadian entertainment company, but an entertainment company based in Canada.
When you talked with my colleague Simon Houpt way back in 2016, there was the sense that the best days of Canadian TV were still to come. Today, it seems everything has collapsed.
Schneeberg: We were ambitious and wanted to make content for more than just the Canadian marketplace, but there’s no doubt that alongside that optimism was our concern about the Canadian industry. Canadians consume mostly non-Canadian content. We’re too similar to our neighbours to the south, and that’s not true of the rest of the world. The Canadian TV industry is a product of regulation, not a product of demand, but the regulation was strong enough to generate a real marketplace. But as that’s deteriorated, the regulatory framework that created and protected the industry has become weakened. So if you want to survive, you have to either stay small in Canada, or look outward.
So the future of Canadian content – stories by Canadians, about Canadians – will it only be made by those scrappier outfits that don’t need or want to grow?
Schneeberg: Absent regulation and regulatory protection, there is no Canadian content. If the public wants to support the CBC, then the public broadcaster will commission that. I do think there will still be content made in Canada by Canadians about Canadians, but it will be much more competitive.
Fortier: Talking about English-language Canada only, it’s difficult to put your hand up and say, “I’m going to tell a Canadian story for Canadian audiences.” There are exceptions, take Heartland and Letterkenny, great shows that people love. But they’re not causing a Canadian industry to be sustainable.
Boat Rocker went public in 2021, at the height of the streaming wars. Now that we’re out of that era, are there times that you think it would have been better to have stayed private?
Fortier: It’s a little bit early to tell, but there were benefits. We were able to organize our business, clean our balance sheet. The strategy that we have now of investing in content and getting good returns is how we can be viable, sustainable, and reliable. We’re developing and trying to sell TV shows to buyers who have too much choice when there’s restricted demand and contraction in the market. That’s a difficult place to be, but we look at the positives. We have cash to spend and infrastructure and intellectual property to exploit. If we only made flashy shows that other people own, it’d be too lumpy.
This interview has been condensed and edited.