The best Canadian comedy series ever?
Ever heard of the The Newsroom?
If you’re under 30, you probably think it’s an HBO series created by Aaron Sorkin. You’d be right, but in 1996 there was another version of The Newsroom, said by critics to be the best TV series ever done in Canada.
Ken Finkleman is a Winnipeg-born writer-director-actor who, after spending two decades working in the Hollywood studio system created a number of memorable, groundbreaking satiric TV series. The CBC-commissioned works, produced between 1996–2000 are now rarely seen or discussed but they were some of the most challenging and creative television ever made in this country. Bold public broadcasting experiments featuring a range of styles from mockumentary to musicals, television with touches of Fellini, Woody Allen and Ingmar Bergman.
I was lucky to have been the editor on all of them and have been a unique witness and participant in the creation of some pretty interesting work.
My favourite piece of them all has to be season one of The Newsroom, a 1996 mock doc style single camera sitcom about a petty tyrant news director named George Findlay. It was initially viewed warily by some as a knock-off of the Larry Sanders Show but the series skewered Canadian news culture in an utterly original fashion.
Finkleman wrote, directed and starred in thirteen episodes depicting this world of self-serving weasley broadcasters, petty manipulators, ratings-driven journalists and racist know-nothing anchormen. The series was shot by the talented documentary DOP Joan Hutton, with a tight editing style with just the right amount of awkwardness that Ken and I perfected in our previous effort for Comedy Central, Married Life .
Later on, shows like Curb Your Enthusiasm and The Office would come to build the popularity of this genre but in 1996, season one of The Newsroom nailed it and this accompanying short film I made, tells the whole story.
