And as I investigated some more, I learned this is fairly common in LCD televisions. Happens about 30% of the time apparently. Not common to any particular brand, it just happens. New technology I was told. Harrumph. Well that sucks. But no worries, it still should be covered under the manufacturer's one year warranty.
So last week, with the warranty nearly expired, I went to my neighbourhood Best Buy...you know, where I purchased the telly in the first place...to get some direction. Erm...bad idea. I asked the first sales assistant I could find where I should take my television to be fixed, and his response: "Why didn't you get the Best Buy extended service plan?" Um, I just didn't. Again I asked, where's the authorized Sony service dealer in town? He shrugged and said: "Don't think there is one. You're going to have to box it up and ship your television back to Sony. Probably will be gone months. Should've got our extended service plan, man."
Sorry...but you're not helping.
I asked another sales assistant...exact same response. Now I was getting snarky. C'mon...let's move past the fact I didn't get the Best Buy extended service plan, where do I go to get it fixed? Shrug. Still not discouraged, I asked a third sales assistant where the authorized Sony service dealer was in town. "Oh, that'd be Video Refit over on McKara." Thank you! I immediately led this helpful gentleman over to the two other fucktards and had him tell them what he'd told me. It didn't seem to matter, they just stared at him blankly... but I felt better.
So I went home and boxed up my Sony and whisked it over to Video Refit, along with my bill of sale and one year warranty card. They seemed very busy there, but were quite helpful...even though I was the annoying customer with lots of questions: were they going to repair or replace screen/panel? Or were they going to just replace it with a new television since apparently the cost of the panel is the majority of cost of the entire unit? And how were they determine what was going to be done...were they going to assess the dead pixel problem themselves? Or did they have to ship to Sony HQ for them to assess?
All my questions were answered...and panel replacement or television replacement were definitely options. They also said a third option might be a refund or voucher so I could go back to Best Buy and replace my TV that way. But they said give them 7-10 days to figure things out...I nodded but left reluctantly, already missing my HD TV.
A refund/voucher, huh? The wheels in my head started spinning...if I got back the purchase price of what I paid a year ago, I could upgrade to a 32 inch version of same television (since prices have dropped). And not only that, I could get the 1080p model, as opposed to the lowly 720p model I was currently saddled with. I raced back to Best Buy to explore this option. And happily, a former student of mine was working in the TV department that afternoon. So I was able to pick his brain without the annoying "Why didn't you get the service plan?" question.
And here's what I learned.
He guessimated it would be about three months before I saw my TV again....that was his experience with people trying to get items repaired or replaced under manufacturer's warranty. WTF? And as for the second part of my master plan, he said he'd never seen a refund or voucher in lieu of replacement or repair before. Bummer. But most importantly, he said that no North American networks broadcast in 1080p!
I. Did. Not. Know. That.
Read about it here and here and here, but bottom line is that it's a bandwidth issue (networks broadcast HD in 720p or 1080i), so having a 1080p television doesn't mean my HD network shows will look noticeably better. Which begged the question: why spend the extra $ for the 1080p if the best digital HD signal you can receive is 720p (or 1080i, same diff)? Oh sure...your Blu-Ray movies will look better, since they are actually delivering a 1080p signal, but that's pretty much it.
I was glad to discover all this, but a little miffed. I'd always been led to believe that HD tv means 1080p tv, if your television can accommodate it. As it turns out...not so much.
Anyhow, my new best Best Buy pal also informed me 'defect' is open to interpretation when it comes to manufacturer's warranty...and in the case of dead pixels, there's actually a number that have to appear before it's considered defective. It varies from manufacturer to manufacturer and model to model, but bottom line is that several (up to 10 I believe) random dead pixels on your LCD screen falls into normal use/wear and tear, and not a defect to be repaired or replaced. And he said to make sure the manufacturers warranty covered parts and labour...apparently some don't do both.
I was now muttering and twitching...expecting my TV to not only not get looked at for months, but that then I'd be informed my problem wasn't even 'covered' or I'd have to pay for work done anyway.
At any rate, this television adventure has a happy ending. One that sent me over the Marquee Moon, so to speak.
End of last week, a mere six days after dropping off my Sony, I received a call from the repair shop. Come pick it up, your television is ready. Really? I double-checked to make sure they had the right person....even reading out the number off my ticket stub. Yep...it was mine.
I drove over later that afternoon and was greeted by the manager. Nice fellow. But he immediately launched into a "Oh we're so sorry about how long it took to repair your telly..." I'm confused. Say I'm not complaining. He sighs and explains how many units they get in that need repair and how short-staffed he is...pulls out my invoice and loudly sighs: "Oh c'mon...let's see when you brought your tv in. The 30th....see?", followed by more apologies. I am now really confused. It's okay I say...I'm really not complaining. Then he takes a closer look at my work order...now he looks confused. "This was just last week," he says. I nod. He hustles over to the box containing my tv and checks the ticket stub number. "Wow," he says, "Did you really bring it in last week?" Again, I nod.
Now he's shaking his head and reviews the work order --- they'd looked at it the day after I'd dropped it off, determined enough pixels were dead to warrant repair, sent the evidence to Sony HQ (they have to take pictures and list specs apparently), the new panel arrived two days later, they took out the 'defective' one and replaced it with the new one, and then called me.
He told me I should buy a lottery ticket, because in all his days he'd never seen one go through the system that fast. Nevertheless, I still had him turn mine on, just to make sure it was working properly. It was. I thanked him, signed the completed work order, and humped my Sony out to the car and home again.
And the warranty covered everything.
Which leads me to my choice for definitive Canadian TV show/series of the decade... Train 48.
Now I know I'm probably going to get called down for naming this show...but for me, Train 48 encapsulated all that Canadian TV has for the most part been since the devastating CRTC decisions of 1999. You know, the changes that decimated the indigenous industry and killed a lot of dramatic TV production by allowing broadcasters to fulfill its Canadian content mandates and quotas with news magazine, arts and entertainment, lifestyle, and reality programming.
A quick recap. The time was 2002/2003. I'd just moved back from LA to Canada, and sussing out what was going on and getting made up here...and truth was, not very much. And then I heard about this new series from CanWest Global. Under pressure to start producing more homegrown TV, specifically drama, and in order to fulfill it's conditions of license and meet CRTC mandated expectations, the network bought into an Australian soap format called Going Home and transplanted it to Toronto. Set entirely on a Go Train, it told the story of a group of commuters each day returning to the suburbs and surrounding communities from downtown Toronto. Largely improvised from outlines (so full writer/script fees wouldn't have to be paid), it was notorious for it's bargain-basement production values and mediocre performances. Shot on the cheap...an episode a day - it was, in short, embarrassing.
And it ran for 3 years.
EDIT: H/T to Weinman for finding a clip (and don't take this whole write up as a knock against the crew or actors or creatives on the show as much as to hammer home the sad fact that this was considered acceptable drama by the network)
Check out some of the negative comment threads on imdb.com for starters, just to get a taste of the disdain people had for this program. And the WGC had a 'behind the scenes' piece on the program HERE, which helps give the lay of the land. From the article:
Global denies picking up the series to meet Canadian content obligations on the cheap. "It costs less per episode, but the volume makes it more expensive," says Loren Mawhinney, vice president of Canadian productions. "Sixty-five episodes cost over $6 million, compared to $3.25 million for all 13 hours of Blue Murder."
Mawhinney calls Train 48 an "out-of-the-box way of creating drama," and says Global hopes to use it to lure advertisers in an increasingly fragmented marketplace. The network also wants the independence of making shows without any direct government funding.
Tim Woods of Friends of Canadian Broadcasting says Global has no excuse for not investing in high-budget dramas. "Simultaneous substitution–putting Canadian commercials on popular American shows–is worth an enormous amount of money to broadcasters. It's a gift in exchange for investing in Canadian shows," he says.
Woods suggests broadcasters hoodwinked the CRTC by establishing a "trust policy" in 1999 that leaves it up to them how to fill time allotted for Canadian programming, rather than requiring them to invest a revenue percentage in Canadian shows.
"I believe the message for this commercial is that we are trying to inspire people to...give."
We’re used to getting paychecks that have all of the taxes and expenses taken out. Maybe you’re bringing home $850 per week. The math is relatively straightforward: you know how much you need for rent, food, utilities and whatnot. And next week, you’ll get another check.
Screenwriting is nothing like that. You get paid in chunks, from which you have to pay taxes and percentages to all the people working for you. The money shrinks at an alarming rate. Worse, you have limited ability to predict when you’ll get paid again.
As an example, let’s say you and your writing partner sell a spec script to a studio for $100,000. That seems like pretty good money. But how much of it do you get to keep? Let’s run the numbers.
Purchase price: $100,000
Agent (10%): -10,000
Manager (10%): -10,000
Lawyer (5%): -5,000
WGA (1.5%) -1,500
Sub-total: $73,500
Partner (50%) 36,750
Gross before taxes: $36,750
Out of all that money, you have less than $37K, and that’s before you’ve paid a penny of taxes. So don’t buy your fractional Net Jet just yet.
Unless you're a studio, you don't start with the money to make a movie. You start with a script, a director, and a cast. You sell your package of bankable elements to distributors in the various territories. (I'm making these numbers up; I haven't been in foreign sales for a decade.) The contract with the British distrib gives you a "minimum guarantee" (m.g.) of X number of dollars. Say Great Britain comes in for 15%, and Germany for 20%, and Japan for 15%. Say you wind up with 70% of your budget presold. Often a foreign film won't be able to presell the US market for any kind of reasonable price. How do you make your movie?
You take those contracts to a bank. They "discount" your contracts (as they would in the rag trade), and give you cash for your contracts (taking a small fee). That leaves you with a 30%+ "gap."
Now you need "gap financing" to "bridge the gap." Gap financing costs more than discounting, because it's riskier. What if the movie stinks? The presold territories have to pay anyway -- their contracts don't promise a good movie, only a movie based on the script, starring the stars, and directed by the director. But you'll have trouble selling the unsold territories. So the bank is going to want to see territories worth, say, twice as much as the bridge money it's fronting.
In years when credit is loose, banks love gap financing. They charge a lot for it. Charging for financing is their business. But now that credit is tight, banks are wary of gap financing. They might only gap 10%, and they might demand, say, three times the gap in territories. They'll make less money, but they won't get left holding the bag.
TV has always defined itself at the intersection of time and real estate. It's that cubby in the primary focal point of the house, in the armoire at the foot of the bed, or in the corner of the gym. But it's also a human allocation of attention to a one-way televisual communication -- one that historically generates internalized emotions, and on rare occasion, reaction.
But in each and every instance and location, the element most necessary to qualify as TV, is an audience. And as the mass audience continues to dwindle, so, too, does TV's very existence (and its definition) become less meaningful.
Despite Les Moonves' cheerleading that "the model ain't broken," TV is, at a minimum, a medium that has lost its identity by allowing itself to be too many things to too many people. What it has failed to do is to fully embrace and enable communication among its consumers, its entertainers, and its sponsors.
With the digital-analog transition countdown now reduced to double digits, the TV will, for most people, soon become merely another "dumb" device with speakers -- a monitor with multiple inputs, for all intents and purposes. And like every other monitor we own, its usefulness is linked to the enabling hardware attached to it.
Truth be told, it's always been about the hardware. While the cable or satellite TV set top box tends to grab input A, as these monitors leave room for other connections, the threat to TV will continue to come from devices that provide for the most important input of all: CONSUMER INPUT.
By hiving off and making sure that Canadian TV is usually only talked about in this separate bubble, it subtly reinforces the point of view that it's something different, something, in the stentorian tones of my long-gone Catholic youth: something slightly unholy.
This kind of disconnect and separation is what allows a lot of the misapprehensions and fictions to keep bubbling through; it's what allows some people to turn up their noses at Trailer Park Boys and talk about it like it's an object of shame, and not a show that brings hordes of fans out every time the actors make a personal appearance. It's what allows a double standard where Canadian shows are judged (sometimes) by a harsher yardstick -- and 'judged' is probably the wrong word, what I really mean is "dismissed."
Some Canadian shows have, I think, managed to prove that there’s a way out of the ghetto. Kids’ shows especially. The viewers of the Family Channel don’t see The Latest Buzz or Life With Derek as CanCon; they see them as shows, no different from the American shows on the same network. They argue over whether they prefer the realistic family shows or the fantasy wish-fulfilment shows, not over whether they prefer American or Canadian product. For one thing, these shows don’t really identify themselves as Canadian. Not that they deny that they’re Canadian, but they don’t go out of their way to demonstrate it, and a new viewer doesn’t always know if they’re Canadian or not. Which is one way around the innate suspicion that Anglo-Canadian audiences have of their home-grown shows.
Executive-produced by Lorne Michaels, the 300-minute tentpole will be helmed by Canadian-Armenian director Atom Egoyan, whose 1994 heavy-breather Exotica remains the only film about sex ever to emerge from the Great White North (the triple-X-rated ouevres of Peter North and Brandon Iron excluded).
Rounding out the cast will be Donald Sutherland, as a retired member of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police whose border-side empire of duty-free shops becomes an underground railroad for draft-dodging Americans; Celine Dion, as a militant Québécois separatist who cuts ties with Morissette after she takes up with Aykroyd’s Ottawan bureaucrat; and Mike Myers, in full Dr. Evil mode, as a poutine-munching French-Canadian terror-cell leader plotting to kill the Queen of England during a royal visit to the Chateau Frontenac.
