Why are so many science-fiction series shot in Canada?

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Why are so many science-fiction series shot in Canada?
September 27, 2010
By Jason Anderson
CBC News

After spending five years making a successful science fiction TV show with a largely Canadian team of writers, directors, actors and production talent, producer Brad Wright thought it was high time for his Stargate franchise to add a Canadian character.

'One of the reasons our show does so well overseas is because it's not written from a completely American sensibility.'
— Brad Wright, producer, Stargate TV franchise

This was in 2002, when Canuck actor David Hewlett had been cast in the recurring role of Dr. Rodney McKay halfway into the fifth season of Stargate: SG-1. As Wright recalls in a recent interview, "I said, 'Let's put a Canadian flag on his arm – we'll make the smartest character the Canadian!' Of course, the American studio president at the time said, 'You're not really doing that, are you?' I said, 'Yes.' He said, 'Oh… I guess that's OK.'"

It was a mildly subversive gesture by the makers of the show, which was spun off from the 1994 Hollywood hit about an alien device that sends travelers back and forth across the universe. It was also a sly reference to the extent to which Canadians are responsible for the science fiction television that airs on a weekly basis around the globe. Produced in Vancouver since 1997, the Stargate franchise has yielded almost 350 hours of TV. Its third incarnation, Stargate: Universe, which stars Robert Carlyle as a member of an expedition that's lost in space, airs in nearly 40 countries and begins its second season on Oct. 1 on the Space channel in Canada.

In the U.S., the Stargate shows are a fixture on Syfy, a network that airs an abundance of shows and mini-series that are also shot in Canada. Vancouver is home turf for Eureka and Caprica (the successor to Battlestar Galactica) while Halifax plays host to the supernatural mystery series Haven. Toronto can be spotted in the background in Syfy's latest hit, Warehouse 13, which stars Canadian actors Joanne Kelly and Saul Rubinek as members of a team that retrieves mystical objects (it airs on CITY-TV in Canada). Continuing the tradition of Mulder and Scully on The X-Files, the paranormal investigators on the ABC hit Fringe might seem to travel far and wide, but they never venture far from Vancouver.
The X-Files, which starred David Duchovny and Gillian Anderson, helped make Canada a favourite destination for sci-fi series. The X-Files, which starred David Duchovny and Gillian Anderson, helped make Canada a favourite destination for sci-fi series. (Reuters)

The Canadian-ness of all of these shows is rarely acknowledged on screen. And yet they are part of a rich but little-known history that dates all the way back to Space Command (1953-54), CBC-TV's first dramatic series. Homegrown shows like The Starlost (1973-74) were relatively rare in the ensuing decades, but they've become a mainstay of the country's TV output in the last 15 years. Recent cop-show exports like Flashpoint and Rookie Blue might have garnered more attention, but to viewers internationally, Canada is better known as the mother ship for Earth: Final Conflict (1997-2002), Andromeda (2000-2005), Battlestar Galactica (2004-2009), the Stargate shows and Sanctuary (2007-present).

According to Brad Wright, the current boom has everything to do with the decision by the makers of The X-Files to produce the show's first five seasons in the Vancouver area. "Purely and simply, they had a certain number of dollars, and if they spent those same dollars in Canada, they could put another half-million dollars per episode or so up on the screen," says Wright. "That's real money – that's a couple of days' shooting or several visual effects. Science fiction and other genre shows all have the burden of having to [create] the spaceship, the monster, the alien or the ghost, and that generally means money."

Taking advantage of a favourable exchange rate was incentive enough for Wright's American financers on a revamp of vintage cult show The Outer Limits, which he helped bring to Canada for a seven-season run that started in 1995. The same American studio, MGM, backed Wright and fellow Outer Limits producer Jonathan Glassner when Stargate SG-1 was launched three years later. It was a busy era for Hollywood North, though the Canadian dollar's eventual rise to parity (and the SARS outbreak in Toronto) would play havoc with the country's film and TV business. However, new tax credits in B.C. helped keep the Syfy shows there.
Lucas Bryant and Emily Rose star in Showcase's Haven, which is filmed in Halifax.Lucas Bryant and Emily Rose star in Showcase's Haven, which is filmed in Halifax. (Canwest Media)

Over the years, financial incentives have enticed many American productions to cross the border; Canada's flexibility when it comes to locations remains another benefit. As the show runner and an executive producer for Warehouse 13, Jack Kenny has spent a good deal of time exploring Toronto. "The great advantage to us is that it's a city that can be made to look like other places," he says. "There's just a huge wealth of location opportunities that you just can't find in most other cities."

Kenny also cites the high quality of the crews. But like many of the TV productions Canada has hosted over the last two decades, Warehouse 13 and Haven are largely the creative handiwork of transplanted Los Angelenos like Kenny. That's why Wright is proud that the Stargate shows have involved and cultivated so much Canadian talent.

"Our projects are wholly Canadian, not simply industrially Canadian," he says. "Everyone in TV usually thinks, 'Oh well, we've got to fly that person up from L.A.' I'd say, 'Well, that's bullshit. We've got some folks up here who are really good, and you should consider them.'"

One of those folks is Martin Gero. Swiss-born and Toronto-bred, Gero worked as a writer and producer on Stargate: SG-1 and Stargate: Atlantis before directing the notorious Canadian movie Young People F---ing (2007). He is now a writer and supervising producer on the HBO series Bored to Death. He was only 25 when he was hired by Wright and producing partner Robert C. Cooper to work on the Stargate shows.

For Gero, the franchise provided an invaluable education. "Science fiction series are logistically the most difficult shows in television to produce, because you are literally world-building every week," he says over the phone from his office in Los Angeles. "You can't just go to the Gap and get all your costumes. All the costumes have to be built. There are very complicated prosthetics and visual effects. All the sets most likely have to be built, even if you're going on location.

"It's fascinating to go from a show some would consider obscure to a very high-profile HBO show, and the HBO show is so much easier to produce because it takes place in Brooklyn! Stargate, essentially, takes place in your imagination."
The cast of Stargate: Universe, the third instalment in the popular Vancouver-produced sci-fi series.The cast of Stargate: Universe, the third instalment in the popular Vancouver-produced sci-fi series. (CTV)

Science fiction is malleable enough to contain a whole lot of other genres, too, from thriller to drama to comedy. Kenny believes this flexibility in tone, as well as advances in big visual effects, have widened the appeal of sci-fi TV. But most of all, he says it comes down to creating memorable characters.

"It isn't always interesting to do visual effects for the entire time. It has to be about something. That's why viewers come back — they care about the characters."

Even so, the genre has yet to get much respect from critics or the industry at large. For instance, it took a long time for Emmy or Gemini voters to acknowledge the efforts of Wright's team on the Stargate shows.

"There is a stigma here with science fiction that I don't know if you're ever going to be able to fix," Gero says. "It's not necessarily there in movies – all the big blockbuster movies are essentially science fiction movies or genre films. But Stargate is a huge hit everywhere else in the world."

Brad Wright suggests that the success of the franchise might actually have something to do with its Canadian content. "Maybe this is blowing our own horn a little bit," he says, "but one of the reasons our show does so well overseas is because it's not written from a completely American sensibility. Granted, it is American funded and the characters on SG-1 were American military people, and I'm not denying that for a second. But the voices writing the show somehow made Stargate more attractive to British, French, Italian and German viewers. For some reason, we do very well over there, and maybe that's because it's from a Canadian voice."