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TORONTO - TV rediscovered variety, premium cable transformed the serial drama, and sitcoms overtly broke the fourth wall in the 2000s as the small screen shifted into new territory in a bid to keep eyeballs glued to the tube. Meanwhile, audiences splintered as they embraced an increasing number of specialty and pay channels, PVR viewing and on-demand entertainment, raising the bar for all shows seeking viewer loyalty.
There was a lot of upheaval over the last 10 years, both onscreen and behind-the-scenes with the financial meltdown and a bitter U.S. writers strike dove-tailing with a post-9-11 cocooning craze.
Through it all, quality TV managed to reach new heights with premium cable channels emerging as the epicentre of groundbreaking original series that audiences willingly paid extra to watch.
Complex, serialized dramas including "Dexter," "The Wire," "Mad Men" and "Six Feet Under" are among the heavy-hitting series that dominate best-of-the-decade lists for critics and hardcore TV fans.
"What defined my career was getting an early screener of 'The Sopranos' because it got me interested in TV in a whole new way," says Kids In the Hall member Mark McKinney, who reinvented himself in the 2000s as a sought-after writer through work on acclaimed series "Slings And Arrows," "Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip," and "Less Than Kind."
"That was just before I got involved in 'Slings and Arrows' and it was just something about the psychological complexity of the (Tony Soprano) character. But it doesn't necessarily have to be a dramatic tool, I think you can do it in comedy as well as long as you're coming from a hard acting background."
Sitcoms underwent a revolution as well, with the traditional three-camera set-up and live studio audience typified by "Everybody Loves Raymond" giving way to single-camera experiments that openly acknowledged the home viewer beyond the lens.
Shows like "The Office," "30 Rock," "Scrubs," and "Parks and Recreation" most obviously played with style as the jokes turned inwards, characters broke into song or drifted into dream sequences, and viewers were made to feel like part of the club.
But it was a rocky road at first, with acclaimed attempts by Judd Apatow on his shortlived series "Freaks and Geeks" and "Undeclared" failing to find audiences in the decade's first years.
"It was very hard to get people to watch those shows because it was hard to program them," says Apatow. "When we did 'Undeclared' there wasn't another show without a laugh track to put it with and it's taken a very long time for audiences to really start getting excited about the lack of a laugh track and the lack of a studio audience."
"Corner Gas" alum Nancy Robertson credits Ricky Gervais's groundbreaking show, "The Office," with reinventing the genre, noting the U.K. series became a cult sensation with its cringe-inducing comedy and unusual mockumentary style. It went on to spawn international versions including a Quebec show and the hit U.S. series.
Gervais's creative partner Stephen Merchant says the pair never expected the show would have such an impact, but admits they employed the single-camera approach because they wanted to take the standard sitcom beyond well-established constraints.
"Doing it in front of a live studio audience kind of limits you slightly - it limits the pace at which you can tell a story, it limits the places you can go to, you're kind of constrained to a few basic sets," Merchant said earlier this year in a phone interview from his London flat.
"Just from a storytelling point of view, it's harder to do it in that old style now. Movies don't constrain themselves to one or two sets so why should TV shows?"
But while creative experiments loomed large, so too did a hyper realism. In 2000, the success of "Survivor" kicked off a craze for salacious, real-life drama that spawned countless imitators and has yet to abate. Over the years, shows like "The Amazing Race," "Big Brother" and "The Osbournes" took the genre in new directions, tapping into an unexpected appetite for average-joe heroes and tabloid-style gossip while providing networks with relatively cheap original programming.
For reality show TV producer John Brunton, the genre was reinvigorated again in 2002 with the arrival of "American Idol," which ushered in a new wave of variety television.
"It's been the return of variety programming in a very, very different style and format," says Brunton, executive producer of CTV's "Canadian Idol," Global's "Project Runway Canada," and CBC-TV's "Battle of the Blades."
"Certainly 'American Idol' was a huge watershed moment. It just captured the imagination of America in a way that nobody, no one, anticipated that it could possibly be that big a hit. And then the producers of that show were so clever, because instead of milking it, like ('Who Wants To Be A) Millionaire?,' ... 'American Idol' runs one cycle a year and it gives people all year long to really anticipate and wait for the next one."
The Toronto-based producer was behind some of Canada's biggest TV success stories, putting a Canuck spin on international hits. But homegrown scripted series seemed to find new footing as well, with the sweet, observational humour of CTV's "Corner Gas" pushing the Saskatchewan-based show to the top of Canadian ratings and making it one of the country's most successful series of all time.
Creator and star Brent Butt says previous homegrown fare was crippled by a top-down directive to be overtly Canadian.
"A lot of Canadian television had a desperateness about it," Butt says in a recent interview from Vancouver, where he's shooting his upcoming series, "Hiccups."
"It was like, 'Look how Canadian we are!' And it's like, 'Well, can't we just do a show that kind of happens to take place in Canada and the people are Canadian and that makes it Canadian?' Does everything have to be about a hockey rink or about the French/English conflict? Do we need more period piece dramas that tell the first couple years of our country?"
Indeed, one of the most notable aspects of recent success stories, including CTV's "Flashpoint" and CBC-TV's "Being Erica," is how slyly Canadian they managed to be. Although both set in Toronto, neither make a point of flaunting the Maple Leaf, while still offering glimpses of a distant CN Tower in the background or the murmur of a rumbling streetcar as characters go about their day.
At the same time, several Canadian series landed prime time deals on big U.S. networks, with CTV's "The Bridge" expected to join "Flashpoint" on CBS next year and Global's "Copper" bound for ABC. Many observers credit the lengthy TV writers' strike of late 2007, early 2008 with putting the spotlight on Canuck talent.
Butt says Canadian TV execs are finally waking up to the potential of homegrown talent as well, and he hoped the next decade would bring more creative freedoms.
"I'm convinced that throughout all this time, there were people with good story ideas but they were either being nixed because they weren't Canadian enough or they were being forced to be more Canadian than they needed to be," says Butt.
"Let's just let these people tell their stories."
