Run by the Monkeys: Letters about the cancellation of Da Vinci's City Hall
If you've sent a letter, please send me a copy and I'll post it here. Email me here to do that. Check out this site's episode guide for info on the episodes.
All letters are posted with the permission of the author
Sent 2/27/06: Hi:
I am writing to let you know how disappointed I am that CBC has cancelled Da Vinci City Hall. It is one of the best television shows on. I don't understand why the CBC is more concerned about ratings than quality. Better promotion on the side of CBC might have helped to increase the ratings.
I urge you to reconsider and keep Da Vinci City Hall on the air.
Sincerely,
Tracy Sannes
Sent 2/13/06: Gentlemen:
Imagine my surprise when I opened my newspaper this morning to see Nicholas Campbell's face on the front page and the message that his show, Da Vinci's City Hall, had been cancelled.
I have been told that the reason has to do with ratings and market share and heaven only knows what and that "I guess it's not what Canadians want to watch." This Canadian watched it faithfully for all the seven season of Da Vinci's Inquest and every minute of Da Vinci's City Hall and I am far from the only one. About half a million of us in a country of not much more than thirty million is a pretty good number. Now that it has been sold to the networks south of the border, it is a runaway hit.
I shall spare you the usual stuff about how it's gritty, etc., or that it dealt with up-to-the-minute issues. It is – was – all that. And more.
It was a comfortable shoe, a Tuesday blanket to wrap ourselves up in. To paraphrase one greater than I, "The fault, dear Ms. Soles, lies not with the show but with yourselves."
I was waiting for a bus a little over a year ago and couldn't help noticing that CTV was coming out with a new show. It was impossible to miss the signs. They were on the sides of buses, at bus shelters, on billboards and in full-page ads in the newspaper blowing past my feet. The show was Corner Gas. It's doing very well. Personally, I don't think it's worth the powder to blow it to Toronto in a headwind but that's a matter of taste.
The key word is 'advertising'. I trust you know the meaning of the word because I'm not so sure that you do. You didn't use it to promote DaVinci's Inquest OR Da Vinci's City Hall. Then there is the matter of that lockout, which YOU called right when a brand-new show was supposed to air, opposite House, allowing people ample time to find something else to watch during Tuesday prime time.
I have yet to speak to any Canadian who thought you had the moral high ground on that one because you didn't. By the time you saw sense, it was almost too late, but you still got eight hundred thousand people watching it, plus a large number of Americans living in border towns where they get CBC.
It looks to me –– and to many others –– as though you really don't give a damn about the Da Vinci series, either of them. If you did, you would push the marketing of them, and not just let it fend for itself out there. For one thing, the first DVD came out and then never a second one. You missed a market there. And now that the US has a growing number of avid viewers, you have a waiting market for DVD's of every season, particularly now that you won't be making any more.
Just for once, I should like to hear someone in management say, "We were wrong". How precious and sweet would be the words, "It was such a good show, we kept it on anyway because we believed in it". Wouldn't that be grand?
Sincerely,
Judith Doloughan
Sent 2/13/06: To whoever is running the ship aground at CBC,
So. You've finally gone and cancelled Da Vinci's City Hall and This Is Wonderland. Why am I not surprised? This is, after all, the network that so far this season has had a pointless lockout, little to no advertising for new shows (I saw more ads on Monday nights for The Nature of Things than I did for Da Vinci), has given us an insipid Shania Twain bio while preempting a bio of a much more important Canadian (Tommy Douglas) for political reasons and has made some astonishingly poor choices in Olympic coverage. Whose brilliant idea was it to screw up the Chinese team's entrance during the opening ceremonies with a split screen effect just so you could show the Canadian team mugging at the camera at exactly the same time? I thought only Americans did that.
Yet, you look at CTV and wonder why it consistently gets more ratings for its shows. Well, it's not the programming, because Corner Gas and Degrassi whatever ain't that great. It's the advertising and its enough consistency to show your viewers that you actually care about their continuing to watch. Would it have been too much to ask, for example, to have a preview for the next week of Da Vinci every week instead of just whenever you felt like it? Would it have been too much to ask to show that preview on primetime from at least the weekend before instead of that same, tired, boring general preview that you would show only on Mondays and Tuesdays? Would it have been too much to ask for accurate and consistent programming of upcoming episodes on your daily schedule? Would it really have been too much to ask to promote the new show when you were showing reruns of Da Vinci's Inquest on weekdays? Hey, here's a brainstorm—how about showing Da Vinci's Inquest in order, so people who were checking it out for the first time might actually have known what the heck was going on? And how about those little mini-interviews they did for last year for Da Vinci during the end credits? Don't you think those might have hooked in a few more people or at least kept those already watching coming back? I'm just noting a few tactics that work great on other networks, like, say, CTV. You know, networks that try to please their viewers. Really, this is basic stuff. You don't have to be an advertising wiz to think it up.
I bet that if you had used such advertising tactics consistently (or renewed the show and tried them), your numbers would have gone up considerably on all of your shows, not just Da Vinci and Wonderland. As it was, I doubt that very many Canadians even knew these shows existed, so pathetic was the amount of "investment" that you made into them. As for the idea that "the audiences...have been in steady decline and did not resonate with Canadians", Da Vinci reruns have been a sleeper hit this year in the U.S., where you'd think the show would be even less likely to "resonate" with Americans. I'm thinking that you folks are the ones not resonating with Canadians, or anybody else.
It would be really nice if you changed your minds and brought back Da Vinci and Wonderland (I could live without The Tournament). I don't see you doing it, but if you did, I'd watch. I'd also watch Intelligence, especially after last year's pilot, though I don't hold out much hope for it lasting longer than a year with the way you folks treat shows. In fact, if you weren't run by the government (or is that the monkeys?), I wouldn't give you much more than a year, either.
Very sincerely,
Paula Stiles
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You can find my Da Vinci page here.
DVD Info: Season one is out on DVD. You can order it on Amazon.ca.
If you'd like to see more seasons on DVD, try signing the petition here.
Want to see how DVI's doing in the ratings, find a past article or catch up on news about Da Vinci's City Hall or Intelligence? Check Da Vinci's Inquest sites, articles and lists.
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This page was last updated on 5/6/2007
