Canada’s Got Talent was a great idea packaged poorly. Rogers pulled the plug on the show after it’s inaugural season.
Having witnessed the chaos at the Toronto screening in the formative days of the competition, it is sad that the great idea was put into the hands of incapable production people with misaligned agendas. The show failed before it got off the ground due to poor planning and disconnected production staff. To be fair, it is extremely difficult to vet out talent that shows up in the thousands across many grueling days, but the show battle should have been won in the planning and organizational stages and not in the “winging it” that occured.
Canada does have alot of talent, and it was a pleasure to witness some of the great talent at the Toronto auditions that never made it onto the show because the show producers thought they knew what Canada wanted and went the overly-politically correct route, or the “this is going to be hilarious” route. By focussing on dancing grannies that were told to dress more sparsely, the producers completely missed high caliber talent right under their noses. Maybe they relied on untrained, second tier production staff to vet the talent or did not have a real and workable scoring system in place at all. So while the executive producer was outside hobnobbing with the cameras and generally milling about with seemingly other things on his mind, the auditions were tanking and the audition process was spinning out of control.
So out of control in fact, that the results from the auditions were postponed for days as staff who did not apparently have an iron-clad initial scoring system in place had to review hundreds of the submission tapes made by the videographer at the auditions. Trouble with that was that the audio on those audition tapes were substandard and the viewpoint was the viewpoint of the single camera which may not have captured great acts faithfully. A bad angle and video of a good act left many of them passed over while focus was placed on other criteria.
Even so, some good acts did get through, but the rest of the show and process just deteriorated their chances even further at ratings and a second season. IMAO though, the show lost before it even aired and the responsibility lies not only with the show budget but squarely with the producer(s) who are ultimately in charge of organizing their staff and the processes and procedures to guarantee a better outcome.
The reason this is a shame, is that Canada has one of the greatest pools of talent in the world. This could have been such as great show in the right hands, so it is not the concept itself that is flawed as witnessed by the ongoing success of Got Talent shows elsewhere in the world. It may have been a difficult task to organize, but producers clearly dropped the ball and went in the wrong direction. Easy Monday morning quarterbacking to be sure, but the signs of failure already were apparent during the audition process.
Read more about the cancellation at the National Post
http://arts.nationalpost.com/2012/06/22/canadas-got-talent-cancelled-after-one-season/
