In a new series, Playback Daily is catching up with some of Canada’s next generation of showrunners and discussing everything from running a writers’ room to closing deals.

Here we speak to Jeff Detsky (Call me Fitz, Seed) and Luke Gordon Field (Beaverton website co-founder), the showrunners and co-creators behind fake/fabricated news TV series The Beaverton, which airs on Bell Media’s The Comedy Network. The wheels were set in motion when Detsky, who had observed the website’s growing reach and audience, contacted Field about the prospect of developing the IP into a TV-based format. The half-hour series bowed last November to an average audience of 189,000 (2+) in its original broadcast. The premiere, which aired the day after the U.S. presidential election, reached a total of 724,000 unique viewers (2+) across all airings. The 13-episode first season was shot last summer in Toronto and Hamilton, ON. Created by Field and Detsky, alongside the website’s senior editors Jacob Duarte Spiel and Alexander Saxton, the comedy is produced by Pier 21 Films in association with The Comedy Network. Executive producers on the project are Pier 21 founder Laszlo Barna and head of development Melissa Williamson.

Jeff Detsky

Back when you launched the website in 2011, did you have any notion that it might become a TV show?

Luke Gordon Field: It’s hard to remember exactly what our ambitions were, I don’t really think we were driving toward a TV show. Our main goal was to build as large an audience as possible for the website. There wasn’t really a big business plan in mind, so it was more fortuitous [than strategic on our part] that Jeff reached out to us when he did.
Jeff Detsky: My uncle shared a Beaverton story in summer 2013 and I realized it had grown beyond just the comedy community. It had reached a breaking point where everyone was becoming aware of this property and I was opportunistic enough at the time to think “this probably could be a TV show.”

Once you made the decision to adapt the website for TV, what were the next steps?

JD:  My goal was to bring it to market as fully packaged as we possibly could, so first we shopped it around to producers and landed with Pier 21. I didn’t necessarily think we were going to get a TV show [straight away], but I thought we would for sure land at a broadcaster, because every producer and broadcaster we took it to said that they wanted it. It made a lot of sense – a fresh, original voice in the Canadian comedy landscape that already had built in audience and a very strong point of view.

How was the writers’ room handled?

LGF: We did a writers room in two phases. So we wrote all the out-of-studio pieces (the stuff where we would go into the field) in May and June of last year, with about seven writers in the room. So we shot all that in the summer, primarily in August 2016, and then when we moved into the studio we formed another writers’ room.
JD: It was a large [writers’] room, but we cycled through people quickly. We usually had about eight people in the room at any given time.
LGF: It’s the kind of show where there’s 15 to 18 different topics that need to be covered per episode. People would come in every Monday with their pitches. It didn’t matter what slot it fit into, as long as it was funny stuff that had a strong point of view. Whoever pitched it had authorship of it for the first several drafts, at which point it went to the room for punch up, the table read and so on. That was our general strategy.

Luke Gordon Field

What was the reason for shooting in Hamilton, ON?

JD: We had access to better locations in Hamilton than we would have done in Toronto, especially given the fact there was so much production going on in Toronto last summer. So, we were able to get locations that better suited us, including Hamilton’s Masonic Temple, which ended up serving as about eight different on-screen locations.

What was it like premiering the day after the U.S. election?

LGF: It was very interesting being in this place where we were doing this buzzword [fake news] that had come out, while at the same time doing what satire’s job is, which is speaking the truth and take shots at the powerful. But at the same time we were also defending our own role in the world, because so many people who were mad about the role of fake news thought that applied to us. One of the more frustrating example of this was in TV panel discussions on the fake news phenomenon, where they would include the Onion or Beaverton as examples of fake news, often with no distinction between satire and the Macedonian websites set up to fool people. Sometimes in comment threads you’ll also see people write #fakenews or send us a Facebook message telling us we’re fake news.

Did the fact you had to film in advance of the election impact the ability to be as topical as you would have liked?

JD: Because of the production model, we kind of missed the boat on it a little. Fake news as a trending buzzword peaked after the election. All our episodes were in the can the week before the election. I don’t think we were able to comment on it as much as we would have done [had we been doing the writers’ room while the topic of fake news was peaking]. We wrote a ton of stuff assuming Hillary [Clinton] was going to win – stuff we were really proud of. But in post-production we just had to kill it. At the same though, part of what separates The Beaverton TV show from the other daily shows/those hyper-topical shows is that because we can make things up we’re not necessarily beholden to the news cycle of the week.

How will you try to remedy that for season two, pending a greenlight?

JD: We are exploring a new production timeframe to be a little bit more reactive and allow us to shoot a little bit closer to our air date. We’re actually beginning development next week on ideas for a potential season two.

Is there any more Beaverton-related content coming down the pipes in the meantime?

LGF: We’re just finishing up with a Beaverton book that Penguin is publishing. It’ll be out in October and is a fake history of Canada. It combines not-true news stories from Canadian history, dating back to pre-colonization and going up to present day, with diary entries, photos we’ve made up, editorials and commentary. Like a scrapbook of history that did not happen. I’m co-writing it with Alex Huntley and a number of other Beaverton writers. In addition, we’re launching a Beaverton podcast.