Late Bloomer, created by Jasmeet Raina a.k.a. YouTuber Jus Reign, right, is inspired by Raina’s life as a Punjabi Sikh millennial.Crave
No Letterkenny? No problem.
2024 was the first year that Bell Media’s Crave did not have a new batch of the Jared Keeso-created long-running fast-talking comedy about hicks, jocks and skids in rural Ontario to offer subscribers since the show premiered in 2016.
But the retirement of the streaming service’s flagship show – which was adapted from a YouTube series called Letterkenny Problems – didn’t put a damper on the Canadian Netflix competitor’s 10th anniversary.
Instead, the past 12 months saw Crave cementing a reputation as the top spot to find strong new voices in Canadian TV comedy – alongside, of course, all those imported goodies from HBO and the extended RuPaul’s Drag Race universe.
Part of that is because of the successful commissioning of three shows that had one major thing in common with Letterkenny: They all had roots in Canadian personas and characters that already had followings online.
Late Bloomer, created by Jasmeet Raina a.k.a. YouTuber Jus Reign, was the first to premiere and the most critically acclaimed of the streamer’s new comedies. It follows the misadventures of one Jasmeet Dutta, a millennial Ontario Sikh creator with a Jus Reign-esque online persona that creates problems for him in his community.
Next came Made for TV With Boman Martinez-Reid – which was even more meta. It saw the titular Toronto TikTok star, whose parodies of reality TV tropes have earned him over two million followers, test out different genres of reality TV, trying to find one that might best fit his unique talents.
The third was The Office Movers, a slang- and slapstick-filled show that starred YouTuber brothers Jae and Trey Richards as workers at a family moving company prone to mishaps. While it was not explicitly about creators, it perhaps retained the flavour of the duo’s shambolic internet sketch comedy the most – with cameos by their pre-existing character Tyco (whose Toronto accent gets translated subtitles) and Canadian TikTok stars such as Lucas Lopez and Jack Innanen in the ensemble. (Those two alone have more than six million followers combined.)
The Office Movers follows brothers Everett (Jae Richards) and Eric Saunders (Trey Richards), as they follow in their father’s footsteps in commercial office moving.Crave
All three of these Crave original comedies have been hits by the standard of Canadian television. Late Bloomer and The Office Movers have been renewed for second seasons, while Made for TV has been sold internationally to the Roku Channel in the U.S. Bell Media is in discussions with Martinez-Reid, who was the face of a Crave ad campaign this fall, on what to do next together.
The transition from online content creator to television star is a notoriously tricky one to pull off – indeed, that’s the theme of Made for TV, how to fit a vertical rectangle talent into a horizontal rectangular hole.
I spoke to Justin Stockman, Bell Media’s vice-president of content development and programming, to ask how Crave pulled it off three times in a row last year.
The reason to work with creators is not to try to turn large social-media followings into streaming service subscribers, he says – that type of attempted audience export is something that U.S. networks tried often about eight years ago and “never works.”
“In the end, people go to different platforms for different reasons,” Stockman says.
Instead, he says the appeal of working with those who have already made a name for themselves in the Canadian creator economy is needing to invest less time, effort and money on talent development.
The country’s television industry is nowhere near the size of that in the United States, which gives artists space to grow their career and find their place. He points to, for instance, the lack of a show like Saturday Night Live, where a junior cast member can emerge as star player and then perhaps anchor their own show. (While CBC’s This Hour has 22 Minutes has sometimes performed this role – see Son of a Critch or Rick Mercer Report – the point is taken.)
“What we’ve found when we do work with creators who have figured out their space in the digital realm, sometimes you get to skip a couple of steps – because they’ve done a lot of that work in figuring out what works for them and been able to test out audience engagement,” he says.
Less talent development doesn’t mean no talent development: Stockman notes Raina and the Richards brothers were part of the original group of online talent that partnered with Bell Media on YouTube in 2014 on what was then called Much Digital Studios, an example of a short-lived phenomenon called a multichannel network.
You may wonder why creators, on the other hand, want to move to television given that their section of the economy will grow to US$480-billion by 2027, according to Goldman Sachs Research.
But the fact is that as precarious as the Canadian TV industry might seem – especially at the moment, with screen production down precipitously – social media platforms can be even more unstable. TikTok bans are looming in several countries as I write this.
Few online creators are able to make a sustainable living on digital platforms for all that long anyway – and some, like Raina, mature out.
“You’re always going, going, going,” Raina told The Globe and Mail last year. “Eventually that can kind of take a toll and catch up with you.”