ON SCREEN
What: This is Pop
Where: CTV and CTV.ca
When: Saturday March 6, 10 p.m.
Note: New episodes arrive each Saturday through April 24
Boy bands, country pop and protest songs are just a few of the musical topics that get the documentary treatment in This is Pop, an eight-part series by two former Victorians that gets underway Saturday on CTV.
University of Victoria grads Scot McFadyen and Sam Dunn, who own and operate Toronto’s Banger Films, couldn’t cover every corner of the pop music landscape in just eight hours of programming — the genre, now 70 years old, includes everyone from Elvis Presley to Eminem.
But the co-executive producers touch on some pivotal moments in music, by using an approach similar to the one ESPN used for its Academy Award-winning sports series 30 for 30 — with a preference for intimate portraits.
“We’ve never done a series where almost every episode has a different director and a different style to it,” Dunn said. “I think we learned along the way to embrace that. That’s what we loved about 30 for 30 — all those docs had a very distinct style, for sure.
“When we started, we had a long list of about 50 different stories that we felt could fit this approach. We narrowed it down to eight, so we definitely feel like there’s more legs in the series beyond just these episodes.”
This is Pop opens with Auto-Tune, which explores the popular pitch-correction technology used to maximum effect by T-Pain, Cher and Kanye West. Other episodes premiering this month include Hail Britpop! (March 13), about the 1990s explosion of British acts Oasis, Blur and the like; Stockholm Syndrome (March 20), which looks in-depth at the Swedish pop genre singlehandedly created by ABBA; and The Boyz II Men Effect (March 27), a meditation on the boy-band phenomenon.
Other episodes set to air in coming weeks run the stylistic gamut, from Dolly Parton, Shania Twain and Lil Nas X (When Country Goes Pop, April 3) and songwriting factories (The Brill Building in 4 Songs, April 10) to protest songs (What Can A Song Do?, April 17) and the history of rock festivals (Festival Rising, April 24).
“If there’s any genre within music that just seems like there’s endless stories to tell, it’s pop,” Dunn said. “Pop means different things to everybody. Depending on your age, your background or where you grew up, pop can be completely different from one person to the next. On a philosophical level, that’s what interested us about this series. What is pop? In different ways, each of the eight episodes explores that question.”
Dunn, McFadyen and series producer Amanda Burt secured time with some big — and notoriously press-shy — subjects, including Twain, Arlo Guthrie and Jefferson Airplane’s Jack Casady.
The biggest interview catch by far, however, was ABBA’s Benny Andersson, who is not known for doing on-camera interviews. McFadyen said they were able to convince Andersson to talk via his son, who was a fan of Hip-Hop Evolution, the Emmy Award-winning series from Banger Films that aired on HBO from 2016-2020.
“That was one of the biggest coups for us,” he said. “Nobody gets ABBA.”
This is Pop took two years to finish, with an unexpected interruption from COVID-19. The initial plan was to fly to England and the U.S. to shoot summer footage for Festival Rising at the Glastonbury and Bonnaroo festivals, “but everything got cancelled,” McFadyen said. “So we have to kind of pivot and talk about that change.”
The duo runs one of the top pop-culture production companies in the world, and has made a handful of acclaimed documentaries, starting with the pair’s first film as a unit, 2005’s Gemini Award-winning Metal: A Headbanger’s Journey. Each documentary is music-related, from spotlights on Rush and Iron Maiden to deep dives on ZZ Top and Alice Cooper.
The two producers have come to embrace the steep learning curve for each doc. “We’re not experts on every form of music, by any stretch, and nor should we be,” Dunn said. “But we still play a pretty important role in terms of overseeing the creative. We may not be there for every little piece of minutiae, but we’re definitely there in terms of the storytelling.”
Yet more projects are coming down the pike. A documentary on Toronto rock trio Triumph, which will première on Crave in the fall, will be preceded by K-Pop Evolution, a YouTube original premièring later this month.
The series will look at the history of Korean pop music through the cultural hurricane that is the group BTS — another example of how Dunn and McFadyen are still learning as they go, nearly 20 years after they got their start.
“Because we started in metal and started with the music that I cared a lot about, it kind of attuned us pretty early to how important it is to not alienate fans of the music,” Dunn said. “When we started branching out into hip-hop and now K-Pop and pop music, we just wanted to make sure that the story is told authentically, because we know that this music matters to people.
“Swedish pop or death metal or Shania Twain, we just try and bring the same level of care to all of it.”
mdevlin@timescolonist.com
