First-time showrunners Romeo Candido and Amanda Parris on how to trust your vision and own your voice

We here at CBC Arts have been mighty proud watching as two members of our family have gotten to show Canadian audiences their talents. Earlier this spring, Romeo Candido (our former senior producer) and Amanda Parris (our current Black Light columnist and Canadian Screen Award-winning host of our former flagship series CBC Arts: Exhibitionists) each had a digital series they created released on CBC Gem — on the very same day, no less.

Candido's Topline is a heartwarming musical (Candido composed the music himself) that follows Tala (Cyrena Fiel), a 16-year-old girl who finds success as a singer-songwriter while grappling with the loss of her mother. Parris's Revenge of the Black Best Friend satirizes both Hollywood and Canada's tokenization of Black actors through a narrative centred on a self-help guru Dr. Toni Shakur (Olunike Adeliyi), who is tasked with representing scorned Black characters. Though the series are markedly different in subject matter, they're each exceptionally singular new entries into Canadian television canon.

Candido and Parris joined us on a Zoom call to discuss their series and the experience of getting their first series as showrunners out into the world. (The transcript of our conversation has been edited and condensed for length.)

Congratulations to each of you on your shows Topline and Revenge of the Black Best Friend. It's been a few months now since they premiered, so maybe we could start by talking about how it's felt getting these projects out into the world?

Amanda Parris: I feel so happy to finally have it out because I feel like I've just been sitting on the idea for a long time. It took really long to develop and the last chunk was like ... it was like a marathon and then it turned into a sprint. But the response has been amazing. It's been so exciting to get messages from people. It was exciting to sit in the theatre and hear people's responses and see people be affirmed but also challenged by it. And to see so much great response to the talent in the show, to the cast, to the people who made our sets and our wardrobe folks. So yeah, it's just been really, really great, and I just want more people to watch it basically at this point.

Romeo Candido: I can basically echo all of the things that Amanda said, but then people will say I'm being lazy and I don't have my own thoughts [laughs]. So I will say that when we released it, I thought Filipinos would be an easy kind of target, but I'm finding other people are loving it too. They love the characters and the world and the music. So it's been validating on every level, especially with how people are responding to the cast. So many people are telling me, "Oh my God, the Filipino talent I never knew." So I'm happy that the talent is being validated and my choice in the talent is being validated.

AP: Yes, it's such a beautiful thing to have the various choices that you make throughout this process of creating a show validated. And I think that for me, as a newer creator, it was really important because you kind of make these choices and you're like, "I really hope that they make sense and I hope that the people get it." I think one of my biggest question marks was: will this show feel like six different shows because every single episode is so different? Or will the cohesiveness make sense? Like, will people feel like they're in this experience and it has a throughline? And so being able to understand that people are getting it and are feeling that way about it has been very exciting. 

In terms of people being excited about the folks that we brought together, I think, "Oh, that's wonderful," but also, "Now you better hire them." I think part of the reason why Romeo and I are so close is the shared mission that we have. Whatever platform that we have, we want to not only utilize it for ourselves, but to elevate other folks. Somebody messaged me the other day asking for our crew list because they're looking to hire diverse crews. And that's like the best request you could have. It's wonderful.

Let's go back a bit and talk about what it was like assembling your teams and what it was like working with them.

RC: Contrary to what I think some of the industry thinks when they don't cast specifically, there was an abundance of Filipino talent that I got to see and who got to audition. But who are the right people? What's the right alchemy? Filipino is not a monolith; I wanted to make sure that a breadth was represented. So for me, casting was important. And as a creator, if your casting isn't proper, then the whole show can fail. They're the frontline workers of the story. So if that doesn't feel right, then like our shows live and die by our characters. And so I think casting was one of the tougher things of the process. 

AP: I would totally agree with that. We spent months casting. We were casting from like September to November. And our casting director, Tannaz [Keshavarz], was just incredible and worked so hard. And, you know, for a show like Revenge of the Black Best Friend, where the title literally is saying so much about our statement and vision of the world, it was really important to me that the folks behind the scenes who are shaping and creating the world ideally be Black or people of colour. As we started hiring folks and looking for folks, it was about finding people also who have a certain degree of experience, have a lot of really great ideas, who can bring a lot to the table, but also, this is going to be a great opportunity for them. So that sweet spot, you know?

So it took a little while to find the right folks, but we did. And the experience of being on set with everybody and working and creating is truly one that I'm going to keep forever. I loved it so much. It was stressful as hell, and it was scary because we were doing it right when Omicron was starting to explode. But it was just like the adrenaline, the energy of it. Like, I was barely getting any sleep, and I still felt like I could go another week — it was that wonderful. So I credit that to the people that we were able to assemble their incredible ideas.

RC: For me, if Topline didn't feel like a real world, if it didn't feel grounded in youth culture and in a diverse fashion and style, I don't think it would have worked. It would have died. You can sniff an inauthentic music show from a mile away, if the music's not right or the clothing is not right or if the hair isn't right or if the makeup isn't right. So we had amazing people who just understood the world. I hate the word authenticity, and every time people say, "The show feels so authentic," it gives me a weird feeling, but that would never be achieved if it wasn't for the people behind the scenes caring about every single thing that made it onto the screen. 

There are a lot of people trying to make shows that are authentic and have unique visions and and are unapologetically their own voices, like both these shows represent each of you. Now that you have been through it, what advice would you give to people that are trying to pull off what you both just pulled off? 

RC: I feel like this digital space is a great place for auteurs to be auteurs. I think working with a lower kind of budget gives you a lot of freedom. And so for anybody who is stepping into this space, first you have to trust your vision and you have to kind of own your vision, and then you have to see it through right to the end — right to the key art, right to the press release. The storytelling doesn't end when you have the final mix and the final colour of your show; the storytelling continues even when you have to get people to come watch the show. And so my advice is to know what your vision is. Stay true to it. There's going to be a lot of voices that are going to pull you in different directions, but if you know why you are doing the things that you're doing, then hopefully that gets to become a guiding principle, like a guiding light through the process.

AP: I think what Romeo just said would be my number one piece of advice. Number two could be just be really particular about your team and who you're going to be working with because you're gonna be working with them really intensely in really high stress situations, and so, make sure that you like them and that they like you and that you're a really good leader. I just think that this industry can be really toxic and it's really difficult. It's kind of a miracle to make anything. And so anyone that's joining you on this journey, just try to have grace, patience and care with them and then hopefully they'll extend the same to you and you can get through all of the inevitable hard stuff that's going to happen without hating each other.

You're both working in the Canadian landscape, which is very specific and — let's be honest — always a little behind the times. And I think both your shows are a part of what seems like maybe an exciting sea change of sorts in terms of what kind of stories are being told. What do you feel about the state of Canadian television? Are you hopeful about what's happening in terms of both your own experiences and as fans of other work?

AP: There are exciting moments that are happening. And what I'm hoping is that they aren't just moments, but that they are indicative of something longer, deeper and structural in terms of the shift of Canadian television. I will confess that for a really long time I didn't watch a ton of Canadian TV. You know, I watched American television. And then as someone who grew up in the U.K., I feel like I'm only now realizing how much U.K. television really shaped my childhood and who I am. At least when I was growing up, there were so many opportunities to see Caribbean representation, for example. And so I remember that and how important that was, and I'm hoping that Canadian television will start to create space for a plethora of experiences.

I'm excited about different kinds of storytelling that goes beyond this idea of cultural representation or racial representation but instead is just a new way to tell a story in a way that I haven't seen, period, you know? And that's interesting to me. The Porter is a period piece unlike any Black period piece that I've watched, for example. There's elements of a heist and there is espionage and there's all of these things that I haven't really seen in a Black period piece before. So I want Canadian television to go to a place that's willing to go into deeper storytelling and more experimental storytelling.

RC: It's also about not trying to always make things that are going to have broad appeal. I think that's always been the goal because Canada is very sparsely populated and it's a large country and there's such a wide variety of experiences across it that I think it's always like, "What can we get that will appeal to the largest number of people in this large expanse of land?" And I think that when you have that as your directive, you're not going to want to be experimental. You're going to stick to what you know has been successful. But I'm hoping that, because of the new way that people are watching things, there's going to be room for us to create things outside of those initial directives or those longstanding directives.

How were you considering the idea of your show's eventual audiences while you were making them?

AP: I was just like, "I'm just going to make the thing that I hope my homegirls find funny." That is always my target audience. But that said, even when I was trying to pitch the show, people didn't understand what I was talking about because there wasn't a lot to compare it to because every episode builds a whole new world, with almost a whole new cast. So to go back to Romeo's earlier point of the opportunity in digital, this only could get greenlit as a digital series. I knew there was no way I could get greenlit as a regular series because it's way too experimental and there isn't anything to compare it to. I don't have anything to point it to. So in digital, where you do get an opportunity to be a little bit experimental and to try new things, we put it out there and you just see if anyone's going to watch it.

And thankfully people are watching it — and more than Black folks and more than Black actors who I guess could be argued as the other target audience. It's so many folks… just like, people who are fans of pop culture. It's an accidental broad audience that we've tapped into. And I think as long as you're making things that you are excited about, that is sincere, that is human, you might always kind of accidentally tap into a broader audience without even meaning to.

RC: Specificity is key, I think. I think specificity of world is what's becoming interesting out there now. I think audiences are starting to really embrace entranceways into worlds or societies or communities that they don't know about. In my head, I think Topline is as mainstream of a show as Canada could make, frankly. It's about a family, it's about a young person finding her voice, it's about grief. It's about how a family moves through grief. And for me, that's as universal a story as I could ever tell. Doesn't matter who has experienced the grief. Grief is grief. And so I had to make sure that that was always at the forefront. It's like, when people say, "What's your show about?" the easy thing is like, "Young people making music in the music industry." No, the show is really about how people move through grief. It just so happens to take place in the context of the music industry. 

Topline and Revenge of the Black are both streaming on CBC Gem.