Up north in a magical, mystical wonderland called Canada, they have a channel called MTV. But this isn’t the MTV we came to know and love, and then later hate with raw venomous passion, as MTV Canada host Aliya-Jasmine Sovani explained.
“We still do the ‘Jersey Shore’ and ‘Teen Mom’ but we also have a bunch of different talk shows for youth,” said Sovani. “We also do a lot of social programming. We have a show called ‘MTV Impact,’ where we talk about everything from gay bullying to what’s going on in Egypt. We play music videos. It’s a lot more concentrated on everything that people care about: social issues to music video and pop culture. Not just the slush.”
One of MTV Canada’s non-slushy shows has trickled down to the States via the Logo Network. Cult hit “1 Girl, 5 Gays” is a late-night roundtable talk show where Sovani pitches not-appropriate-for-daytime questions about sex, love and life to a group of gay guys, eliciting equally inappropriate answers.
According to producer Garrett Wintrip, the formula for the show came as a result of trial and error.
“About a year ago, my boss came to me and wanted to do a relationship or sex show,” Wintrip said. “We toyed around with doing an open-format show where a lot of young people would just talk about their relationship and sex experience. So we taped a show with 13 young people, gay and straight, and it just seemed really unfocused and it seemed like people weren’t willing to share. I’m a gay guy and I was brainstorming about how we can make this show better. I was thinking about how all the gay people that I know don’t have their guard up as much when they are talking about sex and relationships. So we thought we’d try it with gay guys and it worked out.”
The resulting show became so buzzed about in Canada, it wasn’t long before people in the U.S. started to take notice and wanted in on the action.
“To work in television in Canada, it isn’t on the scale that it is [in the U.S.],” Wintrip said. “We were kind of blown away when they showed interest in it. From what I understand, it was one of the guys’ fans from the show who messaged [website] AfterElton. So we kind of got discovered through them from a fan, which is amazing.”
The Logo Network soon picked up the show and was impressed enough to pick up a second season.
Wintrip said the show’s popularity has allowed it to expand upon the pool of gays that make up the panel.
“We accumulate people as we go along,” he said. “We started with maybe 10 guys and periodically we have auditions and we add one or two to the rotation. We have about 15-20 guys that we rotate in and out, but we’re always looking for new people. We hold open auditions and ask the same questions we ask on the show, and we get a sense of who stands out in the group.”
Wintrip added the program now has gay guys from the States clamoring to be on, despite that it tapes in Toronto.
“Since Logo picked us up, we have people driving in from the States,” he said. “We had guys from Buffalo and Cleveland come in for auditions.”
“People constantly send us e-mail and Facebook messages about being on the show,” Sovani added.
“1 Girl, 5 Gays” airs weeknights at midnight on Logo. For more information, visit www.logotv.com.