Adjusters On The Airwaves

As news that a television show about insurance adjusters was set to hit the airwaves, rumblings — musings perhaps — about the focus of the show could be heard. Excitement abounded because finally the industry would be in the public light, hope persisted that the show would help to abolish negative stereotypes of the insurance industry, and pride swelled because the industry was set to become the focus behind a television show.

Enter Showcase’s pilot episode of Cra$h and Burn. We meet Jimmy Burn, a Hamilton, Ont. adjuster with Protected Insurance. Burn is not only forced to settle claims quickly, but is up against shady Russian mob body shop owners, backstabbing coworkers, a past he can’t seem to shake and urine-launching clients. And near the end of the episode he dips his hand into the life insurance side of things.

Needless to say, the show has received mixed reviews from the insurance industry. Some were so infuriated by it that they demanded it be removed from Showcase’s line-up, calling it a gross misrepresentation of the adjusting profession. Other’s took the liberties taken by the show in stride, essentially conceding it’s ‘just television’ and meant to be a departure from reality.

“No one had ever done a show about insurance or insurance adjusters,” says Malcolm MacRury, Cra$h and Burn’s creator and executive producer. “It may not seem the most likely candidate, but it seemed to me something like fresh terrain and something that actually is really pervasive.”

Where it all began

The motivation behind the show was two-fold: 9-11 when suddenly insurance was front and centre on everybody’s mind, and outrageous stories about insurance. “I had a friend and colleague, who is an executive producer on the show — John David Coles — he and I started talking and wanted to do a show together,” MacRury says. “His buddy, who he went to college with . . . he is one of the founders of Progressive Insurance in the States and every time he would come to New York he would sit down with John and just bedazzle him with outrageous stories about insurance.” MacRury says he started to do some research into the insurance industry in Brooklyn and Queens and around that time, there was news about Russian cons who were ripping off the no fault laws for medical rehabilitation. A few years later, a grand jury indicted 567 people and corporations connected to what might be the largest organized insurance-fraud ring in U.S. history, according to CNNMoney.com. Many of those indicted were Russian émigrés and prosecutors refer to the investigation as the “Boris” case -Big Organized Russian Insurance Scam, CNNMoney.com added.

“It seemed to me if you could create a show that could combine the corporate world . . . with the street level con man mobster world, put those two together, you might have something kind of cool,” MacRury says. “And the pivotal figure would be the guy that had a foot in both worlds and that’s our hero, Jimmy Burn.”

“I call him the every man,” he says of Jimmy’s character. “He’s kind of a stand-in for the embattled middle class … where their share of things is getting smaller and smaller and I think that’s why we root for him. He’s trying to get his picture: his house, his family, a job with respect; he’s trying to make it. Of course he brings with him all this baggage of being a former con man and a juvenile delinquent. He’s a charmer, but he’s got dark waters — like a temper — and sometimes he’s his own worst enemy. The juice of the series comes from knowing if Jimmy is going to make it. Is he going to make it for the dream he wants — that middle class dream — or does he go to the dark side and become like the characters he deals with all the time?”

Not everyone shares the enthusiasm for Jimmy Burn. “I think Jimmy Burn does for loss adjusters what Elmer Fudd does for rabbit hunting,” Fred Plant, president of Plant Hope Adjusters, says. “This guy, Jimmy Burn, he could have been a dentist or a plumber, it wouldn’t have made any difference, it’s just bad TV.”

MacRury drew on his experiences of being on the road for a few days with adjusters from Progressive Insurance in the U.S., and information from a criminologist, the Insurance Bureau of Canada (IBC) and an independent adjuster when developing the series. The show looks at staged accidents, adjuster kickbacks, the medical rehabilitation system, car thefts, equestrian euthanasia, suicide, arson, hostage incidents, crooked service providers, among other issues.

Garry Robertson of the IBC provided insight about some of the issues plaguing the industry, including car theft, staged accidents, coaching seminars in high rises in Mississauga for the “victims” of fraudulent accidents. Jane Rogers, an independent adjuster in Hamilton, read the scripts beforehand and offered up suggestions as to what might be more “realistic,” MacRury says of his research. While in the United States, MacRury rode around with adjusters — which is where he got the idea for a “ballsy insurance adjuster” — going to half a dozen body shops a day where the adjuster would have to go nose to nose with the owners to do the estimates.

Not even close to reality

But for Plant, past president of the CIAA, there is nothing realistic about this show, at all. “They shouldn’t caution about coarse language and nudity,” he says of the warning that appears before the show starts. “They should caution about detachment from reality.” But while it might be unrealistic, Plant is not concerned it will influence those thinking of entering the industry, nor will it increase interest in the industry. “Anybody that really understands what the business is, won’t be the least bit influenced by this; no more than anybody that wants to join the military in Britain thinks that they are going to end up being James Bond,” he says. “It’s just not real. This isn’t even close to what it is that we do and how the business operates.”

While Plant says he doesn’t like the way the show portrays the industry, especially since he does not feel it’s a real depiction of the industry he works in, he does realize that sometimes when you’re close to something, it can be difficult when someone else tells the story differently than you might perceive it. And while there might be situations depicted in the show an adjuster might face, there is no way one adjuster will encounter all of these things over the course of their career, let alone in a few months. “To those of us in the know, it makes the depth with which they went to really deal with this, you’d blow it off and go ‘they’re not really serious about this,'” Plant says. “This really isn’t about insurance, cause none of this is real. Then you stop looking at the insurance aspect of it and look at the story and that’s where the thing really falls down, because it’s just really stupid.”

Well-written script

Rogers, who enjoys the show and feels the concept is good, read through the scripts beforehand and offered up suggestions in areas that should be changed, places where the story-line was definitely a far stretch. “For the most part, their scripts were very well written, and certainly they had a grasp of the insurance industry,” she says. “[Jimmy Burn] is depicting that person who has come into insurance, but he’s got a knack for it,” Rogers, Hamilton branch manager with Crawford & Company (Canada) Inc. Risk Management Services, says. “Here’s this young kid and he’s got a bad background and he’s trying to move on and he is in a world that could take him over that line that he shouldn’t go over. But, at the same time, he’s got that moral sense of right and wrong. You get the impression that even though he’s been tempted and he kind of wavers on that line, at the end of the day, that sense of right and wrong comes through and I think it’s a good reflection on the insurance industry.”

Patti Kernaghan, president of the CIAA, says viewers need to bear in mind the show is in the same line up as the Trailer Park Boys — and that show is definitely not serious. “It does showcase the pressure that an adjuster has to go through,” she says. “That you do have to respond quickly, that you are under a great deal of pressure, that you are dealing with adversity at all times. So even though it’s exaggerated adversity, a good adjuster has to have strong investigative skills, strong investigative abilities. So from that perspective it is interesting.”

Showcasing insurance fraud

While the IBC is definitely not pleased with the way the insurance industry is being portrayed in the series, they do approve of the fact the show is bringing to light organized insurance crimes seen in Ontario. “Our industry does not act that way,” Rick Dubin, vice president of investigations at IBC, says. “Our insurance companies are reputable, they are honest, they really do a very good job and so do the adjusters. I mean, I think with what you’re seeing, it’s pretty obvious insurance companies do not operate that way.”

While IBC was consulted about activities going on within Ontario with regard to organized insurance crime, Dubin is quick to point out they had nothing to do with the script — that is strictly the imagination of the creators. “We would tell them the schemes that existed, what we’re finding in terms of how they were staging the accidents and then how they proceeded to make the claims and who was involved,” Dubin says. “We would explain that there are a number of cases where they take a vehicle and they would intentionally cause significant additional damage and they would show the adjuster getting there and he would say, ‘wait this damage wasn’t there at the scene of the accident what’s all this?'”

Dubin says the intent on the part of IBC was to show there are staged accidents that go very wrong, where not only those who intentionally involved are injured, but also innocent individuals can be seriously hurt. “[In one of the episodes] the occupants in the vehicle that were actually staging got hit by a transport and it was a fatality,” Dubin says. “That really happens, where something goes really wrong, and it could be an innocent person, another vehicle being sucked in to a staged collision and getting seriously injured or killed, or it could be that something’s gone wrong right in the vehicle that is intentionally causing the accident.”

Made for TV

Rogers says she understands the industry has worked very hard to ensure it is seen as a good corporate citizens and why some might be concerned about the portrayal of the industry in the show. However, she says the industry needs to bear in mind it is a television show. “We watch all sorts of shows that depict different industries,” Rogers says. “Did you ever watch the show The Shield? I loved it, but it was all about rotten cops and what they did and yet it was just a show that a lot of people really loved and enjoyed.” She says she feels that viewers from the industry need to separate the fact that there is a storyline around a young man and his fiancée and his past life, and that he happens to be an insurance adjuster. The show is not depicting that this is what happens to all insurance adjusters, it is about Jimmy Burn. “I think that people should look at this show and from some perspective look at it and think I wish I could do that,” she says. “Wouldn’t that be kind of fun if you could actually say that to these people, whereas we’re all entrenched in customer service and what we can and cannot say.”

“I think that they’re showing the good side and the bad side of the company,” Rogers says. “I don’t think that it depicts the entire country, I don’t think that it’s depicting all of the insurers. I think people just need to look at it with a lighter approach and laugh, ‘you might never get away with that, but I really like the way he handled that’.”

Rogers is convinced that if people give it a chance they will learn to enjoy and appreciate the show, even the farfetched parts of it.

And, as MacRury, notes, the show is independent and it is intended to be a dark comedy.