Canadian Television Today

Abstract

The artwork on the cover of this book is not open access and falls under traditional copyright provisions; it cannot be reproduced in any way without written permission of the artists and their agents. The cover can be displayed as a complete cover image for the purposes of publicizing this work, but the artwork cannot be extracted from the context of the cover of this specific work without breaching the artist's copyright.

The Don of Hockey: Making Comments and Offers We Can’t Refuse

“…As we unravel this tightly woven text of cultural contradiction, we arrive at the core of a man who offers us insight and his version of truth. Cherry is an important aspect of the Canadian image; through him we see what is missing, [and] the fact that Don Cherry, a hockey commentator, is the best-known public face of the national broadcaster is demonstrative of how little interest Canadian television mandarins have in multiculturalism (Beaty & Sullivan, 2006).…”

Anatomy of a Format

“…Previous research by Beaty and Sullivan (2006, 83) has suggested that rather than a celebration of any form of national symbolic culture, the Canadian adaptation of Pop Idol, Canadian Idol is “numbingly formulaic,” reiterating that the homogenizing feature of an international format, its delocalization and shallow localization, allows it to travel from nation to nation, and a flat version of Canada is presented. This is one of the few articles suggesting that the inclusion of Canadian artists, media events that “embed .…”

“…The derivative nature of the Canadian version begets immediate comparison. Defensive comparison is not new to Canadian television and culture—many expressions of Canadian cultural nationalism, in content and policy, have historically developed in response to the power of the States (Attallah 1996; Beaty and Sullivan 2006). This program functions as a contemporary imprint of a long-standing argument and conundrum in the development of Canadian national identity (Mackey 2002).…”

“…While the focus to date on Canadian Idol is appropriate given the high ratings of the show, its prominence in formatting in Canada, and its cultural weight in the global cultural industries, there is much more room to contribute to the emerging discussions of formats in Canadian contexts begun by these scholars. This project is also relevant in its response to Beaty and Sullivan's (2006) call to increase the discursive/textual knowledge base regarding Canadian television programming.…”

“…This research is important in that despite its strong television industry, Canada is underrepresented in the literature on formatting and reality television. To date, there have been several key articles that have more directly addressed Canadian formatted programs, and these mostly focus on Canadian Idol (Baltruschat 2009; Beaty and Sullivan 2006; Byers 2008; de B’béri and Middlebrook 2009). While the focus to date on Canadian Idol is appropriate given the high ratings of the show, its prominence in formatting in Canada, and its cultural weight in the global cultural industries, there is much more room to contribute to the emerging discussions of formats in Canadian contexts begun by these scholars.…”