In this week’s Hub book review, Lydia Perovic examines What Television Remembers: Artifacts and Footprints of TV in Toronto (McGill-Queens UP, 2023) by Jennifer VanderBurgh, which explores the relationship between television and the city of Toronto to highlight just how much television in Canada has been undervalued as a cultural form
Whenever we move through our hometown, we inevitably encounter our past selves. Here on this corner is where my love and I kissed. In this building here, on that floor, behind that window, I worked at a desk for ten years. I/my child was born in this hospital. This is the pub where a dozen of us went to celebrate that time. I had my graduation ceremony across that lawn. This is the beach where I swam, this is the pond where I skated. And this cemetery, behind this gate, is where my parents are buried.
Those of us who read history—and those blue City of Toronto plaques—will have another layer to this communal self-telling. It’s here, many years before this condo building appeared, that Robert Baldwin lived. Up those stairs, the rich Austins. Behind that Georgian terrace, MacKenzie King, if not for very long. Those of us who love novels will add another layer. Behind those trees, the upscale gated community where Russell Smith’s Muriella Pent lived. In those ravines below, a girl from A Cat’s Eye—and other Atwood novels—is being bullied by her classmates. In this unremarkable street named after a potato, Emily Schultz’s Gordon Small hangs on even after death. Behind this shuttered storefront on Queen East, you can practically see the sign for the family business of Seth’s Clyde Fans.
The vast majority of people, though, use television and film references for this purpose. And though we are now a country without any kind of official television archives, Canadian TV production, for a few decades of the 20th century and the early 21st, was a busy industry. It’s hard to believe now, but at one time people in Toronto regularly watched their own city and their own lives on the small screen. Jennifer VanderBurgh, a Torontonian who is now an academic in Nova Scotia, wrote a book about the place of television in the making of Canadians—or rather, the making of Torontonian Canadians, as most of television production, for better or worse, used Toronto as a stand-in for the country.
What Television Remembers: Artifacts and Footprints of TV in Toronto documents some of the key moments in Canadian television and TV consumption and I couldn’t help reading it as an archaeological effort. When was the last time you enjoyed a Canadian TV show and talked to your friends about it? Did you ever try to rewatch a favourite show from the past, only to discover it was nowhere to be found, streaming nowhere, archived nowhere, not a single bootleg clip anywhere on the internet?
The reasons for that, VanderBurgh writes, are both the neglect of the national televisual heritage and a complicated legal maze of copyrights and distribution rights. In addition, between 1984 and 1994, she writes, the CBC underwent five major funding cuts from the federal government, while its mandate kept growing. The national broadcaster thus embarked on its “underfunded and overmandated” era, which we are still living in today. The money for the original drama programming thinned out and the CBC turned to partnering with independent production companies as a co-producer or broadcaster, or purchasing “broadcast windows” to show content owned by other companies for a limited period.
If today I can’t find the 2002 Trudeau miniseries anywhere to stream, rent, or buy, I expect it’s due to the fact that the CBC, where it was originally broadcast, does not hold the necessary rights. The 1985 Anne of Green Gables, the absolute classic of Canadian and English-language television, is nowhere to be watched today: you can only purchase a couple of episodes on the American Amazon.
One of the first Canadian shows that I’ve seen, Les Filles de Caleb, wildly popular when shown on Yugoslav state television when I was in high school, has only recently made it to the Radio Canada online streaming site, Ici.Tou.Tv, but you have to pay. Another show beloved in the Balkans, North of 60, is for some reason an American streaming property now, available on Prime and rentable on YouTube. Ken Finkleman’s The Newsroom, after being available on Gem for a while, is now accessible on Prime, Apple, and something called Plex TV. His later show, More Tears, only exists as a VHS rip-off on YouTube. Proof that the CBC comedy was risque and funny once, the old Kids in the Hall is only available thanks to YouTube fan accounts (the 2022 Amazon Prime revival is just not it).
The shows that VanderBurgh analyzes, and with them the times we lived in, are mostly unavailable today (she accessed some of them through personal archives). There is nowhere you can watch King of Kensington, which, with CTV’s Corner Gas, is arguably the most successful Canadian sitcom on record. Twitch City is available on YouTube thanks to a “Derpy McDerp.” Sidestreet, The Collaborators, Wojeck, the show based on the real city of Toronto coroner, the outspoken Dr Morton Shulman—all gone. (If you feel adventurous, there’s a rough-looking rip of an episode on YouTube.) Hangin’ In, Seeing Things live on YouTube fan archives; Airwaves is not even there.
LA Law’s rival, the old Street Legal, is only findable on DVD today (the new Street Legal, the 2019 revival, lives on Gem). One of the shows that I remember enjoying watching on CBC TV as a tentative Canadian and Torontonian, This is Wonderland, is available on the American platform Tubi. When I bike through Palmerston Ave past one of the midrise sixplexes, a memory resurfaces sometimes that Erica, of Being Erica, “lived there.” While mostly filmed in a studio, the outdoor shots, and the show itself, were very Toronto, the way few TV shows are today. All four seasons are available on Gem—which is something I couldn’t say about any of the shows above.
In all the talk about defunding or re-forming the CBC, few people—almost no one—mention the importance of the creation of original drama and comedy. Even those advocating for the reformed and thriving CBC have forgotten it (or think it is an unreasonable expectation). One of the reasons is, I expect, the quality of fiction that the CBC produced in the last few years, as much of the narrative art in North America, both publicly and privately funded, took an identitarian, “social-justicey” turn. This is the problem of cultural policy and governance, and not of funding; some of the worst politically correct schlock is being produced today by large entertainment corporations.
As Harrison Lowman reminded us recently in his piece on the CBC, it was Conservatives of the earlier generation who pushed for the creation of the public broadcaster. Today we are probably nearing the last years of Canadian television. Yes, the odd show will still appear on Crave and Gem, streaming channels that will arbitrarily archive or memory-hole items they make available. But we will primarily record our lives on social media, and not through narrative art—TV shows, films, and novels.
Art is the only way, for the growing numbers of us without a religious faith, to connect with the dead, the yet-to-be-born, and with strangers outside our own families (and sometimes inside of them, and ourselves, too). In this not-too-distant future, Toronto will be recorded for posterity as a phantom city in the background of American TV and film, in the vein of the Mies TD Towers pretending to be Manhattan in American Psycho, and Mavety Street and Newman Centre putting on their best Boston masks in Spotlight.
