Illustration by Valerie Thai

Now that my son is seven, our weekend mornings have gelled into a proper routine. He wakes up at some ungodly hour—earlier, by the way, than he gets up on weekdays—and plays for a while in his room. When he’s tired of that, he’ll grab a couple of granola bars from the kitchen and then find the family iPad. By the time I’m (finally) awake, he can usually be found sitting on his bedroom floor, his face creased into a frown of concentration as he swipes his way through whatever Netflix Kids is currently offering. His current favourites include a cartoon called Masha’s Spooky Stories and Teen Titans Go!, the latter of which made him think it was the height of hilarity to exclaim, “Look at those juicy thighs!” every time I wore shorts this summer.

I can remember the weekend mornings of my own childhood in the 1990s very clearly: the hush of our suburban neighbourhood, the ugly grey carpet scrunched beneath my bare feet and matched the colour of the pre-dawn sky, the impenetrable barrier of my parents’ bedroom door, which I was not allowed to breach until they were up for the day. Like my son, I would help myself to whatever food was available— usually Alpha-Bits, the plain kind, although I coveted the ones that had marshmallows. Then I would head down to our barely finished basement, where I would spend the next few hours watching cartoons. On the surface, this doesn’t seem so different from my son’s routine. But when I try to explain the details of it to him—the boxy old television, the five flickering channels we had to pick between, the fact that I had to wait a whole week between watching one episode of the Ninja Turtles and the next—I feel like I’m describing something so foreign that it’s hard to figure out the words to properly convey what it was like.

Where do I even start when some baseline words hold such different meanings today than they did three decades ago? When I’m telling a story about my child-self making a phone call, I picture myself talking on the big white rotary dial telephone that we had until I was 12; my son, by contrast, imagines me pressing the little green icon on an iPhone. For me, making calls is the raison d’être for the telephone; for my son, calling people is just one app among many. I blew his mind a few years ago when I told him that when I was a kid, phones didn’t have cameras. “But how did you take pictures back then?” he asked. And then: “What about walls? Did you have those? Were they even invented yet?” I can see his point: if this one thing that he considers to be a dependable and fixed part of the universe has not always been that way, then how can he know what to trust? The idea of a universe where phones can only do one thing—and not a very interesting thing, at that—both astonishes and disturbs him.

There is a part near the end of Laura Ingalls Wilder’s 1932 novel Little House in the Big Woods where she describes lying in bed in her family’s log cabin and listening to her father play “Auld Lang Syne” on the fiddle. When he finishes, she asks him what the days of auld lang syne are, and he replies that they are the days of long ago. As she considers this, she tells herself that the “now” she lives in will always be now; it could never be a long time ago. I remember reading this passage as a kid and trying to figure out the paradox it offered. The time that Laura lived in, with its calico print dresses and wood stoves and lack of indoor plumbing, had inarguably happened a long time before I was born. But even though it was obvious to me that Laura’s present had eventually become the past, I was just as certain that the clothing, culture, and technology of the ’90s would never feel old. Even when I became a parent, by which point the decade of my childhood felt like the ancient past, I didn’t consider the cultural gap that would exist between my son and me.

It’s hardest for me to understand how the way we view information has changed. I don’t mean the ways in which we consume it and relay it, although those things are obviously different now than when I was younger; I mean the qualities we attach to it. By the time I was a tween, every bit of media felt so precious. If I wanted to watch an X-Files episode more than once, I had to make sure to record it on my VCR (and then make sure that no one else in my family taped over it). I kept a shoebox full of interviews with Tori Amos, each of which I had painstakingly cut out of newspapers and magazines. If I wanted to read up on the Black Death (I was a weirdly morbid kid), I had to go to the library, find the right keyword in their computer system, and then sift through the chapters of various books until I found what I was looking for. I would often photocopy things or write down quotes that seemed especially important; I remember feeling this urgent need to hold onto everything, because nothing seemed permanent. Once an article or a book or an episode of a favourite show was lost, there was a good chance that I would never find it again.

It’s not like that for my son, though. If he wants to know more about outer space, everything he needs is at his fingertips—YouTube videos, podcasts, articles written by actual NASA astrophysicists. And none of it is in danger of disappearing; after all, once something goes on the internet, it’s usually there forever in some capacity.

This might sound like some kind of value judgment about kids these days, but I promise that it’s not. Greater access to information is never a bad thing. Consider this: my great grandmother grew up in a house with two books (one of which was the Bible) and she probably treated them with a devotion that I wouldn’t be able to muster for any individual volume in my library. Books were, for her, a nearly irreplaceable treasure, whereas if I lose one of mine, I can usually find another copy quickly and cheaply. Would anyone argue that owning literally hundreds of times the number of books that my great grandmother did somehow means that I am somehow living a less wholesome or engaged life?

Like any parent, I have some anxieties about what changing technologies will mean for my kid, but most of them centre around how he will use them to interact with his peers. Will I know what to do if he’s being bullied on social media? What limits will be fair to set on devices that he uses for learning, entertainment and socializing? How can I know if I’m making the right choices, not just making it up as I go along?

Sometimes it can feel like these are questions unique to the past decade or two, but I suspect that every generation of parents has wrestled with them in some way or another. It’s tempting to try to find someone or something to blame for the ways in which the world is changing—over-indulged kids, lazy parents, the technology itself—but to look for a scapegoat is a way of refusing to deal with a fundamental truth about life, namely that change is not good or bad, it just is.

I feel the same way about social media and smartphones and streaming services; they’re a part of our world now, whether we like it or not. There’s no going back to how things were before. Our only choice is to learn to adapt as best we can and accept that the day will come sooner rather than later when our kids’ understanding of how to navigate technology and media outstrips our own.

It’s tempting to dread what you don’t know, and I certainly don’t know what the world will be like when my kid is a teenager or a young adult. But instead of giving into that fear, I’m trying to be excited about the brave new world he’s growing up in. My parents must have faced similar challenges, and someday my son will live through his own season of realizing that the phones, tablets, and computers he grew up with are clunky and obsolete. By then, maybe our respective childhood weekend mornings won’t feel so different from each other; just two more links in the chain of ever-advancing cartoon consuming technology. Until that day, I reserve the right to feel like an old crank every time he asks me to explain the exotic functions of the VCR.

Illustration by Valerie Thai

In the 1980s, Dan Hubbard and Richard Catinus were two brainy young guys trying to sell Apple computers when I was working in a government office that used IBMs. While outlining the advantages of using a Mac for my work, Dan mentioned in passing that, after reading Jerry Mander’s book, Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television, he and his wife had decided to raise their children without a TV.

They wanted to give their kids a more enriched life, he told me, one that wasn’t influenced by a diet of bland television programming. About 15 years later, I heard that a young girl with the same last name won a prestigious science award and wondered if the parent’s no-TV decision was a factor in their daughter’s early success.

Dan was a smart fellow so I paid attention to his book recommendation. I headed to the library and borrowed what would prove to be a life-changing read. Mander argues brilliantly that TV is dangerous to viewers, the environment, and—the factor that worried me most—our democracy. He proposes that the medium discourages vigorous thinking and discussion, instead confining human understanding to a rigid channel. After the compelling read, I tossed my little Hitachi, smack in the heyday of M*A*S*H, Three’s Company, and Happy Days. I was in my early 20s, living on my own, and had been spending most evenings sitting on the couch watching sitcoms for three or four hours after working all day. It wasn’t a very different routine from the one I’d had growing up. The novelty of an alternative lifestyle seemed like a perfect challenge, and I went at it with the usual righteous determination of someone that age. I didn’t want a co-dependent relationship with a television.

So, I spent most of the next three and a half decades without one.

***

I grew up as one of six kids in a small flat in Montreal and had never been a huge reader or had much quiet time. Now, I figured, was my chance to change that. A typical weeknight in those years without TV consisted of wolfing down a large bowl of Kraft dinner with a glass of red and retiring to a dilapidated chaise lounger to spend an evening reading. Every so often I’d lean back, look out the window, and ponder an especially enjoyable chapter.

The tranquility of evening reading in my very own rented bachelor suite on Vancouver Island was thrilling. After a few satisfying book hours, I’d listen to some Spirit of the West or Madonna or Fleetwood Mac, maybe write a letter to family or friends back east, and putter around, getting ready for work the next day. I really came to know myself in those years.

I read a library tome, an introduction to 500 great books, and jotted down the titles that looked interesting to me. I gave the list to my sister in case anyone in our large family was ever looking for a useful gift idea for me. My siblings surprised me that year and delivered 30 wrapped books for my 30th birthday. That thoughtful present set me up to a habit of reading 30 or 40 books a year for most of my adult life.

Not having a TV habit enabled me to use my leisure time to pursue different interests. In 1986, I took a leave of absence from my government job and went to Tokyo for a year to learn about Japanese culture and work for a local advertising firm. In 1990, I won a competition for an international Rotary scholarship to the Philippines. I took night classes at the University of Victoria over a 20-year period and managed to earn a bachelor’s degree and a humanities diploma (I was probably the slowest person ever to earn a degree, but I had fun learning). One summer, I took a peace research course in Norway, and for several years I mentored a boy with dyslexia. I seriously doubt I would have pursued these adventures if my life had centred on keeping up with my favourite TV programs. My time was unmediated by a screen.

There were, of course, downsides of not owning a television in the pre-internet age. Visiting nieces and nephews were horrified at the prospect of spending a cartoon-free weekend at Aunty Thelma’s. I was frequently the odd one out at the water cooler, as colleagues and friends discussed the latest episode of their favourite show. I remember two friends talking about some person named Roseanne and thought: “This woman sounds like a jerk, I hope I am never introduced to her.”

TV then had strange effects on society. I had read about people in some countries using the show Friends as a teaching aid to learn English. After seeing an episode at my sister’s place, I thought the idea was strange. The lines delivered by the actors sounded like clever and witty phrases concocted by writers. No one I knew talked like that in everyday conversations; if they did, I would have thought they were a bit off. The sitcom-language-study model is fine for learning new words as long as you realize no one actually speaks that way.

I also avoided amassing a surplus memory full of unerasable real and staged violent scenes. Once while visiting a friend, I saw the television news of two girls hanging from a mango tree in India. The young women were strung up after being raped. I wept at the sight and still ache from that painful scene. Another time, I walked into my brother’s house as a scene from CSI was on the prominent living room screen. A group of young women were celebrating as they partied in a limo when one of them stuck her head out of the sunroof waving a glass of champagne—just as the car veered under a low-hanging sign. The memory of the five-second horrific glimpse still sends shivers down my spine. I have not been desensitized to violent images and have no impervious armour.

It is hard to believe that 100 years ago there was no such thing as television. And now, after millions of years of human evolution, few people on the planet exist without daily exposure to a steady stream of perpetually shocking images, as well as constant sales pitches from our televisions and screens.

***

After 15 years without a television, I married a man who had a big-screen TV. Television was a disappointment. I was traumatized to find the newscasters’ nostrils were bigger than my head, or so it seemed. The images looked kitschy and over-the-top. Sitting by the radio and listening to CBC News had been much more interesting than watching an announcer sit behind a desk reading a teleprompter. It felt hollow and lonely to be sitting in a room with another human being when we were both silently staring at a TV in the corner. The marriage was short-lived, and the big boring box exited with the man who loved watching it.

I spent another 10 years enjoying life without a TV until 2011, when I fell in love with a man who had three TVs. (Men with TVs are everywhere.) This time I was more careful. I laid bare my disclosure: I wasn’t interested in television, particularly violent content, but I did enjoy thoughtful movies. He played his cards well. Every weekend we spent together he would borrow a movie from the library. He consulted lists of the “most inspiring movies”—Nelson Mandela’s Long Walk to Freedom, Dead Poets Society, and Groundhog Day—and we saw them all over the course of a couple of years. He also saved carefully considered programs and weaned me back to the worldwide tube. Usually anything with David Suzuki, 60 Minutes, or political humour worked for me.

After seven years of blissful weekends, we decided to live together. The expectant question on my mind was: How will I cope with television in my midst?

At first, the most shocking thing on TV was the wavy red, blue, and green, ribbon-like digital graphics on CTV’s station identification. The novel optical illusion of the compelling artwork was mesmerizing. I couldn’t get over the richness of the colours and the sharpness of the images. I felt like a child observing something fantastically new. TV in the early ’80s didn’t look like this. In those re-entry months, I found many programs and ads to be hysterical. I would actually slap the arm of the couch and nearly roll over laughing. The Olympic Rona ads were goofy comical—I got a kick out of the circle of about a dozen needle-nose pliers opening and closing to mimic synchronized swimmers, and the relay race with a Rona employee running across the country to deliver a single tool to a worker on the job. There was one shoe store ad where a woman was in her closet trying on half a dozen pairs of new shoes while dancing around as if in a state of delirium. Her husband kept calling her for dinner. He should have called a psychiatrist. The whole thing was too silly.

I only watched one episode of a reality TV show and it was absurd. Ozzy Osbourne was dumping a huge bag of large chocolate bars into a drawer in a cavernous kitchen, while nearby little dogs pooped on the floor. I pitied the poor souls who had to live in such a desolate environment. That was the end of reality TV for me. I agree with film director Spike Lee as he commented in a 2016 CBC interview with Peter Mansbridge: “I think one of the worst things that has ever happened to America, or the world, is reality TV…. [Reality TV] put the worst elements of us human beings on television, and made it entertainment.”

In 35 years, the evening entertainment medium has gone from Happy Days to an insulting assortment of so-called reality shows and a frightening abundance of crime dramas. We have gone from Perry Mason to Judge Judy; from “betcha can’t eat just one” or “reach out and touch someone”—cute ad jingles— to a barrage of stress-inducing, digitally constructed morphing monster graphics with laser beams shooting out of their everywhere as they inexplicably chase the latest version of the new car being advertised. I don’t get it.

And then I saw the sensational Wild Canada, a four-part documentary series on CBC’s The Nature of Things, narrated by David Suzuki. We have watched it several times and each time it makes me feel grateful to be alive and living in a country that is still full to the brim with magnificent natural beauty and thriving wildlife compared to many other places on the planet. I imagined what television could be if all the content were all as thoughtfully produced. I was reminded: It is not the TV itself, but the content we select.

***

After six months or so, I came to the new habit of watching an hour or two of television every day with my partner. My favourite daily program is CHEK TV, a local five o’clock community news show produced by a station that has been successfully employee-owned for nine years. They do a good job of covering events on Vancouver Island and they talk like sane, everyday people you might chat with at the grocery store.

If I had to pick a single weekly television show to watch, Real Time with Bill Maher would be the one. The program is well-named; the content feels real. I could actually imagine having a decent conversation with the guests; they aren’t there just to flog their books or their movies. We never miss it and are disappointed when Maher takes a holiday. What more could you want from a TV show when you sit down to relax after dinner, holding hands with your lover on a Friday night?

I enjoy some of the broad range of TV fare, but with the focus on President Donald Trump this past year in both news and entertainment, I am becoming bored. If I flip through the channels it usually feels like a waste of time. Violence, conflict, and anger are predominant themes. I don’t laugh at the TV as much as I did at first. The shine is off. Some days it is beginning to feel as if watching television takes me away from myself and makes me feel less alive.

When I am home alone, I never turn on the television. Frankly, I don’t even know how to. But I’m okay with that.

***

I never set out to be a freak, but reading the Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television in my early 20s led me down a different boulevard. TV-free living offered a rich set of decades for me—but I doubt I will venture back there. Recently I have been thoroughly enjoying the brilliant documentary filmwork of Ken Burns, especially his series on the Roosevelts. (Eleanor Roosevelt is my new hero.) Mind you, I do find myself winnowing my way into my partner’s heart with my audiobook-listening habits. At the moment we are getting refreshed by reading Steven Pinker’s Enlightenment Now and we just finished swooning over Rachel Carson’s The Sea Around Us. Reading together is even more pleasant than watching a little TV together. I’m torn.

But I am grateful to that Apple salesperson for the excellent book recommendation.

Mr. Mander had some compelling arguments.

Lena Dunham as Hannah in HBO’s Girls

I am quite open about the fact that I have Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, or OCD. Talking about it comes easy to me. More difficult to handle are the reactions I get from others. “So are you like that nerd on The Big Bang Theory?” someone in a work meeting recently joked after I mentioned my OCD.

That nerd is Sheldon Cooper, a character on the popular CBS sitcom whose habits include not wanting his roommates to sit in his spot on the couch and knocking three times. Sheldon is often what people think OCD looks like.

I don’t watch the show, but I have yet to hear of an episode where it takes Sheldon more than an hour to leave the house because he needs to repeatedly check all the taps in his apartment to make sure there is not even the tiniest drip that could lead to a massive flood, destroying all his Nirvana memorabilia, killing his cat, and leaving him homeless. I doubt this would make for Emmy-winning television.

The Big Bang Theory is certainly not the only show to play OCD for laughs. Glee, Friends, and Monk have also reduced it to a punchline. Movies from As Good as It Gets to The Aviator depict OCD as a quirk, eccentricity, or Type-A personality indicator. Marketing campaigns joke about Obsessive Christmas Disorder, online quizzes ask “How OCD are you?” and Khloe Kardashian calls OCD, which she doesn’t have, a “blessing” because it enables her to create perfectly symmetrical stacks of Oreos.

Of those with clinical OCD, more than 90 percent have both obsessions and compulsions, but pop culture portrayals focus only on the latter. Portrayals are also often exaggerated, with OCD depicted as being performed in a specific way (often counting) or as a character’s defining personality trait. These negative portrayals not only diminish the severity of the problem, but also hurt those, like me, who don’t consider embarrassing blisters on their hands from repeated doorknob checking a blessing.

These portrayals also lead to silence and suffering for those who fear they will be dismissed or mocked for their OCD. (I was seriously once asked if I bottled my urine like Howard Hughes after someone watched The Aviator.)

Not all people with OCD are clean freaks, counters, or constant hand washers, but that is what pop culture has reduced us to. A few months ago, a friend visited my apartment and was disappointed it wasn’t cleaner. They assumed my OCD made me exactly like Friends’ Monica Geller. The apartment wasn’t clean, but my stove certainly was—I hadn’t used it in months because checking to make sure it was off became too exhausting and it was easier not to use it. Unlike me, Monica never survived on microwaveable Lean Cuisine entreés and Cheerios for several months to avoid the stove.

It took until 2013 for me to see a portrayal of OCD I could finally relate to. Many things about Lena Dunham’s HBO series Girls frustrated me, but the show’s depiction of OCD perfectly captured my crippling feeling of frustration, darkness, and isolation. Talking to her therapist, Dunham’s character described how her compulsions and rituals would keep her up until the wee hours, leaving her exhausted and zombie-like in the morning, when she would wake up and do it all again. When my OCD is at its worst I often put off going to bed, staying up until 2 or 3 a.m. to watch something I am not even all that interested in (Top Chef: Colorado, anyone?) just so I can avoid my pre-bedtime lock and window checking.

In the morning, I stay in bed long after my alarm has gone off because the thought of getting up and doing my hours-long pre-leaving-the-house checking, followed hours later by my pre-leaving-the-office checking, has me feeling exhausted before I even have my feet in slippers.

In between all my checking, I remain hopeful there will be more positive pop culture depictions of OCD and mental illness. John Green’s recent novel Turtles All the Way Down, which is an account of Green’s own struggles with OCD, gives me hope, as do the better and broader representations of mental health issues in characters like Gretchen Cutler in You’re the Worst and Ian Gallagher on Shameless.

Take that, Khloe Kardashian.

Russell Peters as Doug D’Mello in The Indian Detective.

Russell Peters’s much awaited return to television was finally satiated with the CTV show The Indian Detective, which aired last December. The sitcom has been five years in the making, and it’s a first for Peters, a Canadian stand-up comedian who began his career in Toronto. It tells the story of Doug D’Mello (played by Peters), a Canadian investigative cop who travels to India to meet his father and gets caught up in a criminal investigation. But the show has already received mixed reviews from audiences across the board. Reviewers have called it out for perpetuating stereotypes about India and failing to engage with its audience, both in Canada and abroad. The show received an overall rating of 6.6 on IMDB, although Rotten Tomatoes gave it a generous 87 percent.

Spread over four episodes, the series sought to set a new trend in Canada by internationalizing the setting of its production, with large parts of it being shot in India. The Indian Detective’s transnational location gets one wondering if CTV was hoping to create an international sensation, or at least engage with Canada’s vast multicultural population.

The show is the most recent addition to a short list of multicultural-themed TV programs produced by major Canadian public and private broadcasters, such as CBC and CTV. Canadian television, though, remains a limited-option entertainment platform that is often overshadowed by the U.S. With just over 58 percent of Canadian households consuming cable TV in 2016, the story of Canadian television programming remains rather humble. Its 2016 revenue was just over $7.2 billion.

Why aren’t Canadians watching traditional cable? Though there are technological and other reason for decline in cable subscriptions, one question must be considered: Who are the TV shows in Canada made for? If we were to look at the last 10 years of shows produced by two of Canada’s major broadcasters, CBC and CTV, they are primarily targeted to Canadians and Europeans. But Canada, the champion of multiculturalism, should prioritize TV programs with themes and characters that appeal to its vast multiethnic community, sponsored and produced by its public and private broadcasters. That doesn’t seem to be the case. Between 2007 and 2018, there were just three TV shows that focused on multicultural themes: Little Mosque on the Prairie, Kim’s Convenience, and now, The Indian Detective.

In the last three years, The Indian Detective and Kim’s Convenience have targeted a non-traditional audience within the Canadian media space, which could indicate a trend followed by other such productions. Kim’s Convenience, a CBC show that first aired in 2016, tells the story of a Canadian-Korean family and their convenience store in Toronto. The show portrays the city’s transforming multicultural community, and the family’s attempt to “fit in.” Kim’s Convenience explores the mores of the family-run convenience store, where you can find everything—jokes, too. The show plays out the conflict between the first-generation Korean parents and their kids who grew up in Canada without accentuating it with overplay of accents and cultural difference—something The Indian Detective banks on.

Canada has tried in the past to promote multicultural and multiethnic broadcasting by giving special provisions to the ethnic broadcasting category. The Canadian Radio-Television and Telecommunications Commission’s (CRTC) Ethnic Broadcasting Policy of 1999 decided to allocate airtime to television and radio shows in third languages—that is, any language that isn’t English, French, or an Indigenous language—over the mainstream. But the CRTC’s broadcasting policy only applied to ethnic broadcasters, and encouraged them to create content in third languages. The only policy for non-ethnic public broadcasters—the public and major private broadcasters—is to dedicate up to 15 percent of their airtime toward ethnic programming, and which could be increased up to 40 percent by the conditions of the licence. The provision to incorporate ethnic programming remains a minor part of the overall policy, which is strictly focused on promoting a siloed concept of multicultural broadcasting. The CRTC policy has been relatively successful at adding a small set of private stations that includes broadcasters such as Omni TV, a Rogers Media production. Omni TV is a consortium of multicultural television programming which offers speciality channels broadcasted in languages such as Mandarin, Cantonese, Tagalog, and Punjabi. 

Specialized television satellite services such as Omni TV have been working hard to bring more multicultural TV options for Canada’s vast multiethnic population, but it is a small dent in the spectrum of broadcasting made possible by Canada’s public broadcasters such as the CBC. As a person of South Asian heritage, I consume media in Punjabi and Hindi, a large set of which is made possible by the CRTC’s funding for ethnic programming. Apart from a very small set of productions, most of it succumbs to advertisements by mortgage brokers, realtors, and real estate brokers—and some just roll all three into one program. The distinction between a news or current affairs program and an advertisement for a product or a service seems to blur into one long segment. Programming that was meant to promote a cultural dialogue between Canada’s vast ethnically diverse communities is being used for investment advice, for instance, in various languages. On the contrary, a successful example of multicultural programming is Hockey Night in Canada, which is a broadcast of hockey games with commentary in Punjabi.

In the United Kingdom, the BBC has long ago realized the need to incorporate multicultural programming, and has been promoting TV shows and media that appeal to its multicultural population on the British Isles. The BBC has a dedicated radio station for Asian audiences—the Asian Network—broadcasting throughout the day; the radio channels primarily cater to the U.K.’s large population of Asian heritage. A successful example of the BBC’s investment in multicultural programming can be traced through the career of Sanjeev Bhaskar, a prominent BBC presenter. Sanjeev is best known for Goodness Gracious Me, The Kumars at No. 42, India with Sanjeev Bhaskar, along with other regular appearances on BBC TV shows. He is among a long list of people of colour that have appeared on the network’s shows; other such figures include Mera Sayal, Idris Elba, Thandie Newton, and Gurinder Chaddha. The BBC’s production of multicultural situational comedy is well-established history that Canada could learn from. Some of the popular examples of multicultural comedy and drama from Britain include Real McCoy, Desmond’s, The Lenny Henry Show, Citizen Khan, and many others over the years.

Though multicultural programming options are thriving in Canada more than ever, it has resulted in a limited dialogue—broadcasting programs that many other Canadians can’t access, and vice-versa. But the recent productions of Kim’s Convenience and The Indian Detective are a positive trend that both major broadcasters should develop further. The CBC and CTV should rethink their strategy for Canadian television to remain relevant and keep up with the changing demographic of Canada. As the media landscape, both print and visual, faces its biggest financial challenge in years, there is a need to consider who consumes the TV shows and programs in Canada—and are Murdoch Mysteries or Heartland relevant to its multiethnic population?

For long stretches of filming, every hour is an off-hour. Denied anything to watch or click or scroll or read, contestants kill time in the Bachelor mansion with what remains to them: eating, drinking, and saying more than they mean to. In contrast with this surfeit of leisure time, minutes spent in the direct presence of the show’s lead are scarce. Referred to as “one-on-one time”—sometimes even shortened to just “time” because everyone knows what kind matters—contestants arrive on set hungry for it and stay never quite sated. It’s the one resource every contestant, no matter what other advantages they might possess, needs in order to conceive and develop romance. As one contestant puts it: “Time is the most important thing in this entire process. You don’t get time—you’re going home. Because how is any relationship going to form if you don’t have time?”

Excerpted from Most Dramatic Ever: The Bachelor © SUZANNAH SHOWLER, 2018. Published by ECW Press, ecwpress.com.

You know I love you, but you really need to stop making me nostalgic for the technology of days gone by. Please, I beg of you, stop reminding me of the good old days like I am Lindsay Lohan and you are 2004.

In Jim Jarmusch’s Paterson, Adam Driver’s character Paterson refuses to get a cellphone, comparing it “to a leash.” You, pop culture, are guilty of reminding me of a time when technology, like the iPhone Paterson rejects, wasn’t a shackle, keeping us constantly connected—and not in a good way—to others, our work, and our obligations (not to mention Donald Trump’s tweets).

I love your television marathons, despite what they do to my productivity, but they also make me miss simpler times. I wish it was 2008 and life was like that episode of The Wire where Jimmy McNulty leaves his business card on the windshield of Omar Little’s van when he needs to track him down. Fast forward to 2017, and McNulty would be sending texts, 12 emails, a Twitter DM, pleas on Facebook Messenger, and maybe an eggplant emoji if he was feeling frisky. If stealing from drug dealers wasn’t stressing Little out, McNulty’s constant attempts to reach him would.

I know you have never met a milestone you didn’t love reminding us of (you’re such a show off!). Your 20th anniversary love letters to Radiohead’s OK Computer make me long for a time when we thought of technology in terms of social alienation, not social media. You reminded me that this December, Wall Street turns 30 years old, which brought back fond memories of Michael Douglas’s big-ass cellphone in the movie—you know, the one that looks like he had a giant Chevy strapped to his ear. The reception probably sucks, but at least I would be able to find my phone in my purse without a 30-person search party and a Black & Decker flashlight.

Your love/hate relationship with Sex and the City makes me long for a Carrie Bradshaw-sized laptop, one bigger than Kim Cattrall’s ego when it comes to filming a third movie of the series. I need a computer that I can’t carry everywhere, so I don’t feel guilty for not working on the subway or while eating at Subway.

Speaking of old school technology, Vice recently informed me that flip phones are making a comeback. This announcement brought me back to 2006, which I truly consider your golden age, a time before I was required to keep up with the Kardashians and Britney Spears used umbrellas strictly for rain coverage.

I love when you remind me of movies where the internet is called “the Net,” and cellphones can kill Shia LaBeouf with a single dial. I want to stay in that place in time, when we were scared of technology, hesitant to let it into our everyday lives.

I miss how sites like Gawker (RIP) covered you in the celeb gossip glory days, before everyone with an internet connection thought they could report on you. When people disrespect you by only giving you 140 characters, I want to cry on top of my stack of old school US Weekly’s, burying myself in endless coverage of who wore it best.

I long for the innocent ways your celebrity deaths were covered. Remember when I waited for the six o’clock news and the weekly issue of People to hear the details of River Phoenix’s death? Coverage used to be respectful—it checked facts and avoided rumour. The internet has made you insensitive and impatient, posting every morbid detail whether it is true or not.

Your recent reboots have been especially hard on me. I know Will & Grace characters using Grindr or Twin Peaks characters on Skype is supposed to make you feel current. It just makes me feel sad, confused, and nostalgic. Agent Cooper and his dictaphone forever.

Illustration by Nicole Stishenko

Photo courtesy of CBC.

When I was a child, I used to confuse the title of Us Weekly magazine—a glossy about celebrities—as U.S. magazine, the entirety of America summed up in a glossy about celebrities. Twenty years later, the same can be done with Canada: The Story of Us. First-person plural pronouns are a messy affair, and it turns out that the CBC, rather than developing its own approach, borrowed a format from production company Nutopia that had previously been used to create America: The Story of Us. It shows.

Originally, I decided to watch The Story of Us because, as a white Canadian settler, it’s particularly important to be aware of national myth-making so that I can recognize my own role and understand how my country sees itself. (Or, at least, how the CBC sees us when it’s asked to make a glossy docuseries to celebrate Canada’s 150th birthday).

But the series is both a failure in the way it navigates and frames history as well as the way it presents that history. Though each CGI-enhanced, this-is a-CRUCIAL-moment-in-the-fabric-of-Canada episode aims for action-movie-level tension, I couldn’t make it through more than four. Each one felt like the longest 44 minutes of my life. I say this having had broken bones, suffered severe food poisoning, and made many awful life decisions.

The series suffers from both momentary and major problems. Momentary: The War of 1812 is referred to, for example, as Canada’s “War of Independence.” No. Canada did not confederate until 1867, and, last time I checked, we are still a constitutional monarchy! The U.S. invaded, and groups of British colonists banded together with First Nations and fought to repel them. A war repelling an invading force is not a war of independence. It’s just a war. (One in which the British burned down the White House, which sadly does not receive play in this dull-as-dust episode.)

Major: Each episode features a blend of dramatic reenactment and commentary from experts and, no offence to handyman Mike Holmes or MMA fighter Georges St-Pierre, irrelevant celebrities. It’s hard to say, but the experts seem to have been fed lines from a script—lines that often echo the narration instead of adding anything interesting. For its part, the narration isn’t much better: Too little time is devoted to historical complexity, and too much time is devoted to underscoring, in case the viewers had not noticed it themselves, the deep and lasting importance of the moment at hand. The most egregiously ridiculous celebrity talking heads include Jim Balsillie and former Dragons’ Den panellist Michele Romanow who provide an “entrepreneurial” context for everything from the making of the Canada stove to the digging of the Welland Canal. Lesson one: Canada’s reason for existence was almost wholly mercantile. Lesson two: Our current government’s obsession with innovation is cut from the same cloth, and we’re just as unaware about it now as we were then.

In an effort to draw audiences in with star power and CGI, each episode feels incredibly slow and bogged down by extraneous contextualization. Had the structural defects of the Welland Canal been handled in narration, the series could have made more space to stop and question the overhunting of beavers or some tales from the seedy, racially complex and often violent history of the Hudson’s Bay Company.

The CBC had 10 hours, before commercials, to tell whatever stories it felt was important to our history. Those 10 hours could have come together with maps, visuals, and recreations to outline a cohesive timeline of Canada from well before settlers until now—something like the David Suzuki-narrated Geologic Journey, which tells the story of the geologic history of present-day Canada. Or they could have been used to challenge the dominant narratives of history we’ve learned in school, focussing on lesser-known figures, complicating our understanding of people like Sir John A. Macdonald, and challenging the difficult racist chapters of our past—like the Chinese head tax, the proposed ban on Black immigrants, or the Sixties Scoop. Or, as Metro columnist Vicky Mochama pointed out on her podcast with Ishmael Daro, Safe Space, all that time could have turned into many new Heritage Minutes.

Almost anything would have been better than shoehorning Canadian history into Nutopia’s format. Canada continues to celebrate the military and mercantile highlights of our past while overlooking much of our complex history—history that is more interesting and more important than much of what’s included in The Story of Us. When it comes to learning about our history, it’s time to change the frame—to focus less on celebrity and more on policy and everyday people; to move away from celebration, and toward education and understanding.

IMAGE BY © HOME BOX OFFICE, INC.

My decision to watch Flavor Flav over Tony Soprano was, at the time, a no-brainer. On March 12, 2006, I had two television options: a viewing party of the first episode of the final, and sixth, season of HBO’s hit crime drama The Sopranos or a solo session with the first season ender of VH1’s Flavor of Love, a Bachelor-style reality show starring Public Enemy’s Flav and his big clock.

While I anxiously tuned in to see whether Flav would choose Hoopz or New York, it felt like the rest of the world was in New Jersey. That spring day in 2006 was the closest I came to an episode of The Sopranos, sitting out the show’s previous five seasons, ignoring its 111 Emmy nominations and glossing over its numerous accolades, including best-written television series of all time honours from the Writers Guild of America. But try as I might, I could never fully escape the show. It came up often in conversations, box sets caught my eye when there were still video stores to rent them from, and friends regularly shamed me for never having watched a single episode.

A few months ago, I finally caved. A woman can only live on the Jersey Shore surrounded by teen moms for so long. As my Facebook feed filled up with Donald Trump stories and the world started to resemble a bad reality show, I craved good writing and smart storytelling. Top chefs and models, once my escape from the outside world, couldn’t save me from a reality that looked like an episode of The Apprentice gone off the rails. I hit play on the first episode and never looked back. Tony had his ducks, Carmela had her priest, A.J. had his baby fat, and I had a new favourite show. I may have been tardy to the party, but it still felt wonderful.

The Sopranos was definitely great TV, but there was another reason I loved it: None of my friends or family were watching it. To find mentions of the show on social media or the internet I had to use search functions and other Google wizardry. There was no spoiler alert shaming, no front-page analysis, and no water cooler conversation—what old people did before Facebook. It felt like I was the only one watching a show, and for the first time in a very long time TV didn’t feel stressful.

Binge watching has turned television into a competitive sport. A marathon, but with, hopefully, less sweat. Now we’re not only judged by what we watch, but by how much we consume. How many episodes did you watch this weekend? How many in one sitting? Only one season, where’s your commitment to the cause?

Before binge watching became fashionable, being camped out on my couch all weekend in dirty Roots sweatpants and a stained Mudhoney shirt, eating chip dip with my finger, and watching Laguna Beach was just called lazy. Now I am shamed if I don’t forgo sleep for days to mainline the new season of House of Cards the minute it is released. Netflix and chill has become anything but, well, chill.

Watching The Sopranos alone I felt chill. There wasn’t a pressure to keep up so I watched at my own pace, often leaving the show for days at a time. Social media may make television feel like a communal experience, but it can also mean we spend more time watching Twitter than the actual program. I read Sopranos commentary, but I didn’t feel like I was cramming for an exam. Gone was that overwhelming morning-after need to impress my co-workers with analysis and behind-the-scenes facts.

With each new season of The Sopranos I felt more alive, even as the mob hits piled up. I returned to scenes and episodes, savouring them in a way that’s impossible with binge watching. At last count I watched the scenes where Tony strangles Ralphie and he and Christopher deal with the aftermath at least 12 times. I cried alone on my couch when Adriana was killed, wondered aloud to myself whether Ben Kingsley actually would have been right for Cleaver, and cringed along with my cat at the homophobia Vito experienced. The Sopranos was mine and mine alone. It was bliss.

When I finally got to the last episode I waited. This June marks the 10th anniversary of the finale so another day or two didn’t matter. “Not now Tony,” I would say setting my remote control on the coffee table. There was no build-up, no must-see TV moment. It didn’t bother me that I already knew how it ended and that some obsessed fans of the show can’t hear “Don’t Stop Believin” without feeling culturally short-changed. I loved the ending, but I haven’t talked to anyone about it. It is still all mine.

I have decided to get into The Wire next. I heard it’s good and it has that annoying guy from The Affair.

I should begin by stating that while I collected Archie Comics as a kid, I am not so imprisoned in my childhood as to receive any deviation from the original script as a personal affront. In fact, The CW’s Riverdale—a modern adaptation of the inter-generationally adored comic strip—is in such desperate need of some 21st-century reality that, as I binged all available episodes on Netflix, I became so empty of human emotion as to doubt if I’d ever had a childhood at all.

The overall quality of Riverdale, filmed in Vancouver, can be best conveyed through its shape-shifting setting. Almost every meal of every character is eaten at Pop Tate’s 24-hour diner, presumably making it Riverdale’s only restaurant; but, in episode seven, Veronica and her friends go clubbing, taking advantage of the anonymity needed for underage drinking, and swaying the night away on a sardined dance floor. Everyone of adult age seems to have gone to school together and then procreated at a similar time—their children are now all in the same grade—meaning the town’s generations progress in small, cohesive waves. Yet, during episode four, the Southside Serpents gang is introduced, leading the viewer to assume that Riverdale is not only large enough to support organized crime but is too large to be taken over by it entirely. Speaking of the law, Riverdale is a one-sheriff town, but that sheriff is totally fine with interrogating minors without parental or legal presence, much in the way of a rogue cop from Baltimore.

The borders of Riverdale are amorphous and highly adaptive, able to shift in order to suit the storyline. Because of this malleability, Riverdale functions as the physical embodiment of the most powerful political force of our time: nostalgia.

Critics state Riverdale echoes Pretty Little Liars and Teen Wolf—two shows I have admittedly never seen but am confident I can deduce the entirety of both plots from their respective titles. I, however, would argue that Riverdale is unique as it uses nostalgia for its sole source of fuel, having no need for sustained story, escalating tension, character development, or even actors who can deliver lines without sounding like a Speak & Spell. Despite this vapidity, Riverdale should not be cast aside as irrelevant. The series parallels our current cultural moment to a degree not televised since The Wire. While Netflix is suddenly brimming with millennial reboots (Gilmore Girls: A Year in the Life, Fuller House) and with more on the way (X-Files), Riverdale speaks to the possible perils of this movement—where old ideas are favoured over new, stasis over progress, what once worked over what could.

You don’t need a literary scholar to tell you Archie Comics had a troubling history with whitewashing. The television revamp afforded the brand a second chance at diversification. But it’s easy to deduce that Riverdale opted to play it safe and keep Archie’s original demographic: the young and the white. Characters who mean nothing to the show’s storylines are cast with people of colour: Mayor McCoy, Reggie, Mr. Weatherbee, Pop Tate. This diversity quota only serves to bolster the status of the show’s caucasian protagonists as Riverdale’s central characters are forever-frozen in their whiteness. (There is a chance that Veronica’s mother may be Latin American or Spanish because of two throw-away mija references, but neither Veronica nor any other character makes mention of her possible non-white heritage.) And in the script, every actor—even Indigenous Samoan KJ Apa, who plays Archie, and Brazilian Camila Mendes, who plays Veronica—conforms to the show’s white-passing ideals. In Riverdale’s attempt to modernize, however, the show’s writers change the one character who—through the original creator’s own ignorance—represented a non-normative identity: asexuality. With the sound of locking lips with Betty Cooper, Jughead Jones joins the fold.

The show’s caucasian normativity may simply be a reflection of the setting; small-town America (or however big this town is) isn’t often thought of being a fruit medley. But that lack of diversity only makes questions like Veronica’s unspoken ethnicity even odder. And why doesn’t the show focus on a Black principal of a white school but instead spends spine-bending hours on the social struggles of Archie, television’s dullest character since the yule log? Betty Cooper can drug, handcuff, and water-torture a Black athlete, Chuck Clayton, in order to solicit a confession of slut-shaming, and the only fallout is Chuck’s expulsion from the football team—not a peep about segregation, Ferguson, or even the Geneva convention.

Riverdale desires to comment on contemporary issues while being simultaneously terrified of doing so. Here, we see the lure of nostalgia: to live in a time when identity wasn’t an ever-present, ever-crushing reality; when racial issues were limited to the margins and the marginalized; when polite society asked nothing more of us than to start sentences with, “I’m not racist, but…” before saying something that was, indeed, quite racist.

Nostalgia is built off false history. As historians repeatedly state, the past had an unending line of phobias that favoured the few at the cost of the many. Nostalgia now holds such sway, however, because millennials from Riverdalian demographics (of which I include myself ) may be the first generation who are able to statistically prove the past was better than the present; now, there are no jobs to work, homes to buy, exciting new flavours of soda to experience. But to be nostalgic is to pout in the well-worn throne of privilege, picking at the seams, while waxing wistfully about when all chairs were made this well.

Much like the after-school specials of old, Riverdale’s characters approach all problems with the same apocalyptic frenzy. Whether it’s solving the show’s central murder or getting into the school’s talent show, the dial of every character is cranked to 11. And since the plot cares about everything, it also cares about nothing. Which, to be fair, is a startlingly apt dramatization of a Facebook feed. But the upshot of this unceasing urgency is the writing becomes so incredibly bored with itself that, like a clicktivist, it abandons most ideas before its conclusion.

In turn, the show offers various threads that, as of writing, have been mentioned once and immediately abandoned. A complete list of these untied threads would last longer than the series. The following is only a highlight reel: Moose, a brawny varsity athlete, is queer and in the closet; his girlfriend, Midge, is alluded to but never seen. Chuck Clayton, the aforementioned recipient of Betty’s Guantanamo justice, is cut from the football team for slandering women; but his father, who is also the school coach, is revealed to have previously covered for his son’s transgressions though remains gainfully employed. And Jughead, who is homeless and living Harry Potter-style beneath a staircase in the high school, can somehow afford a MacBook Pro on which to type a novel that acts as the show’s narration—a novel which is able to exist outside the confines of time as it repeatedly predicts future (“On Tuesday, half-way through fifth period, the first arrest would be made.”). Also, how can the leader of the Southside Serpents still hold down a full-time job as a construction worker? And where the fuck did Archie’s dog, Vegas, go?

Rather than working against the show, however, these shortcomings all aid its thesis: none of it matters. It would be incorrect to call Riverdale self-indulgent because to do so would imply that Riverdale has a self to indulge. Much like nostalgia itself, when you put even the slightest weight upon the series’ internal logic, it collapses. How could Archie go the entire summer without seeing anyone except Ms. Grundy and Jughead? Who cares? You don’t need narrative when you have neon lights radiating across a blonde woman’s face.

Riverdale has a preternatural ability to disengage with the present moment, incessantly historicizing itself by casting its gaze from the future; for example, after the town’s drive-in is demolished, the audience is gifted the lines, “Maybe they’ll save it. All the pieces. Store it in the town hall attic and rebuild it in a hundred years. Wonder who the hell we were.” I, too, am wondering who the hell you are, Jughead. This show has made me wonder the same of myself. Nostalgia speaks to an idea of return, to times of simplicity: when teenagers were shot for mysterious and glamorous reasons, not for wearing a hoodie. But the problem with return is that doing so demands you turn your back on contemporary issues like race, gender, and (in the case of Pop Tate’s Diner) America’s diabetic death-drive. Riverdale’s creators have confused the rearview with the windshield, believing they’re hurtling forward instead of swerving haphazardly in reverse; it’s as if they actually believe their pilot could drive us toward a new, modern, high-definition understanding of ourselves. I’d like to see them try. Please—I mean it—try

I remember the day I booked the now-hit web series Carmilla like it was yesterday. I was so ecstatic I performed an awkward little happy dance to the dust bunnies in my bedroom when I received the call from my talent agent. I had never wanted to land a part so intensely. From the moment I read the character breakdown for the titular role, this unexplainable and innate feeling told me it was a role I had to play. Maybe it’s because playing a vampire was something I had always wanted to cross off my “acting bucket list,” or because Carmilla was described as being “capable of profound loneliness” and that spoke to me. But mostly, I think it’s because it would finally give me the opportunity to portray a lesbian on screen—and one who actually gets her fairytale ending.

As a pansexual woman, I grew up watching the only lesbian show that was available to me over and over again. It was Showtime’s The L Word, and when I first started to realize I was also romantically interested in women, it was my saving grace. As it flickered on the television in my teenage bedroom, I recall thinking how cool it was and hoped for the courage to be out and proud. Now my own fans tell me they have a similar experience when binge-watching episodes of our little show on YouTube, and it’s gratifying to be a role model.

If you’re not familiar with the show, Carmilla is a modern retelling of Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu’s gothic novella of the same name. Written 25 years before Bram Stoker’s Dracula, the original story is considered the first vampire tale by some historians, and that it was Le Fanu who created the negative, oversexualized lesbian vampire trope. Nearly 150 years later, the story was revamped into a video-blog–style adaptation that takes a cautionary tale about the “dangers” of female sexuality and turns it on its head. Instead of an outdated homophobic story, the team created a version of Carmilla that offers both a queer-positive and feminist narrative. The importance of such a series resonated with many, and received a great deal of support in return, from executive producer U by Kotex, branded entertainment agency shift2, and production company Smokebomb Entertainment.

There are too many places in the world—unfortunately, even in Canada—where being anything but heteronormative is still not accepted. In some cases, it’s even illegal and many people in the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer community (especially youth) feel alienated, isolated, and sometimes even suicidal. Many turn to scripted content for escape—but finding positive portrayals can prove difficult. Studies have shown that the landscape of media is slowly changing for the better: a GLAAD media report examining 2016 television series found almost five percent of characters were identified as LGBTQ+. But too often, lesbian characters’ stories end in misery: these women die, have breakdowns, or end up heartbroken. It fuels the misguided idea that there is something wrong with being queer.

That’s why it is so imperative that queer characters are no longer misrepresented in film and television. And that is why I think Carmilla is such an important and successful show: because it stars the queer heroes that LGBTQ fans deserve.

Carmilla is the full escape. It’s young adults solving mysteries and fighting evil in their supernatural university. It’s action and adventure, whimsy and campiness. Sexuality isn’t in the foreground, and it isn’t a harrowing coming-out story (albeit, coming-out stories are important to share too) but it still features an honest and realistic lesbian relationship—one that has resonated with fans.

I first realized how important queer representation in entertainment was in August 2014, when I was shooting the first season of Carmilla. We filmed it in only four days, over two blocks of shooting, and after the first block we released six episodes that began trending online. While sitting in hair and makeup, one of my co-stars showed me the first piece of fan art someone had posted on social media of my character. It was a charming pencil sketch of me as the broody gay vamp, attached to a virtual “thank you” letter. My heart melted and it brought me to tears. That is when I knew I was part of something bigger.

Today, Carmilla has three seasons, a prequel, a holiday special, more than 50 million views worldwide, and will soon be a feature film. One simple piece of fan art has become tens of thousands of creations, and it’s a digital phenomenon that allows me travel to comic conventions, media events, panels, and more.

But for me, it’s not about red carpets and the illusion of glamour. It’s about feeling the warm energy a room full of fans gives off, and meeting parents who say to me, “Thanks for telling my kid they’re worthy.” It’s the lives and perspectives that have been changed forever.

Carmilla is one of few positive queer love stories available on screen for LGBTQ+ audiences, and it is important for me not take for granted the gift of social responsibility that I have been given with this show. I hope to continue to accurately and fairly represent queer women, even as I shift into writing and producing content of my own. My heart and eyes have been forced wide open, and I encourage others to think critically about the media they’re consuming—all because of our fans, and a little web series that could.