Programming Reality: Perspectives on English-Canadian Television

The last group of essays, in "Mapping Geographies," addresses the locality of Canadian television, offering insights into the ways that representations of the country's urban areas can forge relationships between authences, spaces, and places. Sarah Matheson's contribution on Global's Train 48 engages with the kinds of communal messages that emerge as the series soapily chronicles a group of commuters' daily travels between work and home. The program collapses and deliberately frames public and private narratives into the structure of everyday life, creating "the sense that these characters' lives unfold within a larger public sphere, as they engage with some of the same issues and events affecting viewers' own lives. It situates personal dramas within the context of a shared public world" (p. 296). Matheson also highlights Train 48's shoe-string budget, as the program's "innovative" approach was conditioned in part by its tight finances. A consistent concern with production contexts and constraints cuts across Progamming Reality's thematic sections, making clear that at times degrees of "realism" are dictated by economic imperatives. As [Michele Byers] discusses, series such as Canadian Idol are re-worked templates imported from other countries, attempts to cash in on proven formulas in an era of continually shrinking subsidies, and the CRTCs expanded definitions of priority programming.