“And reruns all become our history.” Goo Goo Dolls, Name

I realized at the end of this semester, that for over a decade, the above lyrical excerpt has been the single constant feature of my introductory television studies syllabus. I originally used it as a subtitle to signal the centrality of television to our sense of community, sociality, and cultural memory. Reading it now, it helps explain the fact that I actually teach very little about Canadian television despite being located at a Canadian university. Reruns of Canadian television drama are few, fleeting, and scattered (or more accurately: ‘sprinkled’) across the spectrum of cable and specialty channels. My students have no memories of a national television culture and, in the absence of tangible video evidence, I would have to resort to pantomime to discuss domestic drama circa the 1970s or earlier. As it is, I sound like I’m channeling Grandpa Simpson every time I try to explain television from the 1980s. Given Canadian broadcasting policy’s obsession with cultural cohesion and nation building, I can only describe this as an “epic fail,” to quote the young ‘uns.

Click here to view the embedded video.

This column ruminates on the role of reruns and their connections to time, place, and cultural discourse. Readers will recognize the title’s homage to Derek Kompare’s book Rerun Nation1 and Martin Roberts’ earlier Flow column, “This was England” . Both authors provide exemplary insights into how ‘vintage’ programming constructs dominant discourses of heritage as it relates to both a sense of national community as well as specific national broadcasting structures and industrial practices. Moreover, they provide important interventions into television studies, in general. Too often, we focus on ‘the new and original’ and relegate syndicated programming to the realm of media history. Reruns, however, compel us to consider how televisual constructions of/from the past resonate and are interpreted within the present moment. They play a critical role in generational memory and social critique. The Canadian television story is the antithesis of the British and American industrial examples. It is a narrative of absence. My attempt here is to merely raise new questions about nostalgia and television: Is nostalgia necessarily a conservative form of remembering? Can nostalgia be productive?

The scarcity of Canadian reruns is a result of the tensions between the economic imperatives and cultural objectives that have long marked national broadcasting and the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) in particular. Canadian private broadcasters have not, until recently, contributed very much to the production of domestic drama. Therefore, the evolution of a rerun culture largely depends on access to the national public broadcaster’s library of programming. And the contractual obligation to pay royalties to the production crews and creative teams dating back to the early years of in-house drama production have made reruns a less attractive option to original domestic programming and international imports. Reruns are simply seen as too expensive within the overall cost-benefit analyses of industry decision makers in a small-market nation where the domestic audience will never be large enough to recoup expenses. This stands in marked contrast to the American industry where reruns provide relatively inexpensive programming and are integral profit generators in offnet scheduling. Profit motives and market size have also delayed the transfer of early Canadian drama series to DVD format. And this is to say nothing of the cost of film and video restoration to contemporary broadcast and digital standards.2 Consequently, Canadian dramas — prior to the proliferation of home video recorders — are ephemeral. They exist primarily in the recollections of those who watched them in real time. If you were to ask a Canadian teenager in the early 1980s to name a rerun, the response would likely be Fawlty Towers or M*A*S*H — reinforcing the postcolonial positioning that national broadcasting was designed to overcome.

Televisual heritage and nostalgia, in the Canadian context, thus become more individualized and generationally specific than their British and American counterparts. As Kompare’s work underlines, American children have continual access to the television cultures of their parents and grandparents in a manner that destabilizes the idea of “heritage” as a canon and reconstructs it as: “a part of the lived, historical experience of a culture. It becomes a critical resource, blurring the concepts of history and memory and forging national and cultural identities” (p. 103). It is the capacity of televisual nostalgia to operate as a “critical resource,” that I find most intriguing. Roberts’ earlier column aptly demonstrates how reruns (and the BBC’s role as arbiter of the national culture) can contribute to a regressive form of nostalgic longing for a ‘simpler time.’ Citing Gilroy’s depiction of “post-imperial melancholia,” Roberts hits the mark in that televisual retrospectives can elide the complexities of the politics of race and class. Yet it can also be argued that the very juxtaposition of vintage television with programs such as Ali G. and The Kumars at No. 42 offer the opportunity for ideological critique of both an imaginary mono-cultural past as well as the question of televisual authority/authorship itself. The past can also bring the present into stark relief and provide an opportunity for in depth political and social dialogue.

Canadian television, in contrast, provides a sense of existing in a perpetual present. Here, the past is indeed “a foreign country.” The lack of reruns is also a point of rupture that has impeded a sense of television heritage and, more importantly, prevented glimpses of the past (as retold by TV) that might foster understanding of the political and social struggles that continue to this day. An illustrative comparison here is between Wojeck (CBC 1966-8) and Da Vinci’s Inquest (CBC 1998-2005). Wojeck was a crime procedural based on the real-life cases of Toronto’s chief coroner Dr. Morton Schulman, and is often cited as the standard bearer for the social justice tone and dramatic realism that are seen as hallmarks of domestic drama. Wojeck pulled no punches in confronting issues of urban conflict, sexuality, and the drug trade. Thirty years later, Dominic Da Vinci (also based on a “real”chief coroner, Vancouver’s Larry Campbell) arrived on Canadian television screens to speak for the marginalized and crusade against precisely the same issues of structural inequality, poverty, prostitution, and drug addiction. To the best of my knowledge, Wojeck has only been rerun once in the past 10-15 years. If we were to imagine these two series as circulating simultaneously we can see the continuity of a specific television aesthetic as well as an indictment of a society that has not learned the lessons of history. Reruns are not necessarily sentimental journeys to an idyllic past. Our evaluation of the relationship between nostalgia and televisual heritage may also be a normative. For example, the current on-line petition to bring Canada’s longest-running drama series, The Beachcombers (CBC 1972-1990) back in reruns and DVD format indicates that many audiences indeed desire a return to a simpler time and place where the quirky characters of Gibson’s Landing defined British Columbia’s Sunshine Coast. However, the nostalgia for the small coastal community of the series’ story world includes an affinity for discourses that naturalized multicultural harmony, respect for native cultures, and a commitment to environmental issues (long before climate change hit the headlines). In a non-preachy narrative style, the series projected a preferred reading of progressive politics for generations of Canadians.

The proliferation of delivery windows and increased demand for content may provide an opportunity to revisit Canada’s television heritage. As Kompare notes, “boutique television” for niche audiences has established rerun cable stations par excellence (TV Land, Nick At Nite). In this regard, Canadian content regulations have somewhat resurrected the domestic rerun. Audiences of Dejaview and TV Land Canada may, by happenstance, stumble across Night Heat or North of 60 in between episodes of Love American Style or Facts of Life. But something may be lost as much as gained. For example, the fictional world of Lynx River, NWT in North of 60 introduced the Dene Nation to an avid national audience on the CBC (1992-7). In a boutique TV world, audiences must know about and be motivated enough to go out of their way to find reruns of the series. And it may only be shown there for a matter of months.

In the end, this column may be guilty of nostalgia too. Nostalgia for a time when broadcast television might have been a “cultural forum”3 where stories of people of different cultures, communities, generations, and interests encountered one another and, through the rerun, continued a dialogue across time. Two final musings as I run out of virtual space. First, I often wonder if the Degrassi franchise receives so much public and academic attention because it has not been ‘off’ Canadian TV, in one form or another, for more than twenty years. It carries several generations of cultural memory and may now actually be Canada’s television heritage. Second, I realize that my subtitle is something of a misnomer. Amnesia means forgetting something you experienced. In a no-rerun nation, you can’t forget what you never knew.

1. The Beachcombers
2. Wojeck
3. Da Vinci’s Inquest
4. North of 60

Please feel free to comment.

1. Kompare, Derek, 2005. Rerun Nation: How Repeats Invented American TelevisionRoutledge.
2. Binning, Cheryl, 2001. Film Past and Future: Preserving Canada’s Cinematic Heritage. Take One, March 21
3. Newcomb, Horace and Paul M. Hirsch, 1983. “Television as a Cultural Forum,” Quarterly Review of Film Studies

Excerpts from IMDb message boards:

“[T]his is America we are talking about, the U.S.A. and we don’t care about our Canadian and Mexican neighbors so why would we care about English shows (collectively, not me). … And we are generally too self absorbed and parocial (sic) as are all empires in their hey-day to want to watch a lot of directly imported British TV. Though for some reason we are on a big kick of hiring Brit actors to be in American shows and do fake, but nearly flawless American accents.” – lisamj1973 (January 3, 2008, Thread: “Life on Mars 2006”).

“I guess the fans of the Brit show are happy now. You all remember them? The ones who were here at the beginning of the season swamping this board with how horrid the show was and how ABC ‘had no right’ to destroy the memory and image of the great Brit series with this ‘American Schlock’ … ripping every detail apart in a second by second comparison of the minutiae of sets, actors, lines, music, ad infinitem; ad nauseum.” — sevenof9fl (March 18, 2009, Thread: “I guess the fans of the Brit Show”).

“This isn’t a ‘US is evil’ type thread. Just stating the obvious. If their TV can travel across cultures, then so can those from Australia, England and wherever … And just being more trusting of non US shows will breakdown the insular attitude of the nation.
— justin_leebrigs (April 16, 2007, Thread: “Life on Mars 2006”).

“I am from the US and I prefer the UK original in pretty much every aspect: setting, themes, characterization, actors, drama, humor, and so forth.” — kinokima (March 12, 2009, Thread: “Life on Mars 2008”).

When ABC announced that it had purchased the rights to develop a domestic adaptation of the award-winning BBC drama, Life on Mars (2006-7), the network sparked a transnational audience debate (at times a feud) throughout the blogosphere and on newspaper message boards. Invocations of ‘cultural imperialism’ were common and even American television critics were concerned that ABC’s version (LoMUS) would be another example where, “American networks took good British shows and removed all the stuff that made them good.”1 As the above comments indicate, the salience of the ‘aura’ of the original was at stake. At a broader level, however, a transatlantic audience dialogue developed that explored the boundaries of cultural difference in a global television environment as well as the divergent national industrial practices that structure drama production. This column provides a mere sketch of the issues raised by the domestication of Life on Mars and situates them within the current challenges facing the mainstream American broadcast networks.

Life on Mars is the story of Manchester DCI Sam Tyler (British actor John Simm) who, following a car accident in 2006, awakens to find himself as a detective inspector in 1973. Tyler is uncertain as to whether he has traveled through time, has gone insane, or is in a coma. His sense of dissonance as a new millennium detective in a by-gone era of police practices allows the series to explore the socio-cultural specificity of the politics of race and gender in 1970s Britain. However, LoMUK operates on multiple levels for its domestic audience. It is simultaneously a crime procedural with science fiction undertones as well as a nostalgic portrait of the styles and music of the decade. Moreover, it speaks to the nation’s television history as an intertextual reference to 1970s crime dramas, most notably The Sweeney (ITV 1975-8), which depicted the darker side of urban British policing. For the series’ fans, this rootedness in a particular space and time(s) made it unimaginable for Tyler to be merely transplanted into an American context. And the American version, originally set in Los Angeles, was beset by creative conflicts from the beginning. The show’s executive producer David E. Kelley left; the setting was moved to New York; and the only remaining cast member was Jason O’Mara as the lead, Sam Tyler. Casting proved to be such a challenge that the new U.S. production team contacted Philip Glenister to reprise his role as the politically incorrect DCI (now Lieutenant) Gene Hunt. Glenister, however, had already signed on to the British sequel, Ashes to Ashes.2 This invitation, combined with the fact that the first seven episodes of LoMUS were practical carbon copies of the BBC series, inevitably led British audiences to question: why not just import the original?

The answer to that query lies in the economic objectives of the American broadcast networks as well as executives’ conventional imaginings of their target audiences. In regard to the first, LoMUK was a limited-run production of 16 episodes over two series (“season” in American television). While limited-run series are common in most national television industries, they do not meet the need of American broadcast networks to produce a sufficient number of episodes for future syndication. Ironically, with the cancellation of LoMUS a few weeks ago, the American version became a de facto limited series with only one more episode than the original. The second component addresses the risk-averse nature of the American networks and their common-sense ideologies of the cultural competencies of domestic audiences. The “heartland myth” that Victoria Johnson so aptly describes, prevails in programming decisions despite the increasing fragmentation of audiences across media platforms and subscription channels. Victoria E. Johnson (2008).3 The construction of an imagined mid-west/populist touchstone that stands in for the unknowable audience reinforces the industry’s assumption that any series set outside of the United States will simply be too foreign or alienating for the target market. From Hollywood’s perspective, 1973 Manchester truly is Mars. The history of successful domestic adaptations also serves as a self-fulfilling industrial prophecy. Throughout the 1970s some of the most popular American comedies on network television were direct remakes of British originals: All in the Family (Till Death Us Do Part), Three’s Company (Man About the House), Sanford and Son (Steptoe and Son). The success of one of the few direct imports, The Avengers, illustrates the lapse in institutional memory. As Miller notes, part of the popularity of the series during its network run on ABC (1966-7 and 1968-9) was attributed to its capacity to represent a particular imagining of “Britishness.”4 Avengers aside, however, most original British television was relegated to PBS.

The rigid national boundaries of American network television have changed dramatically since the days of All in the Family et al. With the advent of various torrent and p2p video-sharing sites, audiences now have access to both original series and their adaptations at virtually the same time. They are also available in more legitimated satellite and subscription venues such as BBC America (albeit edited for commercials). Therefore, I want to conclude this cursory analysis with a series of questions about the future of U.S. domestic adaptations — both as cultural productions and topics of academic study. To date, most of the scholarship on format adaptations has examined the hybridization or glocalization dimensions of reality television, makeover programs, and game shows. Studies of adapted scripted drama and comedy, such as Griffin’s analysis of the American version of The Office, provide excellent details of how a series can be ‘made to work’ for international audiences but there remains a gap in our understanding about what this means for national audiences in the original broadcast market.5 The reactions of British fans to LoMUS indicate a different depth of cultural resonance and ownership of television drama than we might expect for Big Brother or What Not to Wear. In this respect, imitation may not be flattering but rather seen as an appropriation by a more dominant cultural player. Here, fictional television series can still be seen as belonging to the particular experiences of space and place. Questions of cultural proximity are also brought to the forefront: how foreign is too foreign in the containment of difference? I’ve attempted to introduce these issues through the example of Life on Mars (as opposed to a series such as Ugly Betty) because the drama would appear to meet the dominant language and genre requirements of the American broadcast networks.

The economic challenges currently confronting the American broadcast networks may provide an impetus for change. It was only a few years ago that Canadian television series set in actual Canadian cities were considered too foreign for American audiences. In 2004, amidst great trepidation, CBS purchased the Vancouver-based crime procedural Da Vinci’s Inquest to address the dearth of syndicated scripted drama that had resulted from an over-reliance on reality programs. Produced within a national public broadcasting system (CBC), Da Vinci more closely resembled the British Cracker than it did most American crime dramas. It also defied the network’s conventional wisdom about imported programming by showing the greatest percentage of audience gains among its competitors in off-network programming.6 In fact, the relative success of the series encouraged American networks to look at imported Canadian programming as an insurance policy during the WGA strike. CBS’s purchase of Flashpoint, which won its market in primetime as a summer replacement series, prompted the other networks to follow suit. Together CBS and NBC will directly import five new Canadian series for 2009-10 as they continue to cut production costs in a softening advertising market. Could the new trend to air imports extend to other countries? Canadians with their indistinguishable accents may be able to pass as Americans but that did not initially overcome the ‘cultural discount’ that was seen to define programs explicitly set in Toronto, Vancouver, or rural Saskatchewan. If this discount no longer applies, can imports of television series set in Slough or Manchester, UK be far behind? The corollary to the headiness that has accompanied the recent success of Canadian imports to one of the world’s most restricted markets is the expressed concern that domestic producers will now cater to the cultural appetites of the American broadcast networks. But that is a topic for another time.

Image Credits:

1. Life on Mars (US)
2. Life on Mars (UK)
3. Till Death Us do Part
4. All in the Family
5. Man about the House
6. Three’s Company

Please feel free to comment.

1. Maureen Ryan (August 5, 2008). “The New ‘Life on Mars’ – Is this ‘Journeyman,’ take 2?” http://featuresblogs.chicagotribune.com/entertainment_tv/2008/08/american-life-0-html
2. Laura Collins, (October 26, 2008). “Phil, baby, it’s Harvey Keitel. How am I gonna follow your DCI Hunt?” http://www.dailymail.co.uk/tvshowbiz/article-1080583
3. Heartland TV: Prime Time Television and the Struggle for U.S. Identity. New York: New York University Press.
4. Toby Miller (1997). The Avengers. London: BFI.
5. Jeffrey L. Griffin (2008). The Americanization of The Office. Journal of Popular Film and Television 35(4): 154-63.
6. Christopher Lisotta (2006). Program Partners Syndicates Canadian ‘Crime Watch’ Block. Television Week 25(16): 28-30.

Two years ago I attended NATPE’s annual sales exhibition and conference. As the event wound up and I skimmed through my notes, I realized that a week’s worth of industry discussion could be summarized in the phrase “monetize your brand.” The dominance of the term monetization, across a wide range of panel presentations, reflected the extent to which television executives are struggling to sustain the commercial structure of program production and distribution in an era of channel proliferation and multi-platform delivery systems. This is not a new concern. Global advertising markets have decreased steadily over the past decade, due in no small part to the fragmentation of audiences that marks the post-network television era. The relatively uncharted territory of online programming has only served to heighten the prevailing sense of uncertainty in the industry. Thus, panelists debated new forms of audience metrics and establishing value chains across traditional channels, Internet windows, and DVD extras as strategies to attract advertisers back into the fold. In the end, it seemed that old methods were being applied to radically new circumstances and I left with the lingering impression that advertisers, themselves, would initiate changes in the relationship between content and commerce in the new media environment. Recent developments seem to support this notion.

In November 2008, Canadian television networks began running advertisements for “the world’s first interactive romantic comedy,” http://www.wakinguphannah.ca.

With little contextualization beyond a voiceover declaring: “you decide what type of day Hannah will have,” viewers might easily presume that Waking Up Hannah (WUH) was a network-produced video venture into interactive programming. However, upon entering the site, audiences/visitors(?) are greeted with the iconic symbol for Dove soap and invited to start the “film” and navigate to their own conclusion. WUH opens with the lead character partying with friends at a nightclub. The next morning, a hung-over Hannah wakes up on her sister’s couch realizing that she has lost her purse and house keys. She has, however, managed to hang on to her cell phone, which provides her with pictures that jog her memory of the previous night’s events. In a study in contrasts, the free-spirited, 20-something Hannah banters with her straight-laced older sister — a stereotyped uber-mom — as she makes her way to the bathroom where visitors are introduced to the rules of the game. We learn that Hannah has a blind date later that day and that her progress to that important meeting will be determined by the type of Dove body wash the visitor selects for her use.

Unfortunately, Hannah’s demanding boss has other plans for her Saturday afternoon. He calls her into the office, ensures that she is sufficiently overloaded with work, and puts her at risk of missing her date. Hannah will, indeed, meet her mystery man but how will she respond after a frustrating day with the boss? Will she be refreshed and daring (choose the blue body wash); will she be relaxed and “chilled out” (choose the green body wash); will she be energized (choose the yellow body wash)? No spoilers here as there are seven possible endings to the “film.” Visitors are offered several interactive options to further immerse themselves in Hannah’s world and influence the story’s direction. Remember her cell phone? Click on Hannah’s iPhone and read her text messages, listen to her voicemail, or perhaps peruse her photo album. The centrality of the iPhone in WUH is one of the more jarring elements of the campaign as it presents what might be the first case of product placement in an advertisement for another company’s product line. On a marketing level, however, it is a brilliant moment of synergy in addressing the target demographic. The iPhone’s invocation of the “PC-Mac guys” commercials reinforces the generational divide between Hannah and her stodgy sister and further hails “20-something” women to identify with Dove’s protagonist.

While WUH provides a wealth of material with which to deconstruct contemporary advertising and consumer culture, I am more interested in questions of classification and the implications of this form of branded content for media studies. Although it is difficult for me to view WUH as anything more than an interactive commercial, the media and trade press consistently define it as a “film.” If I was inclined to nitpick here, I would argue that aesthetically and narratively WUH more closely resembles a television pilot (replete with Hannah’s Carrie Bradshaw-esque voiceovers narrating her discovery of the importance of inner strength and beauty). Of course it is not actually on television and as it provides a (somewhat) self-contained story world, it might be described as a film. WUH was created by advertising agency Ogilvy and Mather Toronto in partnership with the digital production company The Barbarian Group. The “film” is a significant component of Unilever’s — Dove’s parent company — $4 billion advertising budget and commitment to expanding the company’s digital presence.1 According to Rob Master, Unilever’s North American media director, digital is no longer an “add-on” for the corporation but rather a “centerpiece for innovative online programs rich in storytelling with a focus on consumer engagement.”2 Unilever sees WUH as a major success story evidenced through the 120,000 hits received in its first month online.3 If the blogosphere is any indication, the “film” has resonated with some members of the designated market:

“Being a woman in her twenties … I have to say that I am completely impressed by this! I feel like the main character is living my life … Dove is showing us it’s okay to have bad days, Its fine to have money/boyfriend/beauty pressures (sic). In the end it all works out and they portray it in a very fun and interactive way …. Kinda reminds me of that movie with Gywenth Paltrow where there are two storylines (sic).”4

I should note my own skepticism in skimming the blog responses for this campaign. Given the extent of viral marketing for WUH, I question the “location” of posters particularly given that the vast majority of reactions to the campaign appeared on marketing publication sites. It’s interesting to note that the sole poster (‘girly’) on the WUH discussion forum stated: “do you like the film? I didn’t that much.’

WUH is not the first, nor most recognized, case of digital brand entertainment. Indeed, BMW claims to have developed the phenomenon of online films with its 2001-2 series The Hire — eight brief action-adventures starring A-list actor Clive Owen as the lead character “The Driver.” Each film was directed by a critically acclaimed director including Ang Lee, Guy Ritchie, Ridley and Tony Scott, and Wong Kar-Wai, to name but a few. The Hire went viral on the Internet and eventually gained further distribution via DVD and satellite. It can still be viewed on YouTube. The Hire proved such a success for BMW that the company now has a television and new media arm (BMW Films) and has further developed the series into a limited-run comic series with Dark Horse Comics.5)

Without resorting to an “Adorno and Horkheimer were right” conclusion (although I can’t help but hear them laughing), what are we to make of a digital trend in storytelling that completely dissolves the arms-length distance between art and commerce. Moreover, what are the implications of manufacturers bypassing the middlemen (i.e. TV and cinema) and producing their own stories.6

Is this a new genre and does it establish new boundaries between high and low culture? For example, it is not difficult to forget the car is the focus of The Hire given the creativity brought to bear by the individual directors. Conversely, WUH appears to be a variation of Raymond Williams’ depiction of the “magical system,” wherein the product mystically transforms the life of the central character. In an excellent overview of the utopian and dystopian visions of interactive television, Boddy cites a product placement broker’s prediction that “’single advertising shows’ where sponsors produce their own TV programs and integrate their products into the dramatic content” are “right around the corner.”7 WUH and The Hire suggest that we’ve turned that corner, digitally speaking at least.

Image Credits:

1. wakinguphannah.ca /a>
3. Apple product placement in a Dove campaign?/a>