On Location: Canada's Television Industry in a Global Market (review)

For reasons too numerous to mention here, few leap at the prospect of studying Canadian television. While there exists a healthy body of work on broadcasting policy and on the activities of the cbc, an appreciation of the rest of Canadian television has been screened from view.

Combining research on broadcasting policy with first-person interviews, industry analysis, and textual readings of television programs, Serra Tinic's On Location is an ambitious attempt to address these gaps. Through a case study of Vancouver's television production sector, Tinic sees Canadian television as a site to explore 'the relationship between place, media representations, and community formations in a global cultural economy.' She strategically positions this community at the crossroads of competing forces, including federal policy measures intended to encourage the production of Canadian stories, provincial efforts to attract capital infusions from Hollywood productions, shifting priorities at the cbc towards Toronto-centric productions, and external pressures from co-production partners to strip stories of their local flavour for international markets. Lost among these tendencies are the opportunities for regional stories to have a place on the nation's television screens. This is unfortunate, for Tinic argues that Canadians support programs representing local or regional stories, particularly those that deal with important social issues and show life on the periphery to central Canada and the United States. To illustrate, Tinic devotes a chapter to the study of marginal discourses on cbc sketch comedies from the Maritimes such as This Hour Has 22 Minutes. Tinic concludes with calls for changes to Canadian content regulations to recognize place and measures to focus the cbc's attention on regional productions, to provide a bulwark against generic programming produced for 'global audiences.'

Although Tinic's project offers much potential, problems persist in its execution. While the study of Vancouver-area producers offers a fascinating glimpse into the processes of cultural production, the author does not provide an explanation of why she chose to focus on different producers instead of doing an in-depth study of one company. Treatment of the benefits and pitfalls of this methodology would have added texture to Tinic's analysis and provided guidance to others inspired to build on these efforts.

On Location's biggest weakness is its description of Canada's television industry. With its focus on the cbc and examples drawn from cbc programs, Tinic makes little mention of Canada's private broadcasters, nor does she provide an adequate account of the history of the independent production sector both within and outside Vancouver. This may have been a casualty of the editing process, but its absence leaves a simplistic picture of the industry's structural components and market trends. Recently, trade in television programs has turned away from shows that Tinic discusses which 'universalize the particular' towards the purchase of international program formats that allow for the local content to be added, such as Canadian Idol. However, these cases of 'particularizing the universal' are not only domestic developments, as even American broadcasters import formats from companies based in Europe and Asia to compete in their own crowded markets. The global market in international television production is more fluid and less dominated by Americans than Tinic allows.

What results, then, is a study that recirculates established arguments about Canadian television. These include a fear that international (read: American) productions will stifle Canadian stories, an overemphasis on the role of marginality as the distinctive motif in Canadian television programming, and the tendency to boil discussions of Canadian television down to the activities of the cbc and policymakers. These assertions derive from a series of problematic analytical approaches: using stylistic comparisons between cbc and American commercial television to buttress assertions of cultural difference; failing to appreciate how the Canadian state incorporates marginality into national political discourses; and denying an appreciation of the viewing activities of Canadian audiences. Attention to these issues would have given Tinic's discussion of the function of location in...