National Post (National Edition)
Calum Marsh on why Canadian reality TV beats American
Is this the golden age of Canadian reality TV? As Canada’s Drag Race, the Canadian iteration of the enormously popular American reality competition show Ru Paul’s Drag Race, sashays through its inaugural season on Bell’s streaming platform Crave, it’s hard not to notice how ubiquitous these kinds of programs suddenly are. On StackTV, a streaming channel available on Amazon Prime and produced by Corus Entertainment, you can watch the Food Network shows Fire Masters, Top Chef Canada, Iron Chef Canada, and Chopped Canada, or the HGTV shows Property Brothers, Bryan Inc., and Love It Or List It Vancouver. Global has Big Brother Canada and The Great Canadian Baking Show; CTV has Master Chef Canada and Amazing Race Canada. These shows are everywhere. Many of them are remarkably good. And audiences are watching.
Broadly speaking, Canadian versions of American programs are meant to be decried. When we talk about Canadian television, we tend to lament the dearth of original content and the scourge of imitation as insidious symptoms of an underlying cultural inferiority — a Salieri complex that has us in a state of constant comparison to the United States. What we really want to see are Canadian voices telling Canadian stories, not cheap copies of shows made famous elsewhere.
But what’s striking about many of these programs is that, despite the origin of the source material, they are very Canadian — deeply, unapologetically Canadian, unmistakable as anything else. The Canadian versions of reality staples tend to overtly differentiate themselves from their American counterparts, as if to prove that they can be not merely different but better.
I have extolled the virtues of Global’s Big Brother Canada before, but that show — an adaptation of the long-running American hit, a mainstay of CBS’s summer schedule and itself an adaptation of the Dutch TV phenomenon — is one of the clearest examples of the enthusiasm and creativity Canadian producers bring to these programs. On CBS, the competitive reality series is simple and straightforward, made cheap to fill empty timeslots. They have barely changed the set since it debuted 20 years ago, and the weekly challenges for power and immunity are frequently reused or slightly re-dressed. Big Brother Canada has much higher production values, and in almost every
A SALIERI COMPLEX THAT HAS US IN A STATE OF CONSTANT COMPARISON
respect seems like the product of more effort and care: sets are re-imagined from the ground up every season, challenges are designed from scratch every week. Big Brother Canada tries harder and it shows.
Other programs, such as Top Chef Canada and Master Chef Canada, don’t always have the means to match the extravagance of their U.S. counterparts. So they get creative in other ways. While competing chefs on the American Master Chef might take overnight trips to London or race around NASCAR tracks with Gordon Ramsay, the chefs on CTV’s Master Chef Canada are tasked with more interesting and daunting challenges, such as devising a menu for an elementary school or cooking a trio of international breakfast foods in under 30 minutes. What’s more, the show favours skill over drama, presenting the competitions with honesty and integrity and leaving over-the-top theatricality off the bill of fare. The result feels more satisfying — and more real.
These shows are often wonderful surveys of wide-ranging Canadiana. The contestants demonstrate the country’s proud diversity: a chef from New Brunswick might compete headto-head with a chef from Quebec in a heated Top Chef Canada finale, while an ardent East Coaster might vie for Head of Household honours against a Scarborough native on Big Brother, each equally passionate about their home. The Amazing Race Canada whisks players across the country in a way that boasts of the landscape’s natural splendour. The most recent season of Master Chef Canada has an episode dedicated to the cuisines of the First Nations. Big Brother’s seventh season featured an Indigeneous contestant who spoke freely and candidly about life on a First Nations reserve.
These are the things that distinguish Canadian programming from content from the cultural monolith to the south. What seem at first like carbon-copies of American hits are in fact meaningfully, indisputably our own, made by Canadians for Canadians. What has made so many of these new Canadian reality TV shows so popular is that they embrace their own Canadianness, and celebrate the country’s people and places, their quirks and idiosyncrasies, their strengths and weaknesses.
We don’t just want to see people baking things, or people living in a house together for three months, or people singing and dancing in elaborate drag. We want to see Canadians do those things. And right now, there are more opportunities to do so than ever.