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'Making' and crafting have been transformed into a reality TV competition, hosted by celebrities, with promotional tie-ins to other media and cultural products. As such, shows like Making It, Craft Wars, and Ellen's Design Challenge define 'craft' according to particular logics familiar to reality TV programming, which highlight making as a competition in which contestants vie for cash prizes and honorific titles engaging with particular gendered logics of neoliberal markets and histories of 'craft'. This article examines three craft TV shows to interrogate the nexus of craft and reality television and consider unstable and shifting meanings of these cultural phenomena. Craft, handmade and DIY invoke various competing politics; when imported into a reality TV context, craft continues to bring into play messy contradictions reflective of broader social anxieties and political economic climates. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Standardized reality television formats proliferate across the globe. It is important to examine the production contexts and discourses of formatted programming, and in particular, reality TV formatting, to fully consider how national cultural expression is being reshaped due to changing economic, political, technological, and cultural demands. This article, first, investigates how concerns over formats are implicated in Canadian reality television. Specifically, the formatted reality program So You Think You Can Dance Canada will be analyzed. The article attempts to understand the production context of this program as a cultural product that has originated elsewhere but has been adapted to suit a local/national context. Second, the project aims to investigate how this show engages in discourses of nationhood, or, how Canadianness is discussed, represented, and performed on formatted TV through commercial nationalism. The article raises questions about the place of formats in Canadian television programming, policy, and culture. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article explores the rise of formatted reality production and consumption in Canada, paying particular attention to their impact on global and local industry and culture. Attention is paid to how cultural production in the Canadian television industry is implicated in contemporary global and national political economic contexts. The study utilizes a political economic framework in order to situate industry reports, conferences/trade shows, ratings data and interviews with industry members. The overall objective is to better understand the Canadian landscape of original reality television, Canadian format adaptations, and imported formatted American format adaptations. At issue are funding mechanisms, technology, policy, and culture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite the easily identifiable concept of a “nerd,” only a few significant articles on nerds and popular culture, and specifically television, exist. This article contributes to television studies by addressing this overlooked, yet popularly significant, representation and lived reality in terms of race, gender, and sexuality. The article introduces the hip/square dialectic and explores the sociocultural construction of nerds vis-à-vis the hip/square dialectic as commodity. The article historicizes the hip/square construct of the nerd or geek on television, assesses claims about the emergence of geek chic, and introduces three reality television case studies: Tranji and reality TV nerd dancing; William Hung, American Idol loser; and the Beauty and the Geek program. At issue is the political-economic factors in the production and circulation of the nerd commodity and the racial and gendered or sexualized politics of the televisual nerd discourses and performances. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

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Background: In 2023, the Canadian government passed legislation empowering the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) to require streaming platforms to ensure the “discoverability” of Canadian content. These debates about discoverability provisions primarily focused on the promotion of Canadian content, with little emphasis on gender and racial equity. Analysis: Through interviews with stakeholders in the Canadian screen industry, we explore views on recommendation systems and questions of gender and race bias in streaming recommendations. Conclusion and implications: Interviews revealed concerns beyond promoting “Canadian” content that the broadcast reform initiative focuses on, including concerns about streaming recommendations’ tendencies to promote a narrow range of content and their failure to “see” and recommend content from racialized women. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article asks "What lessons does commercially produced news teach young people about the meaning of democracy and of citizenship?" Three competing models of democracy are introduced: Neo-liberalism; Communitarianism; and Participatory. With these three models as reference points, one week of Primedia's Channel One video news program--the week of the 1999 World Trade Organization (WTO) protests in Seattle, Washington--is analyzed. While the concept of "democracy" is never directly taken up in this programming, it is argued that the stories, advertisements, and formal structure construct a compelling vision of neo-liberalism as the normative standard for democracy in the United States. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]