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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]

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