Photo by INSTAR Images / Alamy Stock Photo

Every week, when I was a teenager, I used to squirrel my hand-me-down laptop away to my bedroom and scour the internet’s sketchy streaming sites for the latest episode of Gossip Girl. (I couldn’t watch it on the family TV—after all, it was, per its marketing, “every parent’s nightmare.”) From quippy dialogue, to attempts at edgy subject matter, to nonsensical use of cell phones, it was a show that was completely of the 2000s.

The first season aired in 2007, in the back half of the decade known—in the parlance of zippy tabloid journalism—as the Naughty Aughties. It was supposed to be an age of irreverence, the age of snark: it was biting, it was catty, it was mean. From burgeoning blogs to reality TV, so much of that decade’s entertainment was predicated on the appeal of laughing at rather than with.

That world can feel very distant these days. Our current pop culture landscape is for the large part one of feel-good shows, peppy positivity, and political awareness. When a reboot of my favourite teen soap dropped this July on HBO Max (and streamed on Crave in Canada), it looked a little different. This time the clutch of privileged Upper East Side teens are presented as racially diverse and fluid in gender and sexuality. Where the publicity for the original focused on shock, scandal, and designer clothing, this new version, creator Joshua Safran told Variety, was to “tell more queer stories.”

Gossip Girl is not the only ’00s show hitting small screens for the second time. HBO also plans to drop new episodes of their Sex and the City revival, And Just Like That… this fall, minus Samantha, but with the added promise of three new series regulars played by women of colour. Meanwhile, a reality show entirely conceived around gawking at fat people’s bodies, The Biggest Loser, premiered a rebooted version in 2020 that purported to be about a “holistic … look at wellness.”

But have these shows really changed, or are they a product of our neoliberal moment?

Referring to the contemporary renaissance of 19th century liberalism, an ideology that espoused laissez-faire economics and minimal government interference, neoliberalism is underpinned by a belief in the necessity of sustained economic growth. In our late capitalist era, this mindset has also taken on the trappings of socially liberal positions, resulting in hypocrisy—acknowledgement of systemic issues while pushing “solutions” that rest on individual actions. We live in a time where our governments prefer to offer a sugar-coating of palatability to bitter pills like widespread economic inequality. And in an effort to engage more progressive young demographics, so do television networks.

While the new iteration of Gossip Girl aims to be more diverse, there are no fat characters, no characters with disabilities, and as Refinery29’s Kathleen Newman-Breemang points out, the actors of colour cast in the new series are all light skinned. The handful of LGBTQ2S+ characters act out scenarios ranging from the mundane (marital spats) to the downright troubling (student-teacher hook-ups)—not so much the “queer stories” promised as a rehash of established heteronormative tropes from the show’s original run.

Queer Eye, which was rebooted by Netflix in 2018, takes a slightly more holistic approach to revamping its source material. The original run, which aired from 2003 to 2007 and originally went by the title Queer Eye for the Straight Guy, was predicated on the dual stereotype of the straight man as slobbish and emotionally disconnected and the gay man as fashionable, neat, successful, and emotionally intelligent. While the show made strides in representing a certain (very narrow) kind of queer identity in the pop culture mainstream, it typically shied away from political statement, representing any problems plaguing its “straight guys” as mere personal failings—a lack of personal style, an uncultivated sense of taste.

While the rebooted version introduces some racial and cultural diversity, the “Fab Five,” the series’ makeover experts, by no means embody the breadth of LGBTQ2S+ communities that use the queer label. The show has, however, captured our current zeitgeist of self-love, body acceptance, and self-care.

The version of these things that the show peddles are divorced from their radical progressive roots. The show co-opts terms like “self-care”—originally coined by Black feminist poet Audre Lorde. The makeover subjects—the show calls them “heroes”—are suffering, we are told, because they don’t love themselves enough, they don’t take time for themselves, they judge themselves too harshly. Hair products and interior decorating then become supposed radical acts, imbued with the power
to shift one’s entire life.

But, many times in the series, it quickly becomes clear how hollow these concepts are. Episodes where the Fab Five help out a young climate change activist or a previously unhoused community worker quickly beg the question, how does any of this address systemic problems?

In July 2021, Netflix released a one-off episode of the show on YouTube, accessible to anyone with or without a Netflix subscription. The episode, sponsored by Delta Air Lines, featured a 26-year-old Delta employee living a spartan lifestyle as he struggled to pay off his student loans. The makeover subject, William Holmes, says in the episode that he is burdened by student debt like “most millennials,” and that it is “really slowing our generation down” in life.

For millennials who have been repeatedly told that financial security would be within our grasp if we gave up luxuries like avocado toast, the show’s advice is downright infuriating. The Fab Five decide Holmes’s main problem is that he’s not “being in the present and having fun,” as the show’s culture expert Karamo Brown puts it. In the end, Holmes gets a new wardrobe and new decor for the bedroom in the house he shares with several roommates, as well as a smattering of advice to “be more confident” and “[go] out and see the city, because life is good.” There is no offer to pay off his debt, let alone a message about the broken systems that created the student debt crisis that Holmes is a part of. Unable to grapple with the reality that lifestyle cannot save a life, the show unearths problems and makes vague offers to solve them with a Band-Aid solution.

Some recent reboots attempt to capitalize on the politics of the current moment without addressing their past misdeeds. Friends, the juggernaut sitcom that ran 10 seasons, ending in 2004, depicted an almost entirely white New York City, and faced questions and criticisms around its lack of diversity during its original run. One of the show’s few Black employees, writers’ assistant Amaani Lyle, filed a lawsuit alleging a culture of racism and sexism behind the scenes at the show. Rewatching it on streaming services 20 years later, many younger viewers have bristled not only at the lack of diversity, but at its incessant homophobic jokes and homophobic and transphobic plotlines.

The 2021 Friends reunion did not address these issues, instead recruiting an assortment of celebrities, political figures, and fans to talk about why Friends had been so special. A collection of people including Malala Yousafzai, the women’s education activist and youngest-ever Nobel laureate, talked about how the show had brought them through lonely, difficult times in their lives. It’s not just a show, they suggest—it has more power than that.

Yet, the show’s importance seemingly does not cut both ways—for many people who, for years, brought up their problems with the show’s content, the implication was that the show couldn’t possibly have power, that it was just a sitcom.

A similar case is Project Runway, the fashion design reality show that first aired in 2004. At the time, the direction of the show was heavily shaped by producer Harvey Weinstein, who saw it, according to a 2017 LA Times report, not only as a vehicle to put a bunch of models on TV, but to meet them himself. Along with shots of young models in their underwear, the show often featured contestants insulting plus-size models, and even using a transphobic slur as a catchphrase.

After Weinstein was brought down by a wave of sexual assault and harassment allegations in 2017, the show was retooled and relaunched with a new host, model Karlie Kloss, and new judges. This new version attempted to incorporate modern criticisms of the fashion industry by using a range of model sizes and setting challenges based on sustainable design. But, again, behind the surface-level changes, the show makes no attempt to dismantle the industry that supports it. In one 2020 episode, a contestant made a quip about Kloss’s connection to Trump’s son-in-law and advisor Jared Kushner (Kloss is married to Kushner’s brother) and was promptly sent home.

The catty shows of the 2000s have been declawed, but what we are delivered so often is neoliberal rhetoric without any progressive substance. So much of TV today has the gleam of corporate art—cold, frictionless, inoffensive, but insubstantial.

Nostalgia is often cited as the cause for our cultural obsession with reboots and sequels, but perhaps there is another drive, not to revisit the gleeful meanness of the 2000s but to surgically remove the painful elements of a property of which we remain fond. Perhaps some reboots come from an attempt to turn painful artifacts into empowering ones, not entirely disingenuously. But the problem is a constant idealizing: if not of the past, through the lens of nostalgia, then of the present, serving up a race-blind, post-feminist, progressive world, where all that needs to change is your skincare routine.

Neoliberalism is, in a way, the ultimate reboot. Reboots are safe. They’re comforting in their familiarity, and they offer the illusion of change without the hard work of making that change. Like signage for condo developments promising community growth while gentrifying a neighbourhood, or bank-sponsored floats in Pride parades: a progressive veneer hiding something more sinister.

Illustration by Deshi Deng

I love sci-fi. I have since I was a kid, and I especially love weird cyberpunk movies. Lately, though, the main thing I notice in sci-fi is creators’ inability to envision a world without violence against sex workers. This really hit me watching both the 1982 film Blade Runner and the 2018 Netflix original Altered Carbon. Both utilize a similar film noir in a dystopian future premise, which leads to having similarities in how sex work is viewed in their stories. Altered Carbon has sex workers as an integral part of the plot and Blade Runner utilizes pleasure bot gynoids as the villains and a more reserved, ladylike gynoid as the main love interest. They were released 36 years apart and yet nothing has changed when it comes to the perception of sex work in either. Once I started paying more attention, I started noticing the contempt sci-fi holds for sex workers beyond just these two works.

In sci-fi, the class divide between the ultra rich and the rest of the world is made abundantly clear. They show us the nice, clean, sterile environments where the nice, clean, usually white, ultra rich live and contrast that with the violent, chaotic, dirty slums of the rest of the city or world. In these slums there are bright, colourful images of women shaking their bodies around. Billboards, holographic projections, and full service sex workers are everywhere in the streets. It’s a male fantasy hyped up on gigabytes with humanoid, artificially intelligent cyborgs who can appear and disappear as needed. You can have it all, as long as you can pay.

Within two episodes of Altered Carbon, protagonist Takeshi Kovacs befriends a sex worker named Alice to gain some knowledge about the case he is investigating, just for her to die once he has the information he needs. Alice is never seen in the show again and never given any real moment of mourning. Sex workers are the ones who experience violence and death because, due to their work, there is no regard for them as complex human beings.

The series revolves around the idea that bodies are just a fleshy host for a human consciousness stored on a futuristic disc that can be removed, and yet I don’t recall seeing people doing extreme sports to the point of body death, or having their bodies used in violent ways as the sex workers do. Their bodies, and the consciousnesses within, just don’t matter enough to be valued or have their deaths investigated.

Sci-fi often relies on the concept of improved bodies, whether it’s cybernetic body mods or completely fake robotic bodies. This brings up the idea of female androids, known as gynoids, being made specifically to fulfill a male fantasy, as Rachael was in Blade Runner. Rachael was made by Tyrell, the creator of the machines, to provide companionship and to test how they develop with false memories. The gynoid comes up often in sci-fi; the first appearance can be found in Metropolis, a film from 1927 where a robot is given skin so she can replicate a human and work as an exotic dancer. Since then gynoids have been used in sci-fi to be the perfect woman, submissive and ready for sex at all times.

Androids, such as Data from Star Trek, are seen accomplishing hard goals, completing tasks that are difficult for humans, and furthering their careers. They are created to do what man can do and surpass them. They are expected to learn the meaning of being human and reflect back important truths for humanity. Gynoids are made to be used, to be tested, to see how far they can be pushed and broken. When Data makes a daughter, Lal, she is put through a series of tests until her brain literally breaks down like any other machine on the ship and subsequently dies all within one episode.

Within sci-fi works there is an implication of legality for sex work. The protagonists are law enforcement or law adjacent, some kind of voice of reason and a moral compass for the viewer. Yet they never care much about the sex workers and their working conditions. Their main concerns with the businesses revolve around the owners’ other shady side gigs rather than the violence the sex workers are experiencing. It informs the world-building narrative on how sex work is viewed within these so-called radical futures.

It’s an acceptable career, with people of many genders and races working within it. However, it is intrinsically accepted that they will experience violence and no one will do anything to stop it. But they aren’t owed respect for this job, they are disregarded and murdered constantly, and the protagonists—as well as other characters—don’t bat an eye at another dead sex worker.

Framing these bodies—these sex workers—in this way shows that, despite being advanced in technology, the future still remains incredibly bleak when it comes to sex worker rights. There is no care or consideration despite the generally perceived acceptance of the career. Which begs the question: if sex work is legal, why are there no protections? There are some burly men around the doors of the sex clubs preventing weapons from getting inside, but nothing to prevent sex workers being murdered. There do not seem to be any laws to fall back on to create safety, no defense systems beyond the doormen, nothing they can fall back on for help. Where are the alarm buttons? The safety weapons for the workers? The harsh punishments for clients who injure workers?

Consider for a moment Inara Serra, Firefly’s (2002) resident companion. Within the Firefly universe, sex work is presented as an honourable and enjoyable trade. Oftentimes throughout the series, ship engineer Kaylee Frye refers to the job as exciting and glamorous, even fantasizes about the opportunity to do the same work and hangs out with Inara to learn more about how the position works. We see her carefully screening potential clients, only picking those she wishes to spend time with. When a client threatens Inara, she quickly makes it clear that he will not have access to her or any other sex worker again. She has respect and standing both among the crew and in any society they visit, and she uses this to get the crew out of rough situations.

People respect Inara and the work she does; she has defenses and can have bad clients banned so they can’t see another sex worker again. This setting provides sex work legitimacy, safeties, respect, and schooling. There is a sea of sci-fi that takes influence from Firefly in other ways, yet it seems no others have ever wanted to utilize the concept that sex workers may at some point be considered worth protecting and even admiring.

Why have there been so few works that have bothered with an apparently all-too-radical idea that sex workers are, in fact, people and deserve to have rights, security, and safety in their trade?

Present-day sex workers are fighting for decriminalization, for safety, for protections—why can’t we see these things existing in these works? We’ve become so complacent in the idea that sex work is something that deserves aggression, violence, and even death, that even in these so-called advanced futures we can’t imagine otherwise. We still see sex workers as disposable because it is the easiest way to see them.

Without complexity, without stories and lives, just another plot device that is killed to give the main character reason and purpose.

Photo by Virginia Sherwood / © Bravo / Courtesy: Everett Collection Photographer

In its 15 years on television, here is a mere sample of the delicious moments Bravo’s Real Housewives franchise has come to be known for: New York housewife Aviva Drescher pulling off her prosthetic leg and throwing it across a room while shouting, “The only thing that is artificial or fake about me is this!”; New Jersey housewife Teresa Giudice viciously flipping a table during a fight; New York’s Kelly Bensimon having a meltdown while on vacation with the other women while claiming fellow housewife Bethenny Frankel was conspiring to kill her; New Jersey husbands Joe Giudice and Joe Gorga tackling each other after one called the other’s wife “scum,” inadvertently revealing Gorga’s spray-on hair; Atlanta’s NeNe Leakes tearing a producer’s shirt and allegedly choking him during a party; and Frankel having a nervous breakdown declaring “Life is not a cabaret.” Honestly, for those of us who follow these women like a religion, it just might be.

Which also makes it all the more difficult to convince non-believers that the franchise is as ground-breaking and feminist television as, say, Big Little Lies or Broad City. Spanning 10 instalments (minus spin-offs and international iterations), including Orange County, New York, Atlanta, Beverly Hills, and Potomac, The Real Housewives is an undeniable institution. Still, it’s never managed to shake off the labels—“toxic,” “trash”—stamped onto it by those who have likely not seen more than a single episode (if that) and have a habit of convulsing at the sounds of women talking.

There is an explanation for this, the same one that has been trumpeted about since reality television found its footing in the early 1990s and into the 2000s, with MTV’s The Real World and CBS’s Survivor. Unlike crime procedurals, sitcoms, or drama, reality TV shows are often assumed to lack substance in favour of the superficial. Such is the stamp slapped onto much of anything in the pop culture world, which has long been trapped inside a limiting gender binary: anything of prestige lives in the masculine, while anything that deals in celebrity lives in the feminine. Reality TV, then, has been sanctioned a feminized property, to be consumed only by women and gay men. (It’s no coincidence, by the way, that those are two marginalized demographics.) While sports—reality’s closest counterpart within the binary—are for straight cis men; sweat, endurance, ass-slapping, and all.

In an interview, Kristen Warner, associate professor of journalism and creative media at the University of Alabama, says the need to make this distinction is rooted in the world of soap operas and melodrama, which are also sanctioned as belonging to women due to their “exaggerated” tone. She says, “There’s a general implicit disdain for work that targets women because it is often thought of as hysterical and emotional. Real Housewives caters to connections about community, women’s relationships with each other, with men, and their children, so it is always clicking toward that genre convention, which creates those responses. God forbid we think about all the things that women on these shows go through as something that can be teachable and valuable.”

Consider, for example, The Sopranos’ Tony Soprano, Mad Men’s Don Draper, and Breaking Bad’s Walter White, all of whom are beloved and admired for being bad men with broken hearts, who are forgiven for breaking the rules and tossing ethics out every window they pass by. Outside their tried and true demographic, these housewives are rarely granted such a read, despite redefining the concept of what a “housewife” is. These are women who have been through it all—domestic abuse, suicide, bankruptcy, infidelity, motherhood, divorce—and have built their own businesses, are raising daughters as single mothers, and are of an age well past their prime if it were up to any other television network.

But, while we place Soprano, Draper, and White on a pedestal for committing murder, assault, adultery, extortion, and money laundering, to name a few, we write off the housewives for flipping tables, throwing punches, and yanking wigs. These criticisms, by the way, come before the assessment of some of these women’s more recent indiscretions, which fall directly into Soprano, Draper, and White territory, with Salt Lake City housewife Jen Shah’s fraud allegations, Beverly Hills housewife Erika Jayne’s embezzlement allegations, and New Jersey housewife Teresa Giudice’s 2015 jailing for mail, wire, and bankruptcy fraud, which also led to her husband’s deportation. Soprano is cackling in his television grave.

It’s a blurring of the lines even noted feminist Gloria Steinem can’t get behind, having said on Bravo’s Watch What Happens Live to the franchise’s creator and super-producer Andy Cohen himself, in 2013, that “[the series] is women—all dressed up and inflated and plastic surgeried and false bosomed … it is a minstrel show for women.” And while there is no mistaking that they can be brash, tacky ($25,000 for a pair of sunglasses!), and oh so ear-piercingly loud, and their choices offensive (supporting a husband faking cancer!), it’s also ignorant to say they are only this. For 15 years, these women have lived their lives on screen, experiencing the greatest heartbreak—from their partners’ deaths to their children moving out and on—and have showcased the powerful bond of lifelong friendships at an older age like no other television series has since Sex and the City. There is bad, certainly, but there is also tremendous good that comes with a side of laughter.

Just a few months after Steinem said those words, fellow (bad) feminist Roxane Gay appeared on the same show, disagreeing and saying, “I think that the Real Housewives franchises allow women to be their truest selves. We see the mess, we see their amazing friendships, and everything in between. When women are allowed to be their fullest selves, [it is] the most feminist thing we can do.” Because it carries so much weight, we tend to forget that feminism is just that simple, and is rooted in granting women complexity. Unfortunately, the screen rarely allows for anything other than good or evil when it comes to women, but that middle ground is exactly where Bravo has built a home.

That density is what makes these women real and relatable. That’s because the focus is not—despite how it may seem to the outsider—on appearance, wealth, and class. In fact, those are really only thin veneers for the stories within, which include everything from Frankel’s rising up from selling cupcakes in grocery store aisles to building a million-dollar lifestyle empire, to Sonja Morgan’s money pit mansion that exudes old money on the outside, but is falling apart on the inside, steeping her in debt, a broken family, depression and alcoholism. As writer Brian Moylan puts it in his book The Housewives: The Real Story Behind The Real Housewives, “There is a critique or counterbalance for just about everything somewhere in the great Bravo oeuvre.” It regularly reminds us that, as New York housewife Luann de Lesseps once sang, “money can’t buy you class”—or happiness.

And it’s those melodramatic moments where they say and do exactly what they want to that might be the strongest connective tissue between housewife and fan. As Warner explains, “that is the thing that brings us out of the didactic of good or bad and into the catharsis that these shows offer us as women who were raised and/or are stuck and abiding by certain ideologies.” In a sense, then, Real Housewives has no space for society’s growing love of respectability politics, which have never favoured the marginalized.

As yet another noted feminist, Camille Paglia, said during a talk at the Skirball Cultural Center in 2012, this franchise shows “the authentic ferocious energies of female sexuality” and, in this singular endeavour, functions as “anthropological documents” that make us more media literate through our consumption not only of the shows, but their cast reunions, aftershow, social media chatter, and the buzzing group chats where we dissect every moment and go over what we might have done, what we hope happens, and who we’re rooting for. As Moylan writes, “Since many Real Housewives aficionados hold all these events in their heads at the same time, it becomes possible to interpret the world through a million lenses at once.”

Another way in which The Real Housewives has long been strutting ahead of the rest of television is the way in which it features entirely Black casts, in the cases of The Real Housewives of Atlanta and of Potomac. Although the former has been one of the network’s highest rated instalments since it began in 2008, it’s also proved divisive, with many criticizing the franchise for showcasing now infamous moments when the women have physically lashed out at each other, perpetuating stereotypes of the “angry Black woman.” For Warner, though, this goes back to “the shame of complex women.” To begin with, there is an incredible dearth of Black women characters on screen, and The Real Housewives has provided a space that is not exclusive to “the Olivia Popes who are pedigreed and have educations, we’re talking Black women in everyday life who never really get seen, who have children, who may not have all the education, but do have street savvy, compelling personalities and interesting stories.”

Certainly, and particularly in the case of the franchise’s other instalments, there is still much work to be done in terms of representation. But, says Warner, when it comes to believing that these women might hinder us from future progress, “the reality is that if you think … Black women are loud, violent, or hypersexual, that’s because you’ve been conditioned into thinking it’s an accurate stereotype. And then it doesn’t matter how many degrees or how much money that housewife has if her getting upset can destroy all progress…. We blame them for perpetuating stereotypes when there’s no correlation to the causation; these things are happening because of how we are hierarchically represented in the world.” In other words, the Real Housewives are not making or breaking any of these stereotypes, but they are offering a spectrum of Black women a platform.

And, in doing so, building on that lively community of otherwise marginalized viewers who congregate several days a week to discuss the various instalments airing at each time, who take great pleasure in seeing powerful, shameless women do, say, and act the way they want in ways we can’t or aspire to.

One might even say, with their individual taglines, the series’ quick cuts and reaction shots, confessionals and gif-ability, The Real Housewives has long operated as a kind of televised comic book, reshaping another genre that has never “belonged” to us. Why, then, can’t we consider these women a special kind of superhero, who has carved her own space for her very own matriarchy? Clownery included.

Illustration by Fraser Wrighte

Dear Alexis,

You once said you escaped a Thai drug lord’s car by bribing him with sex. You said that one of your longest relationships was a three-month affair with a Saudi Prince, but you spent two of these months trying to escape from his palace to an embassy. These are only a couple of your adventures, not including the time you were taken hostage by Somali pirates on David Geffen’s yacht.

Schitt’s Creek has been called the perfect show for how it allows queer relationships to exist in a world without judgement. But there are a great many people who do exist in the face of judgement in this show, specifically the people of the countries you’ve traipsed through. “Aroon was a lovely gentleman, until he ran out of money,” you say of the Thai drug lord. Your words contain multitudes, but also stereotypes flimsy as gauze; if you were to look at these sentences with an interrogative gaze, they would fall apart because stereotypes are never meaningful, though they do have grave consequences.

After Aroon’s story, one thinks, maybe it’s an anomaly. Unfortunately, this anecdote is the beginning of a trend: foreign countries are name-dropped so unimaginatively they read as though a writer was tasked with writing flat jokes based solely on stereotypes. You, a delicate, rich white woman, had to bribe a person of colour with sex because he became violent—it was all you could do to survive; you emerge from the story cunning and deft.

When a show like Schitt’s Creek is sold as a depiction of life unfettered by judgement and discrimination, then, by a cruel calculus, your stories mired in stereotypes become fact. These are strange jokes laced with a fiery spirit—they flow in a direction that doesn’t seem intuitively right. One would expect for the joke to land at your expense, to show you blundering through unfamiliar and foreign landscapes with your bags of cash and glittering privilege. Instead, they show a precocity and cunning on your part—a deep knowledge of the way things work in these countries—that work against the intellect of those who ought to know the rules of the game best, those native to the countries where you’re a tourist. In these scenarios, you and your friends emerge unharmed, while your adversaries are humiliated in their own spaces.

On a more meta level, I wonder why these images were written into the show to begin with. The show pokes fun at your socialite past in so many respects, but never in these jokes, which is why their racism is so glaring. They serve to show you have lived a wild life but also that you’re very smart, and therefore earn your growth in the show. But your intelligence could be, and certainly is,
shown in less racist ways.

Everyone says Schitt’s Creek is an escape to empathy and radical acceptance; unfortunate that it’s marred by these flashes of dirt thrown at entire countries and ethnicities. I wonder how writers who have put this much time and care into character development, crafted lines with introspection and circumspection for every lead, could do this to swaths of people—reading them based not on their definitions of themselves, but for filth, based on otherizing sentiments, what Westerners have always arrogantly said about them. You might tell me to get over it, that these lines crept in unawares, but this is a TV show, it’s much mediated. You might tell me they’re accidents. Maybe. But the first line in Schitt’s Creek is uttered by an apparently Latina maid who opens the front door to government agents: “Immigration?”

What do these jokes say about the people who have created a show that is internationally beloved for being a place where love flourishes unapologetically? What do they say of the things we’re willing to ignore to find a glimmer of hope? What do they say of viewers who are willing to erase the agency of people of colour in order that we may be comfortable?

Your stories seem to be racist in a polite way, an idiosyncratically Canadian way, which has now been smuggled into the U.S. Ew, Alexis.

Warmest regards,

Alisha Mughal

Because I enjoy frustration and really bad customer service, I called Rogers. They informed me they could fix it, but not for six days. Six days! But, I was missing Gossip Girl! Panic set in. I worried about what kind of trouble the Real Housewives would get into without me. I imagined the anxiety caused by  being the only person on Twitter on a Sunday night not in on the Mad Men jokes or snark about Girls. What if some racial diversity suddenly showed up on Girls and I missed it? What about the dreaded plot spoilers? Rogers didn’t care.

I curled up on my living room floor and threw the best only-child in-a-world-that-is-unfair-woe-is-me- temper tantrum I could muster. I sulked and imagined my life without TV. Would I have to read books? Enjoy nature? Get a hobby? Interact with humanity? Screw that.

My life wasn’t always this way. There was a time when I often chose not to join a regularly scheduled program already in progress. As an avid consumer of pop culture, I sometimes find myself exhausted and overcome with the need to disengage. This has resulted in me avoiding: competitive cake baking shows, Brangelina, Glee, people trying to make Channing Tatum happen for me, and anything to do with the Hunger Games. I also refuse to make macaroons the new cupcake and, no, I haven’t seen the new Avengers movie. Leave me alone!

But when the fatigue really sets in and this pop culture junkie needs rehab, I often take my frustration out on my television. It’s not that I have high viewing standards. Not at all. I’ll watch and hate watch—sadly I’ve kept up with the Kardashians more than I would like to admit—pretty much anything. Except televised talent competitions. I have never watched an episode of American Idol. The terrifying combination of Ryan Seacrest, people breaking into song, and live studio audiences is too much for me.

But Lost was Seacrest free and I still managed to avoid it until season two. I knew it was about an island and a plane crash, but that was about it. Mad Men suffered the same fate. I felt like a feminist fraud when a friend and I were discussing pop culture heroines and Buffy made the list. I had to confess I’d never seen an episode. Battlestar Galactica. Whatever. Space sucks.

Eventually, I come around though. Resistance is futile. I finally started watching Lost and managed to annoy my friends—who were wondering why they were stuck in 2005 all of a sudden—with incessant questions about the hatch and the polar bears. I recently watched the first two seasons of Buffy and wish I hadn’t come late to her vampire slaying party. I now host Mad Men viewings on Sunday nights. No themed cocktails though. I’m far too lazy for that.

When faced with pop culture overload we sometimes just need to regain control and consume things on our own terms. I’ll care about Don Draper when I’m good and ready, thank you very much. It’s not just the watching of the TV. It’s the TV-related tweets. It’s the endless online recaps and media analysis. I had reached my saturation point with Girls before I even started watching it. It’s the friends who make you feel like a total loser if you’re not watching Game of Thrones. I am not watching Game of Thrones, by the way.

While laying on my floor post-Rogers temper tantrum I considered becoming one of those people who doesn’t watch TV. Those smug people I avoid at parties cause they think they’re better than me. You read The Economist instead of watching Jersey Shore. Hooray for you, here’s a smarty pants medal!

Lucky for me I didn’t have to ponder this long cause my cable ended up returning after four hours. Turns out it was just a service problem in my area. I did miss Chuck Bass that night, but made it in time for Shameless. It’s a great show. You should totally watch it.

**Yes, I realize this is a very first world problem. I also realize I could watch these shows online, but really that’s not my preferred method of TV delivery.

Lisa Whittington-Hill is the publisher of This Magazine. Her blog on pop culture will appear every second Tuesday.

David Skok. Illustration by Dave Donald

David Skok, the managing editor of GlobalNews.ca, checked into Harvard University in September to begin a one-year Nieman Fellowship. The 33-year-old is the first Canadian digital journalist to receive the prestigious award. He’ll be studying “how to sustain Canadian journalism’s distinct presence in a world of stateless news organizations.” He spoke with This two weeks before heading to Boston.

THIS: I’ve seen you referred to as an online journalist and a digital journalist. Which do you prefer?

SKOK: Digital journalist. Online is a little too specific to the web. What we do is beyond that. It’s mobile. It’s iPads and everything else.

THIS: Do you like being called a digital journalist?

SKOK: It’s fine for now but I look forward to the day when there’s no label that separates digital versus broadcast versus a print journalist.

THIS: Do you think the established media consider digital to be less important than traditional media?

SKOK: It depends on what we’re talking about. There are two ways to look at digital media. For me there’s the newsgathering … and then there’s digital media for publishing and distribution. I think digital media [for the latter] is becoming more accepted, if not by choice but by necessity. From a newsgathering point of view, I think there’s a long way to go.

THIS: For example?

SKOK: Look at the Arab Spring and how Andy Carvin of NPR used Twitter to verify information and facts. And he did the same thing with Syria. He was in Washington, DC. He’s being more effective at getting the accurate, fair, correct news out than the mainstream or legacy news organizations. That’s something I don’t think many news organizations have actually caught on to yet. And if they have it’s in a very tokenistic way, not as a real way of telling stories.

THIS: There’s a concern that if someone Tweets something, how do you know it’s true?

SKOK: Exactly. When I speak within my own newsrooms, I often make the point: how is a Tweet any different than a press release, or a report you’re hearing on a police scanner or anything else? Every piece of information we get needs to be verified and Twitter is no different.

THIS: Can you sum up your overriding goal for your fellowship?

SKOK: It’s probably too far-reaching but there are three parts I really want to look at. The first is the new tools of journalism, such as Twitter, open data, data journalism and even things like WikiLeaks. Second is how should Canadian newsrooms evolve in light of all these changes. This one hits me very close to home because I run a digital media organization within a legacy news organization. We created that from scratch and eventually, ultimately we have to integrate our product and our journalists into the main news organization as a whole. The third part is how can we, as Canadian news organizations, think of our role in the global sphere.

THIS: What do you mean by stateless news organizations?

SKOK: Ones that are based in a country but whose target audience is not that country. Al Jazeera, for example. Its target audience is not Qatar, where it’s based or Dubai or even the Arab world. I watched Al Jazeera and BBC World and CNN International on my iPad during the Arab Spring demonstrations. I didn’t need to be watching a Canadian news organization. Do we even need a national news organization anymore?

THIS: What else will you be studying?

SKOK: I’m noticing, as someone running the digital side of things, that we’re increasingly reliant on private enterprise to host the content. For example Facebook, Twitter, even the servers we use, Amazon, let’s say, they’re all private companies that host content in California. What interest do they have in sustaining Canadian journalism? What obligations does the CRTC place on them? There’s something about that we should be questioning. I’ll also be taking some courses at business school to understand more of the business side of things. As journalists we’ve always had this church and state mentality and I don’t know if we can still afford to do that anymore because we’re not making money anymore.

THIS: Are you excited about spending a year at Harvard?

SKOK: Absolutely. The resources at Harvard are immense. There are so many bright people. But not just that, there are programs that are thinking about all these issues we’re talking about, whether the law school, the Kennedy School, MIT. And they’re tackling these issues every day. To be immersed in that environment and be able to tackle them without the day-to-day operational running of a newsroom is incredibly exciting.

ASSIGNMENT Watch the fledgling Sun News Network, infamously nicknamed “Fox News North,” for eight hours. Note distinguishing characteristics, rate credibility and journalistic bona fides, and measure decibel levels of hosts’ shouting. Hypothesize audience size and composition. Compare and contrast with American forerunner Fox News. Administer wine as needed.

4:00 PM The Caldwell Account with host Theo Caldwell. Ten seconds in and there’s a veiled reference to ladies being gentler creatures, free from the oppressive bonds of thinkin’ and carin’ ’bout heavy stuff that matters. I begin jotting a tally of such events, and loosen my bustle so I don’t get the vapours.

4:08 PM Tiny, WASPy fellow sits behind a too-large desk burping sorta-ideas into the ether while people wandering into the background agree with him. Folksy phrases abound: “You know what really fries my ham?” Boy howdy! “Go pound sand!” Darn tootin’! Then he calls all Saudis “nefarious.” (Shortly after this experiment, The Caldwell Account was cancelled. Based on this observation, it is not missed.)

5:06 PM Preston Manning is a guest! I forgot that he sounds like a sad duck.

5:09 PM But don’t be a sad duck, Preston Manning! You have your very own think tank now. And according to that think tank, Canada is becoming more conservative. Just ask the 1,000 elderly people who actually pick up their landline telephones whom Preston Manning called and asked.

5:11 PM Host Charles Adler (his show is called Charles Adler) keeps calling Manning by his full name. Maybe he doesn’t know what title to give him, so it’s safest to just say the whole thing. That, or Manning requested it. Both of these ideas please me.

5:17 PM A commercial: a bunch of hot female Sun News Network anchorbabes. One says, “Finally, a news channel that lets me be me.” There we go again, us womens, confusing our news broadcasts with our tampons.

5:23 PM Joy Tiz—author of Obamanutz! A Cult Leader Takes the White House—comes on to discuss the scandalous underwear photography of congressman Anthony Weiner, and how the Democratic Party refuses to do anything about it (except, you know, call for an investigation. Boring!). She joins Adler “via Skype.” Take that, lamestream telephony! A little Googling reveals that Obamanutz! is self-published and includes 100 percent more zeds than necessary. Her website also notes (on the front page!) that she is the owner of “three magnificent and staunchly conservative German shepherds.”

6:04 PM Bryan Lilley hosts Byline. Finally, someone to make me genuinely mad rather than drowsily irritated. This hour, I will think and write the word “obfuscate” approximately once per minute, e.g., when Lilley uses the postal lockout to try to illustrate how unions are forcing their employees to support “radical organizations.”

6:10 PM A swoopy graphic of money going down a drain with the CBC logo on it!

6:34 PM Former Stephen Harper chief of staff Guy Giorno asserts that politics is not about left or right, or parties, but who stands up for “ordinary Canadians who don’t pick up placards and protest, they’re too busy working and taking care of their families.”

6:35 PM I pour a glass of wine.

6:42 PM According to this guest, whose credentials are unclear, the CBC is “atrophying money.” I think he means hemorrhaging. Also, he notes the CBC cut $30 million from its budget the previous year, so perhaps “atrophying” is exactly what he meant? More wine.

6:47 PM Brian Rushfeldt of Canada Family Action says TV is all left-wing propaganda. “Manipulation of emotions is what television does,” he says—and lo, a dictionary doth populate the word “irony.” The lefty TV shows referred to are Friends and Sesame Street. Never forget: A is for Abortion, B is for Bolshevik, C is for CBC.

7:00 PM Here it comes! The Source with Ezra Levant! Finally, the show I’ve been waiting for—Canada’s answer to Glenn Beck! He of the theatrics! And… he’s off tonight. Instead, please enjoy this dour substitute, who delivers a 15-minute rant about squeegee kids and panhandlers who wait to terrorize your shiny car with dirty water and crudely written signs.

8:14 PM In this neat little advertorial, Charles Adler is actually shilling a product sitting at the same desk from which he broadcasts his show. It’s some sort of nutritional supplement. Let’s all take it! With wine. After all, you have nothing to lose, since the next three hours will all be repeats of the shows you just watched.

9ISH A commercial advertising Sun News Network: “We’re out there. Far out there. Beyond the reach of the television police.”

10ISH More repeats. By the way, where are all the hot chicks “being themselves”? Have not seen even one sexy anchor getting down with her neo-liberal self.

MIDNIGHT OR THEREABOUTS I am done. And glad. So glad. Thank the TV gods that we are so bad at this—this making of polemics, this dividing of loyalties, this unpacking of prejudices masquerading as argument. We, as a nation, appear mercifully ill-suited to the task.

CONCLUSIONS Be unafraid of Sun News Network, lefty elites: there is so little there there. Was watching Sun TV News funny? At times. But mostly it was a little sad, a little pitiful. Sound and fury signifying … not nothing, but worse—just more sound and fury. A sad duck eating its own tail.

RAW DATA COLLECTED:
Incidents of thinly veiled racism: 6
Incidents of not-at-all veiled misogyny: 3.5
Self-congratulatory statements by Sun News personalities: 4
Unions are scary! 5
Artists want all your money! 8
Bottles of wine consumed: 0.75

Creative Commons photo by Flickr user Daniel Villar Onrubia.

The CRTC’s in the news again, this time for proposing that journalists can lie, as long as no one gets hurt.

Last week the CRTC asked the Canadian Broadcast Standards Council to review its ban of unedited version of the Dire Straits’ 1985 song “Money for Nothing.” The 25-year-old hit, which has since started climbing on iTunes, was banned from Canadian airwaves after a complaint over its use of the word “faggot.”

But days before Straitgate, the CRTC quietly published an amendment that would punish the broadcasting, through radio or television, of “any news that the licensee knows is false or misleading and that endangers or is likely to endanger the lives, health or safety of the public.”

The amendment would replace the current wording, that “a licensee shall not broadcast […] any false or misleading news.”

CRTC sources told the Toronto Star the amendments aim to clarify the regulation, as the current text is open to legal loopholes. The amendment also clarifies “obscene” material as either the “undue exploitation of sex” or a dominant sexual characteristic combined with “crime, horror, cruelty [and/or] violence.”

Tech law expert Michael Geist blogged about the proposal, pointing out one small weasel word: “and.” Once again, the amendment concerns the broadcasting of “any news that the licensee knows is false or misleading and that endangers or is likely to endanger the lives, health or safety of the public.”

“It would perfectly permissible for a broadcaster to air false or misleading news,” he wrote, “provided that it not endanger the lives, health or safety of the public.” Geist also noted how much closer the amendment puts us to U.S. regulations.

The proposal comes weeks before the expected launch of Sun TV News in March. The channel generated controversy last fall for its attempt at Category 1 status, making it a must-offer for digital and satellite providers. Critics dubbed the network “Fox News North,” noting references to the controversial right-wing broadcaster in its application.

Before its approval, the channel prompted a scandal implicating Margaret Atwood and eventually George Soros, a rumoured ousting of the head of the CRTC, and an actual resignation from the project head. Although Sun TV generated much unfounded hysteria, hints at Fox News North have been copious throughout the coverage of this proposal.

But not without reason. This month’s shooting spree in Tucson, Arizona made many Americans think twice about overheated political discourse, propagated by many mainstream outlets.

Minutes after news that congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords had been shot, a Palin PAC image of her district in crosshairs went viral, as did clips from enflamed talk radio pundits and savage television “debates.” To quote Pima County sheriff Clarence Dupnik:

“I think it’s time as a country that we need to do a little soul searching because I think it’s the vitriolic rhetoric that we hear day in and day out, from the people in the radio business, and some people in the T.V. business […] it may be free speech but it does not come without consequences.”

Although many now draw a link to the suspected gunman’s mental health issues, that many Americans automatically thought of their violent news media is telling.

CRTC’s proposed change would make it okay for media to deliberately lie, as long as nobody’s hurt. The results could be ineffective at best. After harm takes place — an assassination, a stampede — it will be hard to find a solid link between one isolated news story and an event.

The reality is that social reaction to media coverage is often cumulative. According to agenda-setting theory, media can’t tell people what to think, but rather what to think about. Media shape the public psyche, not through individual reports but through larger thematic decisions about what merits coverage and how issues are framed.

The CRTC’s proposal is bad for journalism and democracy. Not only does it allow for lower-quality broadcasting, it could divert public attention from wide-ranging media issues by pigeonholing individual cases.

That our broadcast regulators would concern themselves more with public offence than public good is disconcerting. Critics left and right have decried the changes as dangerous for democracy.

If implemented, the changes would take effect in September. If you’d like to speak up, you have until February 9 to submit a complaint.

In 1999, the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission took a hard look at the then-burgeoning internet. They then did what many Canadians would consider a very un-CRTC-like thing: they decided not to regulate it.

That may come as something of a surprise, as we tend to think that if the CRTC has a thing, it’s regulating stuff. They are, after all, the people known primarily for “CanCon” rules, the quotas that dictate that a certain percentage of programming on Canadian radio and television is made in Canada.

Yet at the time, the Commission’s logic for not touching the web was twofold. First, it felt that the bulk of material online consisted “predominantly of alphanumeric text,” and thus simply wasn’t theirs to regulate; second, it seemed Canadians were both consuming and making lots of Canadian content just fine on their own.

Eleven years later, the internet is a different place. The big change is that, whether on YouTube or the sites of Canadian TV networks, we are watching millions of videos a day. What’s more, we also have unfettered access to TV and film through online services like iTunes, and, since September, streaming video through the U.S.based Netflix. With this sudden online expansion of our entertainment and cultural choices, it may be time for Canada to not only change its approach to regulation, but the entire CanCon concept itself.

Though always contentious, the need for CanCon in our culture’s most dominant medium, TV, has compelling evidence behind it. Except for Hockey Night in Canada, the top 20 most-watched shows in Canada are all made in America. Though there are many reasons why, money is the big one. The pilot episode for ABC’s Lost was widely rumoured to have a budget of around $12 million. That’s as much as or more than many Canadian dramas get for an entire season. The disparity in financial backing—and, consequently, in cultural influence—is often stark. Legitimate debate rages over whether regulation is the best way to solve this gap, but the dominance of American media is likely to increase following the arrival this September of streaming-video service Netflix, allowing users to watch movies and TV shows on their PCs or, with the right equipment, TVs. The growing service already has 15 million subscribers in the U.S., and the company has become so well-known that even Ottawa-based Zip.ca has for years advertised itself as Canada’s Netflix.

But because Netflix delivers content over the web, it’s not subject to any CanCon regulation by the CRTC, and is under no obligation to deliver Canadian content. Similar services from Apple, Microsoft, and Sony are also free to sell and rent whatever they please. Because it’s relatively easy to license Canadian content, and because Canadians will watch it, most services do launch with some Canadian shows and music. But as more and more of these services spring up, Canadians will have increasing access to online broadcast channels untouched by CanCon requirements.

The answer, it would seem, would be to regulate them. When the CRTC initially chose to leave the web alone, it did so because it felt the market was doing an adequate job of protecting Canadian interests. But a decade later, market economics have done what they always do: they created a link between capital and cultural clout, and wealthy American giants like Netflix and Apple will soon have even more influence over what we watch.

What’s more, if media is the fodder for the conversations we have on Facebook and Twitter about the contemporary moment, it’s hard not to talk about those ubiquitous American shows. If you want to chat about body issues, it’s Mad Men’s Christina Hendricks you talk about. The web is a global conversation, and in a world in which U.S. cultural production is everywhere, American culture often becomes our shared reference point.

But even amidst this changing landscape, regulating the web is not the answer. In fact, the cyclical relationship between web hype and pop culture means that regulation is far less effective than relevance. CanCon was effective in a world with a few limited TV channels to choose from; the nearly limitless bandwidth of the web has changed the game.

To become more present in Canadian culture, Canadian media must provide its own fodder for online chatter, links, and debate. What this means is that rather than regulating the delivery system, we need to fund homegrown arts and culture to ensure the internet pipe into every home is filled with high-quality Canadian content.

Forget the free-marketeers’ response that “Canadian media should stand on its own two feet.” We need to acknowledge that the web has expanded our cultural choices well beyond Canadian borders. For Canadians to have and keep our own points of reference that speak to our own issues, we must fund them so that, placed side by side with American or British counterparts, there is no reason to click away.

Fortunately, this path has a precedent. Recent examples from television like Corner Gas and Being Erica prove that when Canadians are given high-quality programming from their own backyards, they will flock to it. In the face of the web and massively expanded competition from across the world, Canada must continue to invest in its own cultural industries if it too wishes to be part of that global conversation.

Truth and lies flourish equally online. Exhausted readers are in retreat. Illustration by Matt Daley.

Though you might reasonably condemn the modern internet for a variety of reasons—ruining attention spans, turning all public discourse into a shouting match, or insulting your sexual prowess with badly punctuated mass emails—one thing the medium could always reasonably claim was its potential for spreading truth. Decentralized and egalitarian, the web seemed to herald the end of the coverup: with no authority to stop the spread of information, facts would inevitably slip the bonds of corrupt politicians, crooked industrialists, and tyrannical generals. Sooner or later, we believed, the real facts would always come to light. The Truth Is Out There.

It turns out that’s not, uh, true.

That’s if the results of a recent study from the University of Michigan are anything to go by. The researchers found that people are remarkably resistant to facts that deviate from beliefs they already hold; the phenomenon is particularly acute in those with strong political leanings. This is the “truthiness” that satirical news anchor Stephen Colbert famously named—a trust in gut instincts instead of documented facts. That intuitive concept has now, somewhat ironically, been scientifically proven. In other words, The Truth Is Out There, But Nobody Can Be Bothered To Go Looking For It.

We already know that falsehood, distortion, and bullshit flourish online just as much as fact. The internet is home to climate-change deniers, 9-11 conspiracy nuts, and fringe politics of all sorts—in part because it is so easy to find “facts” that support whatever you believe. The sheer glut and variety of information online has made it difficult to distinguish fact from invention and truthfulness from truthiness. The result, for many people, has been to retreat into the comfort of the mainstream media.

Canada experienced this during the G20 summit in Toronto in July. After some protestors caused property damage early in the weekend, many journalists found themselves at the centre of what they believed to be an excessive police reaction. Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube were central to this real-time reporting, and people who were following the demonstrations and police actions online had a very different experience than live-TV viewers—who mostly saw sensational footage of a burning police car on a continuous loop for two days.

TVOntario’s Steve Paikin—a man who has built a career on measured neutrality—told of what seemed like an illegitimate round up of legal protestors and the beating of a reporter from the U.K.’s Guardian. The Globe and Mail’s Lisan Jutras wrote of her experience being detained in the rain for hours and taken into police custody.

New media seemed to finally be fulfilling its promise: coverage that was richer, more immediate, more diverse, and faster.

Yet a few days after the summit, an Angus Reid poll revealed that a full two-thirds of Canadians not only supported the police action, but were also “disgusted” with the protestors, despite the fact that the majority of them did nothing more than walk down streets holding placards. Images of anarchists breaking windows dominated big media, and the fact that there was plenty of information online offering a different interpretation mattered little, if at all.

The problem is that, unlike TV, you have to choose what you view online. That means that unless you’re already looking for an alternative take, it’s unlikely to find you. But more than that, the web is full of so many different versions of the truth, from the legitimate to the lunatic, that their very existence undercuts the medium’s validity for many people. When it is as easy to stumble upon a cogent, well-researched critique of global capitalism as it is a raving theory about “the moon-landing hoax,” the tendency is to discount the medium altogether.

By allowing anyone to publish and disseminate information, the web broke the historical link between power and publishing. Many people cheered that change, and for understandable reasons. The web embodies the contemporary collapse of all the things that once seemed beyond question: truth, fact, authority. But when nothing is objectively true, it also means nothing is objectively false. Presented with an almost infinite mass of options, most people, rather than diving in, simply retreat into what they already know—and for the majority, that’s still television.

Tremendous excitement accompanied WikiLeaks’ July release of 91,000 military documents related to the conflict in Afghanistan. Perhaps it’s justified. But earlier this year, when the same organization released “Collateral Murder”—a video that showed an American helicopter crew killing unarmed civilians in Iraq—excitement and controversy produced nothing lasting.

Despite the video’s incendiary content, and the clip’s seven million YouTube views, almost nothing changed. In the face of the official story and people’s faith in the authority that stood behind it, the clip was nothing more than a grain of sand, like those blown about by that helicopter’s blades—one more “fact” among millions, lost in the roar of a rushing, directionless storm.