What Television Remembers

Jennifer VanderBurgh asserts in this book that “television knows more, remembers more, and does more” than is usually recognized. Since their earliest days, television programs have both reflected and shaped culture.

The author, an associate professor at Saint Mary’s University in Halifax and the daughter of a CBC producer, explores the long relationship between television, particularly the CBC, and the city of Toronto. She argues that, from the 1960s to the 1980s, CBC’s Toronto-based dramas attempted to reach a national audience by having the city stand in for the idea of Canada as a collectivity. But this shifted in the 1990s to an emphasis on dramas that depicted a city of diverse individuals, “reflecting a more globally ubiquitous understanding of urbanity.”

VanderBurgh is writing for her fellow academics, so What Television Remembers is not for anyone looking for a popular history of broadcasting in this country. There are mentions of controversial thinkers such as Italian Marxist philosopher Antonio Gramsci, French philosophers Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault, and Canadian philosopher and media theorist Marshall McLuhan, and there are quotes from experts such as an “urban semiotician” and a “media scholar.”