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Heading South to Make It Big: The American Success of Canada's You Can't Do That on Television

For scholars and policy-makers anxious about questions of Canadian national identity, the standard narrative describing the flow of television programming across the U.S.-Canadian border is one of an invasion from the south. After all, as Michael Koch explains, Canada shares a border of over 5000 kilometres with the United States, and 90 percent of Canada's population lives within 100 kilometres of that border. As a consequence of this proximity, the prodigious cultural industries of the United States have long been perceived as a threat to the cultural identity of Canada. (1) In other words, this anxiety is motivated by both geographic proximity and relative industrial strength. The American television industry has long enjoyed certain advantages over its Canadian counterpart, not least of which is its access to a larger domestic audience. One result of this access has been that producers of programs for the commercial television market in the United States have historically had more money to work with than producers of programs for Canadian broadcasters, whether state-funded or commercial, with better funding leading to higher production values. Another result has been that American producers have historically had an easier time recouping their costs on domestic sales alone, which has in turn enabled them to sell their programs in Canada for less than what it would cost Canadian companies to produce something equivalent. (2) Given this situation, and given the linguistic and cultural similarities between the U.S. and English-speaking Canada, it would seem that anxiety about the role played by American programs in the Canadian television landscape is not entirely without grounds. (3) This is not, however, the whole story. To focus exclusively on the flow of programming from the U.S. to Canada is to miss an important aspect of cultural trade between the two countries. In the essay "Canadian Television Exports: Into the Mainstream," Paul Attallah traces the history of Canadian programs that have been successfully exported to the U.S. and elsewhere, starting with the Canadian Broadcast Corporation's (CBC) science-based show The Nature of Things, which began production in 1956. (4) He divides this history into two periods defined by the Canadian government's approach to the subsidization of television production, the turning point coming in the early 1980s when Telefilm Canada, the organization charged with stimulating Canadian film production, began to shift away from its historical focus on film to include television as well. Attallah goes on to point out two areas where Canadian television producers have been particularly successful in gaining access to the U.S. market. The first has been in the provision of programming for children, where the lower costs of production "coincided with the resources of Canadian producers." The second has been in the provision of programming to U.S. cable networks, which developed an "insatiable appetite" for programming content in the 1980s, a decade marked by rapid growth in the U.S. cable industry. (5) With this in mind, I examine in this paper the 1980s children's television show You Can't Do That On Television (YCDTOTV), a low-budget sketch comedy known for its gross-out humor that was produced by the independent broadcaster CJOH in Ottawa and became a hit on the U.S. cable network Nickelodeon. According to Attallah, the show, which premiered on CJOH in February 1979 and began airing on Nickelodeon in 1982, was "one of the most successful independent exports" to originate during the era before Telefilm Canada began to shift its funding focus to include television. (6) As such, it serves as a useful case study for comparing the dynamics shaping the U.S. and Canadian television industries during the 1980s: despite its hit status on Nickelodeon, where new episodes ran until 1990, YCDTOTV remained more or less unknown in Canada, even in Ottawa, until late in the decade. …