In case you've missed it - here's a great article by Kate Taylor in the Toronto Star.
An excerpt:
In marked contrast to English Canada, Quebec is a textbook case of national identity and popular culture mutually reinforcing each other.
“They have created their own TV universe,” notes Arnie Gelbart, president of the bilingual Montreal film and TV production company Galafilm. “Both the commercial (TV) audience and the CBC audience prefer local content and local actors. It is self-reinforcing . . . It’s a cocoon, and it’s 180 degrees different from English Canada.”
In English Canada, American hits aired by commercial broadcasters, such as Survivor, Grey’s Anatomy and Criminal Minds, rule the ratings.
In francophone Canada, that list is dominated by Quebec game shows, talk shows, reality contests, soap operas and dramas, some of them created by Radio-Canada but the bulk of them produced by the commercial broadcaster TVA.
A hit such as Le Banquier, TVA’s adaptation of Deal or No Deal, can draw audiences as big as 1.5 million in a market of seven million francophone Canadians, six million of whom live in Quebec. That would be like drawing five million viewers in English Canada, a feat that no game show, Canadian or American, would ever achieve.
Of course, Quebec is protected from Hollywood’s influence by the language barrier, but many European TV schedules, which have increasingly featured dubbed American content in prime time since the introduction of new commercial channels in the 1990s, are put to shame by Quebec’s originality. There is something more at play here than language.
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