[LINK[ The Hills After Show
Aug. 15th, 2008 03:15 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rfmcdonaldMy days of watching Canada's music channels, MuchMusic and MuchMoreMusic, are long past me, and I've never watched MTV Canada. That said, Marc Weisblott's interesting Eye Weekly article "The Hills After Show" suggests that Canada's aftershow analysis of MTV's reality soap The Hills has a fair amount to say about Canadian (or rather, English Canadian) popular culture and its relationship to the United States.
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My days of watching Canada's music channels, <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Much_Music">MuchMusic</a> and <a href="http://www.muchmoremusic.com/">MuchMoreMusic</a>, are long past me, and I've never watched <a href="http://www.mtv.ca/">MTV Canada</a>. That said, Marc Weisblott's interesting <I>Eye Weekly</i> article <a href="http://www.eyeweekly.com/features/article/36059">"The Hills After Show"</a> suggests that Canada's aftershow analysis of MTV's reality soap <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jordan_Eubanks"><I>The Hills</i></a> has a fair amount to say about Canadian (or rather, English Canadian) popular culture and its relationship to the United States.
<blockquote<i>[O]n the other side of this house of mirrors called The Hills sit Jessi Cruickshank and Dan Levy, the 25-year-olds who co-host MTV Canada’s The After Show. Perched on their futon throne at the station’s studio in the Masonic Temple at Yonge and Davenport, they’ve been given the task of making sense of it all each Monday night at 10:30pm, in front of an increasingly rabid studio audience. Designed to help fulfill the CRTC licence requirements of a Canadian interactive talk-show channel required to program two-thirds homegrown programming, The After Show follows in the tradition of feeding off, and commenting on, American junk culture in order to cultivate a Canadian one (see sidebar).
How successful has it been? Successful enough to be sold back across the border, with the MTV mothership in the US promoting it for weekly online viewing on www.mtv.com. And the last two season finales of The Hills incorporated an After Show simulcast, live from Hollywood. Cruickshank and Levy, meanwhile, perfected their improvised banter to the point where their pop-culture klatch goes nightly on MTV Canada this fall, expanding beyond Heidi and Spencer to the entire hyperverse of mindless drivel.</i></blockquote>
<blockquote<i>[O]n the other side of this house of mirrors called The Hills sit Jessi Cruickshank and Dan Levy, the 25-year-olds who co-host MTV Canada’s The After Show. Perched on their futon throne at the station’s studio in the Masonic Temple at Yonge and Davenport, they’ve been given the task of making sense of it all each Monday night at 10:30pm, in front of an increasingly rabid studio audience. Designed to help fulfill the CRTC licence requirements of a Canadian interactive talk-show channel required to program two-thirds homegrown programming, The After Show follows in the tradition of feeding off, and commenting on, American junk culture in order to cultivate a Canadian one (see sidebar).
How successful has it been? Successful enough to be sold back across the border, with the MTV mothership in the US promoting it for weekly online viewing on www.mtv.com. And the last two season finales of The Hills incorporated an After Show simulcast, live from Hollywood. Cruickshank and Levy, meanwhile, perfected their improvised banter to the point where their pop-culture klatch goes nightly on MTV Canada this fall, expanding beyond Heidi and Spencer to the entire hyperverse of mindless drivel.</i></blockquote>
