The Hills: The After Show follows in the tradition of Canadian broadcasters responding to American television culture and, in some cases, selling it back to them. This historical timeline traces the evolution culminating in our cover story.
1972: Vic Cummings is recruited by Hamilton’s CHCH-TV to kill time during soap-opera commercial breaks due to regulations preventing Canadian broadcasters from running as many minutes of paid advertising as the originating American feed. Cummings becomes a heartthrob among housewives with campy acerbic commentary during breaks on shows like General Hospital, later getting his own show, Soap Box, and appearing as a police sergeant on an actual soap, Rituals.
1976: Second City Television debuts on Global, a parody of the medium from the first generation of performers weaned on the small screen — mostly the American shows that antennas picked up north of the border. Five years later, SCTV is picked up by NBC for Friday late-night airings, although Eugene Levy is the only Canadian-born cast member to stick with the show to its end in 1984. Like the others, he goes on to join the showbiz establishment SCTV aspired to skewer.
1979: The New Music, a weekly series interspersing rock videos with field reports about the people who made them, debuts on Citytv. The increased adoption of these promotional tools by the recording industry is a dream come true for no-budget Canadian television, foreshadowing the Aug. 1981 launch of MTV. J.D. Roberts, the show’s co-host (pictured with Freddie Mercury above), later cashes in his broadcast chips to become a well-coiffed American news anchor now haunted by YouTube mullet memories.
1983: MTV’s tipping point blows back north of the border as pop videos help feed after-school CanCon programming, like CBC’s Video Hits, CFMT’s Video Singles and Citytv’s Toronto Rocks, with the camera-ready likes of Culture Club, Duran Duran and Tears For Fears using our Brit-friendly tastes as a launch pad for their American hits. These shows are made redundant with the 1984 launch of MuchMusic, which was seen as more cerebral than its stateside counterpart (a faded memory that makes Gen-Xers feel as old as they are).
1995: The information superhighway finds an early favourite in The Beverly Hills 90210 Weekly Wrapup, an excruciatingly detailed critical rant written by Daniel Drennan. Moving the summary to the web generates a stream of hate email and defensive forum posts from the 90210 faithful. Drennan inspires a partly Toronto-based knock-off dedicated to Dawson’s Creek, which evolves into multi-show rambling recap site Television Without Pity, bought last year by NBC Universal.
2001: A new millennium ushers in a short-lived era of interminable Canadian television about television: U8TV, an online video network hosted by fame-craved twentysomethings living in a loft, has a parallel-reality cable show, The Lofters; CTV’s talktv is built around The Chatroom, which invites audience participation, including law student Ben Mulroney babbling via webcam; MTV finally surfaces in Canada, as an obscure digital cable channel.
2008: Rolling Stone describes The Hills: The After Show as a spot “in which giddy, hyperventilating fans dissect the show as if it’s the NFC championship,” rendering it the most legitimate cultural export to ever be spawned by archaic CRTC regulations. This month, MTV Canada bred a digital cable sequel, MTV2 — which, paralleling its US mothership, duplicates the formula for dudes who don’t watch reality soaps. (Too bad it’s too late to try launching a Jackass After Show.)