PhD Oral Exam - Patrick Bonner, Film and Moving Image Studies

When studying for a doctoral degree (PhD), candidates submit a thesis that provides a critical review of the current state of knowledge of the thesis subject as well as the student’s own contributions to the subject. The distinguishing criterion of doctoral graduate research is a significant and original contribution to knowledge.

Once accepted, the candidate presents the thesis orally. This oral exam is open to the public.

Abstract

This dissertation examines the early history of Canada’s first commercial children’s cable channel, YTV, tracing the complex and contradictory ways in which the network and its popular programming were shaped through relationships with American studios, networks, and children’s brands. As one of the most watched cable networks in Canada throughout the 1990s, with a programming lineup dominated by original Canadian series, YTV was, in the context of Canadian television, a rare cultural and economic success during this era. This uniquely productive period was, however, short-lived. While in 2026 the network remains part of the Canadian television landscape in a depleted form—effectively a distributor of American children’s programming and children’s films from major American studios—the rest of Canada’s children’s television industries are slowly disappearing. Through case studies that analyze YTV’s early broadcast licensing conditions, its branding and marketing strategies, the transnational partnerships that shaped its programming, and the construction of its audience, I explore how the Canadian network provided an exciting commercial alternative to the dominant American children’s media culture, while paradoxically helping produce the conditions for Canadian children’s television present crisis, characterized by a new, though in some ways familiar, form of media dependency. As a nexus of popular Canadian culture, YTV does not only help us to better understand how Canada’s children’s entertainment industries transformed at the end of the twentieth century; it is broadly instructive for thinking about how Canadian television has adapted (or failed to adapt) to the demands of an increasingly globalized (and given Canada’s geography, Americanized) media environment at the turn of the millennium.