Jian and George may harken the advent of a new “culture” to some, mostly those who have given up thinking, dreaming, yearning.
But the criticism aimed in their direction has nothing to do with younger replacing older, and everything to do with replacing smart, daring and honesty with the fake and pretentious and dumb.

By the way, Dave, what ever happened to Vancouver?
It used to be so creative and brave, and unimpressed with the efforts of corporations to co-opt youth culture.
Now, the culture there sucks, really because there doesn’t seem to be any culture there at all.

CBC has made key decisions about its target demographic before. I remember as a child how all the parents used to love the singer Juliet and her show (“Our pet, Juliet”). When Beatlemania hit in the early 1960s, networks on both sides of the border decided this required a new line-up of programming to address this new world order. In a way, it was, as the boomers were coming of age, leading to an incredible focus on youth and youth culture. I was an AM radio fanatic in the early 1960s and I remember, there was a point where a Frank Sinatra song was bumped off the hit parade by a Beatles song. Then, a Dean Martin song bumped the Beatles down the charts. I realize in retrospect that was the last gasp of the popular culture of our parents’ generation’s culture as the predominant mainstream.

I don’t watch any TV so have not seen Strombo. I think Jian is a very good interviewer. Anyone I know who heard the Thornton interview thinks he was very professional in how he handled Billy Bob’s blow-up.

What an asshole. Identity crisis!!!!!!!

http://www.macleans.ca/culture/media/article.jsp?content=20061225_138619_138619

“The Hour is tracking exactly where I expect it to,” says Kirstine Layfield, executive director of network programming. “We’re really happy with it. It serves a lot of purposes. The main thing is that the measure of a success on the CBC isn’t just about the ratings, it’s about how much discussion it starts. And this show has started a lot of discussion.” The average nightly audience for the program over its first two months on the main network was 110,000 viewers — a substantial improvement over the 30,000 people Zed, the previous owner of that time slot, used to deliver. The weekly numbers also show a modest upwards trend. However, The Hour’s lead-in, Peter Mansbridge, draws close to 600,000. And the averages camouflage the nights when Stroumboulopoulos’s audience has reportedly(CBC won’t provide the breakdowns)dipped as low as 50,000. Layfield boasts that The Hour has, on occasion, even beaten Jon Stewart’s Daily Show, and The Colbert Report. What she doesn’t add is that those broadcasts of the U.S. comedy shows were reruns. The combined average audience for the two shows on the Comedy Network — a specialty channel — is 158,000. When Stewart and Colbert are rebroadcast on the main CTV network at midnight — an hour later than Stroumboulopoulos — the number grows to 205,000.