Since its inception in 1994, Vice has expanded from a zine-like Montreal publication to a global media empire—the company has offices in 18 countries and runs several websites, a record label, and a film department. For its latest venture, Vice Media Inc. has joined forces with HBO on a weekly 30-minute news series called Vice.

When it comes to Vice, it can be hard to distinguish news from entertainment. Its charismatic CEO, Shane Smith, is often characterized as a sort of hipster Peter Pan, a prankster who doesn’t want to grow up. Like parents signing off on their kid’s field trip, Bill Maher is listed as an executive producer and CNN’s Fareed Zakaria as a consultant.

As a company, Vice’s mission is to have a good time, which can give its news coverage a disjointed feel, as if we’re having a little too much fun watching other people suffer. As a TV show, Vice aims to “expose the absurdity of the modern condition,” according to its opening credits. Its slapdash aesthetics—reporters appear on air in jeans and flannel shirts, and the narration is conspicuously casual—openly defy the formal, detached reporting style of mainstream journalism. Compared to the stuffy, airbrushed atmosphere of traditional news channels, Vice is scruffily appealing, the underdog Starks to cable’s gleaming Lannisters.

Vice’s unkempt correspondents are the real stars of the show, constantly pointing out the ways in which their reporting puts them in danger: The “Escape from North Korea” segment is ridiculously short for such a huge undertaking, but there’s enough time for the reporter to point out that he’ll probably end up in jail if the group is caught—as if we’re worried about this guy and not the people leaving their families behind in search of a better life.

TV news has traditionally been a bastion of unbiased reporting—it’s this legacy that Aaron Sorkin clumsily advocates for in (ironically, HBO’s) The Newsroom. You could argue that Vice’s bros-on-the-ground approach is as close to unbiased reporting as you can get; this happens because they dispense with the illusion that unbiased journalism is even possible, a precedent set by Jon Stewart on The Daily Show and Stephen Colbert on The Colbert Report. Both of those comedians cultivate an irreverent attitude towards news reporting that Vice has always embraced across its platforms. In the process, the brand has reeled in a demographic that is notoriously tricky to monetize: young people who get their news online.

The show is appealing in part because it is selling a fantasy: Wouldn’t it be great, Vice seems to ask, if world peace were as simple as hopping on a plane and grabbing a drink with a warlord? It’s not that simple, of course, but Vice does have one advantage over its competitors. As a recent New Yorker profile pointed out, the company is a media anomaly in that it makes money rather than loses it. In 2011, Vice was valued at US$200 million, and Forbes estimates it could eventually be worth a billion. It costs money to produce segments shot in remote locations that they may not be able to access legally. It costs money to take risks.

Vice Media Inc. has built its reputation on its willingness to court controversy. Vice offers no shortage of powerful images, but the show is in such a hurry to move on to the next segment that it fails to provide any real context. Talking heads range from professors to warlords, but it’s difficult to know how much credibility to give their claims when their credentials are brushed over to fit in one more shot of a child holding an AK-47.

This is the enduring paradox of Vice: I saw things on the show that I had never seen before, but I somehow felt dumber after watching it. Offering Vice as an alternative to people who don’t like to read the news is like giving a photo album to someone who is illiterate. If you don’t already consume the news in some form, this isn’t going to help you very much, although it will probably give you something to talk about with your friends at the bar—and that’s really all Vice needs from its viewers. The HBO program functions less as a stand-alone show than a televised ad for the company, which has always made more sense online than in any other medium. Vice gets excited about a topic, shows off a quick, titillating glimpse, then leaves it behind—if that’s not a commercial for the internet age, I don’t know what is.

Vice airs Fridays at 11 p.m. on HBO.

Like a recurring northern version of The Truman Show, the MuchMusic VJ Search is back on the air, criss-crossing the nation in order to discover another on-air personality who can throw to Rihanna videos and hang with One Direction. (The winner will be announced on April 26.) In its 29 years of existence, Much has created an impressive (and fairly resilient) celebrity ecosystem. Often, the hosts have become more famous than the musicians they’re interviewing. We’ve tracked down 12 of the chosen ones. Here’s their oral history of the network, in all of its sweat-drenched, fashion-friendly glory.

THE 1980S

In the beginning

Christopher Ward: I was in the Second City touring company and was about to do my last show at the Old Fire Hall theatre. My good friend John Martin [creator of The New Music] came down to see it. At the end of the show I received a pie in the face, a china Elvis doll, and an offer from John to do a television show on Citytv, to be called City Limits. This was the fall of ’83. The idea was to do something that would be a prototype for MuchMusic. I think Citytv and CHUM already felt like they had a leg up because of The New Music. I think the final thing they felt would put [the MuchMusic bid] over the top was if they had something that resembled what they would do if they got the licence. City Limits was an all-night video show that ran two nights a week. When we got the licence, we just transitioned directly into MuchMusic on Labour Day weekend of 1984.

Kim Clarke Champniss: Within a day of arriving from Vancouver in 1986, I had to go on air and host the Rockflash news desk. No teleprompters, no researchers, no scriptwriters. You were lucky if you even got makeup. I’m serious. We were making it up as we went along. VJs had to stand in front of the camera for about 45 or 60 seconds and talk about the videos they’d just seen, and the ones that they were about to see. They would have to do their own research. There were paper files, no computers. There was a fax machine later on, when fax machines became fashionable around ’87. That was it. Suddenly, you’re up in 30 seconds…are you ready? Quick, think of something!

Christopher Ward: There was this buzz going at all times, to the point where literally there were times when you could hardly hear yourself speak, it was so loud around you. But it was very exciting. The camaraderie was great; that’s what fuelled the thing. Everybody pushed everybody else to be better, and do something better and take a risk.

Kim Clarke Champniss: Turning up to work at MuchMusic was like turning up to your clubhouse. It was absolutely awesome, and I had the best job in the world, like everyone there.

Christopher Ward: I mean, come on—how often do you get to launch a national network? The buzz surrounding it—oh, my god, it was fantastic to be a part of.

The divine Miss Ehm

Christopher Ward: Erica [Ehm] was quite young at the time and was working as a receptionist. As the lore goes, guys would see her in the background of shots and constantly want to know who she was. They put her on air, and boy, what a trajectory her career had. Erica became a very sophisticated commentator on popular music and culture, but in the beginning she was just kind of like the cute girl next door. And the bands loved her, fans loved her.

Changing the landscape

Kim Clarke Champniss: Moses Znaimer called the Citytv/MuchMusic building “the living movie.” And what Moses was getting at was way ahead of its time—it was essentially reality TV. The cameras were on as soon as you walked in the door. Anyone could walk through the shot, the phone would ring, you’d flub your lines, anything could happen.

Christopher Ward: There were certain acts that Much just committed to. We sat in the programming committee and we went, “You know what? These guys have it.” Glass Tiger was an example, and Honeymoon Suite, Blue Rodeo, Colin James. They didn’t come in the door with a lot going on, but Much put the pedal to the metal for them. For me, it was kind of personal. I’d been a Canadian musician. I knew how challenging it was. And it wasn’t just lack of finances, but geography working against you. Much changed the landscape instantly, because if you were on Much, you were everywhere.

THE 1990S

Getting the gig

Sook-Yin Lee: I was living in Vancouver and completely impoverished. I’d been making music and weird little movies and stuff, and there was a producer who wanted to pitch a TV show to Moses Znaimer, and he asked if I’d be one of the people to help make it if he got it off the ground. I said sure, and gave him a video of a bunch of my short films and music videos and stuff. He went to Toronto to talk and pitch his show to Moses, and Moses wasn’t interested in the project he was pitching, but he saw my stuff and said, “Who is this person?”

Rick Campanelli: I was still in university, and I remember holing myself up in my parents’ basement in the spring of ’94 while I was supposed to be studying for my final phys-ed exam, and just working and working on this banner, which was at least 20 feet long. I put that in a box and sent it into Much [as my application] for their work-as-a-temp contest. I waited and waited until the announcement. That was a life-changing moment for me. I remember Erica Ehm came back after a commercial break, and said, “You’re probably wondering who the winner of the contest is…. Well, we’re about to tell you.” As soon as I saw the M-shaped box, I knew [I’d won]. I started at Much in July of ’94, and I never looked back.

Rachel Perry: I was in my fourth year of university in the Fine Arts department at York, and I could literally see MuchMusic from the place where I bartended [Easy and the Fifth]. The actors I worked with were like, “You have a great look, you should get an agent.” So I went and got pictures done and then I got an agent. And the second thing they sent me for was MuchMusic. I don’t know what made me think I could be a VJ, but, you know, I did acting when I was in high school and I was a huge music fan. I went in and I did an audition. They took me into a big room that had a piano and I was screwing around on the piano and doing whatever came into my head. They loaned me a video camera and asked me to make a videotape. And I got a call to come in. Denise Donlon asked me to come outside with her to the back parking lot and she was like, “We want you to be our next VJ.”

The job

Sook-Yin Lee: It was pretty damn crazy when I walked in there, because I was so non-technological. And suddenly being thrown into the crazy steel eye of the “environment,” where everybody had ADD and there were cathode rays pointing at every spot on your brain. At first, I was like, “I don’t understand how these people are talking,” because they all spoke in fragments. And there was Steve Anthony, running around like a madman. I was like, “Oh, my god, am I gonna turn into one of these people?”

Bill Welychka: I grew up watching Christopher Ward and Steve Anthony and Erica Ehm, so to be able to work with them was brilliant. And Denise Donlon. Learning from them, watching them craft their interviews, and realizing it is a craft, it is an art. I had really good teachers that way. They probably weren’t aware of it, and I never told them that—it was too embarrassing.

Sook-Yin Lee: The first day of my job, I thought it’d be really funny to be dressed up as a fast-food server, because I was fast food for the culture. I made this tray with a stack of 20 videotapes on it, and I’d roller-skate around wearing a polyester waitress outfit, serving videos. When I was leaving Vancouver, a friend of mine had given me a handmade dildo harness, and I noticed that when I wore it without the dildo, I felt very grounded—all that leather and stuff. I was feeling quite nervous as the waitress that first day, so I went to the back and put on that harness. After a while, it began to chafe, so I took it off and put it in my backpack. And then Master T was walking around, on the air, making shit up off the top of his head. And he comes over to the new VJ, me, and says, “What’s in your backpack?” He looks in and says, “Oh, forget it. Never mind,” and walks away. There were hours to fill.

Rachel Perry: I was there at the intersection of the easiest people in the world to interview and the hardest to interview. Some people are dicks and some people are nice, and it comes down to personality. But when your band image is based on being tough or something—like the Korns and the Limp Bizkits of the world—you interview them and it just goes to shit. And you have to deal with the human element of being a fan and not having a good experience with the band. I had this terrible interview with Weezer, and I could never listen to Weezer the same again. It’s sad.

Bill Welychka: I remember going to a Bush show at the Molson Amphitheatre and being escorted out by security because people were yelling for me after the show. I got spotted in the audience and I created a bit of a riot with girls trying to get an autograph or a picture. For me, signing autographs was hilarious. I was never the cute one. Rick eventually became the cute one. I thought it was funny. Gratifying and sweet, but it never went to my head.

End of the road

Sook-Yin Lee: At the time, there were a lot of boy bands, and I think they’re psychologically interesting, but I didn’t find their music all that interesting. I liked a couple of the Backstreet Boys’ songs, but by and large, there was this whole ’50s quality, a strange conservatism, in all that music that was kind of a bummer. As were the more corporate stories I was being sent out on. After a while, they were like, “Sook-Yin, do you think you could go cover the Colgate DJ Challenge?” I took that as a sign that that was my time to leave.

Rick Campanelli: I wanted to show solidarity for Sook-Yin during her last day on air. As a kind of final statement, she decided to moon the nation, and I remember her saying, “Rick, I can’t do this myself.” So I said I’d do it with her. I think it was her very last shift, and nobody was expecting it. I dropped my pants right beside her, to show support.

Bill Welychka: I remember doing a Spice Girls day and I dressed up as Sporty Spice. And to me, it wasn’t necessarily about the music anymore. Eventually, I took a step back and chose to leave entertainment reporting because it wasn’t gratifying anymore. I was close to 30; I didn’t want to be interviewing rock stars anymore. I see that they’re slowly coming back around to blocks of videos. When I was doing it, we would have four-hour VJ shifts. And in those four hours you’d have dozens of videos, interviews almost every day depending who was in town, live performances. That was the presentation I remember as a kid, going home after school as a teenager to watch MuchMusic. And I think that sort of changed in the late ’90s, early 2000s, when it became about shows.

Click here for a close-up view of the timeline below

MILLENNIAL MUCH: 2000-2006

Getting the gig

Amanda Walsh: I was an actor and I was waitressing in the small town I grew up in outside of Montreal, and a friend of a friend of a friend was there who worked in TV in Toronto. It turned out that he worked for MuchMoreMusic. I was 19 and just getting ready to go to university, and he gave me his card and I remember being like, “Whoa, a business card!” He put me in touch with someone and they said they weren’t looking for anyone, but to send a tape if I wanted to. I wrote some sketches. I didn’t think anything was going to come of it. So I sent it in and about a week later they asked me to come to Toronto, where they interviewed me and had me do some sort of mock VJ shift, to see if I could read and put stuff together. They said they’d call in a week. And then they said yes.

The “Environment”

Bradford How: It did have a kind of Wild West sensibility in that it was going out across the country, and whatever we could conceive we could turn around and put it on national TV. You could walk into shots and grab a mic and just be in on it. That kind of lawlessness doesn’t seem to happen that much on live TV anymore. That was really the sensibility of the time, that you didn’t necessarily know what was going to happen on a shift.

Amanda Walsh: I felt very fortunate to be there at a time when there were all these great videos. For the VJs during the flow shifts, you had that creative freedom. I feel like when I was there, the only shift pop culture–wise was that celebrity culture was just starting to take hold. For the most part, the programming was really still about the music.

George Stroumboulopoulos: I loved being around the energy, I liked being in front of the windows. I was outside all the time, talking to fans, you know, kids would just come down from Sudbury or Slave Lake, they’d show up in Toronto and they would recognize that street corner. At the time, MuchMusic really valued its relationship with the country, and it really valued its relationship with the audience—like, they actually took the audience seriously at the time. So the kids would just come down and stand outside—they would wave. I would see them because I would be at my desk, and I would just walk outside and I’d hang around with the kids for a little bit. Queen and John was an exciting street corner in Toronto. All kinds of bands would just show up and shoot a guerrilla video right on the street [outside Much]. Like Down with Webster, I remember them as kids just pulling out of a van and recording a video.

Leah Miller: It was always loud. If there was a band on, they’d be soundchecking all afternoon. I swear I’m deaf now from having to listen to drum techs check the drums all afternoon, and not wearing earplugs when I should’ve been. But you know what, it was so much fun.

George Stroumboulopoulos: Most of my previous broadcasting had been really intimate, headphone-microphone radio. MuchMusic taught me a new skill, which was to take your intimacy and present it to a larger group of people. And I couldn’t have learned that anywhere else. It was the tail end of the cowboy era. I was able to jump on cars. I remember doing an episode of The Punk Show once and giving Keith Morris of The Circle Jerks and Black Flag the camera.

Unexpected Visitors

Bradford How: Celine Dion was on Brad TV once. We gave away t-shirts every week that would say funny things, and that week it said: “J’aime Celine, mais seulement comme une amie,” which, in English, means, “I like Celine, but only as a friend.” And then she signed them and we’d give them away.

George Stroumboulopoulos: I was standing outside one day doing a MuchNews hit, and Tre Cool from Green Day walked by and he needed to find a certain kind of shop that sold a certain kind of paraphernalia. So I said to him, “Well, there’s one here and there’s one there.” He said, “Can I walk there?” and I said, “No, you can’t.” So I just gave him my motorcycle key and my helmet. I asked, “Do you know how to ride a motorcycle?” I barely knew the guy, you know? And he was just walking down the street, and he was like, “Yeah, man, I do.” So I gave him my motorcycle and he took off for hours going to these various paraphernalia shops. Then he came back and returned my motorcycle with a Green Day sticker on the helmet and an empty gas tank. That shit was going down all the time.

MODERN-DAY MUCH: 2007-PRESENT

Cultural relevance

Devon Soltendieck: MuchMusic has an incredible history, and people who say it isn’t still culturally relevant—I’ll fight them. I still believe that it is. It’s just different. Sarah [Taylor] and I, we were the representation of that shift. Not positive or negative, but just a shift in the way people were starting to consume media. The average age for a VJ when I started was probably people in their early 30s. We were the first people who were hired who were really young. If you tuned into MuchMusic now and saw a bunch of people in their early 30s talking about music, it would be really weird. I think it needed to change. I think that kids want to relate to other kids now, and relatability is a huge thing in TV now.

Lauren Toyota: Everyone’s quick to make that argument of, “They’ve stopped playing music videos.” Really? We really haven’t. I’m watching right now, and there are two hours of video flow—which is still a huge part of the station, which has been that way since I grew up watching it. Obviously, people are at work and at school, but we play a wide variety of music during the day, and also incorporate it into other shows, like Video on Trial. We’ve had to incorporate drama programming because people are watching videos online. There’s been the argument that people don’t want to watch music videos on TV. The fact of the matter is that our highest-rated shows are Pretty Little Liars and Degrassi. That’s what people want to watch. But I still say our video content is as high as it ever was.

Devon Soltendieck: I remember having a chat with Matte Babel—maybe midway through our tenure—about how crazy it was that you’d get 15,000 girls surrounding MuchMusic when the Backstreet Boys and ’N Sync would come. We’d noticed for the first year or two we were there that fans weren’t responding in the same way they used to respond. Maybe stardom has changed and people don’t get that excited. And then, like three months later, the Jonas Brothers broke. We got to experience the lull, and then how exponentially fast an artist can become famous. I got to witness, first-hand, Justin Bieber becoming an enormous star. When he first came in, he was travelling with his musical director, his manager, and his mom—just this rag-tag team driving around Southern Ontario in this rented van.

Lauren Toyota: It’s pretty much exactly as I always imagined it. This is what I dreamed about as a kid: I’d be in my room, watching Sook-Yin Lee and Rachel Perry and Amanda Walsh and George, the classic MuchMusic interviews in an alleyway.

Much perspective

Devon Soltendieck: I’ve been reading Bill Carter’s The War for Late Night, and people say about hosting The Tonight Show that it’s not your show; you lease it. It’s the same for MuchMusic. For every VJ, there is a shelf life—there’s a time when viewers relate to them. But it’s a lease, and there’s always someone else who will come and do it, and that’s the way it’s supposed to be.

UPDATE, APRIL 5, 2012, 1:40 P.M.: A note about how interviews were conducted for this story. Since this story was published, we have received many inquiries as to why certain MuchMusic personalities were not included in the piece. An open invitation to participate was extended to all VJs, past and present, through official MuchMusic channels. From there, Grid editors pursued interviews with many potential participants, with the goal of achieving a clear balance in a number of areas (both in terms of the eras of Much history covered, which was necessary to provide a basic chronological sketch, and also in terms of diversity with respect to cultural background, musical purview, and gender), and within the allotted space. Some of those contacted declined to participate in this project, while others failed to respond to numerous interview requests. Our hope was to recount a fraction of the vast history of Much—one which is by no means the definitive or complete story, as is often the case with any oral history—and we’d certainly hoped to include additional voices (Master T and Michael Williams chief among them), but were disappointed when our repeated attempts to contact those individuals were unsuccessful.

Signing breasts is just another day at the office.

Catapulted to fame at 19 after appearing as the young slave Kunta Kinte in the 1977 blockbuster miniseries Roots, LeVar Burton hung his star on two little shows called Reading Rainbow and Star Trek: The Next Generation. “These days I’m most often recognized for Reading Rainbow,” says Burton. “There’s a generation of people who are now in their late 20s and early 30s that grew up on the show—they just seem to be everywhere.” Not that TNG fans are wallflowers, exactly. “I’ve signed a lot of arms and legs and breasts, which kind of loses its lustre after a while. I love my life, I’m the first to say it, but it does crack me up that this is normal to me. We were at a convention not too long ago and someone asked Brent [Spiner, who plays Data] to sign his name on her arm. She came back the next day with it tattooed. That’s an extreme example of how we coexist with this part of our lives that is completely ludicrous and bizarre.”

Being chief engineer is cooler than being captain, okay?

Over the 178-episode run of Star Trek: The Next Generation, everyone got more nookie than Lieutenant Commander Geordi La Forge, including Data (an android). “It never rang true to me that Geordi was socially inept with women,” protests Burton. “In no other aspect of his life was Geordi not operating at peak efficiency. Geordi was a rock star! He made the words ‘coolant leak’ sound sexy.” Burton wouldn’t trade places with any of his former castmates (“Geordi was a shit-hot engineer and he never took himself too seriously, unlike Picard”), but he’ll give credit where credit is due. “We love being together. We make each other laugh and that’s never going to change. No matter how many years away from the work that we get, we will always be family.”

The cast that reads together stays together.

Three years after the long-running Reading Rainbow went off the air in 2009, Burton and his business partner resurrected it as an iPad app. “The technology and the format are different,” he says, “but the mission is still the same.” Burton’s not above calling in a few favours—just think of the children. “I read a certain percentage of the titles and then I handpick other storytellers to read the balance of the books. I’m hitting up everybody: the Roots cast, the Star Trek cast. We’re trying to change the world one children’s book at a time. Who’s going to say no to that? Besides, actors have huge egos—if you tell them they’re needed and they’re loved, they’ll be there.”

Optimism is where it’s at. And for dark nights of the soul, there’s always Twitter.

The creator of Star Trek was onto something with all that chatter about diplomacy and peaceful exploration. “Gene Roddenberry put forth a point of view that is hopeful about the outcome here on Earth where humanity is concerned,” says Burton. “You’ve got to admit, looking around from where we sit today, it looks pretty bleak.” That’s where Reading Rainbow comes in: Burton, an optimist by nature, claims he’s tried to “magnetize toward himself” opportunities to reflect and share his upbeat outlook. Still, it’s not always raindrops on roses and whiskers on kittens. “There are times when the idea of failing keeps the hamster running around in the cage,” he says. “That’s when I log on to Twitter. There are people there, 24/7. For the insomniac, it’s quite a blessing. There’s no agent, there’s no manager, there’s no studio, there’s no network, there’s no publicist; it’s just me and my voice, my authentic self. It’s what I want to say when I want to say it—in 140 characters or less.” In short, god bless the internet? “I think Jonathan Frakes said it best when he said without Star Trek and porn, there would be no internet.”

LeVar Burton appears at Toronto ComiCon on March 9 at 7 p.m. $49–$149. Metro Toronto Convention Centre, South Building, 222 Bremner Blvd., comicontoronto.com.

Once a Saturday Night Live cast member, always a Saturday Night Live cast member.

Martin Short burst into the Canadian consciousness during his early ’80s run on SCTV, where he unleashed a delightful array of demented comic creations, most notably Ed Grimley (the impossibly optimistic Pat Sajak fan) and Jackie Rogers Jr., an unctuous lounge entertainer who happened to be a cross-eyed albino. He also did spot-on impressions of Pierre Trudeau and Brian Linehan. But it was Short’s wondrous single season on Saturday Night Live in 1984–85 that solidified his career stateside. The comic actor recently returned to his sketch roots by hosting that show’s Christmas episode, and the experience brought back memories of being in the oh-my-god-we’re-going-live pressure cooker. “It’s very intense,” he says. “And you’re very focused, so you’re reminded of that. I mean, for years after I was a cast member, I’d be at 30 Rock visiting, and if it was a Tuesday I’d think, ‘Why am I so antsy?’ You know how you leave university, and for 10 years you have nightmares about not being prepared for an exam? It’s that kind of place.”

Watching an American game show can change your life.

As the youngest of five children, Short didn’t get to decide what his family watched when they gathered in front of the TV. Still, the brand-new medium had a profound impact on young Martin’s psyche—it all seemed so glamorous to a kid growing up in 1950s Hamilton. “It was huge,” he remembers. “If we hadn’t owned a TV I probably would’ve been a social worker or something. I’d watch What’s My Line?”—a game show that featured four celebrities trying to guess various contestants’ occupations—“and the panelists would ask each other, ‘Didn’t I see you in Sardi’s restaurant earlier tonight?’ and I’d think, ‘What’s Sardi’s? I wanna go to Sardi’s!’ It just seemed like fun—people were laughing and being glib and dressing up, and seemed to have money to go to Sardi’s.”

Johnny Carson, yes; James Franco, not so much.

This Sunday evening, Short returns to Toronto to host the Canadian Screen Awards, the brand-new mash-up of the chronically underwhelming ceremonies formerly known as the Geminis (TV) and Genies (film). Describing his preparation for the gig, he says, “You go to who you liked as an awards host through the years, and figure out why you liked them. I think of Johnny Carson and Steve Martin and Billy Crystal. Tina Fey and Amy Poehler did a brilliant job on the Golden Globes. I think it’s really important to go out there and hopefully kill in the first 12 minutes.” Don’t expect any Jackie Rogers Jr.–style narcissism, though—he’s adamant that the night won’t morph into The Martin Short Show. “The star of that evening is not you; the star of that evening is the awards, and the talent and the artistry and the hard work, and that’s what it’s there for. But if it’s too much about Marty, that’s not what it should be.”

Don’t expect to see him play King Lear.

Now 62 and able to be selective, Short keeps things fresh by seeking out an eclectic mix of assignments, rather than spending years working on a sitcom. A season-long arc as a dour lawyer on Damages in 2010 gave us a rare glimpse of his dramatic chops, but he isn’t itching to play another serious role anytime soon. “I wouldn’t say no to that but I don’t seek it out. I kind of think that we—the audience—make an agreement with people who make us laugh. When they want to stretch publicly, sometimes we say, ‘Let us know when you’re back doing what we like.’ I just remember seeing people I loved in comedy doing an episode of The Rockford Files playing an assassin, and thinking, ‘I don’t need to see that.’ I loved doing Damages; I was totally challenged by all that and I thought it was fantastic. But it’s not something where I say, ‘This is better than comedy.’”

The Canadian Screen Awards air on March 3 at 8 p.m. on CBC-TV.

The medical profession’s central edict: “First, do no harm.” The guiding principle for medical dramas runs more along the lines of, “First, assume every headache is a brain tumour.” These shows require more than the usual suspension of disbelief: I felt validated by my decision to quit Grey’s Anatomy after four seasons when, in later seasons, Izzie got a brain tumour (and then another one), George was hit by a bus and died, and the doctors started singing Snow Patrol’s “Chasing Cars” mid-surgery.

The latest entry in the genre is Monday Mornings, based on a 2012 novel by CNN’s medical correspondent, Dr. Sanjay Gupta, credited as a co-creator along with David E. Kelley. The title refers to the weekly morbidity and mortality (M&M) meetings that take place at the fictional Chelsea General Hospital in Portland, where the chief of staff (Alfred Molina) grills doctors on their latest medical errors.

A defining trope of the medical drama is the hospital-as-high-school analogy, an aspect that the now-cancelled Emily Owens, M.D. magnified by placing its lead character alongside her med-school crush and high-school nemesis. On Monday Mornings, the M&M meetings take place in an auditorium, inviting the viewer to imagine the doctors as teenagers forced to sit through a school assembly as they slouch in their chairs and exchange smirks.

This analogy serves the notion that TV doctors can never handle their personal lives the way they can a triple bypass, a common theme in the mid-’90s heyday of medical soaps like Chicago Hope—another David E. Kelley production, and one which got its ass whooped by ER. Legal dramas, like Ally McBeal and The Practice, have always been more of Kelley’s forte (he’s an ex-lawyer), and Monday Mornings brings his legal expertise into the foreground. The impulse to peel back the curtain on the more politically charged aspects of medicine seems like the logical next step for the genre. But the M&M gimmick does little to hide the show’s reliance on the same stale tricks.

The malpractice angle gives Monday Mornings a convenient excuse to pit doctors in a suffering contest against both the patients and each other, the medical drama’s favourite habit. The dovetailing of patients’ ailments with the doctors’ personal crises feels especially heavy-handed on this show. In the first episode, a mother whose child dies on the operating table consoles the guilty doctor who performed the surgery. And I’m glad the 13-year-old with a fatal brain tumour was able to remind Dr. Napur (Sarayu Rao) that life is short so she should go ahead and ask that cute doctor out already.

Medical dramas probably should have ceased operations after the 2008 premiere of Childrens Hospital, a brilliant parody of the genre on the cable channel Adult Swim. Created by Rob Corddry, the show barely manages to be more ridiculous than the material it spoofs. In one episode ripped from a Grey’s plot, the doctors have to choose between saving an old black man and a white teenager, both of whom are impaled on the same pole: “What started out as a routine multiple- pole impaling has become a socio-racial minefield,” a doctor panics.

Judging by the spate of 2012/2013 medical shows that never made it to a second season—Emily Owens, M.D., The Mob Doctor, Animal Practice, Do No Harm—Monday Mornings is on shaky ground. The renaissance that dramatic TV has enjoyed over the past decade doesn’t seem to have touched doctor shows. I’d love to see a truly raw medical drama, shot with harsh lighting and featuring doctors who actually look as frazzled as they claim to be.

With the recent cancellations of House and Private Practice, I propose a moratorium on the medical drama—at least until someone can figure out a way to outdo the medical comedy. Last year, The Office’s Mindy Kaling premiered her excellent new show, The Mindy Project, in which she plays an OB/GYN looking for love. In the funniest episode so far, Mindy’s colleague insists he can take her on as a patient since he has no personal feelings towards her. Determined to prove him wrong, she asks him to be her gynecologist, and they make it to the breast exam before he finally ducks out. If this sounds like a potential Grey’s storyline, that’s no surprise: At this point, the medical drama is simply comedy delivered with too much gravitas.

He may be the host of Wild Things, but he’s not the star.

It’s not uncommon for celebrities to lend their voices to nature documentaries—e.g., Oprah’s narration of Discovery Channel’s Life series, or Morgan Freeman’s penguin film. But it’s rare to see an actor accustomed to makeup effects and green screens get up close and personal with a nature show’s real talent: the wildlife. Even if you need to cruise IMDb to remind yourself that Dominic Monaghan was a key figure in two of the most obsessed-over franchises of the past decade—as Charlie in Lost and Hobbit Meriadoc Brandybuck in the Lord of the Rings trilogy—there’s no denying that it’s impressive to observe the guy snorkelling up to a venomous giant water bug in Vietnam’s aptly named Crocodile Lake. “I don’t necessarily view myself as a celebrity,” says Monaghan. “I think of myself as an actor. I’ve never wanted to become a celebrity. Because of the acting work I’ve done, I was able to go into meetings and pitch a nature show. But I wasn’t pitching ‘Dom the celebrity goes to look for animals.’ I was suggesting that someone who’s an enthusiastic traveller and interested in wildlife could make a good host for a show about animals that a lot of people might not want to go looking for.”

There are no stunt doubles for handling cobras.

That whole picking-up-a-poisonous-snake-up-by-the-tail thing might seem like an homage to the late Steve “The Crocodile Hunter” Irwin, but Monaghan confirms the technique is simply how you “attempt to control them in a way that doesn’t hurt them and doesn’t hurt you.” It’s also part of the economical approach that he insists is essential to what they’re doing. “It’s a very small crew. We don’t have anything apart from the things needed to film [the action],” says Monaghan. “It’s the only way you can film nature shows, in the hope you will see things along the way that you can interact with.” In the case of Wild Things’ first episode, the animals that cross his path include a massive python and a feisty cobra, both of which the host expertly handles. “I was delighted we were able to find that kind of cobra because I think it’s the one that kills more people in India than any other cobra—and it’s also a stunning animal.”

No, he doesn’t have a death wish.

While discussing his interest in mortality on George Stroumboulopoulos Tonight last year, Monaghan casually mentioned that he has “no fear of death.” Although the animals Monaghan pursues on Wild Things are decidedly deadly, he says his enthusiasm for, say, flesh-eating army ants is fuelled more by admiration than adrenaline. “I have a small amount of trepidation about how I’m going to get to that place, but I’m not scared of dying and ceasing to be and not existing anymore,” he says. “I’m not courting death—at least I don’t feel like I’m courting death doing this show. I’m doing this show as a love letter to what I have gained from my interest in the natural world. It’s like saying thank you and raising awareness about something that’s meant so much to me.”

Wildlife wrangling is just as exciting on Twitter.

Monaghan, whose handle is @DomsWildThings, is surprisingly accessible and candid on Twitter. This tendency can lead to amusing exchanges with “Losties” and “Ringers,” whose fanaticism knows no bounds online. “If I were to make a judgment call on both of those groups,” he says, “I think I’d give [the title of “craziest”] to the Lord of the Rings fans at the moment, simply because The Hobbit has come back into culture.” Still, he insists that 98 per cent of his Twitter interactions are positive. “Even the crazy fans are still positive and cool,” he adds. “They might blow up my feed a bit, but that’s fine—that’s why I got Twitter.”

Wild Things with Dominic Monaghan premieres on OLN on Jan. 21 at 9 p.m.

Last year saw its share of prominent female showrunners—Tina Fey one-upped herself on the final season of 30 Rock, Mindy Kaling branched out from The Office with her own show, The Mindy Project, and Lena Dunham’s Girls made a splashy debut on HBO. So it was a good time for Amy Sherman-Palladino to make a comeback. Sherman-Palladino is best known as the creator of Gilmore Girls, a show featuring a protagonist who, by having a baby at 16 and cutting herself off from her wealthy family, did everything wrong but made things right for herself and her brainy daughter, Rory.

In the hands of another showrunner, Lorelai Gilmore might have been a bad girl working towards redemption. Instead, Sherman-Palladino gave TV a mom it had never seen before: a hilarious, spirited, fast-talking woman who is her daughter’s best friend first and mother second. After failed contract negotiations, Sherman-Palladino was replaced as executive producer for the show’s seventh and final season; with her departure, Gilmore Girls shifted from a compelling network anomaly to a conventional, soapy mess. Gone was the headstrong woman who kept her spare change under a dancing rabbi that played “Hava Nagila”: The Lorelai of season seven turned to mush.

Michelle (Sutton Foster), the protagonist of Sherman-Palladino’s latest show, Bunheads, which began its second season on Jan. 7, doesn’t have a Gilmore-style bond with a daughter-slash-BFF—she’s a Vegas showgirl who impulsively agrees to marry Hubbell Flowers, a nice guy who she doesn’t love. Michelle finds herself stuck in a small California town with her new husband and his mother, a situation that becomes more complicated when Hubbell is killed in a car accident. The show exemplifies Sherman-Palladino’s knack for sneaking subversive female characters into shows packaged as “women’s programming” and backed by wholesome networks like Bunheads’ ABC Spark.

Sherman-Palladino’s family-friendly oeuvre would appear to have little in common with 26-year-old Lena Dunham’s explicit take on her generation. Girls, which begins its second season on Jan. 13 on HBO, is a sex-fuelled scamper through the lives of four twentysomethings in Brooklyn, starring Dunham as the flighty Hannah. But like Bunheads, Girls neatly skirts stock character archetypes in unexpected ways.

Women on television invariably fit a limited set of types: the bitch, the hottie, the airhead. By breaking out of neat templates, Sherman-Palladino and Dunham’s characters and the shows they inhabit also break the rules of plot. It seemed inevitable that Michelle would end up working as a dance teacher in her mother-in-law’s ballet studio, but Bunheads’ first season left this prospect dangling in mid-air. Girls resists the routine pacing of most half-hour comedies: A plotline that seemed important may never be mentioned again, or a throwaway character could unexpectedly reappear in a later episode.

Sometimes, the most illustrative moments are wordless gestures. In the third episode of Girls’ upcoming season, Hannah’s friend Marnie inexplicably bursts out laughing after having sex with a hotshot artist. One of Bunheads’ best scenes is a dance routine tacked on to an episode that was running a few minutes short. It did nothing to advance the plot; it simply expressed how a character was feeling. That moment was a small assurance that a medium as formulaic as TV can truly surprise its audience.

These shows are compelling because they break the rules, rendering them unclassifiable in the realm of women’s programming. You can’t figure out a character’s arc based on her type—the narrative twists and turns thrill precisely because these characters don’t play to type. Hannah might land the hot guy she’s been pining for, but that doesn’t mean the relationship will work. Unlike, say, Sex and the City, where we were meant to assume Carrie would live happily ever after as long as she ended up with the elusive Mr. Big, these shows are more nihilistic: Both Hannah and Michelle end their respective first seasons utterly alone. For the most part, these women are in it by (and often for) themselves, and that’s a feeling that transcends gender boundaries.

Girls airs Sundays at 9 p.m. on HBO. Bunheads airs Mondays at 9 p.m. on ABC Spark.

When the country-music soap Nashville premiered this fall, it was rightly hailed as one of the season’s best new dramas, a charming frolic through the country-music machine and the city it calls home. Showrunner Callie Khouri, who lived in Nashville for several years, told the New York Times in October, “I want to represent [the city] in a way that everybody who lives here would find completely realistic.”

Khouri has cooked up a convincing portrayal of the industry, particularly in the show’s demonstration of the interplay between different subgenres of country music. It centres on the rivalry between queen bee Rayna Jaymes (Connie Britton), a diva whose best days are behind her, and Juliette Barnes (Hayden Panettiere), the new girl in town who’s stealing Rayna’s thunder.

So far, the show’s promising setup has failed to pay off. Despite the inclusion of real Nashville venues—like the small but venerable Bluebird Café—the Nashville of Nashville is largely limited to the state-of-the-art recording studios and mansions of its wealthier citizens. Even Scarlett, a waitress who writes songs on the side, is the niece of a veteran studio musician. And heaven forbid the writers give the struggling musicians more than a love triangle to contend with.

A show that aims to create a complex character out of the city in which it takes place can’t simply hold all but its biggest luminaries at arm’s length. It is widely acknowledged that the Manhattan of Sex and the City—in which you can live in a cozy Upper East Side brownstone and shop for $4,000 heels on a weekly columnist’s salary—doesn’t exist. Conversely, The Wire’s Baltimore is the most candid depiction of a city we’ve seen on TV so far, but the result was not pretty.

Nashville, on the other hand, is nothing if not pretty, from the stylishly scuffed leather boots to the music itself. While the program’s songs are climbing up the country charts, it’s not living up to its promise to show us the “real” Nashville. Richer portrayals of a city’s music scene are certainly possible, as evidenced by HBO’s Treme—which was co-created by The Wire mastermind David Simon. Set in post-Katrina New Orleans, Treme depicts music being made from the ground up, and takes pains to explore the lives of musicians who are talented but unsuccessful, or who have spent their lives happily playing at local venues without necessarily making it to the big-time. Nashville depicts the process much further up the food chain.

The program could play like a country version of Glee, but it aspires to be far more than a weekly karaoke session. A political subplot involving Rayna’s father, a J.R. Ewing type, and her husband, who decides to run for mayor, gestures towards Khouri’s loftier goals. But this B-story is the weakest aspect of the show, and it underscores the same tendency to focus on the upper echelons of Nashville society rather than the city’s regular folk.

It’s a shame, considering Nashville is perfectly positioned to be a great blue-collar show, something TV has largely been missing since Roseanne went off the air in 1997. NBC’s Friday Night Lights was a fascinating, nuanced look at a small Texas town, but the high-school football drama never had huge ratings, and it took a couple seasons for the media to start paying attention. Critics and viewers have flocked to Nashville—6.8 million people watched the pilot, and the show scored a more-than-respectable 84 per cent on Metacritic. It has the makings of a crossover hit.

Yet the show seems maddeningly determined to leave all the grit out of the depiction of its titular city, which may come down to Khouri’s desire to portray Nashville as a cosmopolitan hub rather than some backwoods cliché about simple Southern life. Khouri proved she could write working-class characters with her Oscar-winning screenplay for Thelma & Louise, a darkly comic road-trip film with two tough-talking Southern female leads. But Nashville is reluctant to veer towards a similarly risky place, choosing to bask in the glow of its megastars. The show teased us with the premise of an all-encompassing exploration of Nashville’s musical universe, but in order to deliver that, it’ll have to get its shiny hair a bit messy.

Nashville airs Wednesdays at 10 p.m. on ABC.

If you’re wondering what MTV has to say about the millennial generation, look no further than its two new scripted programs, Underemployed and I Just Want My Pants Back. Both shows are about a group of recent college grads trying to navigate a grown-up life that’s already full of deflated expectations. In its attempts to relate to these low-earning, high-stressing young adults, MTV tries to put a positive spin on going nowhere, but the network can’t resist talking down to a generation that, in its estimation, is more concerned with getting laid than getting a job.

There’s a lot of anxiety these days around marketing to millennials, which often gets expressed through a fumbling desire to speak in their internet-codified language. MTV’s efforts are no exception. On Underemployed, five friends in Chicago find their options limited a year after graduating. The valedictorian works at a donut shop; the model serves cocktails in his underwear. Craig Wright, the show’s creator and writer, is a generation removed from these characters—he based the show on his 23-year-old son’s experiences—and it shows in the creaky dialogue and excessive references to Facebook and Angry Birds.

I Just Want My Pants Back is Underemployed’s cool older cousin. It centres on Jason and his deadpan best friend, Tina, who gallivant around Brooklyn, smoking weed in bar bathrooms and hooking up with whomever they happen to brush up against. They seem to delight in their vacuity, and their conflicts usually revolve around something or someone spoiling their good time.

The problem with MTV’s take on this generation isn’t the characters’ poor decisions—the girls of HBO’s Girls make some questionable choices, too, but creator Lena Dunham resists the we’re-a-happy-family ending that concludes every episode of Underemployed. Girls dramatizes the terrifying prospect of being shoved into the world with a college degree and not much else, and it leaves the loose ends dangling precariously in mid-air. But then, MTV is not exactly known for its ambiguity.

Criticize these shows and you risk coming across as a finger-wagging parent: If these people have no money, how come they’re always going out to bars? How can they afford spacious loft apartments with exposed-brick walls? These gripes also sound a lot like the ones levelled almost two decades ago at another show about aimless young adults: Friends. When the series began, the characters on Friends were in their mid-20s—only a couple years older than MTV’s post-grads—but they seemed so much more grown up than their MTV counterparts. They helped each other make good decisions, instead of encouraging bad ones.

That protective-chosen-family dynamic was both relatable and aspirational, which is part of why Friends had such broad appeal—it was a network hit in the heyday of network hits. But it’s not surprising that Friends’ simple premise, which has been recycled by countless other shows, adopts such a different tone when translated for a much narrower demographic on MTV.

One of the network’s recent forays into scripted programming was the 2011 teen sex-and-drugs romp Skins. A remake of a British drama, the American version drew so much ire from critics like the Parents Television Council that advertisers backed out and the show was cancelled after one season. Having learned their lesson, MTV’s programmers have shifted focus from the ruinous debauchery of teenagers to the hilarious debauchery of recent college grads. That’s the only reading of Underemployed and Pants that resonates with me: The glorification of a period that’s so bleak for so many young people almost makes sense if it’s aimed at high-schoolers, who might see in these shows the golden possibility of a future without rules.

TV is an aspirational medium. People on TV are prettier than you are; they say funnier things and wear nicer clothes than you do. So it’s troubling and truly condescending that the primary message of a youth-oriented network seems to be that going nowhere is super cool. But don’t wring your hands just yet: The network has already cancelled Pants, which suggests today’s teens aspire to something more than watching other people do nothing on MTV.

Underemployed airs Tuesdays at 10 p.m. on MTV. I Just Want My Pants Back airs Sundays at 9 p.m. on MuchMoreMusic.

Twenty years after MTV’s The Real World introduced us to reality television as we know it, you can find a version of the format to suit any sensibility: You’ve got Survivor-style physical endurance shows, you can DIY along with handymen like Mike Holmes, you can follow your favourite celebs on Keeping Up With the Kardashians, or you can shudder at the nadir of humanity on Hoarders, Toddlers and Tiaras, or pretty much every show on TLC.

But Big Brother—a reality-competition progam on which a group of strangers are confined to a house with shitty food and no TV or internet—is the purest form of reality TV. It may not be the zaniest (hello, The Surreal Life) or the most fun to mock (The Bachelor, if you please), but its conceit has a brilliant simplicity and an internal logic that takes our addiction to the fish-bowl worlds we peer into week after week and reflects it right back at us.

The only skill you need to be successful on the show is an ability to manipulate people. Because the “houseguests” vote each other off, your survival depends on alliances. You have to be careful whose back you stab: When it’s down to the final two, a jury of former houseguests votes for the winner, who takes home a cash prize.

A show like Survivor, on which players also vote each other off, aims to disorient its contestants by putting them in an unfamiliar place and testing their endurance to the point of misery. While Survivor breaks its players with overstimulation, BB breaks the houseguests by removing stimulation: They’re left to fester in a house that gives off the illusion of domestic comfort. It’s like The Real World, only it actually matters if you’re a dick to your housemates. Unless, of course, that’s your strategy.

On Sunday morning, I went to the Big Brother Canada auditions to speak to Mike “Boogie” Malin, who made his first appearance on the show’s second season in 2001, and was open about the fact that as an actor in L.A., he originally tried out for the show to get some exposure. He went on to win the all-star season in 2006, and entered the house again as a “mentor” on the most recent season. By all accounts, Malin would seem to have a Big Brother addiction—one that’s not easy to shake. “It’s very hard to re-enter the real world,” he said. “You’re used to having a microphone on and having cameras watching, and when the cameras go away…you’re kind of like, Wow, no one really cares anymore.”

I got the impression that most of the people auditioning for the Canadian edition were trying to avoid the boring, no-cameras-or-microphones kind of life Malin described. The mostly twentysomethings lined up at the Fairmont Royal York looked surprisingly normal for reality-show hopefuls. Energetic representatives in Big Brother Canada t-shirts went around telling the contenders, “Be yourself!”

Being a houseguest on BB is probably the closest you can get to “being yourself” on a reality show. While most heavily edit conversations (I’m looking at you, The Hills), Big Brother shows events unfolding more or less as they are, with a completely live season finale. And if you doubt the editors’ judgment, you can watch a 24/7 live feed of the show online, for a small fee.

Despite Big Brother’s Orwellian title, to many people, constant surveillance seems to be more comforting than being left alone. Almost everyone I spoke to at the audition was a fan of BB; they wanted to go on the show to “be as popular as Mike Boogie,” as one man told me. “My life is so dull and boring,” said another. “I just go to work and come home.” One woman was hoping her real-world job as a therapist would help her decide which houseguests to trust; two girls from Ridgeway, Ontario, wanted…well, to get out of Ridgeway, Ontario.

Usually we play a game with ourselves when we watch reality shows—to borrow a line from The Hunger Games’ Peeta Mellark, real or not real? Is this contestant a ditz, or just playing one? Is this guy’s assholery part of his strategy, or is he just an asshole? On Big Brother, the contestants themselves take part in this dilemma, one that is usually reserved for reality-TV viewers.

“You can’t really make a living doing this,” one young man lamented, but if Mike Boogie is any indication, that’s not necessarily true anymore. The winner of Big Brother 14 was a 21-year-old mega-fan who’d watched the show since he was a kid. For a new generation of reality-show super-fans, the real world begins when the cameras switch on.

Big Brother Canada is scheduled to air on Slice in winter 2013. slice.ca.