Restaurant Makeover isn’t a real reality show, but it plays one on TV. I watched it this week because it was about Toronto’s Dooney’s café, where I’ve spent an unhealthy amount of … time over the years.

By a real reality show, I mean a documentary, an old idea in film. The term was invented by John Grierson, who created the National Film Board of Canada 70 years ago. Canadians have been making them ever since. The CBC is now initiating a little digital channel called Documentary, far off the main track, while it pours its major resources into the farcically named Factual Entertainment department — i.e., reality TV. I’ll come back to that.

Like all reality shows, Restaurant Makeover is irritatingly formulaic. Any actual reality is dunked like a doughnut in a brew of perky music, terminal editing and vapid voiceover narration dumbing it all together. “With so little time remaining, will the crew pull off a miracle?”

Ten years ago, Starbucks, following its own global formula (find the best café sites and buy them out from under the local operators), tried to displace Dooney’s. The community rose up and beat back Starbucks for the only time anywhere. There were furious public meetings.

In this week’s show, there’s a wan moment when a “mob” of regulars herds compliantly in to voice fear of losing the character of the place, gets mollified and departs on cue. The only conflict is a bogus fight when Igor the contractor confronts Jonathan the designer in his bathtub (I swear). In fact, the real drama began when the crew departed, leaving anger and chaos. There should be a show called Restaurant Makeover Aftermath. You could call it postreality TV, as in postmodern.

Restaurant Makeover did manage to succeed where Starbucks failed: by turning Dooney’s into Starbucks, though only onscreen. You take a rich, textured reality (dare we reclaim the word?), flatten it out, then try to sell it back, overpriced, to the yokels as something just as good as the original. That’s what Starbucks does with the café experience, leaving a bitter taste (not just literally) with customers, who wonder: What happened to the real thing, that we and our ancestors built and loved?

Eventually comes the reaction: resentment, rage, roadside bombs. It’s no secret that the violence of our time, in ethnic, national or religious forms, is related to the dislocations of corporate globalization. I don’t think at bottom this stuff is solely ethnic, religious or about greed, either; it’s about emptying realities people have a historic right to, in the name of reality itself, or of facing economic reality.

Not everyone is as easily gulled as the bosses at the CBC. When I asked university students why they weren’t worried about invasions of privacy by websites such as Facebook, they said: Aww, everyone knows it’s a game. You don’t post anything truly intimate that you wouldn’t want revealed. They also know that the reality in reality TV is ironic, if it’s even that.

The young are always ahead of the curve. I was pleased to see a recent revival of 1960s-bashing by mavens like Robert Fulford. It’s the only decade to get that treatment. The prescience of the young inevitably bugs their elders but, allied to politics, as it was then, it becomes a special threat. Maybe it’s happening again.

U.S. Senator Bob Casey said he endorsed Barack Obama because his four apolitical kids were enthralled and he wanted to know why. Good for him. One hopeful sign is that Barack Obama doesn’t pander to the young or try to ape them. He wears a suit and no earrings. Same for Jon Stewart. Being yourself suffices. Donning generational drag doesn’t. Take note, CBC, in your ageless quest to conscript a youth audience.

Whoops, I’m out of space and can’t go into the point about reality TV versus documentary. You can probably guess what I had in mind.

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Rick Salutin

Rick Salutin is a Canadian novelist, playwright and critic. He is a strong advocate of left wing causes and writes a regular column in the Toronto Star.