CTV

CTV is the closest thing Canada has to a broadcast heavyweight, and it shows in the sheer breadth of the schedule. Mornings belong to the national news and chat format, afternoons stack courtroom dramas and lifestyle repeats, while prime time rolls out the network's big American imports and its own homegrown hits. This is appointment television, not background noise, and the channel knows it. You'll see aggressive promotion for its fall lineup months in advance, which can get tiresome, but the payoff is that the shows themselves are polished to a high gloss. CTV's local news inserts feel properly local, too, you get real regional reporting, not just a Toronto feed with a different logo. If you want to understand Canadian pop culture, this is the channel to watch. It's safe, familiar, and occasionally brilliant, and it's the reason so many Canadians still say 'channel 2' when they mean the remote. General TV Canada doesn't get much more mainstream than this.