Quebec televsion is an important part of the culture of Quebec. The prime-time French-language television soap operas probably constitute the only core cultural element of Quebec which is shared by nearly all the citizens of the province (those who work and play in English only being excluded) regardless of their social status or their education. Snobs can pretend that they do not watch television, ever, or that they watch only really cultural foreign channels, but even if they do not even own a television, they are probably aware of what is going on in the latest soaps become of their pervasive nature in Quebec society. The soaps are all broadcast in evening prime-time hours, on the state-run French-language federal television network as well as on the private French-language networks such as TVA.
One of the many paradoxes of Quebec culture comes from the fact that the evening soap operas that did and still do so much to define it as a distinct francophone entity had their origins on the SRC, the Société Radio-Canada (CBC) TV network owned and operated by the federal government, which is in turn controlled by the English majority in the Canadian House of Commons. Because of this there are quite a few links to the media in Canada.
The existence of Quebec consumer culture and a consumer society distinct from other similar societies in North America and Europe is a corollary of this common core of TV watching. All of the prime-time soaps, including those run on the state network, are supported by massive advertising. Nearly all of this advertising is made in the province of Quebec or translated specifically for the francophone audience from "modular" commercials planned for translation. In the first decade of the introduction of TV, in the 1950s, many commercials were translated to French very simply, from the English commercials run on English-language networks in Canada and the United States.
In the 1960s a few major commercial advertisers noticed that they got much better results in Quebec if they made a translation of the idea behind their campaigns instead of just the text and used local Quebec personalities and actors instead of U.S. or English-Canadian individuals. Two decades later nearly all breakfast cereals, appliances and automobiles were being hawked on the French-language networks using Québécois French texts (usually written in Montreal) and local actors and personalities. Commercials made in France cannot be reused because, for the most part, they advertise goods and services which are not available in North America, and the cultural references of Paris and its "street language" do not connect with the street lingo of Montreal and its cultural reality of summer jazz festivals and extremely cold winter weather, to name but two differences.
