Abstract

This thesis examines the oversight of Canadian children’s television through the Canadian-American co-venture Goosebumps (1995-1998) and the Canadian specialty children’s network YTV. Grounding Goosebumps within the North American post-network television landscape, this thesis argues that the show anticipates hypercommercialism, a term used to define “the way in which advertisers tend to colonize media spaces” (Asquith 2012). This thesis proposes that by detaching YTV and Goosebumps from the threatening connotations of hypercommercialism, scholars can better engage with the show’s reception. It further contends that Goosebumps is imbued with sensorial and perceptual operations which can help children achieve the “mastery of intertextuality” (Kinder 1999). Analyzing how the poetics of the children’s horror genre are articulated through the show’s form, this thesis argues that Goosebumps cultivates the child audience through sensorial and perceptual operations, preparing them to engage with increasingly hyper-saturated media spaces. This audience training is problematized by the suffusion of the aesthetics of children’s horror into the marketing efforts of Goosebumps and YTV. Analyzing two multi-part episodes of Goosebumps, this thesis argues for the merits of textually analyzing children’s programming, an approach that opens up inventive pedagogies through which young people and academics alike can critically engage with commercial children’s television.