No one riding the rocket this winter could have missed them—entire subway cars wallpapered end to end with ads for CBC Television, part of a $10-million campaign to promote the season’s new shows. The programs represented a 30 per cent increase in spending on Canadian productions over last year. On offer was original CBC comedy (Sophie), drama (jPod, The Border), reality (The Week the Women Went) and even a homegrown prime time T&A soap about the sexual adventures of pro hockey puck bunnies and their prey (MVP: The Secret Lives of Hockey Wives). Though the season started with a bang, most of the shows went on to receive a lukewarm reception from viewers and critics, and a few, including jPod and MVP, were killed two months after their launch.

Still, you can’t knock them for trying. Over the past 15 to 20 years, the CBC’s populist appeal has been limited to the annual broadcast of the Grey Cup, the Olympics (both of which were lost to CTV), Hockey Night in Canada and possibly, in moments of dire national crisis, the nightly newscast anchored by Peter Mansbridge. Otherwise, for entertainment, most of us watch American shows on private networks like CTV or Global, which substitute Canadian for American ads so they can make enough money to buy the rights to said shows and pocket a tidy profit besides. The programs are bought for a fraction of the cost of producing original Canadian content. This reality has created something of a dilemma for our national broadcaster. Since our tax dollars pay in large part for its existence, shouldn’t it be airing programming that Canadians actually want to watch? But what if what Canadians want to watch isn’t necessarily good for them, doesn’t educate or enlighten them, but is instead the television equivalent of fast food? Can the government, in good conscience, feed its people a diet of high-fluff, zero-nutrient fare?

The answer appears to be yes. Give the people what they want. Recently, the CBC has shifted its focus away from an abstract cultural mandate to a narrower ratings-driven approach, and in the process pissed off countless employees, confused its audience and set off yet another debate about the role of public broadcasting.

All of this—the planning, implementation and the ensuing controversies—can be put down to the direction of one man: former Ottawa policy mandarin turned business executive turned culturecrat Richard Stursberg. Before being chosen by CBC president Robert Rabinovitch to oversee English television, Stursberg came to public attention as the executive director of the federal funding agency Telefilm, which he ran for three years until 2004. There, he implemented a mandate aimed at funding commercially viable projects, films that might compete with Hollywood at the box office. For him, the quantitative measure of success was $1 million in ticket sales. Filmmakers railed against the arbitrary benchmark and what they saw as a shortsighted directive, one that they insisted (rightly, if melodramatically) would undermine Canada’s distinct cinematic voice and jeopardize cultural sovereignty.

Upon arriving at the CBC, Stursberg encountered both a deeply entrenched bureaucratic culture and a staff demoralized by years of funding cutbacks and creative uncertainty. He is rumoured to have accused CBC employees of behaving more like “entitled graduate students than employees of a television network.” The place was in dire need of a shakeup, and on that front, Stursberg didn’t disappoint. In a four-year reign—first as executive vice-president of English television and now, having rolled radio into his portfolio, executive vice-president of English services—he has led a radical restructuring of the CBC, forcing the corporation’s management to rethink and revise long-held dogma. And when that rethinking didn’t service his mandate or operational tempo, he cleared out the dissenters. (Around the building, he’s known as King Richard, after Shakespeare’s hunchbacked rotter.)

So far, Stursberg has replaced several senior managers in radio and TV with hand-picked appointees mostly from outside the CBC. Some insiders are grateful for the weeding out of old management, who’d positioned themselves as the CBC’s spiritual leaders and were seen as a hindrance to change. (As one former news producer told me, “The news, current affairs and doc units were still being run by the people whose glory days were The Journal with Barbara Frum.”) Among Stursberg’s more high-profile hires were Fred Fuchs (formerly a TV and movie producer in Hollywood) and Kirstine Layfield (previously at Alliance Atlantis’ lifestyle channels).

On the entertainment front, in an effort to draw viewers away from the private broadcasters, he’s pretty much followed their lead. More reality shows, more light comedy, more sexed-up drama, with the target for each show being that magic number: a million viewers. But an initial effort to jump-start the process ended disastrously. The One, an American Idol–style talent show hosted by George Stroumboulopoulos, which was produced by ABC and simulcast on CBC, was essentially stillborn—cancelled by ABC after four shows. The One pre-empted The National, and Stursberg took a lot of heat for bumping the news for a doomed reality show.

In late February, he rolled all three elements of the CBC news—radio, TV and the Web—under one managerial roof. Previously, they had pursued separate agendas, sometimes leading to multiple coverage of the same event. While the restructuring makes sense on one level—streamlining operations, eliminating duplication, saving money—critics inside the CBC argue that the new arrangement means less creative autonomy for producers and will result in diminished quality across the board.