A hint: the following television series also have the same two things in common – 21 Jump Street, The 4400, Airwolf, Battlestar Galactica, Caprica, Dead Like Me, Highlander: The Series, Human Target, Kyle XY, Life Unexpected, The L Word, MacGyver, Noah’s Arc, The Outer Limits, Psych, Reaper, Smallville, Stargate SG-1, Supernatural, Taken, V, and The X-Files.

Answer: (1) All filmed in Vancouver, Canada; (2) None set in Vancouver, Canada.

Watching the Olympics, along with all of NBC’s shots of Vancouver, has thus been a very odd experience for a Vancouverite. I’ve seen Vancouver on film and television more than any city other than LA or New York. Probably everyone reading this has too: you just don’t know it. See, since it has rarely been allowed to play itself, its most identifiable and identifying landmarks are usually hidden. The Vancouver Art Gallery’s steps have been many a courthouse steps, Simon Fraser University has often played a sinister institution’s hideaway (or Earth pre-kaboom on BSG), and parts of its skyline have stood in for Metropolis in both Smallville and 21 Jump Street (yes, that was the city’s name). But Lions Gate Bridge, the tell-tale sails of Canada Place, the Burrard Street Bridge, Granville Island and English Bay, the beautiful group of Grouse, Seymour, Cypress, and the Lions that frame the city, or an aerial view of the downtown peninsula – these all had to be hid.

The SFU quad, which you've seen in the BSG miniseries, X-Files, or ...

I’m certainly not the first to notice this. Indeed, for an excellent discussion of the ghost-like representation without representation of Canada on film and TV, see Serra Tinic’s On Location: Canada’s Television Industry in a Global Market (half price right now, btw!). But when one is most used to recognizing one’s city in a particular parking garage (Rumble in the Bronx), a back alley that looks familiar (The Neverending Story), a house next to a good friend’s (It), the very well-watered grass (every show), the swimming pool and school at which one worked in summers (Smallville), a cafe at UBC (The Accused), or in a bilingual Keefer Street sign (Life Unexpected pilot), the city takes on an underground character. When a great deal of these shows and films are worlds for the supernatural and/or superheroes, one’s city seems to become all the more ethereal.

Smallville High, a.k.a Templeton High School

So it feels very odd to see a more decisively, obviously, proud Vancouver profiled in endless clips on either side of a commercial break, in glorious HD, with the camera pausing and luxuriating on all those sights that must usually be avoided to keep the myth of Chicago, Philly, Seattle, Portland, Metropolis, or some other American locale alive. I’m even getting weather reports for Vancouver and its suburbs every night on the local news! It’s a nice kind of odd, but also a cruel tease when I know Vancouver will need to be put back in a box in a week, once again I’ll need to extrapolate its weather from what’s happening in Seattle, and once again it will need to be represented by a glimpse of a street I recognized, a style of pre-ordered home, a rainy plot of land, a coffee shop I went to once, or so forth.

There is thus a fair amount of professional insanity in suggesting that I think I know better. In fact, I even know the exact date of beginning of the postmodern era: 28th July 1984, the day of the opening ceremony of the 1984 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles. At the tender age of twelve I had persuaded my parents to allow me and my cousin to stay up and watch the opening ceremony. Having drifted in and out of sleep following the broadcast from L.A. on Western European Time, I could no longer be certain which realm of imagination – television or dreaming ‑ the rocket man flying into the Coliseum belonged to when I woke up on the living room sofa the next morning. The Los Angeles games offered a dramatic prefigurement of what was to come: the disappearance of the Communist block (the Soviet Union and most of its allies boycotted the 1984 games in retaliation for the US led boycott of the Moscow games four years earlier), the emerging symbiosis between celebrity culture and professional sports and the dramatic rise of spectacle and consumer culture ‑ the future had arrived and each subsequent Olympic summer games further underscored the global, postmoderm trajectory of the Olympic movement post Los Angeles.

At the opposite end of the spectrum, Olympic winter games are a rudiment of a bygone modern era of (television) culture. Whereas summer games have adopted to changing viewing habits by adding sports that feature global sport stars through the (re)inclusion of tennis (1988) or golf (2016) and the opening up of the competitions to professional athletes such as the 1992 US basketball “Dream Team”, Winter Olympics have essentially remained fifteen ways of sliding.

In televisual terms, the types of sports featured in the Winter Olympics are those associated with the modern era of broadcasting: Alpine skiing, speed skating, biathlon, luge, or bobsled are rarely supported by large enough fan cultures to stand on their own televisual feet. Instead they have survived throughout television history as part of the magazine format in the mould of BBC’s Grandstand, the weekend afternoon sports magazine programme that ran form the early days of television in 1958 until its demise in 2007 when in a deregulated media market the “sports-interested viewer” had given way to the fan and enthusiast of individual sports such as football, baseball, basketball, tennis or Formula One motor racing. During the Winter Olympics this magazine type coverage of different competitions under the banner of winter sports is briefly revived – yet only by resorting to the life-support machine of the X-factorisation of winter sports coverage as national broadcasters have shifted away from the universal coverage of different sports events to the human interest stories surrounding particular competitors from that country.

The nation, in fact, is the true marker of Winter Olympics’ inherently modern nature. Summer games have increasingly become a platform for global sporting celebrities from Carl Lewis to Usain Bolt and Michael Phelps, transcending the national as (sole) frame of reference. Olympic winter games, in contrast, remain a strangely local phenomenon in a globalising world. In its 86 year history Olympic Winter games have been staged in only ten countries, all in the northern hemisphere.  The fame of Winter Olympians has accordingly remained infinitely more localised and ephemeral. Competitors are often barely known even by their national audiences. Former stars such as surprise 1984 Olympic downhill champion Billy Johnson or four times ski jumping gold medallist Matti Nykänen have not only been quickly forgotten by the wider public, but have struggled financially and personally as their fame dissipated. The precariousness of Winter Olympians’ fame so closely tied to national success and thus so interchangeable from games to games is possibly best illustrated by the fact that even the memories of those whose achievements remain outstanding among Olympians such as US American speed skater Eric Heiden pale in comparison to who remains one of the best-known stars of the Winter Olympics of all times: British ski jumper Eddie “the Eagle” Edwards – an athlete who became known for his dramatic lack of competitiveness that made every jump he managed without crashing a seemingly greater achievement than the competition’s longest and most daring jumps.

Danger and risk have endured as further markers of Winter Olympics archaic traditions. Even before tonight’s Opening Ceremony, Georgian luger Nodar Kumaritashvili fatally crashed during a training run on the ice track in Whistler. The menacing nature of high speed winter sports not only sets them apart from most sports at the Summer Olympics, but bears all the hallmarks of sport – to rather liberally borrow from Carl von Clausewitz’s words – “as the continuation of war with other means” – echoed in the words of Georgian Minister for Culture and Sport, Nikolos Rurua, who evoked the war between Russia and Georgia during the 2008 Beijing Olympics (or, in his words “invasion of Georgia by Russia”)  and called Kumaritashvili “a fallen comrade”.

It is not without logic that the Cold War provided winter games’ most natural habitat. In the bipolar world of the second half of the 20th century winter games served as snow-covered stage for the confrontation between ideological power blocs, one that culminated and crystallised in the finale of the 1980s Olympic ice hockey tournament in Lake Placid between the USA and the USSR – one of the last occasions when Americans could resort to a narrative of the agency of the underdog overcoming, against all odds, the seemingly insurmountable might of the system of their opponents – a story, one imagines, sworn enemies of the United States like to tell themselves these days. Much like the James Bond franchise, Winter Olympics have never been quite the same again since the fall of the Berlin Wall.

For the next sixteen days, the Olympic winter games offer a journey into our recent, modern past; to some an enjoyable walk (or, rather, slide) down memory lane, to others a reminder of traditions best kept in the past. Vancouver as a distinctly multicultural and global city, of course, holds as great a promise of transporting Winter Olympics into the world of the 21^st century as any host city. But I doubt they have a rocket man.