We live in the age of television proliferation. Gone are the comfortable days of the Big Three. Today whole new networks are coming to life, taking advantage of converging technologies, orbiting satellites and pizza-sized discs, the exploding Web and improving cable. New brands are struggling to be born from the marriages of new media. And the stakes are growing as long-term corporate futures are wagered on short-term business model bets.

But is more better? It's hard to escape the feeling that, instead of having 57 channels and nothing on, today it's 500 channels ... and still nothing on. You can change the channel. But can you change television?

In Toronto, televisionary Moses Znaimer, co-founder, president, and executive producer of Citytv, has seen the problem and has the answer. "The problem is not too much television," says Znaimer, 55, a Zen-like figure in a black suit with a white shirt, hair slicked back in a small ponytail. "It's too much of the same television." Twenty-four years ago, Znaimer and a partner started Citytv with $1.5 million, 80 employees, and a distinct vision of how to make TV with a difference -- TV that was local and interactive, real-time with real people, optimistic and realistic, constantly reinvented and grounded in a consistent set of values. Today Citytv has grown to more than 600 employees, revenues of more than $200 million, and ratings that consistently give it a large % of the Toronto market.

Now Znaimer is out to spread his vision: he recently launched MuchaMusica, a Spanish language pop music venture in Argentina, privatized Alberta, Canada's public access television service, took over creative supervision of CKVR Barrie, a 40-year old Canadian Broadcasting Corporation affiliate, and bid for a license to open a Citytv-like station in Vancouver, Canada -- perhaps the first step in a strategy to create mini-citytv's across North America.

What amazes Znaimer, even after 24 years of pioneering creativity, is how little creativity the rest of the television industry seems capable of. "How is it possible," he asks, "that French TV is like German TV which shares a lot of similarities with English TV? The answer is the similar way in which TV is made. There are arguably 1,000 TV stations in the world, and they're all virtually identical in the way programs are created in offices and executed in artificial places called studios."

Znaimer's creation: a studio-less television studio, program-less television programming, a boundary-less television experience that embraces reality, rather than make-believe, as the essence of the medium. Starting in September 1972, when Citytv first took to the airwaves, it was clear that this was television with a difference: low-powered, low-cost, and local television delivered with high-energy, high-style, and high-tech. Over the past 24 years, Znaimer's principles have remained consistent -- so much so that the principles are the programs and the programs are always on. Here are the listings behind Citytv's TV revolution.