The sun came up very suddenly in Toronto on Aug. 29, when troubled local station Toronto 1 was quickly rebranded with the name of its co-parent Sun Media.

Now SunTV, the channel immediately launched into a new schedule lighter on news and heavier on celebrity gossip, sports and decades-old reruns. Gone is the experimental news magazine Toronto Tonight and its showbiz counterpart The A-List, replaced with A Current Affair and the new hour-long Inside Jam, a Sun-branded daily entertainment magazine.

The weeknight show is produced by Paul Schmidt and the station’s head of in-house production, Paula Davies, formerly of CHUM and MTV Canada.

The station has also dumped its print mag tie-in Toronto Life and most of its daytime talk and court shows in favor of reheated eps of King of Kensington, The Beachcombers and Barretta. It has no news programming.

‘We made a decision back in the beginning of the summer that we’re not doing local news per se in this market,’ says programming manager Don Gaudet. The station’s licence does not require news, though Toronto 1 gave it a try. News anchor Ben Chin recently quit the station – following his boss Barbara Williams to CanWest. ‘It’s an expensive undertaking and it’s hard to get recognition. Rather than follow that path we decided to go where our strengths were.’

Namely entertainment and sports, hallmarks of Sun newspapers across the country.

SunTV also runs an in-house sports talker, The Grill Room, weeknights at 10:30 p.m., and the food half-hour Street Eats by locals S&S Productions, Saturdays at 1 p.m. (See story, p. 15). Insight Productions is also working on four hour-long variety shows – Toronto Rocks, Toronto Dances, Toronto Sings and Toronto Laughs – that will spotlight musicians, comics and such from around the city. The first, Rocks, will debut in November.

‘We saw footage the other day,’ says Gaudet. ‘They’ve taken known or up-and-coming Toronto performers but put them in unique settings. They had an opera singer on a streetcar, singing.’

And yet, echoes of T1 remain. Its variety hour The Toronto Show is in reruns, for the time being at least, and, curiously, the station still begins its programming day with a yoga show.

The bulk of its early weekend programming – Church of the Rock, Asian Horizons – is also still in place, as is the reliable money-maker Prime Ticket Movie, on four nights a week.

The station, technically CKXT, was bought by TVA Media and Sun Media – both part of the Quebecor conglom – last year, and soon announced plans for a relaunch. It has struggled to gain ground since its launch by Craig Media in fall 2003.

The station is an important chess piece for Quebecor, which has long sought to gain a foothold in English-Canadian TV. It also adds considerable muscle to its sister newspaper The Toronto Sun, which has been losing ground against the city’s three other daily papers.

SunTV plans to move the station from its original home across the street into the newspaper’s offices.

It airs locally on cable channel 15 and up in the nosebleeds on BellExpress Vu (channel 213) and Starchoice (channel 326).

www.sunnetwork.org/suntv