The method behind the CBC’s madness
TAKING SPECIFIC AIM AT MANY TARGETS
If nothing can be everything to everyone, the CBC can at least be nothing to anyone. I don’t know that our public broadcaster will ever shake its reputation for striving cluelessness when it comes to what, exactly, Canadians want to see on television. There’s all that history, for a start, and it’s a nice convenient narrative that works for everyone from grumpy free-marketers who see “heritage funding” as just another term for setting their hardearned tax dollars on fire to sniffing esthetes who think art isn’t art unless each and every second of it is a punishing ordeal designed to shake your understanding of human experience to its very core.
Trying to address this perpetual, buzzing dissatisfaction has lead the Ceebs into some unfortunate decisions, the most current being the late-’ 00s/early ’ 10s doldrums that it is still in the process of shaking off. Marked by a forcibly engineered broadness, the network’s programming seemed like it was the direct result of Mothercorp trying to make everything appealing to everyone, with little of it gaining any traction (except maybe Dragons’ Den, watching regular folks fall flat on their face being one of the few things that enough of everyone can get behind).
The last couple of years have seen a shift in programming strategy that seems, if not entirely revelatory, at least a much smarter bet than trying to cram everyone into the same tent. Rather than trying to find one thing everybody might like, the CBC schedule has started to feel like a collection of things, one of which you’re bound to like, if you give it a chance.
So, in addition to its returning stalwart roster of prime time soaps ( Heartland), kitschy game shows ( Canada’s Smartest Per- son), Victorian detective mysteries ( Murdoch Mysteries) and Dragons’ Den, the CBC has given us a smattering of options: a sketch show that is both resolutely feminist and decidedly downtown- y ( Baroness Von Sketch); wall- to- wall coverage of the final show by Canada’s greatest poetfronted bar band (# CBCTheHip); and a surrealist twenty- something comedy ( Four In The Morning). Coming very soon are a mommy- group- based si t com ( Workin’ Moms), two more sliceof- life documentary series ( fall’s This is High School and winter’s True North Calling join airport series Hello Goodbye), a crime potboiler told through the eyes of a journalist ( Shoot the Messenger), another in a burgeoning industry of CanLit- based miniseries ( Caught) and the return of psychological comedy Michael: Tuesdays and Thursdays, as close to a totem of the CBC’s failures in its fallow period as exists. These join semi- recent additions like the based- on- a- Quebecois- series dramedy This Life, dysfunctional family comedy Schitt’s Creek and self- consciously sexy spy drama The Romeo Section.
Whatever that may lack in a traditional sense of network coherence ( CBC: your home for … well, what are you looking for, exactly?), when put all together it looks a lot like taking specific aim at as many targets as it could reasonably hope to hit. The degree to which any individual show actually hits the bull’s eye is debatable, sure, but there’s still a bullet for virtually any taste or disposition. (It’s a similar idea to Netflix, when you get down to it, albeit with a fraction of the budget or marketing capability.)
In the right light, this thinking has even seemed to filter down to things that look a lot like some of the shakier choices CBC made in its recent past. Kim’s Convenience, its latest stab at the kind of nice, big- tent family- friendly sitcom that, along with the police procedural, is basically what we mean when we talk about appealing to the broadest audience possible.
Kim’s picks up and frustrates this legacy in equal measure. The premise — the travails of a convenience store in a notably diverse downtown Toronto neighbourhood — hearkens right back to King of Kensington, albeit with a more pronounced family focus. On the other hand, it’s born of a smash hit play that had its start at the Toronto Fringe and its first boost by the eminently respectable hands of Soulpepper, who manage to balance artistic vision and populist scope as well as anyone in Canada’s theatre scene.
That said, even those who raved about the play noted its story, of a Korean family coming together around the potential sale of the family corner store, had a certain sitcom-y simplicity to it. If it’s not quite as hoarily sentimental Canadiana kitsch as a Wingfield or Vinyl Café, it’s at least the broad head-and-heart style of a 40-yearold Norman Lear special. But then again it was shepherded to the small screen by producer Ivan Fecan, who you might remember as the guy who put The Kids in the Hall on the CBC, and it is unabashedly particular to its first- and second- generation Korean immigrant milieux, right down to goofoff twenty-somethings giving each other “ddong chims” (it translates as “poop needle,” and I entreat you to look it up).
So even the broadest comedy on CBC’s fall schedule has a serious artistic pedigree, a notably specific point of view and a legacy, both literal and implied, of classic Canadian television running through its veins. I don’t know if it’ ll do anything to change the perception of our national broadcaster, but you certainly can’t say the people in charge aren’t trying.