CBC Announces Fall Lineup: Can the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation Be Saved?

CBC (Canadian Broadcasting Corporation) unveiled its fall season lineup on June 16 and it was scary. A Canadian government-owned cluster of television and radio networks founded in 1936, CBC has decided to vamp up its previously staid image and go reality television in a big way. The question is, will it work, will CBC end up privatized or will the whole season end up going down the tubes? And if it fails to launch, will anybody care?

CBC is obviously trying to imitate domestic competitors who are also commercial ratings winners like CTV. CTV has hits like "Corner Gas", a goofy sitcom, but makes most of its money from importing U.S. shows like "CSI: Miami" north of the border for Canadians who seem to have no interest in their own country's stories. CBC's response was to fill its schedule for Fall 2006 with reality shows, sitcoms and a single West Coast series by Chris Haddock (creator of critical favorite "Da Vinci's Inquest") called "Intelligence". "Intelligence" is about a Vancouver smuggler who becomes an informant for CSIS (Canada's equivalent of the CIA). It's also about the only show that seems worth watching in the entire CBC fall lineup. Everything else is centered almost obsessively on Toronto or Montreal (back east) and those fluffy-headed young urban viewers that CBC so desperately wants to cultivate. Well, why not? Nobody else is watching anymore.

CBC's rationale is that Canadians want to see more American-style content, so that's what they should get, only in a homegrown version. CBC cancelled three very Canadian series in February: "The Tournament" (a dramedy about obsessive hockey parents), "This Is Wonderland" (a sitcom set in a law court system gone bonkers) and "Da Vinci's City Hall (the eight season/spinoff of "Da Vinci's Inquest", a show about a Vancouver coroner-turned-mayor). The reason given was low ratings, despite the fact that the triple cancellation cleared the CBC's schedule at a bad time and that the shows that replaced all three series did even worse.