Okey-dokey. Let's look at CBC's lineup tonight. It's a big one for our friendly public broadcaster.
First: So two Muslims walk into a country and western bar. One tells the owner that he wants him to stop serving alcohol and ban mixed dancing. The other stares around at the saloon scenery and says, “Five-cent wings! Is that possible?”
Oh yes. Little Mosque on the Prairie (CBC, 8 p.m.) is back and, yeah, I think it's funny.
Now, as you know, I don't care much what other people think. The fact I was the only one of five Canadian TV critics to give Little Mosque a really positive notice when it arrived last season doesn't bother me. It's just a teensy little TV show with silly jokes and slight characters. Others can harrumph about it. Others can whine that it's not as slick and funny as some U.S. comedy, but they clearly have not seen The Big Bang Theory. (Two geeky guys, one hot young woman. Nudge-nudge. Never mind.) See, I don't have a problem with gentle humour.
The first new-season episode tonight is a lot less insistent than last season's shows about locating all the humour in the Muslims-in-a-small-Western-town premise. Mainly, it now seems the idea is to generate gently provocative humour from the internal dynamics of the small Muslim community and then play up the ordinary family oddities. There's a clear romantic tension between Rayyan (Sitara Hewitt) and the imam Amaar (Zaib Shaikh), and here the tension plays out in a bit of comic business about a woman reading the community announcements in the mosque. (In the second episode, there's a nice bit of comedy derived from that toxic subject, the burka.) In general, there's a lightness to the humour that means it often floats rather than falling heavily.
The lightness can be credited to Paul Mather, who wrote the episode and who was poached from the writing staff on Corner Gas. Mather's gift for inspired whimsy and a kind of word-vaudeville in dialogue was very obvious on Gas and it's intriguing to see it applied to Little Mosque. The series certainly needed an injection of whimsy and it got it. Little Mosque returns with much less fanfare than when it launched, but it's a lot funnier now.
No Opportunity Wasted (CBC, 8:30 p.m.) is a crock. Cute, but a crock of derivative reality-TV nonsense. According to CBC, the thing is “inspired by the book and personal life philosophy of The Amazing Race host Phil Keoghan. In each episode, two challengers, who do not know they have been chosen, will be surprised by Bruce Kirkby and asked to take on Phil Keoghan's 72-hour NOW challenge.”
We've seen this sort of thing a hundred times – the host standing somewhere and barking out the premise of the show while the camera circles around him, to make it all look terrifically exciting. Then some people are surprised at home or work. They gasp and gush about being given this exciting opportunity. They're whisked away to do something for the entertainment of TV viewers. Thus it unfolds here. Mind you, Keoghan isn't all that visible, and it is mostly Kirkby, the Canadian adventurer/photographer who climbed Everest, who does the demanding work.
First up, two people who are afraid of heights get to climb something and, you know, overcome their fear. One is a firefighter. The other is described as “a housewife.” She is surprised by the show's crew as she leaves church, no less.
As Keoghan informs us in the voice-over, for one of these people, overcoming his fear is “a matter of life and death.” For the other, it could mean “saving her marriage.” It's the latter that sticks out as pointlessly hyperbolic and manipulative. The woman has simply said she feels her fear of heights has held her husband back from some vacation adventures he would like to take.
So, the two participants do some cool height-related things in pretty scenery. That's it. Call me peculiar, but maybe CBC could try to overcome its fear of intelligent television.
The fifth estate (CBC, 9 p.m.) also returns, with a sobering, well-told story. It's actually two stories, simultaneously unfolding, one about a gun, a .45-calibre handgun bought at a store in Jonesboro, Ga., and the other about a boy from Jamaica. Eventually, the stories collide with tragic results in suburban Toronto.
Bob McKeown explains how the handgun that killed six-year-old Michael James in Toronto is only one of the many illegal handguns that make their way from the United States to Canadian cities. As McKeown tells it, we get a glimpse of the American gun industry, the National Rifle Association's battle to quell to anti-gun sentiment and those mean streets of New York where so many guns end up, before they come to Canada. It's not only sobering, it's eventually enraging.
Check local listings.
