If you tune in to Radio-Canada Monday nights at 9, you can watch Quebec actor Rémy Girard in one of his signature roles, playing the mustachioed Stan, coach and den mother to the amateur hockey team on Les Boys. The next night, at 8:30, you can see a clean-shaven Girard as the oenophile, gourmet cook and veteran secret agent Claude Lesage on the new CBC-TV sitcom InSecurity.
In what must be a first, Girard simultaneously has lead television roles on both sides of the linguistic divide, playing characters on the French and English CBC services. It’s another feather in the cap of a beloved Canadian actor often cast as an affable bon vivant, whether he’s playing that for sitcom laughs or with heartbreaking subtlety in the films of Denys Arcand. But the singularity of this achievement underlines the division: Attempts to export the popular hits of Quebec TV into English Canadian are rare, and rarely successful.
“There is an ongoing conversation between CBC and Radio-Canada about what we are doing and they are doing,” said Phyllis Platt, acting head of arts and entertainment programming at the CBC and a long-time TV producer. “There is an attempt to know what is happening du côté français [but] it has been difficult to achieve success. ... It’s tough and it’s not for a lack of goodwill.”
Quebec has a powerful TV culture well endowed with homegrown hits: Les Boys, a show based on the hugely successful film franchise of the same title and now in its fourth season, often draws a million viewers. It’s tempting to think that sharing shows with Radio-Canada might provide ratings fodder for the CBC, and even financial efficiencies. But since the bilingual He Shoots, He Scores (Lance et compte), shot in both languages and aired simultaneously on both services in the 1980s – but lasting only two seasons in English – the model has never proven itself.
The twin networks do occasionally share short-term projects, enjoying some success with The Last Chapter, a bilingual mini-series about biker gangs that ran in 2002 and 2003, and co-producing the 2004 documentary/entertainment series Solstrom about the Cirque de Soleil. But Radio-Canada generally doesn’t pick up CBC formats for French-language adaptation, while the CBC’s remakes of Quebec shows – the most recent being Sophie, a sitcom about a single mother based on Les hauts et les bas de Sophie Paquin – have not been long-lived.
The network decided last year not to proceed with an English adaptation of Les Boys set in Toronto. The proposal, based on a franchise unknown to English-Canadians, was competing for a slot against a similar project with some rare English-Canadian star power: Men With Brooms, the curling sitcom based on the Paul Gross movies and featuring cameos by the actor, got the nod instead.
Any show adapted from French is up against the same competition all programming in English Canada faces, trying to draw eyeballs in a prime time dominated by simulcasts of big-budget U.S. dramas and comedies. Quebec, meanwhile, is protected by the language difference: Platt is one of several observers who think English Canadians tend to overestimate the number of Quebeckers who watch American shows in English.
“The great wash of American comedy that English Canadians are so enamoured of ... isn’t a factor,” she said.
Still, many also believe there is something more than language behind the success of Quebec TV:
“I don’t think it’s just the language barrier. I don’t have an exact answer but it’s a question of loyalty,” ruminates Girard, pointing out that Quebec film was nowhere a few decades ago, and has gradually built such a following that a hit such as De Père en flic (Father and Guns) can best a Harry Potter movie at the Quebec box office.
Platt also points to the province’s social cohesiveness.
