The new decade already shows signs of life for the great Canadian sitcom. Somewhere Al Waxman is smiling.
For a country known to crank out comedy and comedians, we've been pretty sparing with the sitcoms in recent years. Where is the next Trouble with Tracy?
The endangered genre took a big loss with last year's departure of Corner Gas, but bounds back tonight with 18 to Life (CBC, 8 p.m.). Airing before Little Mosque on the Prairie on Monday nights, Canadian viewers now have the luxury of a full hour of situational comedy. This doesn't happen often.
18 to Life is a very big deal for the new-look CBC. The slickly produced sitcom is the first charge of the public broadcaster's midwinter reboot, which includes the crime drama Republic of Doyle, which starts Wednesday, followed later by a Kids in the Hall murder-mystery miniseries and a Don Cherry biopic.
18 to Life was originally planned as a CBC-ABC co-production, but ABC dropped out of the deal. Which worked out rather well.
Left to its own, 18 to Life is immediately mindful of Corner Gas, and not just because it was penned by a former Corner Gas writer. Corner Gas provided droll TV snapshots of real, down-to-earth Canadians in the fictional Saskatchewan community of Dog River. Everyone was funny, even if they didn't intend to be, and everyone spoke in one-liners. Now 18 to Life shifts focus to the big city and two "typical" Canadian families, if such a thing as a typical Canadian family exists.
On one side of the fence we have the nice Jewish couple Ben and Judith, played by the reliable Peter Keleghan and Ellen David.
Their easygoing 18-year-old Tom (Michael Seater) is obviously moony for next-door neighbour Jesse, played by Stacey Farber of Degrassi: The Next Generation.
One day the cute couple are hacking around the park when Tom drops to one knee and proposes, just like that. Crazy kids.
And they're serious. This being a sitcom, the planned nuptials draw mixed reaction from the folks. Tom's parents are outraged; Jesse has to prod her tree-hugger parents Phil and Tara (Alain Goulem, Angela Asher) to even get a reaction. Eventually Jesse's mother offers to lend her daughter a copy of the Kama Sutra.
Does 18 to Life work as TV comedy? It's not Modern Family, but it's not bad, and it is Canadian, don't forget.
In fact everyone on the show is very clearly a Canuck (save for the Iraqi refugee living with Jesse's parents) and everyone talks in the rat-a-tat sitcom dialogue familiar from Corner Gas. We are apparently a nation of wiseacres.
Toward that cause, 18 to Life benefits hugely from the presence of Keleghan, a Canadian comedy veteran best known as dim anchorman Jim Walcott in Ken Finkleman's The Newsroom. Some men are simply born looking uptight.
More impressive are the two young leads. Honed from four seasons as Derek on the family sitcom Life with Derek, Seater is a naturally gifted comic actor who has mastered the art of delivering witty dialogue with a blank expression. If you think that's easy, talk to Michael Cera.
The winsome Farber is a solid match for Seater and rises to the occasion now that's she's removed from the histrionics of Degrassi. Together, they make the perfectly adorable teen couple, which naturally puts viewers on their side for the wedding brouhaha, while the parents are left to sputter.
There are minor flaws: The pilot plays the diametrically opposed neighbours premise too much - they're different, we get it - and the actors playing Jesse's parents lay the hippie routine on a bit thick (her mom speaks dreamingly of the hemp wedding dress she always wanted). But those moments flash quickly and the show returns the story back to the two young kids, which is wise.
The best moments in the pilot surface in the honest exchanges between Tom and Jesse. That's when the show feels less like Corner Gas and more like the movie Juno. The characters are a few years older and nobody becomes pregnant - at least not in the first show - but a little teen angst goes a long way.
Check local listings.
John Doyle returns tomorrow.
*****
Also airing
This Emotional Life (PBS,9 p.m.) is devised to help people start the new year on solid emotional ground, or something like that. The three-part series deconstructs social relationships and purports to help viewers learn to better cope with anxiety and depression. The host is self-help author and professor Daniel Gilbert, who speaks in the soothing tones of a highly paid shrink. The program also includes some celebrity insight on controlling one's emotions from Chevy Chase, Alanis Morissette and, fittingly, Larry David.
Conveyor Belt of Love (ABC, 10 p.m.) follows The Bachelor tonight and covers similar lovelorn territory. The one-off special places five single women into a TV studio and rolls 30 handsome fellas with waxed chests by them on, yes, a conveyor belt. The women get to pick which one they'd like as date material; if two women pick the same dude, he gets to make the final call. People are rejected and feelings are hurt. The path of true love is so cruel these days. A.R.