Canadian TV needs to get weird again

There was a time when my best connection to the rest of the country was a pair of rabbit ears. They emerged from the body of our television, and were often held precariously in place by wire and careful duct tape — useful tools that, in just the right position and at just the right angle, might catch waves of the world outside.

Growing up remote, isolated and working class in the Yukon meant that often the only TV available was delivered as a public service, and the CBC was a cipher for the world beyond. So where other Canadians my age were raised on the cultural juggernaut of 1990s American pop culture, I was steeped in different waters: the strange oddities and bizarre one-offs of Canadian television. 

I raced home after school to watch out-of-order episodes of The Odyssey, an early ’90s fantasy series about a child who goes into a coma and journeys through an alternate universe where adults don’t exist. I tuned in for North of 60, a drama series based in the fictional Indigenous community of Lynx River, N.W.T. I spent weekends with The Red Green Show as the backdrop, a show about well-meaning but somewhat inept men in the fictional town of Possum Lake, Ont., who gave credence to the duct tape holding our rabbit ears in place. 

These shows spoke an unacknowledged shorthand, translating the tundra and concrete upon which so many of us lived into a collective understanding. It was as if the country were a patchwork tapestry with all of us woven into it, disparate but in conversation with one another. A national identity defined by a firm commitment to the performance of lives that are at odds with the American cultural hegemony, that thrive as distinctly weird. 

This is not to use “weird” as a pejorative. It is to hold “weird” like a shield with vibrant pride — “weird” as something unique and beautiful. The Canadian TV of my youth was itself wonderfully bizarre and almost unexplainable. To loosely describe the plot of The Odyssey to unseen eyes is to describe a fever dream half-remembered. But it was real and everlasting, and it lingers in my heart on the strength of its weirdness. That it was Ryan Reynolds’s second TV series role — where he played the leader of the in-universe youth Gestapo — is a side note pinned to a larger portrait. 

Shows like this also spoke to me in words I knew and of cities that could be my own, that felt real to me in a way that America and beyond felt different. Not bad or sinister, but something different. Unknown, like sleeping in a hotel bed for the first time. 

We have been locked in an endless debate about the idea of “Canadian culture” for years that stretch to decades, but rarely has that idea been so focused on than in the last year. The Trump government continues to table threats — idle and otherwise — at the sovereignty of other nations, including but not limited to Canada. While the “51st state” rhetoric has died down amid persistent threats levied at Greenland and the bombing of Venezuela, the tenor of its earlier notes remains. 

This has caused an outsized reaction of Canadian nationalism, red and white bleeding into everything, all hockey and maple-flavoured. A country of stereotypes rises as the wolves linger at the gate, and our weirdness fades into the scenery. Instead of defining who we are to ourselves, we catalogue ourselves as lives in contrast and present a caricature as tribute. And in doing so, we flatten the texture of our lives down to a single layer.

Canada has long been a bit of a joke looking from the outside in — the polite and well-meaning neighbours to the north of a country edging on unchecked aggression. But we are more than that caricature too, and there is proof of it in our weird and beautiful TV past. Degrassi Junior High, long before the Drake of it all, was a teen drama unafraid to talk about the HIV/AIDS crisis, addiction, queer panic, suicide, young motherhood and so much more. It was a weird, distinctly Canadian show that was more than just polite and well-meaning in its message. It was messy and imperfect, and it’s the texture of its grit that created a cultural legacy. 

Beyond the dramas that traded in identity, Canadian TV could often feel surreal. There were sci-fi shows with bold, ambitious worlds that were never fully realized before their funding ran dry. Animated offerings like The Raccoons and ReBoot that ran alongside bizarre children’s programming like Under the Umbrella Tree and Today’s Special, a show where a mannequin comes to life at night when he wears a magic newsie cap. When I tell people that a demonic-looking pineapple taught me French, it is instantly recognizable as Canadian. 

We are not a homogenous idea of the perfectly non-threatening neighbour, and pretending we are is also a disservice to the flaws that mark our past. We have our own history of violence and bigotry, but we are also far from broken. Canada is a wide and vast county sparsely populated by oddballs and eccentrics who live and thrive across an array of ecosystems. More than the heights of our metropolitan cities, and more than the isolation of our towns and communities nestled away in the cold. We are all of these things and none of them all at once, and it is weird to live here. It is weird to live in one of the coldest places on earth for much of the year. It is weird that the Calgary Stampede is still so popular despite a dwindling supply of cowboys. It is weird that we spend loonies and toonies. 

We are eager for a national identity to cling to in all our desperate hours — and struggling to develop an intriguing answer. We know who we don’t believe ourselves to be, but defining yourself in contrast to something else is not a strong identity. We know who we want to be: kind, nice, non-threatening, and welcoming to all and everyone. A bastion of safe spaces and unlocked doors. But we are not that either. 

The best of our culture tells complicated stories with shared reverence, never intent on selling the perfect idea of place, but rather sharing stories with oddball honesty about what it means to live here. A country that is often misunderstood, even and especially from within. 

Our chief cultural export, at the time of writing, is a queer love story set in the world of professional hockey that manages to make Ottawa a believable romantic end goal. Heated Rivalry works not just because it is a well-crafted icon of modern television, but because it is unafraid to commit to the version of itself it sees in the mirror, never needing to translate the unspoken parts of it.

We are blessed to live in a country with robust government funding for the arts, a country that understands culture as a cornerstone of a nation’s identity beyond financial remuneration or military might. And if we want to hold on to our identity, it’s key that we hold on to our wild roots. That the stories we tell speak to us in ways that only we know. That they are weird in a way no one can quite describe, save those who live here, in all our disparate and disconnected towns, cities and communities. Never speaking with one voice, but rather with many, sharing the bizarre and beautiful breadth of our weird stories.