You down wit' CBC? Yeah, you know me...

CBC, how can I explain it? I'll take you frame by frame it, to have y'all jumpin', shall we singin' it.. 

I'll admit it. I used to be a hater. Anything that looked remotely like a Canadian production (music was the one exception) was automatically written off as crap. Where certain nights were reserved by default for certain shows (i.e. Wednesday nights for 90210 and P.O.F., and Thursday nights for Friends and Survivor), time was never blocked off for, say, Corner Gas. To that same point, I've never heard excited water cooler talk focus around the latest episodes of "Anne of Avonlea" or "Durham County". 

CBC must have fired the old boys' club and brought in some fresh minds, because as of late, my PVR records 3 shows weekly off of the CBC. The kicker? They're actually Canadian productions! 'The Hour', 'Being Erica', and 'The Week the Women Went' are three shows that have made CBC entertaining, funny and actually watchable (no it's not a real word). I'm pretty sure Strombo can turn anything he touches into gold, so no surprise with 'The Hour.' 'Being Erica' is targeting my generation, and gender. It's about a woman in her early 30s who had "such potential" in school secondary and post, and all of a sudden, she's 31-ish, single, working in a call centre and living at home (well, in the pilot, anyway), and wondering where she took a wrong turn and where the time went. 'The Week The Women Went' is actually not that great, but it's a guilty pleasure. Basically, as the title indicates, all the women in a small town are sent to a resort/spa for a week, and the men are left to handle everything. The reason this works in a small town (and I can say this because I actually did live in Smalltown, Onatrio between the ages of 12 - 17) is because most guys who grow up in a small town are hicks who are babied and have no clue on how to run a house, take care of kids full-time, or basically do anything domestic. If they do know how to do it, they play their dumb card so that they can get out of it. Interestingly, the more populated the city, the less you actually see this behaviour. Which is why, I'm assuming, both installments of this show have been filmed in small-town Canada. Anyhow, like I said, it's a guilty pleasure, and v. predictable, but also extremely entertaining. 

In closing, hats off to the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation on finally breathing some new (and unexpected!) life into its programming.