Moose TV a channel worth keeping

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This article was published 05/08/2004 (8032 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

I want my…

I want my…

I want my Moose TV.

But the big question is whether or not I’m going to get it — at least, beyond the appealing half-hour special that airs tomorrow night at 7 on CBC-TV.

It looks like a series pilot, sounds like a series pilot and has all the other trappings of a series pilot, but Moose TV — a charmingly comedic yarn about a couple of pals in a remote First Nations community who decide to launch an outlaw TV station — is being promoted simply as half-hour special that’s part of the network’s summer-season Trans Canada Comedy Trail series.

Apparently, the “special” label is mostly a political consideration, because funding for the project was provided under the regional Comedy Trail banner, which is mandated to produce stand-alone programs for the summer series.

But one of the show’s producers said last week that there’s every intention to turn Moose TV into a series if the one-off introduction is well received.

“It is a stand-alone, but we would like it to serve as a pilot,” said executive producer Catherine Bainbridge, who worked as a news reporter for the Free Press in the late ’80s. “We’d like the CBC to treat it as a pilot…. We’d love for it to go ahead as a series.”

Based on the introductory show, it’s hard to believe the brass at the People’s Network wouldn’t be interested in taking this concept further. It’s a smartly written show with an extremely appealing, very diverse cast that includes several aboriginal performers, including A-list Winnipeg product Adam Beach.

And what that means is that in addition to being pretty good, Moose TV also represents many of the politically correct agenda items that the public broadcaster must consider when deciding what to include in its schedule.

The technically-not-a-pilot opens in a fictional northern community of Moose, where a couple of regular-guy buddies named George (Beach) and Clifford (Nathanial Arcand) are working on a broken-down snowmobile and talking about nothing much in particular.

Suddenly, George is seized by a thought, followed by an idea.

“It’s not the same around here without local TV,” he observes, clearly angling toward the suggestion that they reopen the community’s boarded-up station.

Clifford doesn’t share his enthusiasm. “All that was on there was weather and bingo,” he says.

But George has bigger plans, for bigger shows and a bigger audience.

“I was in a play once,” he offers. “How much harder can it be?”

And with that, the two friends decide — George eagerly, Clifford quite reluctantly — that it’s time for Moose TV to take to the local airwaves. But their efforts to relaunch the outlaw station — including a call for show proposals and open auditions for would-be TV personalities — hit several hitches, including indifference from much of the local population and resistance from the town’s mayor, who promises to block the station’s revival unless he gets his own show.

Among those who jump on board the Moose TV bandwagon are Joan Littlebear-Whitney (Diane Flacks), a white wanna-be-Indian woman who’s as loopy as she is enthusiastic, and a myterious new arrival in town named Robin (Tamara Podemski), who is apparently running away from a bad marriage and has some background in the real-world TV business.

Watching the four central characters bring their shows-within-a-show to life provides quite a few genuinely funny moments, and more importantly, it leaves a very real feeling that there’s much more that ought to be explored. Moose TV, if given the chance it obviously deserves, could develop into a channel worth watching.

brad.oswald@freepress.mb.ca