A scene from time-travel drama Plan B, an English-language remake of a French Radio-Canada series.Danny Taillon/CBC GEM
Watching the new season of the psychologically perceptive time-travel drama Plan B on CBC Gem this week, I started fantasizing about what I would do if I could go back in time.
As a taxpaying Canadian television viewer, I can tell you what my No. 1 mission would be: Stop CBC from making this show.
Don’t get me wrong: Plan B is the most ambitious homegrown drama CBC has in English at the moment – the only serious, streaming-era serialized storytelling in a lineup saturated with cop shows.
But it is also a remake of a French-language Radio-Canada series also called Plan B that I’ve already watched on its streamer, TOU.TV. The second season told the same story, about a feminist activist media host wrestling with her teen daughter’s suicide, in a more credible fashion.
CBC’s Plan B is a dark time-travel drama for the darkest timeline
Co-creator Jean-François Asselin has moved the action to Toronto from Montreal for the English version, but not adapted it sufficiently. So 15-year-old kids still drink with their parents at restaurants, and a major plot point hinges on circus school.
Likewise, the central family’s white parents have become a white mom and Black dad – but this goes unmentioned despite every other element of their marriage’s dynamics being dissected in minute detail.
From a creative perspective, CBC/Radio-Canada set a pile of cash on fire by creating an inferior show instead of just slapping English subtitles on the original.
Sophie Lorain as Florence Morin and Emi Chicoine as her daughter Marilou in the French version of Plan B.KOTV/KOTV
To prevent this waste of money, I’d travel back in time to the beginning of the streaming era and write a persuasive column arguing that the technology was now possible for CBC/Radio-Canada to create a single online TV service – one with a bilingual interface that offers the choice of viewing its French content with subtitles in English and vice-versa (or with dubbing should that be more politically palatable).
I’d write: “Believe it or not, in a few short years, some of the most popular international TV shows in Canada will be Scandinavian noirs and Korean gorefests – and a significant chunk of the audience will even watch shows in their own language with the subtitles on. For a small cost, CBC/Radio-Canada could vastly expand the reach and value of its content to Canadians.”
In the actual past, however, the two sides of the Crown corporation launched Gem and TOU.TV separately, years apart, and did so with each operating on different technology supported by separate engineering teams.
That costly error took a costly multiyear harmonization project to fix. But even now that the back ends are in sync, CBC/Radio-Canada still does not automatically secure the rights to subtitle or dub their own shows in the other official language.
A selection of their programs (Radio-Canada’s Lakay Nous; CBC’s SkyMed) do get shared, belatedly.
But only the 18 per cent of Canadians who understand English and French, concentrated in the bilingual belt from Northern Ontario and northern New Brunswick, really get full value from CBC/Radio-Canada’s televisual services.
American streamers, by contrast, were quick to understand what was linguistically possible on their services.
While CBC/Radio-Canada were building up two separate brands, Netflix racked up huge subscriber numbers in Canada by offering their original shows in English and French – and more than 30 other languages.
Consider this warped reality: Netflix is the only place where Canadian francophones can watch the excellent Nunavut-set comedy North of North with subtitles or in either of its French dubs (it’s available in both Canadian and European French versions).
CBC co-produced that buzzy show – but the deal it signed let the Yanks have exclusive French rights, according to a Radio-Canada spokesperson.
So, sorry Canada’s francophones – you’ll have to give an American company at least $7.99 if you want to watch this show you funded in your mother tongue.
In the current “elbows up” environment, Netflix, Prime Video and Disney+ have become the enemy for many in Canada, but a little discussed reason why they took over the world in the first place is that they cater to many linguistic groups, allowing them to penetrate deeper into the markets of multicultural countries, too.
Meanwhile, I’d argue that by not offering all recorded content in at least both official languages, CBC/Radio-Canada isn’t living up to its existing mandate – the one that requires it to “strive to be of equivalent quality in English and in French” and especially to “contribute to a shared national consciousness and identity.”
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Private telecom Bell Media’s streaming service, Crave – which holds the English and French rights to all its originals – does a better job on both counts.
Jared Keeso’s raucous hockey comedy Shoresy exists in a creatively dirty joual dub as Shoresy, le salaud du hockey – and has an ample francophone fan base as a result.
Meanwhile, Empathie, Florence Longpré’s French-language drama about a criminologist turned psychologist, is Crave’s most watched original show of the year – a feat it achieved with the help of a substantial viewership streaming it with English subtitles.
CBC spokesperson Chuck Thompson says GEM and TOU.TV don’t have any plans to follow Crave’s footsteps by offering their original programming in both languages any time soon, and puts it down to a rights issue.
“Since we have separate online services specifically tailored to each of the English and French markets – and their audiences – most often we do not pay extra to get the French rights (although sometimes that can happen – depends on the show and the finances available),” Thompson said in an e-mail.
Yet, CBC/Radio-Canada found the finances to completely remake Plan B in English. Talk about penny-wise, pound foolish.
Fortunately, there are a couple of hacks for those who speak only English or French to get the full value of their investment in the national public broadcaster.
CBC/Radio-Canada already puts much its news programming up on YouTube, where autogenerated English or French subtitles are just a couple of clicks away.
As for the dramas and comedies shown on only Gem or TOU.TV, search for browser extensions that open a pop-up captioning window and then enable translation. In Google Chrome (which I use), it’s just a matter of going into the accessibility menu.
The auto-translations aren’t always eloquent, but they give you the gist. So, if you’re looking for something to stream this weekend, why not check out Plan B in its superior version on TOU.TV?
