CBC shows off circus tricks and rescue pups, but no new dramas or comedies at 2025-26 upfront | Canada Voices

Rescue dogs! Circus tricks! CBC put on a show about its upcoming 2025-26 season at its downtown Toronto headquarters on Wednesday.

Unfortunately, the overall impression left by the live performance was not of a national public broadcaster reinvigorated after a brush with death by defunding, but an institution spinning its wheels, especially in terms of scripted entertainment.

It’s “upfront” week in Toronto – with Corus and Rogers and Bell Media all showcasing shiny new wares to advertisers and the media. But unlike those private companies, the CBC didn’t have any new English-language comedies or dramas for linear or streaming to announce.

Instead, the public broadcaster enlisted radio personalities Tom Power and Elamin Abdelmahmoud to promote the mostly already revealed renewals of a strong TV comedy slate, diverse in style and substance, and a less inspiring drama lineup overloaded with procedural cop shows.

Given that the CBC didn’t have major news or interviews with talent for invited media – and there weren’t many media buyers in attendance either – it was unclear what the two-hour dog-and-carnie show really was for. Mark Strong, who hosts a CBC podcast called Olympics FOMO, accurately described the atmosphere as “very cubicle energy” when he came on stage and tried to hype up the staff-heavy audience about Milan-Cortina 2026.

If it felt pro forma, that’s because it was. “The way the upfront game works in Canada, everybody does it in the same week, right?” said Barbara Williams, CBC’s executive vice-president English services.

“That’s just been historically how it’s been done in Canada.”

Any impression left, however, that the Crown corporation might have put the commissioning of new scripted work on pause as it awaited to find out its funding fate in the recent election would not be accurate, according to Williams and Sally Catto, general manager, entertainment, factual and sports, at CBC.

“We have green-lit more than a handful of dramas and comedies and would have loved to announce them today,” said Catto. “Every show that we support now in the scripted realm needs a partner in order to complete its financing. So some of that is still in progress.”

So, what was new, fully financed and ready to reveal? CBC has three short new docuseries coming up – all centring on Montreal-area stories.

Running Smoke, a three-part docuseries about the Mohawk NASCAR driver Derek White and the biggest tobacco-smuggling bust in North American history, looks true-crime-adjacent and thrilling.

But if a series about Quebec’s Tupperware queen Maria Meriano (Diamonds & Plastic) or a behind-the-scenes look at a Cirque du Soleil touring show that’s been around since 2016 (Cirque Life; hence the circus performer) are going to have any depth to them, it wasn’t apparent in the trailers.

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On the front of factual entertainment – that’s exec-speak for reality TV – Must Love Dogs, in which CFL All-Star Brady Oliveira and influencer and ex-Bachelor contestant Alex Blumberg, find forever homes for Manitoba mutts (a couple were present and, admittedly, cute) seems like something the private sector could have covered.

The Assembly, on the other hand, in which interviewers on the autistic spectrum have conversations with celebrities (based on an international format), was charming and moving in its sneak peak.

CBC’s returning comedy lineup was rightly front and centre – with the always entertaining Mark Critch perking up the crowd as he talked about the perennially popular Son of a Critch, Anna Lambe charming as she spoke about finding international fame starring in North of North, and an amped-up Jennifer Whalen and Meredith MacNeill selling Small Achievable Goals, their menopause-themed workplace comedy that will be given a second season to find its legs.

If CBC is as proud of its dramas, it was less apparent as no stars were on hand from Heartland or its four case-of-the-week cop shows – Saint-Pierre, Wild Cards, Murdoch Mysteries and Allegiance. (SkyMed is not returning – or, at least, not on CBC.)

CBC-watching Canadians looking for anything a little more prestige and less procedural in the drama department currently only have the six episodes of season three of the time-travel anthology drama Plan B to look forward to – a solid remake of a Radio-Canada show that nevertheless would, with the addition of English subtitles to the original, be redundant.

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While Williams hailed Saint-Pierre for its bilingual elements, she also defended the supposedly cash-strapped CBC/Radio-Canada essentially making the same show twice at a time when subtitled drama like Shogun and Squid Game thrives (and when Bell Media’s Crave is bilingual by design). The two solitudes are still mostly siloed off even as streaming has allowed for shows to easily cross linguistic barriers.

“Partly it’s about whether we think our audiences are really going to be as likely to engage with the show if it’s got subtitles,” said Williams.

That the CBC struggles with allowing itself to find new ways of doing things was certainly another impression left by an upfront that ultimately could’ve been an email.

“We had to go this week with what we had,” Williams said. “We would have been really happy to announce dramas and a couple of comedies today, trust me.”