Quebecers are losing their bearings. Even the popular Canadian radio series District 31 written by Luc Dionne will find its outcome in April. It is conceivable. A screenwriter gets tired of drawing from the same breeding ground for six years, even if it was hectic, populated by police and thugs, fed by upheavals and followed by a tide of enthusiastic spectators. There are not many group meetings anymore today. The end of a quality flagship series will be experienced as a bereavement in the Quebec imagination.
In our country, the small screen remains, thanks to the language barrier in North America and despite the immense competition from various digital media, one of the last bastions of collective communion. Audience records for the last bye as shown by. Note that many young people mainly watch reality shows there, which in turn attract adults. They seem distressing to us, these bubbles of emptiness where the participants have nothing to say. A sort of maelstrom that has sucked in the spectators by their feet. The public feels out of breath, that’s for sure. All the same, all these collective abdications were initiated years before the pandemic. There remains this certain danger of being stupefied in circles. Nothing to offer very strong legacies to rising generations. But, of course, it is always the fault of others when there is a break in the house.
So when the former participants ofDouble occupation and of The Island of Love, alongside raging Web influencers, goof around in a chartered plane during the reign of Omicron, they are seen as the ostrogoths portrayed by Trudeau, barbarians from elsewhere, but especially not from here. However, the spirit of the times, laxity in education and the aggressiveness of social media have blown their breath away on these rich and irresponsible child kings, whom we denounce today to avoid digging into the sources of the problem. TV also blew hard, which generally aims less at excellence than at discount entertainment, in the frantic struggle of channels for ratings. People are served what they like, on state networks as elsewhere. Or they like what they are served. A bit of both. The snake bites its tail there.
The small screen, here and there more inspired, produces a lot of talk and wind. Not to mention that French is getting poorer there from one year to the next. As if the desire for a collective effort to improve the common language was no longer a challenge, except in the fine speeches that everyone uses to themselves. It makes you want to shut up on TV more often than not, beyond two reports, a few news and analysis programs, films here and there. For many, a flagship series at the end of the course.
In times of pandemic, cultural and social food is more abundant on the small screen than elsewhere. Inevitably, since the cinemas and theaters are closed as well as the gyms. The press briefings of the authorities impose themselves de facto as new unavoidable appointments. Dystopian fiction and reality echo each other in these speeches by politicians to their people: hospital load shedding, injections with a vengeance in mushroom sanitary spaces, curfew, resignation of Horacio Arruda, health tax for the unvaccinated, masks N95 offering humans duckbills, but increased protection against harmful particles released in the wind. Who would have imagined these improbable scenarios two years earlier? Much more tumultuous episodes than in District 31. What would we do without TV to better follow this, I ask you? The rest of the time, we were able to watch Quebec government ads, which also monopolized the airwaves by competing with the culture of laughter.
Because humor remains the absolute monarch on the stages and on the small screen, often thick, alas! in several public affairs programs as well. We never stop laughing at the foyer, even when the joke launched by a host and a guest is not so funny. Rather zero, on second thought, but on the spot, it relaxes, it consoles. In front of his TV, the public laughs to who better better in order not to think too much. Nor to learn too much, because the exercise requires superhuman effort, it seems.
Humor, the cultural sector where the French language is the most mistreated, is a powerful collective stress relief. Like a convenient way of blinding one another without taking the fragile future of one’s society in hand and without wondering from what nest the children of TV have come. We laugh… But with shivers at the bottom of the gorgoton. “I am so gay, so gay, in my sonorous laughter, wrote Émile Nelligan in his poem The romance of wine. Oh ! so gay that I’m afraid to burst into tears! »