Météo+

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Météo+

Genre	sitcom
Created by	Robert Charbonneau Robert Marinier Luc Thériault
Starring	Martin Albert Stéphane Paquette René Lemieux Guy Mignault Micheline Marchildon Lina Blais
Country of origin	Canada
No. of seasons	1
No. of episodes	10 (List of episodes)
Production
Executive producer(s)	Robert Charbonneau
Running time	30 minutes
Broadcast
Original channel	TFO
Original run	February 14, 2008 – present
External links
Official website

Météo+ is a Canadian television sitcom which began airing on TFO, the French language public broadcaster in Ontario, on February 14, 2008 ^[1].

1 Overview
2 Characters
3 Themes
4 Production history
5 Episodes
6 References
7 External links

[edit] Overview

Météo+ is a fledgling francophone television weather channel for the Northeastern Ontario region, launched by a local businessman in Sudbury after one too many angry outbursts at the Montreal-based French-language media in Canada constantly getting the local weather forecast wrong.

[edit] Characters

Bernard Vaillancourt (Martin Albert) is a newly-divorced news producer from Sherbrooke, hired to oversee the channel and its staff. Not informed until his arrival in Sudbury that he's actually helming a weather channel, not a news channel, he is initially reluctant to take the job, but is eventually convinced. His culture shock at being in an unfamiliar city far from the major media centres in Canada drives some of his decisions — when staff suggest that he could fill dead airtime on the network by airing footage of the Big Nickel and slag, he believes they're local rock bands and starts trying to track down their managers to book live appearances.

Pierre Douglas Guérin (René Lemieux), the CEO of Météo+, is a businessman with delusions of being the next Ted Turner — even going so far as to adopt the nickname Ted instead of his own given names.

Conrad (Conny) Fillion (Guy Mignault), the federal Member of Parliament for Moulin à Fleur, is a longtime friend of Guérin's who regularly pulls special favours from bureaucrats and government officials in Ottawa on behalf of Météo+, in order to establish his political legacy and earn himself a sinecure in the Senate. Self-serving, corrupt and possessed of a touch of megalomania, he is on his fourth wife, has lost count of his extramarital mistresses, and spends more time hanging out at Météo+ than he does in his role as a member of the Royal Commission on Official Languages.

Béatrice-Marie Williams (Micheline Marchildon), nicknamed BM, is the network's ambitious and perfectionist but sometimes insecure senior producer. Having worked for Guérin for ten years, she continues to dream of her opportunity to move on to a more powerful and lucrative media job with Télé-Canada. She dislikes Bernard, frequently calling him a loser, and is not above using sarcasm to put him in his place — as when she uses an exaggerated series of gestures in front of the conference room's mural of Sudbury to point out to Bernard that he's confused celebrities with inanimate local landmarks. She was initially offered Bernard's job, but turned it down because she didn't want to feel tied down. She had an unstable family life growing up, with a constant succession of stepparents entering and exiting her life because neither of her parents could sustain a relationship for very long.

Mario Czhwaenski (Stéphane Paquette), the network's lead camera operator, is the fluently bilingual son of a Polish Canadian father and a Franco-Ontarian mother. A slightly rebellious but amiable young man in his first job out of college, he is always seen wearing his trademark Kangol cap and refers to most of his colleagues by nicknames such as Big Boss (Ted), Big Bern (Bernard), Beemer (BM) or Billie the Kid (Billie Jean). He is occasionally a bit naïve about adjusting to the professional working world: told to help fill airtime by walking around downtown interviewing people in the street about the weather, he approaches a former neighbour who promptly assaults him in retribution for a childhood prank, a homeless person, and an old family friend with whom he promptly forgets his assigned responsibility to ask people about the weather and gets into a personal conversation with her about their families, in English, while still on the air.

Gratien Desrosiers (Jean Pearson) is the network's bow-tied and occasionally tongue-tied lead anchor. Middle-aged and slightly neurotic, he is still under the thumb of his domineering mother and gets completely flustered whenever she visits him at the studio or calls in to criticize his on-camera appearance. Usually, however, he's more composed and smooth on camera, and quick-thinking enough to ad-lib, in two different voices, a conversation about the weather in French when he's asked to do a live overdub on top of Mario's English interview.

Billie Jean Caron (Chanda Legroulx), a reporter for the network and a former DJ at a country radio station, is a young woman who regularly includes anecdotes about her pet dog Fluffy in her weather reports. Gratien hates Billie Jean's perky hosting style and is constantly pressuring her to be more serious and sedate.

Gisèle Mailloux (Lina Blais) is the network's receptionist, who manages to keep the office under control despite spending more time on the phone with her parents or her truck driver husband Gilles than she does actually working. She keeps a stash of cheese curds in her desk, which many of the staff — especially Mario — are constantly trying to get into.

Spare Change (Roch Castonguay) is a mysterious homeless man who lives in the alleyway behind Météo+'s office. Nicknamed "Spare Change" because nobody knows his real name, he is extremely wise and intelligent, and sometimes hints at having had a more successful career in the past which was derailed by a personal tragedy he refuses to divulge.

Lara (Fanie Lavigne) is Bernard's ex-wife. She appears primarily as a talking photograph, a dramatic device used to illustrate Bernard's own internal dialogue and turmoil around the recent breakup of his marriage.

[edit] Themes

The show is a comedic take on a genuine social and political issue. Although almost 45,000 francophones live in Sudbury, constituting the second largest francophone community of any city in Canada outside of Quebec, and a further 133,000 live in the rest of Northeastern Ontario, the region has no locally-oriented francophone television service. Apart from the rebroadcast transmitters of Radio-Canada's Ottawa affiliate and TFO, francophone viewers must rely on cable television services based in Montreal. In coverage of the initial program announcement, Charbonneau stated that many francophones in Sudbury and Northeastern Ontario really do believe that Montreal-based services such as RDI (the cable provider in Sudbury does not carry MétéoMédia) frequently get even current local weather conditions wrong.^[2]

Proposals to improve media service to francophones living outside of Quebec have been presented to the CRTC by groups as diverse as the Francophone Assembly of Ontario, Astral Media, TFO, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation and the Office of the Commissioner of Official Languages.^[3]

[edit] Production history

The first sitcom ever produced for a primarily Franco-Ontarian audience, production on the series began in 2007 when producer Robert Charbonneau received a $2.5 million grant from the Northern Ontario Heritage Fund on June 15, 2007. It is expected to create up to 170 jobs in the Sudbury area.^[4]

The series is written by Robert Marinier and Luc Thériault, and produced by Les Productions R. Charbonneau. The series is filmed in a studio space in Sudbury's Rainbow Centre mall, which is currently the largest television studio in Ontario outside of Toronto.^[5]

Dennis Landry, the executive director of Music and Film in Motion, a local entertainment industry development agency in Sudbury, also cited Météo+ as a major coup which would provide a tremendous boost to the agency's efforts to build and sustain a film and television production industry in the city.^[6]

Mignault, Blais and Castonguay worked together in the earlier TFO series Francoeur, which was itself the first dramatic television series ever produced for a Franco-Ontarian audience.

Another French language sitcom revolving around a weather channel, Miss Météo, also launched in 2008 on the Quebec-based cable network Séries+.