Kate Taylor: Canadian cop show Blood and Water puts #multiculturalism first

Makes the point about lack of meaningful diversity in most popular programming and an example of what can be done:

There’s a new Canadian police show making its debut Sunday night. It revolves around the murder of a junkie in a Vancouver park; his young widow is eight-months pregnant but his wealthy family wants nothing to do with her because they blame her for his drug use. Meanwhile, the female detective who is investigating has just been diagnosed with cancer.

If none of that drama sounds particularly remarkable for a TV cop show, get this: The characters in Blood and Water speak English, Mandarin or Cantonese, according to their situations, and the whole series, which airs on the Canadian multicultural channel OMNI, is subtitled for both English-language and Chinese-language viewers.

Here is a show in which various recognizable figures in Canadian society – a wealthy Chinese businessman, an old white cop, a younger Asian cop, a Downtown Eastside drug dealer – swim alongside each other in a realistic linguistic soup. Television’s pretense that North American cities are conveniently unilingual places is discarded.

Kudos to OMNI, on which original programming usually means cheapo talk shows, for commissioning the series from producer Breakthrough Entertainment. Multicultural television is the great missed opportunity of Canadian broadcasting, something that the unusualness of Blood and Water serves to underline.

This may be a country that prides itself on its multiculturalism but you wouldn’t know it by watching Canadian television, where content that is not in English or French is mainly ghettoized on OMNI or Telelatino and is mainly low-budget – unless it’s been imported from abroad. You can watch a current-affairs show in Punjabi or a documentary about Italian weddings, if you understand those languages, but you aren’t going to encounter much South Asian or Italian content if you only speak English or Cantonese. Small silos rather than broad cross-cultural dialogue is the norm.

Although the CBC has a mandate to reflect Canada’s multicultural nature, its onerous bilingual agenda – by law, it must strive to produce content of equal quality in the two official languages – plus the need for aboriginal-language programming trumps multiculturalism. The result is that the area has been left mainly to the commercial broadcasters – OMNI is owned by Rogers; Telelatino is partly owned by Corus Entertainment, which in turn is owned by Shaw Media – where the reality of serving multiple niche audiences on secondary cable channels has kept programming ambitions low.

Source: Kate Taylor: Canadian cop show Blood and Water puts multiculturalism first – The Globe and Mail