by RAF KATIGBAK

For the last two years, a powerful subversive voice has grown to resonate with this city’s poor and working class. The voice spoke of empowerment and the real issues affecting our daily lives—the pitiable state of health care, police corruption, political deceit, the state of immigration, terrorism, greed and the city’s sex trade—while also stressing the importance of a loving and caring environment. It was a voice that enraptured me and had me listening with baited breath to every word.

But now I’m saddened. Two weeks ago, this once-influential underdog and champion of this city’s downtrodden fell dead, its voice silenced forever. Well, at least until the full-length movie comes out in 2007, anyway. That’s right folks, television’s most lovably twisted, morally dubious, sociopathic family, Les Bougons, is no more.

Created in 2004, Les Bougons was the hilarious hit Québécois TV show co-written by Montreal’s François Avard and Jean-François Mercier. Since I discovered it a few months ago, it has also become one of my Monday night rituals (next to full-contact pilates), and after the final broadcast this coming Monday, I will miss it dearly.

But I do not mourn alone. At one point, more than two million viewers tuned in to watch Les Bougons and their familial shenanigans, and the show has since garnered interest south of the border from both the Fox and NBC networks.

For those of you who have yet to see the series, it’s exactly like The Cosby Show. That is if The Cosby Show were set in Hochelaga-Maisonneuve, if Heathcliff and Clair Huxtable where scheming, chain-smoking, shit-talking alcoholics, Vanessa was a prostitute who works from home, Theo an awkward, obese teen who once stapled his penis to a table, Rudy an adopted Chinese girl (who the family thought was a boy the first season) and the dog was named after Osama bin Laden.

While it’s unclear if Americans would really get a show that references Québécois/Canadian cultural as heavily as Les Bougons, it’s obvious why it became a local hit. With episodes that invariably involved beer guzzling and ribald talk that would make a sailor blush, Les Bougons are, gross, nasty and just what the CBC needs.

But beyond the potty-mouth humour and shock value, Les Bougons is also quick-witted, sharply written and socially relevant. Take for example the final episode that aired two weeks ago. Dolores, the daughter, was about to give birth and, after failing to get any help from an overcrowded hospital, instead called a cab company to elicit help from one of the many obstetricians that worked as a driver. This should hit home for anyone who has taken a cab in this city and bothered to find out what some immigrant cab drivers did in their country of origin. Most passengers don’t realize they’re often being chauffeured by former architects, doctors and economics professors who, because of labour laws in Quebec, would rather drive a cab than go through years of re-certification.

But not every Montrealer is a Les Bougons fan—some find that the show’s vulgar portrayal of this underprivileged family of crosseurs perpetuates a stereotype of Québécois white trash. Some believe it’s a dangerous type of satire that could be taken the wrong way. In an interview with the New York Times, Fabienne Larouche, a co-producer of the show, countered by saying Les Bougons was actually a commentary on the shortcomings of the Quiet Revolution of the ’60s and ’70s, when Quebec’s conservatives created more bureaucracy and corruption than benefits for the poor. To me, their tight familial bond and the defiant spirit of taking on a corrupt system, whether it’s by blackmailing a politician into doing your dishes or dismembering a cat (well, maybe not), is what Quebecers should get excited about.

While the first season DVD is available in stores and there is talk of a full-length film due out in autumn 2007, if you have yet to see Les Bougons, you have one chance left. This Monday, May 1 at 9 p.m., Radio Canada will show a rerun. The description of this episode on the official Les Bougons Web site reads: “Junior goes back to school... Mother steals lawnmowers and takes advantage of hardware store chauvinism...”

Dans ta face, Clair Huxtable!

Riff-Raff@sympatico.ca

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