Ripe for political satire
Miniseries based on Parliament Hill echoes real life
The Best Laid Plans
Monday, 9 p. m., CBC
It’s said that in politics, luck and timing are everything. That could also apply to the CBC series The Best Laid Plans, based on Terry Fallis’s awardwinning political satire novel.
The series is being broadcast at a time when Canadians have been both fascinated and repelled by Senate scandals and the antics of Toronto Mayor Rob Ford. It might seem an ideal time for political satire — after all; Canadian politicians provided more laughs and shocks in 2013 than The Big Bang Theory and Breaking Bad combined.
But Fallis, who wrote the novel about the backroom manoeuvring of Daniel Addison, a political aide on Parliament Hill who helps get a crusty Scottish engineering professor and neophyte elected as an MP, has mixed feelings.
“I’m not happy that we’ve had these scandals, frankly,” Fallis says in an interview from Toronto, where he heads a public relations firm.
“These novels are my love letters to democracy and they are intended to illuminate a different path we might take in how we practise politics in this country, even though it has created fertile ground for the TV series.”
The six- part CBC series debuted Sunday, Jan. 5, then moved to its regular Monday slot. It stars Jonas Chernick as Addison, Kenneth Welsh as Angus McLintock, Eric Peterson as a senior citizen and Raoul Bhaneja as Bradley Stanton, the chief of staff. Other cast members include Sarah Allen, Jodi Balfour, Barbara Gordon and Mark McKinney.
Fallis, who worked for cabinet ministers on Parliament Hill, wrote The Best Laid in Plans in 2006 and had it self- published before the book was picked up by McClelland & Stewart. The novel went on to win the Stephen Leacock Award for Humour and was selected as the 2011 winner of CBC’s Canada Reads competition. Fallis has written two sequels, The High Road and Up and Down.
The novel follows the idealistic Addison, a speech writer for the leader of the Opposition, who after several years on Parliament Hill becomes disillusioned by politics and yearns to return to academia. But before he does, he is forced by party brass to find a candidate to run against the incumbent in the next election. In the campaign, a sex scandal brings down the incumbent and propels the neophyte McLintock into the House of Commons, representing constituents in the fictional riding of Cumberland- Prescott.
“I was looking for opportunities for Angus’s sense of honesty, public service and his personal ethics to emerge and that seemed like an obvious one,” Fallis says. “He lives in the area and he just didn’t think it made sense ethically or otherwise to take taxpayers’ money.”