Météo+ is a Canadian television sitcom which aired on TFO, the French language public broadcaster in Ontario, from February 14, 2008 to April 28, 2011. The series is about the colourful crew of Météo+, a fictional francophone weather channel for the Northeastern Ontario region based in Sudbury.

Characters

Themes

The show is a comedic take on a genuine social and political issue. With almost 45,000 francophones living in the city, Sudbury has one of the largest francophone communities of any city in Canada outside of Quebec, and a further 133,000 live in the rest of Northeastern Ontario. Despite the fact that this community is significantly larger than some cities in Quebec which have their own television stations, the region has no locally oriented francophone television service — at the time of the series' production, the region only had rebroadcast transmitters of Radio-Canada's Toronto affiliate (CBLFT-DT) and TFO, and as a result, francophone viewers otherwise had to rely on cable television services based in Montreal. (Since the 2012 closure of Radio-Canada and TFO's transmitters in the region, all francophone television is limited to cable and satellite.) 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 (EastLink, the cable provider in Sudbury, does not carry MétéoMédia) frequently get even current local weather conditions wrong. 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.

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 was expected to create up to 170 jobs in the Sudbury area. The series was written by Robert Marinier and Luc Thériault, and produced by Les Productions R. Charbonneau and Carte Blanche Films. The series was filmed in a studio space in Sudbury's Rainbow Centre mall, which was the largest television studio in Ontario outside of Toronto, while external location shots place the fictional studio on Durham Street near the YMCA and the Sudbury Arena. As the series aired on a non-commercial public television network, scenes were separated by brief interstitial shots of various locations throughout the city of Sudbury rather than by commercial breaks. In Seasons 2 and 3, each episode was also followed by a brief "Météo+ sur la route" segment, in which Chanda Legroulx, in character as Billie Jean Caron, presents a local interest report from a community in Northern Ontario; in the final season, each episode was followed by a brief interview segment featuring one of the cast or crew members. 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. 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. That series was also produced and created by Charbonneau. Another French language sitcom revolving around a weather channel, Miss Météo, also launched in 2008 on the Quebec-based cable network Séries+. The series' final season aired in winter 2011. Concurrently with the end of production on Météo+, Productions R. Charbonneau and Carte Blanche Films announced the launch of a second series, Les Bleus de Ramville, to be produced in Sudbury. Carte Blanche also later produced the English language series Hard Rock Medical in Sudbury. Stéphane Paquette was a cast member in all three series.