Why ‘The Porter’ deserves to be watched despite the cancellation

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Some TV shows make you work to love them; some grab you right from their first moments. “The Porter” did the latter for me.

The CBC period drama opens with the kind of antagonism you might be used to seeing between Black and white characters in a historical narrative: a preening white cop struts around a bar in which most of the patrons are Black, stopping to purloin a bottle of rum from a table. Except the owner of the bottle grabs hold and won’t let go, he and the cop staring daggers at each other.

Before the confrontation can go any further, another white officer emerges from a back room counting bribe money. He and his partner leave; the club owner claps his hands and snaps his fingers, someone starts slapping a bongo, and the place explodes in music, dancing, laughter and conversation.

The white interlopers are gone; the Black people can get back to what they were doing before they were so rudely interrupted.

That opening is emblematic of “The Porter” as a whole. As co-showrunner Marsha Greene said, as she accepted the Canadian Screen Award for Best Writing in a Drama Series last week, “We made this show in a time that we desperately needed to reclaim the narrative, to be the heroes of our stories and not the victims, and to show our lives.”

“The Porter” won a record 12 Canadian Screen Awards that night, just weeks after the announcement that it wouldn’t get a second season because American partner BET Plus had pulled out and CBC couldn’t afford to finance new episodes on its own. But there were no “victims” among the cast and creative team of the majority Black-led show, either, as they celebrated their wins.

As co-creator Arnold Pinnock put it: “I’m not about to talk about being a victim. We got it done.”

What they did was create a richly detailed series full of characters with jobs and interests, families and friends, loves and hates, passions and secrets — something that is not always a given for characters of colour.

Of course, you can’t make a series about Black characters in a majority white society like 1920s Montreal without bumping up against racism. So, yes, it’s present in “The Porter,” but its protagonists aren’t defined by it.

Nor are they there just to support white characters, as is often the case in traditional TV shows — a fact hilariously lampooned in “Revenge of the Black Best Friend,” a CBC Gem web series I highly recommend.

It’s satisfying, frankly, to see Black Canadian actors who haven’t previously been top of the call sheet, like Mouna Traoré (“Murdoch Mysteries”) and Ronnie Rowe (“Star Trek: Discovery”), as leads. It’s a reminder of what we’ve been missing and what we need to see more of on our screens.

I am sorry we won’t find out what becomes of these characters beyond the initial eight episodes. But “The Porter” exists and that counts for something. You can watch it on CBC Gem.

Seeing double: It’s not Canadian content, but the series “Dead Ringers,” out Friday on Prime Video, is based on the 1988 movie by Toronto-born horror master David Cronenberg. The twin gynecologists played by Jeremy Irons in the original are now women, brought to fascinating life by Rachel Weisz (“The Constant Gardener,” “The Favourite”), and they are not so much attempting to perpetrate horror on their female patients as trying to save them from the abuses of a patriarchal medical system. But the core of the show is the unhealthy relationship between the sister doctors. Jennifer Ehle also does great work as an offensive rich benefactor from a Sackler-like pharmaceutical family.

Debra Yeo is a deputy editor and a contributor to the Star’s Culture section. She is based in Toronto. Follow her on Twitter: @realityeo

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