New Crave comedy Anna Comes Home is the opposite of Emily in Paris. The Quebec comedy looks a woman moving back, regretfully, to North America from France.Crave
Emily in Paris continues to be wildly popular with viewers for the same reason the Netflix series is sniffed at by critics: It’s a pure escapist fantasy about living abroad.
Emily Cooper never suffers any of the actual annoyances or alienation of an expat lifestyle in Europe – such as figuring out how to set up a bank account or find housing, or dealing with the ennui that can come from being at a physical distance from your loved ones and culture.
And as the social-media meme goes: What visa is Emily on anyway?
By contrast, Anna Comes Home, a new Quebec comedy with its first two episodes streaming on Crave as of Wednesday (with English subtitles), manages to be amusing while simultaneously throwing a pail of cold water on the expat dream.
It’s a TV show about repatriation – specifically, the experience of coming back to Canada with your tail between your legs.
That LA or London relationship or job didn’t work out and you’re back in Toronto or Calgary, possibly with an affected accent or manner. Your friends aren’t sympathetic: What, you thought you were too good for Winnipeg?
As we meet her, after 10 years away from Montreal in Paris, Anna (Julie Le Breton) seems to still be living in Emily in Paris make-believe. We first spy her strutting confidently past cafés and the Eiffel Tower to meet her handsome older love Renaud for a glass of wine.
But the illusion crumbles fast: Renaud’s cheating again – and just as he’s suggesting the possibility of forming a throuple with his mistress, he collapses from a heart attack, no doubt from all that fatty French food. The chic flat that Anna’s been living in with Renaud is left to his son and she can’t afford to live in any fashionable arrondissement on her own salary.
Back to Quebec it is. As the 43-year-old Anna arrives in la belle province, we see Montreal through her eyes. She gives a frisson of disgust upon spying the Canada customs line at the airport. The temporary digs she’s rented are smelly and full of mice. The telecoms are expensive and the WiFi is bad.
Above all, Montreal gives Anna shudders because her difficult artist mom Monique (Élise Guilbault) and egotistical actor ex-boyfriend Antoine (Patrick Hivon) are there.
More happily, Anna reconnects with her old friend Patrick (Benoît McGinnis), who runs a talent agency and quickly forgives her for her long absence. Indeed, the platonic comic chemistry between Le Breton and McGinnis anchors the show.
Patrick’s the Generation X boss surrounded by younger, more attractive Gen Z publicists. But this is Call My Agent! without much glamour – the agency’s clients are desperate to get back on Tout le monde en parle or Big Brother Célébrités.
The semi-satirical sense is of Quebec as a place with a strong culture, but stifling and insular. Anna, a former screenwriter and refugee from the province’s entertainment industry herself, has to deal with the fact she might see her ex on the cover of Échos Vedettes while picking up cheese puffs.
Then, there’s one of Patrick’s clients, an actor-musician named Romane B (Karelle Tremblay) who gets in trouble for telling a radio interviewer that she’s ashamed to be Québécois; she means from an environmental point of view, but that doesn’t stop her from losing bookings and getting a brick through her window.
Despite the show’s Quebec specifics, there’s a universal message here – explored as we discover the dark secret behind Anna leaving in the first place. As Ernest Hemingway, who knew a thing or two about being a Paris expat, wrote: You can’t get away from yourself by moving from one place to another.
Anna Comes Home is itself a return, to comedy, for creator Richard Blaimert after a decade or so focusing on more dramatic fare. He was the creator of Les Hauts et les Bas de Sophie Paquin – a show you may recall was so big in Quebec in the 2000s that CBC remade it.
Sophie, as the short-lived English-language version was called, aired on ABC Family in the United States too, thanks to an assist from the 2007-08 Writers Guild of America strike. When it was pulled from that lineup early, it was another one of those Canadian conversations that Anna Comes Home taps into: ah, not good enough for [insert country here].
Crave, Bell Media’s streamer, has a better idea than remaking Quebec shows: It’s just making Le Retour d’Anna Brodeur, as the series is known in French, available with English subtitles right away.
Why the CBC hasn’t picked up on that possibility – and doubled the content available on its English and French streamers – is a mystery. Canada can feel smaller than it actually is because of these unnecessary divides. Might as well laugh about it.