The end to its eight-week lockout leaves the CBC facing a lingering rift with its workers, a jilted audience that must be wooed back from the competition, calls for president Robert Rabinovitch’s resignation and an uphill battle in the already crowded fall TV season.

‘No one is going in without realizing this was a big rupture in this [worker-management] relationship, and there’s work needed to overcome this,’ Arnold Amber, president of the Canadian Media Guild’s CBC branch, said after his membership returned to work on Oct. 11.

Working from a standing start, CBC workers and management scrambled to get the public broadcaster’s two profit centers – sports and news programming ­- back on air.

‘The CBC shouldn’t have lost a beat on sports,’ says Sunni Boot, CEO of media buyer ZenithOptimedia Canada, noting the appeal among young males of Hockey Night in Canada, which returned to air Oct. 8 to a reported 1.7 million viewers, up some 46% from the average the previous season.

But convincing Canadians to watch the CBC’s fall schedule of ‘high-impact’ comedies, dramas and miniseries represents the network’s biggest challenge going forward.

‘The real danger is viewers have found something interesting while The Antique Roadshow was playing [during the lockout] and will stick with that,’ says Bob Rheaume, vice-president of research at the Association of Canadian Advertisers.

The CBC’s programming and marketing brass are busily reconnecting with independent producers post-lockout to give their new shows the best possible push out of the gates.

CBC workers were still voting on a new collective agreement when Howard Busgang, the creator and producer of hockey mock-doc The Tournament, and CBC comedy chief Anton Leo executed a Vanity Fair-style photo shoot in Montreal that featured the female cast in hockey jerseys, and little else beneath, for promos ahead of the series’ season debut on Nov. 15.

The lockout put an earlier marketing plan on hold. ‘Everything is kicking in a big way, and we anticipate a big cross-Canada promotion,’ says Busgang.

The best-laid plans for the Oct. 28 final-season launch of The Red Green Show similarly went awry after Aug. 15, when CBC workers first hit the picket lines. Series star Steve Smith recalls a June meeting with CBC programming, marketing, website artists and outside PR specialists gathered round a table to develop a promotional strategy for his farewell season.

‘Then the lockout came to be, and all that went away,’ he says.

Now Smith sees media interest in the 15th and final season of The Red Green Show building ahead of a final taping on Nov. 5, and a series finale in February.

Other CBC fall highlights include Trudeau 2: Maverick in the Making, the miniseries prequel shifted from a September airdate to Oct. 23-24, a Just for Laughs special on Nov. 1, and the Royal Canadian Air Farce bowing on Oct. 28.

Elsewhere on the schedule, the rechristened third season of Rick Mercer Reports will debut on Nov. 8, right after two TV movies, The Walter Gretzky Story: Waking Up Wally on Nov. 6 and Shania: A Life in Eight Albums, about country/pop singer Shania Twain, on Nov. 7.

The good news for the upcoming launches is they come late in the fall season, after freshmen U.S. network series bowed on rivals CTV, CHUM, Global and CH.

‘We’re not competing head to head with U.S. network premieres,’ says Laszlo Barna, president and CEO of Barna-Alper Productions. He has high hopes for his two CBC shows this season, Da Vinci’s City Hall, which debuts Oct. 25 with a two-hour special, and the Twain biopic.

At the same time, Boot cautions that rival Canadian broadcasters are unlikely to let their guard down in November as they continue fighting for leadership amid fragmenting audiences.

‘It’s a time of the year when all… networks are watching the ratings,’ says Boot.

For the Ceeb’s Leo, who has shepherded much of the net’s fall schedule from development to debut, there’s more in the pipeline after November to whet Canadian appetites.

He points to three recently shot pilots – This Space for Rent in Vancouver, Cheap Draft, Fast Cars, Bad Language, Women and a Video Camera in Halifax and Rabbittown in St. John’s – each aiming at edgy comedy taking the CBC in a new direction.

‘The producers are all young, the writers and actors are new and they are so charged with energy. That should grab some attention,’ Leo says of the three new pilots to debut in January.

Whether the latest incarnation of the CBC can draw back viewers lost during the lockout, and even boost audience share down the road, remains an open question, according to the ACA’s Rheaume.

‘For the past 17 weeks, no doubt their shows have slipped, and it remains to be seen how quickly and how high they will come back,’ he says.

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