The Royal Canadian Air Farce has reached the end of its run on CBC, and next season will end its long stay on the network with a final 10 episodes. CBC on Tuesday confirmed that it has ordered an abbreviated season of the storied sketch comedy — its 16th — and that its final episode will air on New Year’s Eve.

The show, a pillar of the network’s comedy programming, has been on CBC TV since 1993, and ran for 20 years before that on CBC Radio — with comics Luba Goy, Jessica Holmes, Roger Abbott, Don Ferguson and others poking fun at Ottawa and the many other oddities of Canada.

The show has remained a ‘must watch’ for CBC’s older viewers, but was reworked as Air Farce Live for the 2007/08 season, going live-to-air in a bid to give its weakening numbers a boost.

Instead, the ratings went down, although only slightly. This season, the Farce is averaging 630,000 viewers, down from the 641,000 it chalked up during 2006/07.

Those numbers are not especially weak, but the show seems to have fallen out of step with the sort of programming CBC is pushing these days. The final episode of the current season will air on Friday.

CBC programming boss Kirstine Layfield praised the show as a ‘CBC institution,’ and says the network is in discussions with the Farce gang about other projects. It’s ‘too soon to say what’s next, but we look forward to continuing to work with them,’ she tells Playback Daily.