Even if the Habs don’t make it to the playoffs, Quebecers will have a second chance to express their hockey fever in 2010: a reality show designed to revive the intense rivalry between the Quebec Nordiques and the Montreal Canadiens.

In January, the Queen of Quebec TV, producer and host Julie Snyder (Star Académie, Le Banquier), will launch La Série Montréal-Québec on the private TVA network. Snyder and her producers have scoured the province to form two mixed garage-league hockey teams from Montreal and Quebec City. Over the course of more than eight weeks, the amateur players will duke it out on national TV (it’s sort of like Les Boys meets Star Académie).

Who will tune in? Likely millions of nostalgic viewers who long for the days when Quebec had two NHL teams and the bitter competition between Les Nordiques and Les Canadiens made headlines.

Hockey themes are a tried-and-true formula for success with Quebec audiences (over 10,000 people signed up to try out for Snyder’s garage-league teams). The hockey drama series Lance et Compte (He Shoots, He Scores), which began nearly 25 years ago, simply refuses to die. After a successful run in the late 1980s, it was revived in 2001 on TQS and from 2004 to 2009 on TVA. Despite its tired storyline and mediocre writing, it remains popular.

The Les Boys franchise has spawned three sequels and remains one of the most successful Quebec-made film series of all time. A spin-off TV series aired on Rad-Can in 2007 and 2009. Bon Cop, Bad Cop, the top-grossing film ever in Canada, largely due to its popularity in Quebec, also had a hockey theme.

In mid-November, 14,000 people attended a special screening of Pour toujours, les Canadiens at the Montreal Bell Centre. The film, released on 500 screens across the province Dec. 4, commemorates the 100th anniversary of the famed franchise. And while Les Nordiques headed south in the mid-1990s and many of the players on Les Canadiens aren’t Canadien at all, Quebecers are dedicated to and passionate about le hockey and their home team.

Pour toujours, les Canadiens producer Lorraine Richard believes hockey rouses Quebec nationalism. ‘It’s about pride. I’m convinced of that,’ she notes.

And if anyone knows how to tap into the collective pride of francophone Quebec, it’s Snyder. In fact, she seems to approach making TV as though she’s organizing a Quebec family reunion. For both Star Académie and her popular dating reality show Occupation Double, special buses traveled to communities across Quebec to select the contestants; extended families and cheering hometowns were an integral part of the buzz surrounding both shows.

Snyder also benefits from Quebecor Inc.’s impressive ‘cross-platform’ marketing machine: the TVA network, cableco Videotron, specialty channels, and a slew of online and print tabloids and entertainment magazines. As with Star Académie, we will likely be inundated with news about the players and their personal lives for weeks.

I wonder if Heritage Minister James Moore will tune in to watch La Série Montréal-Québec? As a former sportscaster, he’s likely a hockey fan. And Snyder’s series offers up a perfect example of the kind of TV the minister appears to want to support with his new Canada Media Fund: it’s Canadian, cross-platform and popular.

Of course, no one knows what the new CMF will look like yet, but producers here remain anxious, especially the makers of documentaries and drama. Many fear the new CMF will favor commercial hits at the expense of innovative dramas and docs – an approach they believe will favor the interests of Quebecor. As a result, the APFTQ wants the CRTC to force conventional networks to spend an average of their revenues and 50% of their programming budget on Canadian content.

‘TV is for us a place to develop creativity,’ veteran children’s TV producer Carmen Bourassa told CMF staff during the Montreal consultation. ‘We don’t want the fund to simply support shows that are purely commercial and popular. That leads to repetition because we just reproduce what’s already working. In order to keep the industry alive, it has to take risks – that’s how it progresses.’

Indeed. In the new year, SRC will launch an innovative historic mystery series entitled Musée éden, penned by Gilles Desjardins and starring Laurence Leboeuf and Mariloup Wolfe. Set in 1910, the program follows the lives of two women from Manitoba who inherit a wax museum. The pair are soon embroiled in the seedy underworld of Montreal’s Red Light district.

Along with being a crime thriller, the series also looks at the little known history of women living in Montreal at the turn of the last century.

The buzz around Musée éden, which took nearly a decade to get to the small screen, is excellent.

Will viewers be drawn to a hockey drama that resuscitates a well-worn theme or opt for something a bit more original? And if Mr. Moore decides to boost his Quebec pop culture IQ and tune in to either program, I wonder which one he’ll choose to support.