With its recent ‘sneak peek’ at the fall season, the CBC continues to stir up a nation that has a decided love/hate relationship with its public broadcaster. And that’s a good thing, says CBC’s Kirstine Layfield. At least they care enough to notice. And increasingly, she points out, they’re tuning in. The question is, to what?

The slate – that which remains and that wot’s in the wings – is taking its share of kicks. ‘The reliance on what is essentially a slate of tarted-up reality TV suggests a significant lack of imagination,’ grumbled The Globe and Mail’s John Doyle, not one known for holding back.

Returning reality fare includes Test the Nation, The Next Great Prime Minister and Dragon’s Den. New reality includes a Canadian version of No Opportunity Wasted, from Amazing Race host Phil Keoghan. (Keoghan has lived in Canada, apparently, so it fits!)

And based on the Ceeb’s fugacious hype so far, the word on its new scripted fare – Heartland (Alberta, multigenerational, horses; horses!), Sophie (single mom, talent agency, misadventures) and The Border (post 9/11, hard-driving) – is that it all seems a bit, well, conventional to be worthy of a public broadcaster’s time and taxpayers’ money.

But that’s okay, says Layfield, CBC’s executive director of network programming. ‘I’m glad people are passionate about it,’ she says. ‘It would be worse if they didn’t care.’

In cold, hard numbers, this is CBC’s best year in the last five. Even a little more than a year ago, she says, things were grim: ‘Except for some occasional successes, and hockey, we weren’t getting much of an audience for anything. Now there are five shows over a million.’

Averaging audiences of one million are Little Mosque on the Prairie, The Rick Mercer Report, The Greatest Canadian Invention, Canada’s Next Great Prime Minister and Test the Nation. All of them, except for Invention, are coming back. ‘Once you know Canada’s Greatest Invention… not much more reason for another,’ says Layfield, adding that Canada’s Greatest… Something Else is a possibility.

So sure, it’s a little heavy on the reality. And next season there are some oddities. Like, what is with The Tudors? It’s an Irish/U.S./Canadian coproduction about Henry VIII made for Showtime – a strange choice for a Canuck pubcaster. But let’s give these guys a break. These are tough times to be in TV, never mind public broadcasting, and given the amount of high-level tinkering, second-guessing and red tape that CBC has to deal with, it’s doing okay.

‘Everyone who takes the helm thinks they can steer the right course,’ says Vancouver producer Chris Haddock, ‘but the seas of media have never been so choppy.’

Increasingly, Haddock’s crime drama series Intelligence is an anomaly in that it’s, well, smart, it doesn’t get great numbers, and, according to Haddock, it’s coming back. Haddock has worked with the Ceeb through three or four regimes, he says, and so far he quite likes what he sees.

‘Kirstine has a good sense of marketing,’ he says. He particularly likes Layfield’s introduction of off-peak rebroadcasts, something that the more cynical among us initially dismissed as the sneaky inflation of homegrown airtime hours and audience padding.

Not so.

‘This came out of a conversation we had about where audiences were these days and how they’re taking their television diets,’ says Haddock. ‘They’re really just not sitting down in primetime. How do you make it available so that you catch the people whose habit is not to watch television through old-time delivery? You develop audiences that watch conventional TV ambiently, up late at night. It’s a good way to add to the younger demographic.’

Or as Layfield puts it, ‘It’s taken the media a while to understand that we know what we’re doing.’

The real case in point on that one is Little Mosque. You might call it pay dirt, or you might call it CBC’s Corner Gas. It’s based on an attention-grabbing premise, manages to be both popular and controversial at the same time, and didn’t they go out and promote the bejesus out of it. (Layfield points out that the pubcaster is spending better, but not more, on promotion.)

‘We’re finding that balance between entertaining and informing and telling Canadian stories,’ says Layfield. ‘That’s a prime directive in the mandate, and we’ve proven that you can do all three in one show. It’s not easy, but we can do it.’

The day the first numbers came in, the Corner Gas folks sent the Little Mosque folks a bouquet of flowers with a card that read: ‘A great day for Canadian television.’

Trouble is, there are 365 of them in a year.