A couple of weeks ago, my wife was on the phone with her mother, explaining that we were about to sit down to watch Trudeau II: Maverick in the Making.

‘Oh, I’ve already seen that,’ replied my beloved mother-in-law. The thing was, she hadn’t.

CBC had not successfully informed her that the new miniseries was in fact a prequel to 2002’s Trudeau, which can be attributed to the recent lockout throwing the net’s programming and promotional plans into limbo. And now, with the labor issue resolved with the Canadian Media Guild, the pubcaster has been rushing some of its prized productions to air without a long lead strategy. Apparently my mother-in-law was not the only one out there who didn’t get the message, as the new two-parter drew only about 500,000 pairs of eyeballs each night.

This is a disaster.

In Hollywood, it is said that a sequel ­- and let’s include this recent phenomenon of prequels – pretty much guarantees an audience at least 60% the size of its predecessor. By this math, Trudeau II is way off the mark. The 2002 mini peaked at more than two million viewers on its first night, which would put the new show’s return at a dismal 25%.

It’s certainly not the fault of producer Big Motion Pictures. Although it was a daunting task to live up to the first mini, which won four Gemini Awards and boasted a fine performance by Colm Feore and an innovative directorial approach from MOW king Jerry Ciccoritti, the talent lined up for the prequel was also strong. Stéphane Demers, who stars as the younger Trudeau, has the advantage over Feore in that he is actually French-Canadian and had played PET before. The plaudits are pouring in from those who actually bothered to watch. At the helm was Tim Southam, director of the well-received feature The Bay of Love and Sorrows.

CBC Television executive VP Richard Stursberg, explaining to Playback why Trudeau II underachieved, suggests, ‘It may be people aren’t so interested in docudramas that date all the way back to the 1940s.’ I would counter that writer/producer Wayne Grigsby and cowriter Guy Fournier, who recently assumed the role of CBC chair, actually had more compelling material to work with this time around. While many of us are familiar with PET’s life as prime minister, as it was constantly in the headlines, few know much about the man before – his rebellious days at Jesuit prep school, his role in the 1949 Asbestos strike, his days as an editor for the radical Cité Libre.

Of course, under most circumstances, it would be difficult to lure viewers away from CTV’s Desperate Housewives juggernaut, which got 2.8 million viewers on Trudeau II’s first night, but this $8-million mini was supposed to be CBC ‘big-ticket television’ at its best, one of the biggest guns in the pubcaster’s arsenal. People can tune in to the ladies of Wisteria Lane anytime.

Certainly CBC programmers can be taken to task for putting Trudeau II up against one of the hightest-rated series on television, but perhaps they did not have much choice. Many hours of scheduling time was lost over the course of the 50-day lockout, and now CBC has a backlog of shows to broadcast, so audiences are getting hit with them in quick succession. Likely, too, the net is rushing these big-ticket shows to air in an all-out attempt to regain lost audience momentum (hockey excepted, of course.) But the problem is, event television loses its event status when it’s on every week, and we will be seeing the likes of the Walter Gretzky and Shania Twain biopics in short order, on back-to-back nights, no less (Nov. 6 and 7, respectively).

And Trudeau II is not alone. The first of CBC’s ‘event’ offerings, the $5.2-million two-parter Il Duce Canadese, produced by Ciné Télé Action, managed an average audience of only about 200,000. Perhaps its title is too obscure, and perhaps the subject matter of Italian-Canadians interned during the Second World War is just too downbeat for most, but the fact that CBC threw it on a week after the lockout, before it could even explain to viewers what the mini was all about, doomed the program from the start.

I asked a producer with an upcoming program on CBC whether he felt the Ceeb had been doing a good job of promoting his show, and all I got was eye-rolling and a bitter ‘Oh, please…’

CBC president Robert Rabinovitch got an earful when he recently appeared in front of a Commons committee to try to justify the lockout. He dubiously shifted the blame onto the Canadian Media Guild, explaining that the action was a preemptive move to disable a potential strike. CBC brass denied that the pubcaster ended up saving any money from not having to pay its employees’ full salaries over the course of eight weeks, while the union estimates the net saved $50 million.

Considering the small gains the CBC made after all this – the fact that it can now hire up to 9.5% of its workers on a contract basis – we have yet to hear a convincing argument as to how this move by the public broadcaster served the public.

Many people are victims here: employees, tax-paying viewers, my mother-in-law, the CBC itself, and let’s not forget some Canadian producers, whose best efforts are dying on the vine because the CBC has failed to properly program and promote their work.