With the information sitcom Stock & Awe debuting on BNN, Canada’s specialty business channel, series co-creator and host Hilary Doyle naturally is nervous.

Jack Fleischmann, general manager of BNN, is not.

“Jack has given us a chance to create a show, and we’ve jumped at the chance,” Doyle, a Second City alumna-turned-TV business reporter, who created Stock & Awe with director Lisa Robertson, told Playback Daily.

Doyle admits to little grasp of her finances and little grasp, either, of financial markets before she and Robertson started to develop the eight-episode comedy.

“When I had money, I spent it,” Doyle recalls of her salad days as an actor. Saving and investing terrified her, despite possessing two RSSP accounts Doyle barely knew existed.

But lucky for BNN, Doyle does have a knack for connecting with a TV audience, according to BNN’s Fleischmann, and also knows how to write, and endlessly rewrite, an information comedy script.

“She’s a great presenter. I thought, we’ve got to do something with her,” he recalls of the time last year when he first weighed the idea for an informational show about financial markets in the wake of the 2008/09 market meltdown.

And so was born Doyle’s on-screen journey to get a grasp on her investment portfolio and so-called “market professionals” who might make it grow. That challenge is baked into the scripted show’s dramatic arc.

Doyle and millions of Canadians took on investments and risk in better times that they didn’t understand, because they assumed their financial advisers were working in their interests.

Then the markets got into a lot of trouble. And when they collapsed, a lot of paper wealth disappeared overnight as financial panic ensued.

Today, the asset value of stock portfolios are growing again. But Canadian investors remain gun-shy, and are looking to learn about indexes and TFSAs and derivatives and much else they took too lightly before the market crash.

Hence the idea for a comedy to explain and comment on financial markets.

Fleischmann insists viewers of TV business channels like BNN and CNBC may say they want to know the basics about financial markets and investing, but that few actually tune into market 101 primers on offer.

So the gamble is on Doyle, and her on-screen antics to get Canadian TV viewers watching a primetime show that combines laughs with learning, and offers characters the audience cares about.

“It’s creative, there’s lots of unexpected turns. It’s a fictionalization to a degree,” Fleischmann says of the funny business behind Stock & Awe.

Doyle plays a faux business reporter without assets.

“Business is my work. Debt is my work-life balance,” she says in the show’s debut episode.

Rather than just rely solely on actors, Stock & Awe also invites industry professionals to offer advice to investors tuning in for comedy.

Doyle hopes viewers that watch her show will no longer just nod at dinner parties or across their backyard fence when talk turns to investments and saving.

“You don’t want to feel stupid,” she says of conversations with banks and financial advisers over investments.

Stock & Awe also strives to be impartial, and not get into questions of whether banks and investment advisers were serving their client’s interests, as advertised, before the financial market meltdown.

And the series, amid the laughs, does aim to teach investors how to avoid harmful and excessive risk.

“You don’t want to throw all of your cash at a (mutual) fund that might crash,” Lisa Robertson, director of the series, interjects.

Stock & Awe appears on BNN on Thursdays at 8 p.m. and Saturdays on CTV at 5:30 p.m.