CBC Television and BET Plus got together to produce an eight-part series called The Porter that centres around the plight of Black railway porters working the Chicago-Detroit-Montreal line back in the 1920’s.
The series has been nominated Wednesday for nineteen Canadian Screen Awards (CSA), a very impressive achievement for the historical period piece.
And then it got cancelled.
It seems that while CBC was all-in for a Season 2, American-based BET Plus saw things differently and chose not to go ahead with that plan. And so the series, nominated for Best Drama Series among the eighteen other category nominations, is no more.
The production company involved with the show, Sphere Media, made a big effort to find another backer for a second season in the United States and the United Kingdom. They were told that there was “a lack of interest in the Canadian point of view” of train porters, particularly Black ones.
It’s the story of Black train porters in the 1920’s who attempt to organize a union in the hopes of attaining better and safer working conditions. I’ve not seen the series myself, but I can recognize nineteen CSA nominations as well as recognize the merit of a story that connects to working conditions in 1920’s and how they contributed to the rise of the labour movement in this country as well as the U.S. Of course, in this show, the porters happen to be Black, which for them is a double whammy, especially back then.
I fear the double whammy is still around, and I fear that if the show highlighted white porters, it might still be around after the nineteen nominations. But if true, you’d never get anyone to say that out loud.
This may well be the first time in my life I start watching a show because it was cancelled.
NEWSMAGRENFREW 