Prince Edward Island is a magical, mysterious place. As Canada’s smallest province, and (perhaps, uncoincidentally) an island, they have developed their own curious culture that’s only been reinforced by rising bridge tolls. For comedians Andrew Bush and Mark Little, the island has provided a treasure trove of material for their new CBC television series, Cavendish.
If you’ve been on the internet sometime in the last decade (and we’re fairly confident you have) you’ve likely run into Picnicface. The Halifax-based comedy troupe were responsible for such internet classics as the dance hit of 2007 “Beard no Beard” and “Powerthirst,” the energy drink for people who need gratuitous amounts of energy. They were right up there with “Trogdor the Burninator” and “The End of the World,” providing seconds of viewing entertainment and hours of quoting them back at your friends. God bless the internet.
Fast forward a decade and Andrew Bush (who has a beard and has since written for Street Cents, Will Ferrell’s Funny Or Die and the feature film Roller Town) and Mark Little (who has no beard, but has won fifteen comedy awards, stars in the CBC Comedy Mr. D. and voices the titular character of Gary And His Demons) are premiering Cavendish on CBC Television tonight.
The story follows two oddball brothers, coincidentally also named Andy and Mark, who return to their hometown of Cavendish to spend time with their ailing and somewhat estranged father after having lived away for many years.
What starts off as a straightforward buddy comedy quickly goes off the rails as Little and Bush unleash their absurdist comedy impulses on the storyline, dragging the quirks of island culture along into it.
“I’m pretty sure [CBC] said, ‘Yes, people are watching our shows in greater and greater numbers now, it’s time to punish them a bit,'” jokes Little. “We pitched two shows to them at the time, this and a live feed of us setting tax dollars on fire. They went with this.”
“It’s a completely different type of show, for sure, and much more straightforward, but that’s something I’ve always liked. I grew up watching the Simpsons and Seinfeld and all sorts of narrative-based comedy, so learning how to do this has been a hoot. I like how The Simpsons always wove its absurdity into heartfelt story lines, or story lines that start out heartfelt before taking a left turn to undermine that heart. […] I like that. The story and the characters carry you, the absurdity and RUDE STUFF gets woven in.”
The premise for the series itself grew out Bush’s experiences visiting the island with his family as a child, but having revisited it as an adult, things seemed a little more outlandish than he recalled.
“What he was describing was so wild to me,” says Little. “We were working on this other show that sucked and then he just started telling me about his most recent trip to Cavendish, talking about all these weird little tourist spots, museums of the phantasmagorical, year-round Santa playgrounds. I think he mentioned an Egyptian-themed indoor mini golf course called King Tut Mini-Putt with hieroglyphs drawn on the wall in glow in the dark marker? All of it sounded amazing. Like Niagara Falls except instead of big corporate stuff like Madame Tussaud or whatever, it’s all just weird mom and pop places.”
And so, naturally, Prince Edward Island appealed to Bush and Little’s comedic senses, but these are the people who brought us “Gun Genie,” and they’re the sort of people who will unleash the Cult of Green Gables on you faster than you can say “creative license.”
“We got to talking about all that and thought it would be fun to set something in a town like that, and then slowly we started weaving in more of the dark, absurdist stuff we can’t help but do. Like my brain can only think about ‘two brothers meeting their dad again’ for so long before ‘plus there’s a Beast’ creeps in,” says Little.
Little grew up in British Colombia but has since lived in nearby Halifax. He says that his own experiences with Prince Edward Island haven’t been as extensive as Bush’s, but they seem to have been endowed with a certain sense of authenticity that has lent itself to his brand of storytelling.
“I’ve actually been a couple times. I went down some water slides and went to a little tourist building with a set of those super-powered binoculars you can use to look at the countryside, but I trained them on a nearby golf course and accidentally watched a man peeing in a bush. He was looking around, so certain no one could see him. But there I was, a mere thousand yards away, taking it all in. The fool. The absolute buffoon. He had no idea.
That’s the entirety of season two. ‘Mark finds very powerful binoculars and humiliates peeing men.’
Honestly, it could all be real, which is something we were going for. We wanted the spooky stuff to emerge from local superstitions — the sort of superstitions you’d find in any small town — and we always wanted to walk that fine line of ‘is this real or is it just a town’s collective imagination?’
The goal was to create something that could plausibly be called a sitcom but still feature enough weird shit to alienate a ton of people.”
In that spirit, Cavendish covers a lot of ground; it shifts from the absolutely bizarre, spins on a dime and delivers a heart warming moment featuring Fred Penner that is arguably the best thing to appear on CBC since 1997.
The CBC original series premieres on Tuesday, Jan. 8 at 9:30 p.m. (10 NT) on CBC and the CBC Gem streaming service.