The Family Plouffe/La famille Plouffe chronicled the daily life of a Quebec working-class family in the postwar era. It was an extended family that included Théophile, the father, a former provincial cycling champion who had traded in his bicycle–and his youth–for work as a plumber; Joséphine, the naive and kindhearted mother who doted on her adult children like a worried mother hen; Napoléon, the eldest child and protector of his siblings, who mentored his younger brother Guillaume’s dream of one day playing professional hockey; Ovide, the intellectual of the family, whose education and love of art and music gave him an arrogant demeanor; and Cécile, the only daughter, who, like many women in the postwar era, was faced with the choice between traditional marriage, children and security, on the one hand, and new aspirations of career independence, on the other.

Plots were generally cast in the form of quests–for love, career advancement, security, or a sense of personal and national identity. These themes were woven with the daily problems and choices that confronted members of the family. Some commentators have argued that Plouffes reflected the common experience of the “typical” French Canadian family and that viewers in Quebec could easily identify with the characters, their aspirations, the plots, and the settings. As nostalgic as this view may be, the Plouffes were still fictional. Moral ambiguities were almost always resolved to fit conventional values of postwar Quebec. Women were expected to be homemakers, wives, and mothers. Those women who strayed from these norms, such as Rita Toulouse, were often depicted as wily and unpredictable. Men were expected to be good providers and strong patriarchs, as symbolized by the fact that Théophile let his treasured bicycle fall into disrepair. It was only to be expected that Cécile would opt for marriage to Onésime Ménard and that Ovide would reconcile his elitist aspirations with his working-class environment.

A year after the successful premiere of the original series, CBS programmers decided to launch an English version. The version was essentially the same as its French counterpart, though modifications were made in the script to remove profane and vulgar language and any references to sex. The scripts were written by Roger Lemelin, the original and only French author, and the same cast of actors were used for the live broadcasts, which were aired later in the week.

This decision was a unique experiment. Using the magic of television, all Canadians were able to follow the same story, and although The Family Plouffe received good ratings in some smaller Canadian centers, the CBC’s own internal survey showed that the experiment to create a common Canadian cultural icon was a failure. In large cities where viewers had access to U.S. stations, Anglophone Canadians preferred to watch American programming. By the end of the 1958-59 season, the CBC had abandoned the practice of broadcasting language-versioned programming. 

La famille Plouffe/The Family Plouffe was a unique “made-in-Canada” live drama. Nostalgic memories of its success prompted a return in 1982 to the family kitchen in a television special, Le crime d’Ovide Plouffe, which was also versioned and broadcast to Anglophone Canadians. After more than two decades of separate programming, another attempt was made to broadcast a series to both English and French audiences in the late 1980s. The series Lance et compte/He Shoots, He Scores (1987-88) was intended to appeal to Canadians’ common love of hockey, but like earlier experiments, ratings demonstrated that Francophone and Anglophone viewers wanted very different kinds of programs. The true legacy of La Famille Plouffe was its influence in the development of the teleroman, which was and has remained a uniquely “made-in-Quebec” television genre.