When the women left Alberta

There was much excitement upon the discovery of The Week the Women Went and despite my usual need for order, we watched season 2 in Tatamagouche before season 1 in Alberta. So after the we finished off the 8 episodes of Nova Scotia goodness, we went back and started with season 1. I was really interested to compare the two since they seem like two completely different cultures. How similar would the men react when the women went away?

We don't know because we never made it past episode two. It's not like we didn't have the time since we just ended up switching back to Stargate Atlantis for our viewing pleasure but there was a distinction difference between the two seasons. My brother said he didn't want to watch it any more because he didn't want to see any child abuse. Though we tried to assure him that the CBC (probably) wouldn't actually show anything like that, we all understood where he was coming from. There was one dad in Alberta that did seem much scarier than all of the dads from Tata. And personally, I didn't like seeing the cows getting branded and castrated. But there was definitely are harshness in general that you didn't see in Tata.

I think part of the reason this was is that the men in Alberta seemed more aware that they were on camera for all the country to see. They have more of a reputation to uphold of being the rough, wild cowboys of the west. I think you could see that a lot in the one guy (I want to call him Sam) who was the joker of the group and was in charge of taking care of his 12(?) year old son who usually lived with his mother. He never knew where the kid was and the kid didn't seem like one of those bad kids that would just disappear. To me, at least, his lack of interest in his kid seemed more like a show to everyone else so that he could still be the 'cool' one. I did not like this.

The one really interesting thing I found was that there were more teenagers in Alberta. And the CBC had no problems showing all the underage drinking and partying that went on. One side effect I never thought of was now that the mothers were all gone, the teenagers run rampant. But the CBC would show these kids out drinking at a party. And I liked that. I think it shows that the CBC, though they may not approve, aren't just going to cover it all up for the sake of a TV or pretend it's not happening. CBC: keeping it real (...which is also why we were afraid that they might show the child abuse, if it happened).