Corner Gas

One of the most popular comedy series in Canadian TV history, Corner Gas largely took place in a gas-station-convenience store located in the tiny Saskatchewan town of Dog River, halfway between Saskatoon and Regina--or, as the locals put it "40 Km. from Nowhere and Way Beyond Normal." In charge of the station was Brent LeRoy (Brent Butt), a comic-book freak who'd taken over the operation from his slightly cracked father Oscar (Eric Peterson). Brent's assistant was the incongruously well-educated Wanda Dollard (Nancy Robertson), a single mom whose never-seen baby son Tanner was one of the series' multitude of running gags. Managing the station's coffee shop was Lacey Burrows (Gabrielle Miller) a displaced intellectual, while hanging around the place for the express purpose of getting in everyone's way was Brent's best friend, caffeine-addled Hank Yarbo (Fred Ewanuick). The rest of Dog River seemed to be populated exclusively by the sort of wacky, self-absorbed eccentrics that one might find on Northern Exposure and similar cult-favorite series: Brent's (implicitly) heavy-drinking mom Emma (Janet Wright), trouble-prone local constables Davis (Lorne Cardinal) and Karen (Tara Spencer-Nairn), and so on down the line. The deceptively simple-minded dialogue, which always seemed to be improvised right on the spot, was actually quite barbed and sophisticated, yielding all manner of quirky nonsequiturs and oddball pearls of wisdom. A measure of the show's success in its native country was its steady stream of unexpected guest stars, including Canadian Prime Minister Paul Martin), whose appearance marked the first time that a man holding this office ever showed up on a scripted TV series (it also proved to be a "last" for Martin, due to a major political scandal which toppled his administration not longer afterward). Equally popular was the series' whimsically inaccurate theme song, "Not a Lot Goin' On", by Craig Northey and Jesse Valenzuela. Although the multi-award-winning Corner Gas was widely distributed throughout the world after its CTV debut on January 22, 2004, it was not seen in the United States until picked up by Chicago's WGN Cable Superstation in the fall of 2007.