La famille Plouffe

La famille Plouffe was a Canadian television drama, more specifically a téléroman, about a Quebec City family that first aired in the French language on Société Radio-Canada in 1953. The show was created to fill a void in francophone television in Canada. Whereas the English Canadian television branch of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation could broadcast English-language shows from American stations, the francophone component of the CBC, Radio-Canada had to develop its own programs for French Canadian viewers from the earliest days of television in Canada. This show was one of the few that helped to launch the téléroman genre of programming in French Canada, around the same time the first telenovelas aired in Latin America.

The series was also broadcast live in English as The Plouffe Family[1] on CBC Television the following year and ran on both networks until 1959. The series was revived in the 1980s as a miniseries.[2]

The series was based on the novel Les Plouffe, by Roger Lemelin. It chronicled the daily life of a working-class family in the years following World War II. The family included patriarch Théophile, a former provincial cycling champion who had settled into life as a plumber, his wife Joséphine, a naive but kind-hearted mother who doted on her adult children Napoléon, Ovide, Cécile and Guillaume.

It was designated and preserved as a "masterwork" by the Audio-Visual Preservation Trust of Canada, a charitable non-profit organization dedicated to promoting the preservation of Canada’s audio-visual heritage.[3]