…indeed the best show on TV thus far in this decade.

The CBC’s Zed (named, of course, after the Great White North’s pronounciation of the alphabet’s last letter) is a magazine show of experimental video, animation, and performance art. That capsule description could apply to a dozen or more past shows on PBS and other Stateside channels. But the Vancouver-produced Zed is far different, and far better, than those. Some reasons:

• It’s on its country’s premier network, in a premier time slot: 11:25 p.m.-12:25 a.m. every weeknight, commercial-free. It’s cutting-edge, but it’s not “fringe.”
• It’s carefully curated and sequenced, despite the enormous amount of material it requires. Canada has vast short-film and animation scenes (due partly to arts grants and to the world-renowned National Film Board of Canada), and Zed could consume all its output in a grab-baggy way. Instead, each episode carfully curates a mix of dramatic-narrative shorts, outre comedies, odd cartoons, mini-documentaries, modern-dance clips, spoken-word snippets, avant-garde musical performances, and items too odd to classify.
• Elegant, erudite emcee Sharon Lewis deftly weaves common threads around each night’s selections, without resorting either to support-the-arts hype nor to PBS-style smugness. She knows these are engrossing, captivating films, and she knows she doesn’t have to hard-sell them to you.
• Under the slogan “Open Source Television,” the show solicits viewer contributions. One of my favorites in this category was a tape of a 10-year-old boy trying hard to stay awake to watch the show.
• The show welcomes viewers of all ages, but doesn’t pander or clean things up for them. In keeping with the Film Board’s heritage, the films on Zed can include quite heavy subject matter (abortion, poverty, bereavement, loneliness). The cartoons can range from the gross-out to the incomprehensibly symbolic. Nudity and cuss words are left intact. One clip featured the writhing of a nude male modern dancer; its soundtrack consisted of the dancer discussing the kind of man with whom he’d most want to fall in love.
• The show’s segments have MTV-like credit screens at the beginning and end. These titles include “Web ID” numbers for each short. Anything you see and like (or want to decipher), you can see again online. And if you live where CBC isn’t on cable (i.e., the United States south of Tacoma), you can see and hear the show’s component parts online, though one piece at a time and without Lewis’s introductions.
• But the most important aspects of Zed are its confident attitude and Lewis’s honest rapport with her viewers. The show presumes a universe in which the sorts of ideas and expressions it presents are fully-accepted and respected features of a sophisticated urban society. Zed is neither elitist nor pandering. It fully respects its viewers’ intelligence. It doesn’t divide the populace into “cultured” and “uncultured” castes. It fully expects you to “get” whatever it shows; and if you don’t, or if you don’t like it, something else will be along in less than six minutes.

Zed’s site doesn’t mention how many episodes are in its current first season. CBC series often have short production seasons. But Zed mostly consists of pre-existing (i.e., relatively cheap to acquire) material, so theoretically go on year-round (albeit with rerun weeks here and there).

My advice: If you’re capable of tuning in to it, watch as many Zed episodes as you can now. See what highbrow-arts TV can really become.