Codco was produced and nationally broadcast on the CBC for six seasons. In 1991 the program underwent a marked change without losing its satirical edge. In that year, Andy Jones, an original Codco theater cofounder and TV show member, left the TV cast to pursue solo theatrical projects. In 1993, just months before Tommy Sexton’s death from AIDS-related causes, and Greg Malone’s own departure, Codco went off the air. The death of the boyish, talented Sexton was a subject of national news and reflection on the role of humor in the television and cultural life of Canada from a Newfie point of view. The remaining core members of TV’s Codco, Mary Walsh and Cathy Jones, teamed up with two fresh faces, East Coast writer-actors Rick Mercer and Greg Thomey, and returned in the 1993–94 season in a revamped half-hour newsmagazine satire, This Hour Has 22 Minutes.

Codco’s satire took aim at regional differences and national assumptions within Canada, attacking politics and politicians, sexism and gender roles, and the gay subtext of straight characters in television genres. The format for Codco’s satire was sketch comedy, with sets, costumes, and makeup mimicking the sources under attack. The Codco members’ theatrical roots trained them to develop detailed caricatures, performed with nuances that dismantled the source subjects, the CBC, and television itself as a medium compromised by commercialization. Spun from the collective writing and acting skills of the members, and ably directed by the experienced John Blanchard and David Acomba, Codco sketches revealed the tightness of well-rehearsed scene studies, exceeding the loose burlesque of Saturday Night Live’s broad spoofs.

All four Codco cast members continued to cross-dress as they made the transition from regional theater company to national television show, and their ability to traverse sex roles played to Codco’s long interest in social transgression and critique. Cathy Jones and Walsh portrayed a variety of males, from macho through wimpy, along with their femme fatales, “loud feminists,” and pesky middle-aged, bingo-bent matrons. The sketches featuring the homely, dateless “Friday Night Girls” satirized the isolation of lone women who lack the glamour of the women they view on television. Walsh’s Dakey Dunn, “Male Correspondent,” replete with gold chain, hairy chest, cigarette, and beer in hand, might explain the local dilemma facing the Friday Night Girls. In one monologue, Dakey admits to not completing high school and, in crude English, lays out a macho view of economic and cultural matters as if his type is a male standard within Newfie life. Malone’s Queen Elizabeth and Sexton and Malone’s gay barristers personified a Canadian colonial condition and gay-rights emergence that only satire could accommodate on broadcast television.

In November 2001, nine years after Sexton’s death, the CBC aired a retrospective biography, Tommy: A Family Portrait, chronicling Sexton’s comedic legacy and struggle as gay son, valued sibling, and alternative performer working in the lively arts and music scene of St. John’s. Part of Sexton’s wider legacy includes the CBC special The National Doubt (1992), a collaboration with Malone and musical-theater satirist John Gray. The National Doubt featured two medieval characters (played by Sexton and Malone) crossing Canada to take the country’s national pulse amid the regional climate that had developed since the Expo ’67 celebrations 25 years earlier in Montreal.

Ivan Fecan, once the CBC’s “wunderkind” and former director of television programming, nurtured Codco’s place on the network, first in a late-night slot and later in prime time. Placed back-to-back with Kids in the Hall to constitute a prime-time hour of “adult” CBC programming (9 to 10 P.M.), the satiric heft of Codco and the Kids was enhanced by this yoking of the two shows. Both were driven by sharp comedic misbehavior—prominently, in the hour before the CBC’s flagship newscast, The National.