The public broadcaster announced its full 2026-27 programming slate Tuesday, with Bee’s new series marking her first headlining project since Full Frontal with Samantha Bee went off the air in 2022. The comedy, titled The Ambassador, casts the Toronto-born comedian as Olivia Winters, a former actor who pivots — improbably — to life as Canada’s diplomat in Sofia, Bulgaria.
Showrunner Tim McAuliffe, who previously led Son of a Critch, created the 10-part half-hour series for Amaze Film & Television. Bee’s co-star is Allana Harkin, who plays Olivia’s childhood best friend Andrea Taylor, a methodical, policy-driven diplomat whose instincts sharply contrast with Olivia’s improvised, chaotic approach to statecraft. The pairing carries an offscreen resonance: Harkin also worked as a producer and correspondent on Full Frontal, giving the two a working relationship that predates the new series by years.
Full Frontal ran for seven seasons and 218 episodes on TBS before Warner Bros. Discovery cancelled it in July 2022 following the studio merger that reshaped the cable landscape. Bee’s return to a scripted format — and to Canadian public television — represents a significant shift in direction for a comedian who built her profile through political satire and investigative comedy journalism.
The CBC upfront also revealed an ambitious slate of new dramas and international co-productions. The Posse, an eight-part Canadian-Norwegian co-production for CBC and NRK, comes from the creators of Norsemen and Captain Fall, Jon Iver Helgaker and Jonas Torgersen, and follows a 19th-century Norwegian factory heir who drags reluctant underlings into the American Wild West to gather material for a novel.
On the drama side, Junior is an eight-part coming-of-age series inspired by former NHL star P.K. Subban’s experiences in junior hockey, with Subban himself among the executive producers alongside Clement Virgo and Lionsgate Canada’s Jocelyn Hamilton. The network also greenlit Cold Country, a six-part limited series co-produced with APTN from Indigenous creators Shane Belcourt and Tasha Hubbard, starring Sarah Podemski, Chaske Spencer and Michael Greyeyes.
The Service, from Cardinal showrunner Aubrey Nealon, rounds out the comedy slate with an espionage-set workplace romance following two CSIS analysts at the Toronto office who fail to notice they are falling in love.
The breadth of the slate — spanning diplomatic comedy, period Westerns, hockey drama, true crime, and spy fiction — reflects CBC’s push to anchor its domestic programming with high-profile talent while expanding into international co-production partnerships that give its content broader reach beyond Canada.
