As I read, they made 130 episodes of this show in a single season, filming seven shows every five days, so between the rush job nature of shooting each episode, the miniscule budget, the various corners cut and the use of clumsily rewritten scripts for an American radio comedy from that had run through the 1930s to 1945 - it was considered a mess.
CTV still ran it in reruns until the late 1970s however because they didn't have the option of just cancelling it like an American network might have - they were still pretty shaky at the time after nearly going bankrupt in the 1960s and so they had to wring the show out and recoup as much of their investment into it that they could. They were rerunning episodes even into the 1980s.
If CFTO/Glen-Warren/Baton produced a show for CTV, chances are the show was amortized for as long as possible. The Littlest Hobo was still on CTV schedules into the 2010s - granted, as weekend filler, but it was still on the official schedule despite not being in first run since 1985, and the owner-in-succession (Bell Media) bigging up newer things like The Social and/or whatever multimillion-dollar takeovers it was presently engaged in.
The Trouble with Tracy's production model isn't THAT different from the "modern" 10/90 model, just without the conceit of a "back order". With 10/90, whatever traces of hilarious technical/performance ineptitude might occur in production are ironed out into more-or-less-professional, ad-money-soaking sitcom blandness.
Canadians in the 70s felt that they lacked almost any sort of national identity, to the point where we tried to invent one. It didn't really work for TV, but to this day they are still required to broadcast a certain percentage of Canadian shows, and you get a big tax credit to make them. Doesn't seem to matter if anyone watches.
... which was the entire joke behind "The Great White North" on SCTV. So if you were a US teenager back around 1980, you know all your friends who pretended they got it and said "coo, coo coo coo coo coo coo cooooooo!" as if they were in on the joke? They weren't. They had no idea why it was supposed to be funny. It'd be like watching a host bit on MST3K where they parody the movie, but you never saw the movie so you don't know why Joel is saying "It stinks!"
Yeah, I can only imagine that incoherence was the punch line here. Otherwise holy crap, the ineptitude in the writing is something to behold.
I can't even figure out how they chose where to use the laugh track, because it happens after moments that are no more "funny" or attempting to be funny than the moments without a laugh track. It's as if they just haphazardly chose to insert it at random.
It really is so bad I can't believe I've never heard of this show.
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