Abroad promises to be a different kind of sketch comedy show. For starters, it will be in both English and Tagalog. It’s the creation of Isabel Kanaan, a young comedian who has appeared on Royal Canadian Air Farce and This Hour Has 22 Minutes. Isabel received the NBC Universal Bob Curry Fellowship for achievements in comedy, RBC’s Top 25 Canadian Immigrant Award, and she has a dedicated TikTok audience of 184,000. In fact it was TikTok that started this whole thing.

“I used TikTok like my sketch diary, so I would put mini sketch ideas on there,” she told me. “I pitched the show to Longhope Media. I wanted to do a sketch show and wanted it to be deeper, to mean something, as I have never seen one that comes from the immigrant experience.”

Isabel came to Canada when she was 16. “In the Philippines we learned Americanized English so all my words were spelled without the ‘u’s, and Canadian teachers docked points. I should have spoken up.” Before long she found herself involved in Toronto’s comedy scene through Second City and the Tita Collective. Now she’s the star of Abroad, playing various characters with a cast that includes Aldrin Bundoc, Joy Castro, Nicco Lorenzo Garcia, and Justin Santiago. Why, I wondered, did she choose to call the show Abroad? “I found it funny because it means going abroad, but I’m also a broad, like, a woman, and also my content is very broad, so there are three word plays in one and it all worked out.”